THE political turmoil inside the Labour Government has far deeper causes than the focus on the personality and policies of Sir Keir Starmer might suggest. Last week’s local election results suggest that a shift has taken place in the tectonic plates of British politics. It is not just that no fewer than five political groupings have ended the two-party politics that has dominated Britain since the Second World War: something more profound is afoot.
The rise of Reform UK and a refashioned Green Party offer vividly polarised reactions to the falling off of the dream of globalisation. Once, it seemed common sense to argue that it was cheaper to buy our steel from China, build our ships in Korea, and manufacture our clothing in Vietnam. But comparative advantage, increased consumer choice, long supply chains, and just-in-time delivery have had a downside. Some things turn out to be more important than economic efficiency.
All across our post-industrial landscape, jobs were lost and economic inequality rose. In the left-behind areas, ordinary people grew alienated. They hit back at the political Establishment by voting for Brexit. Resentment grew at the increased migration that globalisation produced. Last week, they voted for Reform UK in large numbers, hoping to Make Britain Great Again.
Voters for the Green Party are discontented with globalisation for different reasons. It promotes use of fossil fuels through increased transport, greater pollution levels, greenhouse gas emissions, and deforestation. It puts the interests of investors before those of low-skilled workers. It makes multinational companies more powerful than governments. All in all, it reinforces the economic, cultural, and geopolitical status quo — which is why support for the persecuted people of Gaza is such a totemic issue for Greens, just as small boats are for Reform.
All this is what turned local elections, with their customary concerns about potholes and bin collections, into a referendum on the current Labour Government and its Conservative predecessor. Both parties were hammered — and Reform and the Greens are in invigorated ascendancy.
When I arrived as The Times’s correspondent in Belfast during the Troubles in the 1980s, the two dominant political parties were the Official Unionists and the SDLP, led by the towering figures of David Trimble and John Hulme. But, over the years, those moderate parties were each replaced by the hardliners of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists and Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, we all thought, echoing W. B. Yeats’s apocalyptic warning about the advent of fascism. It is tempting to think that again now. But, within a decade, the killing had ended and the intransigent Dr Paisley and IRA man Martin McGuinness were working together so well that they became known as the Chuckle Brothers.
Looking at today’s Labour and Conservative parties, alongside Reform and the Greens, we may be enticed once more to observe that, today, too, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.” It is easily possible that the obituaries of Labour and the Tories penned by over-dramatic political pundits this week are grossly premature. But the prospect of Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski taking up the mantle of the Chuckle Brothers seems exceedingly remote.