Andy Beckett's Blog, page 17
July 10, 2020
Keir Starmer needs a bolder vision – being the grownup in the room isn't enough | Andy Beckett
The Labour leader’s minimalist, methodical approach is beating Boris Johnson’s chaos so far. But where are the big ideas?
Keir Starmer likes things to be neat. His hair, how he speaks, how he manages his party: a definite Starmer style has emerged since he became Labour leader just under 100 days ago. He doesn’t waste words, briskly summing up the government’s handling of Covid-19 as “flailing around”. He quickly sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey when the row about her and Israel threatened to get messy.
Starmer faces a government that – partly by design – is Britain’s most disorderly for decades. Boris Johnson rarely utters a clear sentence. Dominic Cummings regards disruptive as a compliment. U-turns, broken promises and bloody Whitehall restructurings occur almost weekly.
Related: Boris Johnson refuses to apologise to care workers at PMQs
Related: Labour's real struggle is not left v right – it is to keep young and minority voters | Owen Jones
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June 29, 2020
The Tories once said only they could keep us safe. Now they're the party of risk | Andy Beckett
With his cavalier approach to coronavirus, Boris Johnson is testing the limits of public safety. He may yet pay for it
So much has changed in Britain since the Tories took power 10 years ago. Less noticed is that the Conservative party itself has changed: from one that prioritises keeping the public safe to one happy to put us at risk.
From their cuts in police numbers to their cosy relations with Russian donors, from their apparent readiness to let Brexit threaten food and medical supplies to their lack of urgency about the climate crisis, the Conservatives have seemed increasingly cavalier about social stability, public health and national security for years. Now their approach to Covid-19 has confirmed that impression to a frightening degree.
Related: 'End of hibernation': what the papers say about England's lockdown easing
Related: Boris Johnson hopes bullish approach can bring back the 'bustle'
Continue reading...June 15, 2020
Coronavirus has damaged Britain's cities. But history shows they will recover | Andy Beckett
Though urban life has lost its spontaneity and appeal, there are signs it can once again adapt to new realities, and even thrive
In Britain, we tend to see our cities as too dominant or too fragile. Currently, it’s the latter. The urban toll from coronavirus – worse than the blitz, by some measures – comes after a decade of riots, terrorism, knife crime, air pollution, homelessness, a wider housing crisis and the deepest austerity cuts. British cities are often seen by the rest of the country as privileged, but since 2010 they have often felt cursed.
They have also lost power. At the last four general elections, and in the Brexit referendum, most of urban Britain didn’t get what it voted for. Instead, a nationalistic Tory government has a big majority built on England’s towns and countryside – the places that frequently still dominate Britain’s sense of itself. As coronavirus threatens to make urban life much harder for the foreseeable future, alongside articles about moving to the country, newspapers are full of predictions that the crowded, hyperactive modern city may be doomed.
Continue reading...May 28, 2020
For years, the Tories have banked on impunity. Is their luck finally running out? | Andy Beckett
The party has clung to power by flouting political norms, but in the Cummings affair it faces an angry and contemptuous public
Will the Tories get away with it? In many ways, it’s been the central question in our politics since they squeaked back into government in 2010. Ever since they used the power vacuum after that year’s hung-parliament election to quickly cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, the Tories have been careering from one narrow scrape to the next.
Related: Tory anger at Dominic Cummings grows as 61 MPs defy Boris Johnson
One obvious advantage of answering only to “the people” is that – in theory, at least – it need happen only occasionally
Continue reading...May 14, 2020
How long until Johnson's vote-winning optimism collides with reality? | Andy Beckett
Like his hero Ronald Reagan, the PM’s half-truths have been carried by his charisma but, unlike the US president, history is not on his side
For a politician of such obvious limitations, Boris Johnson’s success can be perplexing. He can’t cope with hostile questions. He can’t cope at prime minister’s questions. He’s no good on detail. His speeches ramble. His premiership and mayoralty have had many failures, from the garden bridge to the coronavirus, and few tangible achievements. His attempts to avoid scrutiny - such as hiding in a fridge during the election - often seem desperate.
Related: Boris Johnson resorts to bluster under Starmer's cross-examination | John Crace
Continue reading...May 1, 2020
A cavalier Tory leader and a botched pandemic response? It must be 1957 | Andy Beckett
Then, as now, a government responsible for a disaster tried to change the narrative. We shouldn’t let history repeat itself
Harold Macmillan was British prime minister from 1957 to 1963. A charming Tory with a patchy record, he’s usually remembered for saying that during his government Britons had “never had it so good” in their standard of living. What has been forgotten, almost completely, is that he said this in the middle of a pandemic.
Macmillan made his claim on 20 July 1957, at a party rally in Bedford. Like Boris Johnson, he was a new premier with a preference for optimistic public statements. In 1957, the British economy was actually quite fragile, and Macmillan acknowledged this in his speech, but the idea that Tory rule kept Britain prosperous and safe was central to his premiership. As now, the party had already been in power for years, and needed to present a Labour government as a terrible risk.
Continue reading...April 17, 2020
Are the Tories turning Britain into a one-party state? | Andy Beckett
Even before coronavirus, today’s Conservatives had a far worse record than the infamous governments of the 1970s. And yet they’re still likely to win another election
Next month the Conservatives will have been in power for 10 years. British parties who manage that anniversary are usually unpopular by the time it comes.
In 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s government lost its poll lead for good. By 2007 Tony Blair was no longer a dominant premier. Accumulating mistakes, personal burn-out, the difficulty of finding fresh goals and voters’ boredom with the status quo; all usually ensure that even parties with able leaders weaken and fall from power after three or four terms. To a large extent, the UK’s traditional sense of itself as a diverse, healthy democracy depends on it.
Related: After coronavirus, Boris Johnson's Tories will be a very different party | Martin Kettle
Related: Coronavirus live news: China denies cover-up as Wuhan death toll revised up by 50%
Continue reading...April 3, 2020
Exit Jeremy Corbyn – just as Corbynism has never been more relevant | Andy Beckett
As Labour’s leader steps down, the world has seldom looked more responsive to the radicalism he stood for
• See all our coronavirus coverage
In many ways, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership ended this week exactly as his enemies always hoped it would. Heavily defeated in a general election, dismissed since as a political irrelevance, and criticised even for questioning the government’s inept handling of the coronavirus crisis, Corbyn probably has a lower reputation now than at any time since he first stood for leader, to much derision, in 2015 – and perhaps even since he became an MP, in 1983. The recent attacks on him for appearing in the House of Commons and working in his Westminster office during the crisis at the age of 70, despite official advice that older people should stay at home, have in a sense taken the years of assaults on his legitimacy to their logical conclusion. To many of his critics, Corbyn has no right to exist as a significant public figure.
Yet this drastic shrinking of his status has also coincided, thanks to the crisis, with a huge expansion of what governments do. And expanding the state’s role in society and the economy is what much of Corbyn’s career has been devoted to. Corbynism was – and is – primarily a politics about addressing emergencies: the stark inadequacies of modern capitalism, the damage caused by austerity, and the accelerating effects of the climate crisis.
Related: Is Keir Starmer failing to call out the government over coronavirus? | Katy Balls
Continue reading...March 21, 2020
Britain has always relished the idea of a national emergency. Will that change now? | Andy Beckett
Since the second world war, we’ve overloaded on dystopian fantasies. We may not want to experience another for a while
Coronavirus latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageBritain sees itself as a stable country, and also as one that’s good in a crisis. So it has mixed feelings about national emergencies: it dreads them, understandably, but a corner of the national psyche is fascinated by them – and even sometimes relishes them. This ambivalence has haunted our culture and politics since the end of Britain’s last great, successfully navigated national emergency: the second world war.
Since 1945, British or British-set novels, films, speculative documentaries and television dramas have repeatedly imagined the suspension of everyday life in the face of catastrophes, from economic collapse to social breakdown, environmental disaster to nuclear war. From the horror movie shocks of the 2002 film 28 Days Later to the heartbreaking delicacy of Raymond Briggs’ 1982 anti-nuclear graphic novel When the Wind Blows, Britain has been good at scaring itself about the future.
Related: Why the cruel myth of the 'blitz spirit' is no model for how to fight coronavirus | Richard Overy
Genuine national emergencies, we are now learning, can be drawn-out, hugely dangerous and utterly disorientating
Related: Coronavirus: at a glance
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Britain has always relished the idea of a national emergency. Will that change now?
Since the second world war, we’ve overloaded on dystopian fantasies. We may not want to experience another for a while
Coronavirus latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageBritain sees itself as a stable country, and also as one that’s good in a crisis. So it has mixed feelings about national emergencies: it dreads them, understandably, but a corner of the national psyche is fascinated by them – and even sometimes relishes them. This ambivalence has haunted our culture and politics since the end of Britain’s last great, successfully navigated national emergency: the second world war.
Since 1945, British or British-set novels, films, speculative documentaries and television dramas have repeatedly imagined the suspension of everyday life in the face of catastrophes, from economic collapse to social breakdown, environmental disaster to nuclear war. From the horror movie shocks of the 2002 film 28 Days Later to the heartbreaking delicacy of Raymond Briggs’ 1982 anti-nuclear graphic novel When the Wind Blows, Britain has been good at scaring itself about the future.
Related: Why the cruel myth of the 'blitz spirit' is no model for how to fight coronavirus | Richard Overy
Genuine national emergencies, we are now learning, can be drawn-out, hugely dangerous and utterly disorientating
Related: Coronavirus: at a glance
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Andy Beckett's Blog
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