Martin Kettle's Blog, page 9

Starmer is being tough on the rioters, but history shows that preventing further unrest is the real challenge | Martin Kettle

Reducing public anxieties about immigration is the best way to combat those fuelling such fears for their own ends

Britain’s 2024 riots are a surprise national crisis. There was no particular buildup, no clearly discernible pressure cooker process. No one appears to have warned that riots were imminent. Plenty of efforts, some irresistible but some dubious, have now been made to explain them. Yet, more than a week after the first violence in Southport, Britain is only at the start of an agreed and effective response.

This is almost always the way with riots. Riots take many forms. Almost always, though, they come as a shock. Nevertheless, riots are not unknown, either in postwar Britain or in British history more generally. The idea that Britain enjoyed a seamlessly peaceful path towards the blessings of parliamentary democracy, tolerance and the rule of law is simply untrue. There was never a riot-free golden age. But each generation is surprised anew.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

Continue reading...

Labour is still in its 'phoney' period. Far tougher tests await in autumn | Martin Kettle

When the honeymoon ends, Keir Starmer’s team will be judged on its handling of pressure points – from the economy to North Sea oil drilling

In the Britain of September 1939, it became known as the phoney war. Hitler had invaded Poland. War had been declared. For months, though, there was little military action. At home, the country was placed on a war footing. But these were not yet the decisive times. Those would come later; they would last for years and would change the country for ever.

In the Britain of August 2024, we are living through something comparable in terms of the arc of Keir Starmer’s prime ministership. Labour has been elected. It is settling into government. It has a radically different project from its predecessors, the scale of which is widely underestimated. But these are not the decisive times either. For Britain, these might be dubbed a period of phoney government.

Continue reading...

It might be hard to take the future of the Conservative party seriously right now – but we must | Martin Kettle

The UK needs a robust, competent centre-right party to stave off the threat of the populist right

The contest to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader may seem like an argument between corpses in a tomb. The candidates are yesterday’s rejects. Not even the hysterical headline-writers of the Tory press can bring themselves to hype the race as they would in the triumphalist years. The infantile tabloid screams of “Boris this” or “Suella that” seem to have gone quiet, though probably only briefly.

After the babel of those years, a period of relative Tory silence will be welcome to many. But the future of the Conservative party is a genuinely important matter – not just to Tories themselves, but also to the workings of parliamentary democracy and to the dynamics of British politics. The election to succeed Sunak, the preliminaries of which began this week, should not be scorned as an irrelevant event.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Prom 4: Hallé/Elder review – a farewell eclipsed by the quality of the music-making

Royal Albert Hall, London
Mark Elder has led the Hallé for 24 years, championing the company’s choirs, in great voice here in a striking James MacMillan work, and bringing cerebral discipline and striking emotional truth to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

In any BBC Proms season, there are always concerts in which the sense of occasion is inseparable from the music-making. This year is no exception, and Mark Elder’s final Prom appearance with the Hallé, of which he has been the music director for 24 distinguished years, was undoubtedly one of them. At the end we got a fine speech from the conductor and an encore, Elgar’s Chanson de Nuit. But in the end it was the fascination of the Hallé’s and Elder’s work, not the emotions of the evening, that gripped most.

One of Elder’s many achievements in Manchester has been to build and sustain the Hallé’s choirs, integral to the memorable Elgar choral works that have provided some of Elder’s milestone events. Three of the choirs, including those for children and young singers, featured in James MacMillan’s 2022 Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia, a no-holds-barred hymn to music, set to a 1697 John Dryden text, of which Elder gave the UK premiere in May, and which took up the first half of this Prom.

This concert is available on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds. The Proms continue until 14 September

Continue reading...

Starmer warns ‘no quick fix’ for UK as he faces pressure over child poverty and benefits – as it happened

PM announces taskforce to deal with child poverty, but refuses to commit to scrapping the two-child benefit cap

King Charles and Queen Camilla have arrived at the Houses of Parliament.

King Charles is wearing his Admiral of the Fleet Royal Naval Number 1 Dress with cap and sword, PA Media reports.

Continue reading...

With this king’s speech, Starmer has staked everything on the long game. But politics has a habit of moving fast | Martin Kettle

The NHS, child poverty, defence: Labour is selling itself on its ability to get some big things done

Britain’s new government has just reached the point where things get serious. The king’s speech marks the ceremonial divide between Labour’s pinch-yourself fortnight following the 4 July election landslide and the start of the hard slog of delivery, by which Keir Starmer’s government will actually be judged next time. It’s the end of the overture and the start of the drama itself, the part that really matters.

Before the election there was a debate among those around Starmer about how to approach the opening days in government. Some wanted the new government to immediately trigger a blizzard of activity to show that Labour was active and a contrast to the Conservatives. In this view, promoted in particular by Starmer’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, the first 100 days were crucial, an agenda-driven opportunity to reignite confidence in government.

Continue reading...

Starmer wants us to believe we can trust politicians again. That’s huge – but he has to mean it | Martin Kettle

The Tories are in denial about the crisis in politics. Labour seems to get it. But voters will punish any government that doesn’t follow through on its word

On the other side of the Atlantic, in an act of shocking irresponsibility, the US supreme court has ruled that the president is above the law. On this side of the ocean, however, something diametrically opposite lies in store for Britain.

The US is a republic that has, in effect, just given itself an elected monarch who will be free to act as he or she pleases. The UK, by contrast, is a monarchy that is about to declare itself the closest thing to a republic of virtue since Cromwellian times.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Tories blame Sunak for this implosion but they are fooling themselves. The rot goes back decades | Martin Kettle

Since Thatcher was deposed, there has been an absurd yearning to magic her back into existence. Their rightwing obsession stems from that

What an absolute shambles the once formidable Conservative party has now become. Whatever happened to political probity, discipline and even mere professionalism? And what an important development this Tory collapse may prove to be for British politics, not just next week, but in the future too. Even now, it is hard to believe it is happening. But it is.

At least the Tories would run an effective campaign, one still assumed, perhaps naively, when the election was called a month ago. Winning elections is one of the things the Conservatives have always been very good at. Sure, they were on the defensive and the polls were against them. And Rishi Sunak isn’t the greatest leader. But this party is nothing if not focused. Even in defeat, it would surely go down fighting.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: election results special. On Friday 5 July, 7.30pm-9pm BST, join Hugh Muir, Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams for unrivalled analysis of the general election results. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live.

Continue reading...

The Tories are fixating on Reform. They should be focused on a far bigger threat | Martin Kettle

Ed Davey’s Lib Dems have fought a smart campaign – and it is they, not Nigel Farage, who have the pulse of middle England

In this general election, the Conservatives are supposed to be fighting a campaign on three fronts. One is against Labour, a second is against Reform and the third is against the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives’ problem is partly that they are not fighting very well and partly that they are only fighting on two of the fronts, leaving the third unguarded.

If wartime analogies are your thing, you could say that the Conservatives have a Singapore problem. Before the second world war, the British empire armed Singapore to fight naval battles against Japan. Famously, most of Singapore’s heavy artillery faced out to sea. But in 1942, the Japanese army overran Singapore from the rear, coming in from the Malayan mainland.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

With this half-hearted, delusional manifesto, Rishi Sunak has all but given up | Martin Kettle

It would take a political genius to rescue the Tories now. Instead they have a leader more suited to churning out quarterly reports

Election manifestos are never going to qualify as works of poetry. Only a small proportion of voters will ever read them. Even the politicians will soon forget them. But manifestos matter all the same. They are a proffered contract to the electorate, in which a political party sets a direction and outlines its priorities in return for the voters’ support. At least in theory, the manifesto offers an electoral setting for overarching visions and for big ideas.

Rishi Sunak launched his 2024 election manifesto at Silverstone today with the claim that only the Conservatives have the big ideas that will make Britain a better place. But the Conservative manifesto turns out to be a negation of that claim. Sunak’s notion of a big idea is a politically impoverished and impoverishing one. For him, the promise of a 2p national insurance cut counts as a big idea. This is an accountant’s vision of political campaigning and not the vision of a national leader.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Election results special. Join Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Polly Tonybee, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams on 5 July

Continue reading...