Welcome to the Conversation
Welcome to our latest Q&A with a Guardian journalist. Political columnist Rafael Behr is online now answering your questions.
Join the discussion here.
Key events
How important is the issue of government centralisation?
Kurwenal asks: The election of Andy Burnham has raised again the question of the over-centralised nature of government. To what extent is this “whinging” by those outside London and parts of the south-east (I am one such whinger) or do the roots of much that has happened with the fragmentation of our politics lie with the reality of the imbalance?
Raf: I’m pretty much persuaded that this really is a big problem. I recommend Sam Freedman’s book Failed State on this (among other) topics. We really need devolved government to acquire some of the status and, crucially, the accountability of national government so local administrations can innovate with policy, experiment. Then we’ll start incubating new ideas and discovering what works. The problem is that this involves the Treasury letting go of some purse strings, which no chancellor wants to do because, understandably, they think ultimately central government will get the blame when things go wrong. Devolution can feel a bit lose-lose for Downing Street. You empower rivals when it works and get it in the neck from voters when it doesn’t. It’s also something governments only tend to do at the start of their time in office, when they think they have more political capital than they do. Pretty quickly the idea of devolving power so your enemies can win in local elections and then torment you starts to feel like a rubbish plan.
But somehow we need to break the vicious cycle by which central government doesn’t trust local politics, withholds power, making local government more dependent on performative opposition to the centre and less able to make a real difference, which leads serious capable people to despair of politics and not want to get involved at a local level.
There’s a separate issue around the way Downing Street itself works and a compelling argument that the centre is weirdly weak, given how much constitutional power it has. Compared to a US or French president, or even an Australian federal leader, a UK prime minister has an under-powered apparatus around him/her to drive her/his agenda. Again Freedman is good on this and the Institute for Government has done some good work in this area. Short version: we need major constitutional reform that seriously federalises power, but with a quid pro quo in making the prime minister’s office much more of a serious institution.
What does Burnham really think about immigration?
Shauny79 asks: Do you believe Andy Burnham really supports the anti-migrant measures proposed by the current home secretary or was he just speaking with the people of Makerfield in mind?
Raf: I don’t have any special insight, but my instinct here is that he recognises the need for any government to have a robust policy of asserting control over the nation’s borders and didn’t want to get into a fight over the details in the middle of a byelection campaign. He will (or should) want to recalibrate the position to strip out some of the egregiously Reform-coded bits of the current immigration policy – the retrospective rug-pull on entitlement to indefinite leave to remain, for example – and I think there is a way to do that without making himself overly vulnerable to the charge of having gone hugely soft on migration.
If he really is the superior communicator he’s cracked up to be, he should be able to reframe the argument as a kind of muscular liberalism, saying Britain has been made stronger by immigration; that Labour policy is about fairness, control and compassion and that Farage opposes it because he actually wants the system to fail. He needs chaos and disorder because that’s his happy place, whereas the decent mainstream of the country can see through him. Or something along those lines.
Does the special relationship with the US prevent the UK from identifying itself as a European country?
sherpa_10 asks: I remember a Kenneth Tynan essay in which he complained that British theatre was far more obsessed with American drama than European drama. Does the special relationship prevent the UK from identifying itself as a European country?
Raf: It certainly has done in the past. I think that is now finally changing. The UK will always have certain distinctive ambivalence towards continental Europe and a particular cultural attachment to the US – these are functions of history, island geography, culture, language etc. But I don’t think anyone should underestimate how seismic the effect of Trump’s marauding behaviour has been in this context. The incineration of trust and the perception that the US is no longer a reliable ally has cut deep. There is good polling evidence to support this and, while Whitehall and Westminster might be a bit slow to catch up, the geostrategic imperative of getting closer to Europe is undeniable. As one (now former) advisor at the foreign office put it recently (bit of a paraphrase here as I don’t have a verbatim note): “when I landed in Washington I was a committed Atlanticist. When I saw the way we were treated by the Trump administration, I became a British Gaullist.”
I think British Gaullism, paradoxical though it sounds, is not a bad account of where our foreign policy is heading. Also worth noting the irony that British politics generally looks a lot more European since Brexit with support fragmenting over many parties, a diminished pro-business centre right failing to fend off a threatening far-right, a small but stubborn liberal party, a haggard and lost-looking social democrat party and a more radical left/Green party. (There are all kinds of complications once you factor in Wales, Scotland, NI but you get the idea.)
How could a Burnham government tackle Reform?
Davroskemp asks: Why has it been so difficult for Labour to weaken Farage when so much of the Brexit disaster can be laid at his feet? How should a Burnham government tackle this to convince the electorate to ignore Farage and Reform?
Raf: It is extraordinary when you pause to think about it. The single most momentous decision in UK public policy for a generation is a decision that is very firmly connected to one man’s personal ambition for as long as he has been in public life, which is decades. He called for it, he campaigned for it, he got it. It turns out to be an unalloyed disaster, and yet somehow this is not the most salient issue when the question then arises as to whether or not he is qualified to be prime minister? Some of this is down to his talents as a politician. A lot of it is about the intensity of political and cognitive bias in the Brexit-supporting part of Westminster that meant no-one wants to own their portion of the blame. And then there’s the 2024 general election campaign in which Labour pursued a strategy of driving down the salience of Europe as the price for winning an audience in so-called “red wall” seats. (Whether or not that was a price worth paying is a different debate; no room for it here.)
To an extent, pro-European politicians have been too squeamish about pinning the blame for Brexit in Farage for fear of sounding as if they are accusing leave voters of being stupid – the spectre of the arrogant, metropolitan liberal elitist saying “I told you so” does haunt the debate a little bit. It wouldn’t be a good look. But I think nearly everyone has moved on a bit from that framing of it. The polling is very clear that a majority can see that Brexit hasn’t worked. In the last 6-12 months, Starmer and Reeves have been pushing on the anti-Brexit button a bit more, especially in the context of economic re-integration with Europe and mindful that Trump is a one-man beacon advertising the need for closer relations with our continental allies. But Burnham can and should go much further.
Hanging Brexit around Farage’s neck is a vital part of the process of pricking his pseudo-insurgent bubble. The idea that he is some kind of outsider is absurd. You don’t want the new prime minister to sound as if he is patronising leave voters, but there must be a way for a half-decent communicator to land the argument that says “this guy peddles nothing but division, he turned us against each other once before, we’ve been living in Farageland for 10 long years and guess what? It isn’t working. We’ve already tried it his way. Man, we have tried and tried and tried. But it’s a dud. Now let’s try it the other way.”
UKIP came and went but is Reform here to stay?
JamesValencia asks: Is Reform going to fade away, like the BNP and like UKIP before it? Or is it a reflection of the global wave of authoritarian movements, and will we, collectively, have to live through the consequences before we re-learn the hard lessons of the past “do not listen to authoritarians, right or left” ?
Raf: I think a radical nationalist party is here for some time to come. These are the times we live in. That party might end up being a hybrid of the current Conservatives and Reform – it depends on Farage’s longevity, frankly. But I don’t think the likelihood of Faragism becoming a fixture of the UK political spectrum (which has happened already, let’s face it) means it is inevitable he will be prime minister. The number of people who don’t want that to happen vastly outnumbers those who do. To overcome that arithmetic disadvantage, Farage has to get lucky with the electoral system (sadly all too plausible) and probably do a deal with the Tories (sadly also conceivable, but not automatic).
Has the neoliberal ship run aground?
thegreatfatsby asks: How difficult do you think it will be to pull the centrist neoliberal ship off the reef its foundering on and reverse course?
Raf: My instinct is that the era where the policies generally clustered as “neoliberal” enjoyed broad consensus and supremacy is over. Core aspects of liberal market economics will, of course, endure and liberal politics should, I hope, prove similarly resilient. But it is important to disaggregate the constitutional and rights-based principles of liberalism from the more Hayekian arguments about economic freedom as the essential countervailing force to state control that puts us on the “road to serfdom.” The bundling of economic liberalism, tending to libertarianism, with political liberalism as one conjoined doctrine was a consequence of the end of the cold war and the total defeat of Marxist shades of left political organisation. That bred the pro-globalisation “neoliberal” consensus from the late 90s through to around 2016. And it was a disaster for moderate, politically liberal social democrats.
But now you have nationalists and populists who combine market libertarianism when it suits them (crypto grift, for example) with incredibly statist policies when it is a question of authoritarian control. Trump has flirted with nationalising parts or all of the frontier AI sector for example.
The natural tendency of the radical right, since it despises social freedoms and liberal permissiveness (“woke” degeneracy as they see it), is to combine very conservative social policies, authoritarian statecraft, especially regarding immigration, with commercial favours in the market to enrich themselves and their friends. A kind of corporate national socialism, in other words.
I’m not sure what it even means to be a “centrist” in this context. It’s a complex term which assumes a certain amount of equivalence and equidistance between left and right positions. That kind of geometry made some sense in the 20th century and first decade of this one, but less so now. I find it more useful to think in terms of constitutional liberalism in political norms and structures; social democracy in the ambition to harness market forces to egalitarian ends.
How will Burnham tackle the Trump issue?
DyvimTvar asks: How do you think Burnham will deal with Trump? More of the same or will he be looking at the likely result of the midterm elections in the US?
Raf: Burnham’s foreign policy is very mysterious. He very rarely talks about the world beyond British shores, and has said quite explicitly that his focus is getting things right “in this country”. That worries me slightly. Foreign affairs dominated Starmer’s diary for a reason and the world isn’t going to calm down. My guess, and it is little more than a guess, is that once he gets the defence and security briefings that explain quite how reliant UK national security is on US institutional partnership (regardless of who the president is) he will respond pretty much exactly as Starmer did. And yes, the midterms will be crucial. A lame duck Trump could become much more volatile but also much more bogged down in running battles – even impeachment proceedings – with a hostile Congress
What will the geopolitical impact on a Burnham government be? Should we relax the fiscal rules?
mspiggy asks: 1. Given the external factors of the economic situation and Trump (Iran, etc) will/can the impact on the UK general public of a Burnham or even a Polanski administration be any different to the outgoing Starmer/Reeves administration?
2. Would you advise a Burnham administration to relax Labour’s fiscal rules? What do you think the outcome would be of doing so/not doing so?
Raf: 1: The defence and security partnership with the US is extremely tight and bundled very deep. Much of the UK’s defence capacity really relies on the Pentagon. In this respect the “special relationship” is hard-wired in. That isn’t an argument for just sucking up to Trump regardless of what he does, but it does explain why Starmer had to tread very carefully indeed. There is a case for seeking much more strategic autonomy from Washington but that’s a challenge to be met over a generation. Can’t be done quickly and is very expensive.
2: The fiscal rules thing is both more complex and simpler than often presented. Ultimately everyone involved, including the bond traders, know it is an artificial construct, but the rules do function as a commitment to recognise finite budget capacity, which matters. Yes, there are arguments for borrowing more to invest in the productive capacity that will generate more revenue in the future, through higher growth. By this mechanism, we should be able to loosen the reins a bit on the understanding that the benefits will accrue soon enough. Bond traders understand the macroeconomic logic of that argument but they don’t necessarily trust the politicians to really be thinking about the long term. It could too easily sound like the chancellor is saying “I want to borrow a load more money so I don’t have to make hard spending/cuts choices in the run up to an election, but I promise I’ll get it all sorted the moment after polling day.” If you don’t have credible revenue projections, the market is going to be very sceptical. As it was with Liz Truss. Ultimately the bond market is just the mechanism by which the UK government borrows money and, like any lender, it sets the terms according to how confident it is in the reliability of the borrower. The fiscal rules are a convenient badge of seriousness for a country that has, sadly, been rather too unserious in the recent past.
Does everyone hate Starmer but me?
LadyPercy asks: I don’t hate Keir Starmer. Am I alone?
Raf: No. I don’t hate him either. I was sceptical to begin with, then started extending the benefit of the doubt, then stretched it as far as it would go – some might say too far – and accepted, eventually, that he wasn’t up to it. I find the levels of vitriol directed at him perverse and demoralising. He has become a receptacle for many years of disappointment with successive prime ministers. Something about the nature of his failure, the way he set himself up as the totem of Change and then delivered what felt so much like more of the same, seems to have distilled public disappointment into an exceptionally potent venom. He came to be seen as the archetypal deceiving politician who promises it all and delivers nothing, and ended up suffocating under a weight of incumbency that covered not just his own government but every government that preceded it. A tragic fate, in some ways.
What will happen to Starmer’s policy agenda now?
Perspectiverox asks: Afternoon Rafael. I was wondering whether there are any policies that Keir Starmer has been especially keen on that might lose prominence if there were a change of leader and also whether there are any policies that could move up the agenda instead. Digital ID and water nationalisation came to mind, but are there other areas where you think leadership change might possibly alter priorities?
Raf: It’s an intriguing question because one of Starmer’s weaknesses has been his inability to signal the kind of keenness on priorities that you describe. What is his big thing? What would he have imagined his legacy might one day be when he started? He seemed to get bounced into so many of the choices he made as part of the endless tactical grind to get through another week. I remember one of his many relaunches being pegged to a big announcement on AI, but does anyone now think of that as Starmer’s signature policy? But for this reason, I think a lot of what he started will carry on for the simple reason that a lot of things that would be very controversial ended up being abandoned or never started. Digital IDs were made non-mandatory, for example, which makes them simpler to roll out.
The steps towards utility nationalisation are very much in the direction that Burnham has indicated he wants to travel. The EU reset, being negotiated behind the restrictive red lines, is low-stakes enough that a new prime minister can easily nudge agreement over the line. The social media ban for under 16s might get tangled up in the legislative process, but that could easily have happened if Starmer stayed on. Nothing much can lose prominence because the most prominent feature of his leadership was the absence of distinctive prime ministerial agenda.
Are journalists to blame for the insability in No 10?
OOOFleming asks: Do British journalists need to do some soul searching over their role in the instability in No 10? Two years of Starmer as PM and every single hiccup presented as if it is a total crisis.
Raf: I think this is a function of a deeper problem with Westminster political culture to the extent that there is a frenetic and pretty mypopic news cycle and the appetite for scandal is vast. And also there is a section of the press that hates the idea of Labour government and treated Starmer as a squatter without a real mandate from day one. But – and it is a big but – I wouldn’t primarily blame journalists for destabilising this government. He did that to himself by making a lot of bad mistakes, failing to communicate the purpose of his government and failing to engage with the Labour MPs who were despairing because of what they could see was happening in their constituencies. It wasn’t journalism that made Starmer think it was a good idea to raid the PIPs budget to make up fiscal headroom, call it welfare “reform” and then U-turn under pressure, or appoint Peter Mandelson to Washington or any other missteps.
There is a question of whether governing has become generally much harder in an age of constant media frenzy and, especially, social media fragmentation. I have no doubt that it has. The kind of message control that New Labour was able to exert in the late 90s is simply unavailable now and the techniques that work online are great for demagogues and charlatans, not so good for promoting nuance and considered reflection based on the evidence. But politicians in other countries face the same challenges and last longer than two years. The bulk of Starmer’s problems were self-inflicted.
What will a post-truth world look like?
911IsAJoke asks: If it were to ever materialise, how will the post “post -truth” world look?
Raf: I don’t have a good answer to this one but I’m pretty sure it comes about through a serious reckoning with AI models and how they process the idea of “truth”.
The whole post-truth discourse in recent years has largely been a function of fragmentation in the information space caused by social media. To my mind (and I’m far from the only person to see it like this) it is a transformation in the foundations of what we judge to be an authority, with the old hierarchies – the gatekeepers and arbitrators of fact – being pulled down, analogous to the upheavals of the European Reformation. It isn’t comfortable for journalists, academics, mainstream politicians to see themselves cast in the role of the old Papal hierarchy and monasteries with a bunch of digital anabaptists burning everything around them. The analogy is flawed in all sorts of ways, but as a rough guide to the likely scale and duration of turmoil, it’s quite instructive. Worth noting, though, that the counter-Reformation was surprisingly successful but that’s a whole historiographical minefield I won’t blunder into.
The key point is that new institutions and new mechanisms for establishing trust will eventually come into being, maybe on the foundations of old ones, maybe as innovations using the very technologies that seem to have undermined the foundations of epistemological security in the first place. I recommend Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge on this subject. Also, I found this Substack essay by Dan Williams, a Cambridge philosopher, really interesting on what AI will do.
A counter-intuitive and often persuasive view making the case that LLMs, far from accelerating the fragmentation and dissolution of information into post-truth mush, actually represent the pendulum swinging back the other way.
Why is the government still on X?
nickwayne asks: Should the government set an example by leaving X? It amplifies the poison left by Brexit.
Raf: Yes. I find it a bit mystifying that this hasn’t happened yet. There is an argument that you need to keep a presence there in order to bring some semblance of balance – that you need the “good” information in the ecosystem to stop it all being overrun by the “bad” stuff. But when the algorithm belongs to a man like Elon Musk, who has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his own posts, it seems pretty futile to think anything like fair balance can be achieved. But this is part of a wider dysfunction in the way digital discourse is debated in UK politics. There is a misconstrual of the whole thing as a question of “free speech”. That isn’t an irrelevant consideration. We have to be careful about regulating information flows. But what is happening now is the capture of the entire information ecosystem by platforms and people who have extreme ideological agendas, actively try to subvert UK politics and aren’t citizens of the UK. It is a matter of control of the basic infrastructure that allows politics to function effectively. When people are poisoning the wells from which we need to draw essential water to irrigate democracy it is no longer a simple “free speech” issue.
Is the Norway option still possible?
MrGluben asks: Is the compromise of rejoining the single market via membership of the EFTA (and by extension the EEA), the so-called Norway option, still a possibility?
Raf: Absolutely, at least from a technical point of view. And the Lib Dems recently made this their policy precisely in the hope of putting pressure on a new (Burnham, presumably) government to move in that direction. In some respects the EEA/EFTA idea is easier because it’s an off-the shelf model and would give Brussels a clearer sense of the destination the UK has in mind, making the negotiations easier to structure. The problems are, of course, political. The big one is freedom of movement, which is a non-negotiable part of SM membership. When I asked Ed Davey’s office about this, I was told he thinks it’s a winnable argument: that the British public are so down on Brexit, so aware that it has gone wrong, and mindful that leaving the EU hardly dealt with the immigration issue anyway, that freedom of movement could be sold as a reciprocal benefit and that the merits of a much closer relationship with our continental neighbours would facilitate better cooperation on other migration issues, chiefly the small boat crossings. There is some polling evidence to support that optimistic view. The European Council for Foreign Relations has a new poll out that suggests freedom of movement, if advertised as part of a package of general trade and economic integration, is acceptable to a majority of people by a surprising margin.
There is another problem with EEA/Norway etc, which is the old “soft Brexit” issue of rule-taking. As members of the single market but not full members of the EU, the UK would end up aligning with regulations over which it has very little say or agency. This is one of the bitterest ironies of Brexit. The eurosceptic myth of Brussels “dictating” laws to parliament never took account of the power that British ministers had on the European council, often with veto powers. “Europe” was not something “they” did to “us” but something we did to and for ourselves. But once we left, the threat of taking dictation became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our interests demand closeness to the single market but proximity without a voice really is a loss of sovereignty. Maybe worth it, but not great. That’s the logic that dragged us towards ever harder iterations of Brexit, leading to the deal we now have, which turns out to be disastrous.
So the bottom line – one that was clear enough back in 2016 to those who thought it through – is that the logic of a soft Brexit tends inevitably to the view that the softer the Brexit, the better it is for Britain; and so the best kind of Brexit is no Brexit at all!
Could the UK rejoin the EU without another referendum?
nivlek47 asks: Our media, especially the print media, is the same as it was 10 years ago. Even if there was another referendum in 10 years, we will still have the same media who were for Brexit be against rejoining, and the same old bendy bananas “arguments”. Wouldn’t it be better to have re-entry as a manifesto pledge and just do it, rather than risk another generational referendum?
Raf: I think it would be hard to enact anything as significant as rejoining the EU without a referendum and, for the reasons you say, there would have to be a very clear and solid majority in favour before even embarking on a campaign. But that would be a condition of starting the negotiations with Brussels anyway. The EU is not going to be interested in a serious process to hammer out terms of UK membership 2.0 if it looks like a knife-edge issue in domestic politics. European leaders were burned enough by the first referendum and by the spectacle of Donald Trump coming back after four years of Joe Biden. So, in a way, the question of whether or not to have a referendum is barely relevant. If you have completely won the key political arguments in favour of Britain being part of the European project again and it’s not even controversial any more, you can have the vote, and if you haven’t made that kind of progress, you won’t be in a position to try your luck with a plebiscite.
But I do think there is path that involves a party winning a general election with a pledge to open talks on joining the EU and that election victory being used as the lever to really shift the dial in public debate. As with so many of these scenarios, a really talented communicator as leader and media strategy fit for the fragmented, polarised digital climate are key.
Welcome to the Conversation
Welcome to our latest Q&A with a Guardian journalist. Political columnist Rafael Behr is online now answering your questions.
Join the discussion here.
About the Author
