We live at a time of extraordinary change: from the postwar liberal international order, dominated by the US, into something whose contours are not yet clear, and may never be. From a world where economic growth was a year-in, year-out near guarantee, to one where climate instability, resource conflicts and nature crises threaten the very foundations of that growth. And, here in Britain, from one where a rock-solid two-party system dominated all questions of national political leadership, to something far more open. This is a time of new forces in politics.
The beneficiaries of this change, so far, have been the radical right. Reform’s local election results were a bolt from above. Councils that had been Labour strongholds for decades, rotting away from below, were finally knocked over. In the end, it has been Reform and the right, not the left outside Labour, that delivered the fatal blows.
And yet that left has, so far, failed to respond. After its most extraordinary general election results since universal suffrage, with millions of votes, and four Green MPs and five left independents returned to parliament, the past 12 months have been drift. The Greens have most obviously failed to capitalise, treading water in the polls and failing to recruit. The independent left twirls endlessly around the question of Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership – nearly a decade after Corbyn won his first Labour Party election. However, in launching his leadership bid for the Greens, Zack Polanski has demonstrated his grasp of the first rule in politics: knowing when to seize the initiative. In pledging “eco-populism”, he has made a bold claim to the form of politics our chaotic times demand.
Keir Starmer in office implicitly accepts those new constraints. This is the real meaning of the Spending Review: that Labour has accepted the harder economic realities we live with but cannot seriously address them. It has chosen to fund social spending to the barest minimum – Boris Johnson increased public spending by more – instead driving up military expenditure to the highest levels since the Cold War, and to concentrate some limited funds on infrastructure investment, matched to a forthcoming industrial strategy. We have not seen a government like this before.
It will work electorally if, and only if, growth convincingly returns. Yet Labour appears to have no clue as to how unlikely this is. Only this week, the World Bank revised its forecasts for global growth downwards, in the face of continuing uncertainty – even ahead of Israel’s military escalation. Domestically, Labour’s concentration of spending on long-run capital investment will do the party few favours: Joe Biden did the same thing, on a vastly bigger scale, investing in new infrastructure across the United States. It did nothing for the Democrats electorally since it confers few immediate benefits for most people. All Donald Trump had to do was ask if voters felt better off after four years of Biden, and of course the great majority did not. Nigel Farage will only have to repeat the same trick in 2029.
Labour’s strategists are aware of their weakness. They believe, instead, that they can frame the next election as a straight Reform vs Labour contest, and thus frighten voters back into supporting the party. This is both dangerous, and stupid. Dangerous, because for this to work, Reform has to look like a serious threat; which means in practice Reform will be setting the agenda while Labour scrabbles along with it. Witness the farrago over nationalising British Steel. And it is stupid because if Labour fails to deliver in office and then offers the merest whisp of difference with Reform on key issues, principally migration, its voters will not turn out. Who could honestly blame them? Starmer’s Labour is deeply unappealing. The local election results were a glimpse of one possible near-future.
For too many voters Gaza is a moral stain on Starmer that he cannot wash away, just as Iraq has been for Tony Blair. It already cost Labour dearly in 2024, and it will continue to do so in the future. But it is not only the moral offence of Labour’s complicity – as powerful as this is. It is the party leadership’s response to the ending of the postwar world, dramatically signalled by both JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference tirade at the beginning of this year and Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff assault, that will very directly impact on living standards here – in the short-sighted half-deal on tariffs, with its open-ended future loss of democratic sovereignty, and in the government’s commitments to rapid military build-up.
The controlled opposition, Reform, have little to nothing useful to say on this, tied as it is to Trump and his coterie. But they have elan, and no shame in saying and doing what is necessary to win. The temptation for the broader left is to dust off the Corbyn playbook and insist that simply turning the volume up on the old tunes will cut through against the government. But with Reform playing pick ’n’ mix with the left’s historic programme – a tasty little industrial strategy here, a cheeky renationalisation there – the political space for a social democratic revival is being extinguished. It may not be especially plausible for Farage to claim he wants British Steel in public ownership, but he, plausibly, could be the next prime minister and Jeremy Corbyn will not be. The left cannot compete on these terms.
We need, instead, to address the immediate realities of the crisis we face. That starts with a correct understanding of what the climate and the nature crises are doing to us. They are not a handy justification for a bunch of things we wanted to do anyway, or, as Biden once put it, “when I hear climate, I think jobs”. But nor, for most people here, most of the time, is climate change the Hollywood story of existential disaster. Instead, it is the slower, steadier accumulation of breakdowns and failures. Food costs more. Insurance costs more. More flights are delayed, more trains fail to run. Power systems break down. Floods worsen. Extreme heat spreads disease and shortens lives. There are existential risks, of course; but the immediate reality is typically of a slow, steady decay.
It is in the countryside where these processes are most shockingly visible: the parched fields, the rivers full of shit. The reality of life across rural towns and villages is of deep neglect, stretching back many decades. It has been too easy to dismiss Green votes in rural England as “Countryfile Tories”. There are certainly tensions inside the Greens, as the New Statesman’s recent interview with Polanski’s two opponents, MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, made clear. It will require political skills to navigate through them. But the potential is there, in what sociologist Nic Buret has identified as a “silent movement” in our countryside, where protests about development can’t be dismissed as twee Nimby-ism. Increasingly, they represent a direct battle for control over what should be common resources. Economic projects that look good in Westminster, like building a new data centre, do little for a local community, creating few jobs, sucking up scarce electricity and water, and repatriate profits back to the US.
And the problem of food prices and availability in towns and cities is directly tied to the crisis of farming in our countryside. The problem of water supplies in Oxfordshire is directly tied to the promises made in Washington to US Big Tech, as Labour plans a huge roll-out of those same data centres. The Houthi blockade of the Red Sea raised prices in shops across the world last year, reinforcing the inflationary impacts of the drought in the Panama Canal. In other words, globalisation as we have known it is crumbling, to be replaced by something similarly interconnected, but far more disorderly. Four decades of falling prices as the world opened up and East Asia industrialised is being replaced with chaotic price rises and shortages as climate change bites – and the very success of China disrupts an international order constructed around the dominance of the US.
Instability creates winners, as well as losers. Soaring food prices in the last few years have handed all-time record profits to the four major companies that control 90 per cent of the global trade in grain. The same applies, notoriously, to soaring fossil fuel profits. This is what a real eco-populism can address: “populism” facing squarely up to the need for redistribution from fat profits and idle hoards of wealth, and “eco” in taking immediate actions to address insecurity and the steady breakdown of basic systems – like the shocking neglect and under-funding of our care sector. Ideas like a basic income for farmers, which is now taking root, could be adopted by an eco-populist Green Party.
This is a new opportunity. The Greens are second-placed in around 30 Labour-held seats, with slender majorities. Next year’s local elections include every London borough. A joint, Green-independent left campaign could knock many of these over, just as surely as Reform managed in the north, and lay the foundations for plausible victories in a 2029 general election. Privately, the London mayor Sadiq Khan has been warning of the growing risk to Labour’s support. Sensing the possibilities, cooperation between the Greens and the left on the ground across cities in England is already happening.
We don’t know how the two-party system will break down at the next election. We do know there are possibilities, which include winning a major bloc of Greens and independent left MPs. Zack Polanski will struggle in the role of insurgent – the British media always marginalises those outside parliament. But it laughed at Farage’s electoral history, until he entered the House last summer. In Polanski’s campaign, we have, finally, to bottle these new winds into a political programme.
[See also: The Green Party’s internal war]
Content from our partners
Related
