Andy Beckett's Blog, page 10

As the Tories implode, Britain’s unions are powering up – and more than ready for the fight | Andy Beckett

Union leaders see themselves as a third force in politics: beholden to no party, and ambitious about changing the country

In some ways, it’s a great time to be a trade unionist in Britain. The anti-worker prime minister has just resigned. A wave of strikes, unprecedented in recent times, is continuing across the country with an unusual degree of public support. The free-market model that since the 80s has made working life so harsh for so many Britons is now widely discredited – not least by its association with Liz Truss. It’s possible that an economy will emerge instead where unions are valued rather than dismissed or hated.

At this week’s TUC conference in Brighton, even before Truss resigned, the general secretary, Frances O’Grady, was able to say in her speech, without it sounding like wishful thinking, “We are winning.” Along a sunny seafront and in expectant meeting rooms, new union celebrities such as the RMT’s Mick Lynch and Unite’s Sharon Graham carried themselves with a a confidence that felt almost startling after all the cautious, downbeat union leaders of recent history. Graham boasted to the Morning Star that this year Unite had won 81% of its disputes.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Truss is frantically blowing on the embers of neoliberalism. But it is a funeral pyre | Andy Beckett

Just as the rest of the world is rejecting free-market economics, we have a purist in No 10. It could come at a very high price

Purity can be a dangerous thing in politics. The world is full of impurities. Compromises are often needed to make policies work. Voters also rarely reward politicians for having a consistent ideology. Sometimes they see such people as fanatics.

Yet without a set of stubborn beliefs, governments and political parties can become directionless. They can lack a sense of purpose and a compelling story. The common centrist argument that grownup government is pragmatic ignores the fact that the most influential British governments since the second world war, Clement Attlee’s and Margaret Thatcher’s, changed society to fit their worldviews more than vice versa.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Keir Starmer, if you really believe in a Labour government, tell us why we should believe in it too | Andy Beckett

With Truss fuelling poverty and inequality, Starmer needs to show he’s ready for a titanic battle. He could win like Blair, or lose like Kinnock

For Labour opposition leaders, knowing that success is a possibility can be the trickiest stage of all. Tony Blair, in the final months before he won power, was famously described as like a man carrying a priceless vase across a slippery floor. For a party that loses more general elections than it wins, and yet is often ahead in the polls, holding a brittle supremacy over the Tories is a familiar feeling.

In one sense, Keir Starmer is carrying a smaller vase than Blair was. Few expect him to win by a landslide. And yet the floor he needs to cross is wider: the next election might not be for two years. Even Labour becoming the largest party in a hung parliament, and thus Starmer the probable head of a coalition government, would be quite an achievement given the current Conservative majority and the onslaught from them and their press allies that is likely to come.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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From Brexit to the cost of living, Tory governments exploit crises to evade scrutiny | Andy Beckett

Big dramas can make politics look small, and in an age of constant upheaval voters can miss how badly the country is being run

Politics in Britain is again marching to strange rhythms. Officially, nothing much has been happening this month, because of an all-important period of national mourning. But in reality Whitehall has been busy, even frantic. The Treasury has been purged of its most senior civil servant and given a new, pro-growth mission. The latest emergency budget is being drawn up, thinly disguised as a “fiscal event”. And a new, potentially very risky government has been settling in. Yet another Conservative experiment on the country is being prepared, largely unscrutinised.

Much of our politics has had this simultaneously stuck and manic quality since at least the EU referendum. Brexit deadlocks and “cliff edges”, the pandemic, Tory leadership contests, the cost of living crisis, the invasion of Ukraine and now the Queen’s death – each has accelerated or paralysed politics, making a mockery of the once common idea that British democracy is about steady progress.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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There is no single ‘national mood’ – just ask Britain’s republicans | Andy Beckett

In the short term, the Queen’s passing will boost support for the monarchy. But that could soon fade away

Our monarchy, however restrained and “constitutional” it is always said to be, is actually a totalising system. We are all the monarch’s subjects. Ministers, members of parliament, military personnel and police officers in England and Wales all swear oaths of allegiance to the crown. All our mainstream media are preoccupied by the monarchy, as the days since the Queen’s death have relentlessly made clear. Whenever there is a big royal occasion, most journalists, politicians and other public figures speak about it with one approving voice. These rituals are so familiar that their strangeness in a society that is supposed to be a diverse, irreverent democracy – and their particularity to this country – is not much noticed and even less discussed.

One consequence of our monarchy’s half-hidden domineering quality is that, at moments of great royal drama and ceremony like now, this country suddenly finds little room left for anything else. Since the Queen’s death much of public life has been suspended: strikes, football matches, parliament, party politics, the Lib Dem and TUC conferences, key decisions by the new government and the Bank of England, even a “festival of resistance” planned in London by the usually fearless and single-minded climate activists of Extinction Rebellion. A country which, by general agreement, is in the middle of one of its worst peacetime social, economic and political crises, with much of its population terrified about how they will get through the winter, has prioritised more than 10 days of elaborate mourning instead.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Is Starmer finally making a breakthrough by pledging to freeze these outrageous energy prices? | Andy Beckett

Labour has leapt in the polls, and even Tory voters like the idea. Now the party needs to realise that gas bills are just the start

For more than two years, an awfully long while in these frenetic political times, people have been waiting for Keir Starmer to do something bold. Since he became the Labour leader, Britain has been shut down by the pandemic, choked by Brexit, made poorer by the cost of living crisis, and governed by the most casually destructive prime minister in its recent history. In response, Starmer has offered “constructive opposition”, modest and mostly quickly forgotten new policies, and long silences.

The few risks he has taken have been the usual ones of orthodox Labour leaders: picking fights with the left; dropping radical but popular policies such as nationalisation; and generally dragging the party to the right. Meanwhile, he has left the over-mighty business interests and dysfunctional markets that dominate British life largely unchallenged.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Thatcherism is an obsolete ideology – but it’s the only one that Sunak and Truss have | Andy Beckett

The Tories see fresh thinking as a luxury, so their leaders are sticking with an orthodoxy that’s well past its sell-by date

It’s generally agreed that the last dozen years have been some of the most turbulent in our modern history. So much has changed or been called into question: our climate, the cost of living, the state’s ability to protect us, capitalism’s ability to spread prosperity, the continuation of the United Kingdom, our relationship with Russia and the EU, even our sense that we can be a functional society. To an extent that was almost inconceivable in 2010, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition took office, this has become a different country.

Some politicians have tried to adapt. Labour has moved leftwards and then back towards the centre. The Lib Dems have moved rightwards, supporting Tory austerity, and then become more hostile to the Conservatives under Ed Davey. The SNP has become more assertive in its push for independence. Meanwhile some Tories, such as Boris Johnson and Theresa May, have at least talked about governing in new ways, by “levelling up” or helping the “just about managing”.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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Labour should be winning – but this Tory leadership circus is drowning Starmer out | Andy Beckett

Compared with the novelty of a new Conservative premier, the no-frills Labour leader is failing to show he is a fresher option

These ought to be great times for Labour. The worst Tory government in decades has just imploded. A discredited Boris Johnson lingers sulkily in Downing Street. The competition to succeed him is like a bad gameshow. Michael Gove, a key minister until two weeks ago, admits that some of the state “is simply … not functioning”. Most voters are rapidly getting poorer. Brexit is steadily unravelling. After 12 years under the Conservatives, much of Britain feels underfunded, worn out, even close to collapse.

Just as governments-in-waiting are supposed to, Labour recently won a byelection seat from the incumbents, and leads most polls by double digits. Well-targeted attacks on the government are emailed to journalists by Labour many times a day. In the Commons, increasingly confident shadow ministers such as Yvette Cooper and Angela Rayner treat their Tory counterparts with contempt. With New Labour veterans among Keir Starmer’s allies and advisers, and the Conservatives associated with sleaze and shambles, British politics occasionally feels like a rerun of the mid-1990s, when Tony Blair was about to take power.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: who will succeed Boris Johnson?
Join Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toynbee, John Crace and Salma Shah as they discuss the who could be the next prime minister in this livestreamed event. On Wednesday 27 July at 8pm BST/9pm CEST/12pm PDT/3pm EDT. Book tickets here

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‘Stuff your 5%!’ Is the UK facing a summer of discontent – and what can we learn from the winter of 1979?

Transport workers, barristers, doctors, teachers, nurses, civil servants: if they haven’t yet voted to strike, they’re likely to do so. The last time anything like this happened, it brought down the government …

The winter of discontent of 1978-79 happened so long ago. In some ways, Britain was very different then: in its familiarity with trade unions, its politics and work habits, its distribution of power and wealth. Some of the long-dead shop stewards and union leaders who led the walkouts that winter, and who considered what they were doing completely normal and justified, would probably be surprised that we are still talking about them.

But we are. For a lot of politicians, journalists, employers, trade unionists and voters, some of whom were not even alive when it happened, the winter of discontent remains a reference point: an infamous or celebrated episode, either something to repeat – a model for turning this year’s strikes into a “summer of discontent” – or something that must never happen again. In short, it is seen as one of the past half-century’s pivotal events.

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Tory leadership rivals are swapping Boris Johnson's illusions for their own | Andy Beckett

Instead of investing in public services, they propose tax cuts; instead of tackling the excesses of business, they promise a free for all

Boris Johnson’s once dominant, now disgraced government is most likely to be remembered for his lying. Not just about his conduct and that of his cronies, but about what his government was achieving. Forty new hospitals, the fastest growth in the G7, falling child poverty, falling crime, the biggest reduction in tax for a quarter of a century, Brexit without a border in the Irish Sea: the exaggerations and fabrications came so thick and fast that his critics were sometimes too overwhelmed to effectively refute them.

All politicians lie – some of the time. The need to get out of tight corners and the contradictory desires of voters sometimes demand it. But it’s hard to think of a precedent, apart from the Trump presidency, for a government in a supposedly sceptical democracy trying to construct such a complete parallel reality, and for long periods convincing many of its core supporters and sometimes many other people. That Johnson was ultimately brought down by a lie, about what he knew about Chris Pincher, does not alter the fact that for almost three years constant lying was a strategy that served the government pretty well.

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