Here in Israel people feel deeply unsafe and the two-state solution looks doomed

March 20 2024 / The New Statesman

The walls and doors of the white-washed, flat-roofed, three-room apartment we have entered in the “juvenile generation” neighbourhood of Kibbutz Kfar Aza are full of bullet holes. The floor is cratered where a thermobaric grenade exploded. This was Sivani Elkabets’ house where she and her partner, Naor Hassidim, lived and were murdered on the morning of 7 October. On one of the walls, you can read a transcript of the final messages Sivani sent via WhatsApp to her mother, who lived elsewhere in the kibbutz. “what is it, mom?/ What’s going on here?/ Mother … Mom, mother/ Let me know every five minutes that you’re okay.”

It’s a warm morning and small, brightly coloured birds flit between the olive trees. Across nearby fields, perhaps a mile away, is the Gaza border and, intermittently, you hear the boom of artillery being fired into the Strip. One struggles to comprehend the consequences of the war – the horrific loss of life and the absolute destruction – and of what happened here in October as you are guided in bright sunshine around the kibbutz by Zohar Shpek , a former police lawyer. He is dressed in a black T-shirt and army-green trousers, his head shaven. He can speak English but prefers to communicate through a translator, as if seeking greater precision. A semi-automatic rifle is slung across his shoulder. He says 69 people were murdered and 12 others were taken hostage after Hamas militants surged into the kibbutz and the killing spree began. They were followed by waves of civilians who looted and rampaged as a blood-dimmed tide broke across the kibbutz; as many as 3,000 people are believed to have poured out of Gaza and into Israel. “We broke our contract with the people of Israel on that day,” said Major David Baruch, an IDF reservist, whom we’d met earlier at the location of the Re’im music festival, now a memorial site to the Israeli dead.

Zohar is one of the few residents to have returned to Kfar Aza. Before the attack 950 people lived here, “nearly all of them left-wing activists” as he describes them. He estimates that perhaps as many as 65,000 citizens have since been relocated from southern Israel. A similar number have been evacuated from towns in the north of the country which is under attack from rockets and anti-tank missiles fired by Hezbollah. Israel’s next war may soon be against the formidable and battle-hardened Iran-backed Shiite militant group inside Lebanon.

We are introduced to a man whose brother, a member of the “first response team” which led the counterattack against Hamas at the kibbutz, was murdered on 7 October. He and his wife and two young children had survived by sheltering for 22 hours in a safe room. He mentions his mother, who also lived at Kfar Azar. She too survived. “My mother is so left-wing that when she looks to her left there is nowhere to go,” he says with a sad smile. His mother worked with Road to Recovery, an organisation whose volunteers would meet sick children and their families at the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza and drive them to hospitals in East Jerusalem for treatment. She longs for peace with the Palestinians. “We built relationships with Palestinians – sending aid and provisions into Gaza,” Zohar says. How does he feel now about what is happening to Gazans? “I don’t care about them. I care only about people this side of the border. My vision didn’t change from twenty years ago. I’m a peacenik. But I can no longer go to help an Arab child. I can only help my child. We are fighting for our lives.” His stare is cold and hard and unyielding. Later, opening his arms wide as if in despair, he says: “This was Eden!”

What is left of the left in Israel? Not much. The Labour Party, once hegemonic, the party of Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the party of the old Ashkenazi elite, is a shell of what it once was and has only four seats in the Knesset. Over coffee one morning at a café in Tel Aviv its leader, Merav Michaeli, a former journalist and columnist at Haaretz, said: “There are fifty shades of right in Israel and Labor. It’s all about who is more right-wing and who wants to kill more Arabs.” She said that Labor, despite its diminished status, was “the only representative of genuine Zionism”. What did she mean? “I mean equality of opportunity for all, with all our neighbours, no matter your sex, race, religion, even in the bloodiest circumstances. And we support a social democratic economy.” The Bibi era, as she called it, referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, had brought only division and conflict to Israel. Likud was now hegemonic: it controls organised labour, the unions, the institutions, she said. And all Israelis are in deep mourning. “Here in Tel Aviv we cannot say to each other: ‘How are you?’ Nothing is personally okay for anyone. It [the attack] has taken away the feeling of being safe.”

Her words were sombre. I left Israel convinced more than ever that there is no pathway to a two-state solution. People have been hardened by suffering. The mutual hatred and distrust are too deep. One senior Israeli official said that the Gaza war would end only when Hamas were militarily destroyed. And after that? “We need a deal instigated by Arab states, supported by the Americans and that Israel can live with”. What of a Palestinian state? There would be no Palestinian state, he said, because Israel had no partner for peace.

Rachel Reeves: is securonomics really Bidenism but without the money?

March 17 2024 / The Sunday Times

Rachel Reeves went to Washington last May to proselytise about what she believes is her big, transformative idea for the next Labour government: “securonomics”. The neologism was her own coinage and encapsulates her considered response to what she calls “our age of insecurity” in which hostile great powers compete to control the technologies of the future.

“The era of hyper-globalisation as we know it is dead,” she told a breakfast gathering at the Peterson Institute in Dupont Circle. Her message was received, overall, with polite indifference and afterwards her interlocutor, the economist Adam Posen, asked if she was preaching a form of “zero sum economics”. Reeves smiled and pushed on, praising the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which uses subsidies and tax breaks to incentivise investment in green technology, American manufacturing and domestic energy production.

Since the Washington trip, Reeves has been ensnared in the debacle over Labour’s U-turn on its incoherent pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green growth. Most weeks she is caught up in the grind of trying to explain how a Labour government would invest in public services without raising taxes. She repeats her mantra of fiscal restraint with robotic discipline.

But she has bolder ambitions and on Tuesday she is giving the annual Mais lecture, hosted by the City of London University, and will use it to deepen the theme of securonomics.

Securonomics, she will say, will not signal a return to 1970s-style big state Labourism.It advances, by contrast, not the big state, but the strategic state. Not the top-down, Whitehall-knows-best industrial policy approaches of the past, propping up industries that cannot compete and seeking to direct from above.”

“This is a big moment for us,” Reeves, who has been “working flat out” on the Labour manifesto, said when we spoke on Friday afternoon. “The central importance of the speech will be to emphasise resilience, security and active government – and the need for reform.”

Reeves, who refused to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, loathed Corbynism – especially its strident pieties and voodoo economics. But she is equally sceptical of progressive boosterism and believes market-driven globalisation has created too many losers, a decaying public realm in Britain and overstretched public services.

Unlike Tony Blair, who once told me he believes the “arc of history bends towards justice and enlightenment”, Reeves does not think progress is inevitable. She’s not an anti-liberal, but her political instincts are increasingly post-liberal and, therefore, more in tune with these dark times.

The purpose of an active state, she believes, is to provide security from the havoc wrought by global free markets as well as creating the conditions for economic growth. There can be no liberty – what Thomas Hobbes called “commodious living” - without security and order. On this, she is aligned with Keir Starmer.

The Labour leader’s colleagues often say that while he is ruthless in pursuit of victory and therefore as pragmatic and flexible as he needs to be, he has “no politics”. He has instincts rather than a grand strategy or ideological conviction, which may be a good thing: he can travel light, and flex and bend as the logic of the situation dictates. He entered parliament late and is not associated with any of Labour’s core factions: the hard left, the soft left, the old right, or the Blairites.

But Reeves is a creature of the Labour Party. She is deeply interested in its traditions and history. Even as a young economist at the Bank of England, having turned down an offer while at Oxford to join Goldman Sachs, she was identified by Gordon Brown as a possible future Labour chancellor and nurtured accordingly.

Starmer’s unthreatening demeanour and moderation should be enough to make him prime minister as the Tories self-immolate. But many Labour voters demand more than incremental change and technocratic social democracy. They want bold ideas. They want radicalism. This, perhaps surprisingly given her public image and innate caution, is where Reeves believes she can help: she is Labour’s chancellor-in-waiting but also its chief ideologue.

That maybe so but does securonomics really amount to anything more than an exercise in wishful thinking: Bidenism but without the money and the mighty dollar? More than this, as Adam Posen suggested in Washington, is it really another word for protectionism?

“Look, I have no problem with our great financial service companies selling to China,” Reeves told me. “But never again should we be reliant on China, a country that does not share our values, to build our nuclear power stations and never again should we open our 5G infrastructure to Chinese investment. Securonomics is not protectionism. But it is hard-headed realism. As for Bidenomics, I know we can’t put in billions, trillions in investment like the Americans can. So we will have to find different ways of getting investment in the economy by working in partnership with business.”

Rachel Reeves knows a long period of Conservative rule is ending and that the political sea-change is now for Labour. She is troubled by what she calls “British decline” and wants to position herself in the vanguard – alongside US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen - of a new economic consensus.

At the end of the 1970s, as the post-war order crumbled, the Thatcherites had a radical solution to the political and economic crisis in which Britain was mired. Can Reeves, with her talk of securonomics and new orthodoxies, and Labour effect a similar transformation today during a comparable period of crisis? Or will the cycle of decline continue? We shall find out soon enough.

John Tavener: sacred music for a secular world

February 14 2024 / The New Statesman

On Christmas Eve I had the good fortune to be present for the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Faraway, in the Holy Land, war raged in Gaza and the churches of Bethlehem were closed. At one point, as the choir sang the hymn “The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap”, my eyes filled with tears. I had a similar experience last weekend during a performance of John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil at Saffron Hall in the old Quaker town of Saffron Walden in Essex. The solo cellist was Guy Johnston, with the violinist Thomas Gould leading the unconducted Britten Sinfonia chamber orchestra, and together they held the audience in rapt and solemn attention.

Saffron Hall is located on the campus of Saffron Walden County High School and has a world-class programme of events and concerts: on a visit there last November, I saw a virtuoso performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.

“I’m sorry there is no encore,” he said at the end while praising the exceptional acoustics. “But the aria is its own encore.”

I have seen The Protecting Veil performed live before but never with Steven Isserlis, at whose request the piece was written, as the solo cellist. It takes its inspiration from the moment Mary, the Mother of God, is said to have appeared before worshippers at the Blachernae church in Constantinople during an all-night vigil in the 10th century. The apparition inspired the besieged Christian Greeks to withstand an onslaught from Saracen marauders and it was felt as if Mary had wrapped her protecting veil around them.

Began as a much shorter work, The Protecting Veil is in some ways an accidental masterpiece. Tavener was asked by Isserlis to write a 10-minute piece for cello and strings, capturing the purity and simplicity of Christian Orthodox church music. During its composition it deepened into something longer and more complex: a full cello concerto.

Born into a Presbyterian family in 1946, Tavener, who was a music scholar at Highgate School and later studied at the Royal Academy of Music, converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church in his thirties and his spiritual music restlessly seeks after the eternal. “I wanted to produce music that was the sound of God,” he said.

The Protecting Veil is both ecstatic and contemplative. With its chant-like austerities and melodic repetitions it is a kind of extended prayer. Tavener called it an attempt “to make a lyrical ikon in sound”: devotional music that was “highly stylised, geometrically formed and meditative in character”. It premiered at the 1989 BBC proms, before a half-empty Royal Albert Hall in London: Isserlis was the solo cellist and received a rapturous standing ovation that late summer evening. The applause has never stopped. His subsequent recording of The Protecting Veil topped the classical charts and, improbably, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize in 1992; a later Tavener work, from 1993, Song for Athene, was sung at Princess Diana’s funeral.

Johnston, who calls Isserlis his mentor, says it “takes quite some stamina” to perform The Protecting Veil. “The cellist is playing in the stratosphere for much of the time.” The listener is taken on a journey, mostly serene. But there are also moments of disruption and abrupt shifts in register and tone; in one section, a long lament, it sounds as if the solo cello is in mourning for a broken world.

With his long, receding hair, deep tan and loose-fitting white clothes, Tavener, in photographs, looked as if he’d just returned from a long summer holiday in Greece. Perhaps he had. He was famous and he was rich. And there remained something of the old hippy about him even into older age. In the Sixties he’d known John Lennon and his “dramatic cantata” The Whale, from 1966, was released on the Beatles’ Apple label.

Some have mocked his spiritual music as conforming to a genre of “sacred minimalism”: he is grouped with Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, both composers I like. But Tavener was no pseud. He was utterly sincere and endlessly questing. Much of his adult life was blighted by extremely poor health: he suffered from Marfan syndrome, had a stroke aged 36 and several heart attacks. He endured debilitating abdominal pain. Perhaps he longed for the eternal so intensely because he knew just how fragile and vulnerable we are. “Suffering is a kind of ecstasy, in a way,” he said. “Having pain all the time makes me terribly, terribly grateful for every moment I’ve got.”

Christianity, wrote the philosopher Bryan Magee, a self-described agnostic, in his monograph The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, was a form of “anti-art”: “The alienation of man against his own nature, especially his emotional nature… the devaluation of life and the world and hence, inevitably, their wonderfulness … all this is profoundly at odds with the very nature and existence of art.”

Magee, a Wagnerian and sensualist, was right about much but wrong about this. More and more, in recent times, I find myself listening to sacred music, not because I am religious but because it unlocks something deep within - a longing for transcendence, perhaps, or what Philip Larkin, in “Church Going”, calls a hunger in oneself to be more serious. After his stroke my colleague Andrew Marr, who is not a believer, found consolation through listening to Bach’s cantatas and reading religious poetry. Confronted by the “possibility of sudden death”, he had sought solace in religious art or art inspired by religion.

Why does the secular mind seek out the sacred, often at moments of heightened stress or torment? What is it we feel we are missing or, more accurately, seeking? What is this absence for which we yearn but of which we cannot speak?

For Magee, Christianity venerates death over life: it promises what is to be is greater – more fulfilling, more truthful – than what is. And yet, for the secular mind, death is the absolute end. But it’s death that ultimately gives meaning to life: definition, a telos. Through contemplating the ever-presence of death in life, although it is not an event in life – Larkin writes of the tense, musty, unignorable silence he senses while alone in an empty church - we may learn to live. Or at least to live better.

On Monday 11 November 2013, John Tavener appeared as a guest on Radio 4’s Start the Week, presented by Andrew Marr. Alongside him were John Drury, chaplain of All Souls College and the author of a biography of the poet-priest George Herbert, and Jeanette Winterson, the novelist who grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Lancashire. Tavener discussed his recovery from heart surgery, having spent six months in intensive care, and of his feelings of abandonment: “I couldn’t sense the idea of God anymore, I couldn’t sense any music. Everything vanished.”

As his strength slowly returned so did his religious conviction and faith in his ability to compose. But the music he wrote was now more concentrated, terser, spare. His way back to God had been to write music. “Music and believing in God have always gone together,” he said. The next day he died at home in Dorset. But the music is imperishable.

Labour has a Palestinian problem

February 4 2024 / The Sunday Times

The Arab Street and the politics of Israel-Palestine have arrived in British cities


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Ramsay MacDonald and The Wild Men of Labour

January 21 2024 / The Sunday Times

King George V had a shrewd understanding of the volatility of the British electorate and of the threat the emerging Labour Party posed to the established order. When in the autumn of 1923 Stanley Baldwin, who a few months earlier had succeeded Andrew Bonar Law as prime minister, asked for a dissolution of parliament ahead of a proposed general election, the king warned him ominously that his “majority might be reduced, or that he might not get a majority at all”.

Labour was led by Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a ploughman. He was raised by his mother, a servant, in a two-room cottage in Lossiemouth, a fishing town in the northeast of Scotland. A supporter of Scottish home rule, he had opposed the First World War and wanted to abolish the House of Lords. The King, whose cousin Tsar Nicholas II had been executed by the Bolsheviks, feared MacDonald and the other “wild men” of Labour, as they were caricatured in the press. Their mission, as the Conservative grandee Leo Amery put it in a letter to Baldwin, was “levelling up by taxation [and] nationalisation”, but the greater fear was that Labour would unlock the forces of revolution in Britain.
The Tories had won a majority of 74 at the 1922 general election, but the United Kingdom was fractured, after the secession of most of Ireland, and the people were fractious. There were restive home rule movements in Scotland and Wales. The Russian Revolution had radicalised British communists and left-wing internationalists (Labour favoured free economic and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union). What Labour called the “chronic disease” of unemployment was rising and Baldwin was mired in a dispute over free trade. He favoured protectionism and wanted his own mandate for tariff reform. He was convinced Labour, an undisciplined coalition of trade unionists, working-class radicals and Fabian intellectuals, was not ready to govern.
In the event Baldwin lost his majority, as the King had predicted. The result was a hung parliament, with Labour coming second for the first time: the Conservative Unionists won 258 seats, Labour 191 and the Liberals 158. There would be no coalition between Labour and the Liberals, but Herbert Asquith, the Liberal leader, was prepared to accept the experiment of a minority Labour government. MacDonald, who began the election campaign by taking a motoring tour from London to his constituency in Wales (he was carried head-high through the streets of Aberavon on arrival), would be prime minister. Henry “Chips” Channon, the Tory snob and libertine, wrote in his diary: “Is this the beginning of the end?”

In The Wild Men David Torrance, a biographer and clerk at the House of Commons, tells the story of MacDonald’s rise and the first Labour government, its people, policies and purpose, with sympathy and fastidious attention to detail. His reading and research are exemplary, but the focus is narrow: he conveys little sense of what Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country and is much more interested in people than in ideology or the political ideas powering change as Europe struggled to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War.
Nor does he peer too far into the future to analyse what became of MacDonald after the so-called great betrayal: in 1931, as prime minister of the second Labour government, during an economic crisis, he broke from his party to form a National Government composed largely of Conservatives.

Labour is a party in thrall to its past. It is sentimental about the achievements of its first leader, Keir Hardie (after whom the present leader is named), and those of Clement Attlee, whose government won a landslide victory in 1945 and created the NHS, the welfare state and the postwar consensus that unravelled in the 1970s. MacDonald, however, remains The Unforgiven.
And yet, as Torrance reminds us in this fascinating portrait of the men and one woman (Margaret Bondfield, a former shop assistant) who were prominent in the short-lived government, MacDonald’s pragmatism and caution reassured the nation that Labour was more than a band of rebels and cranks. It was a national party of government, led not by revolutionary wild men, or a “beggarly array” as Asquith called them, but patriotic politicians who believed in moderate reform and the parliamentary road to socialism. Many of the most impressive, such as Philip Snowden (the chancellor of the exchequer) and Jimmy Thomas (secretary of state for the colonies), were working-class autodidacts who had excelled through hard work, idealism and the trade union movement. The King was also persuaded. Despite his earlier fears about a far-left takeover, his relations with MacDonald were those of “unhesitating mutual confidence”.

MacDonald’s wife had died in 1911 and he was especially dependent on his daughter, Ishbel. She lived with him in Downing Street and served as his confidante, secretary and hostess. But she and her father were also accused by the left of being too fond of society dinner parties and state banquets: John Wheatley, the Labour health secretary, remarked, presciently as it turned out, that if the Conservatives “were an intelligent party” they would make MacDonald their leader.

MacDonald had become enmeshed in a cash-for-honours scandal after a childhood friend, Alexander Grant, the managing director of McVitie’s and the inventor of the digestive biscuit, had given the prime minister a Daimler as well as shares in the company from which he derived an income. Grant, a notable philanthropist, had been granted a baronetcy, but MacDonald protested that his friend was honoured only for public service. After losing office he relinquished the shares and the car.

There were other scandals as well, especially the faked “Zinoviev letter”, a Daily Mail scare about the supposed sinister influence of Soviet Russia on Labour and the British left, although there were communist fellow-travellers on the Labour benches. By the time Labour lost a confidence vote in October 1924, MacDonald, occupying the dual role of prime minister and foreign secretary, was exhausted.

Labour may wish to forget MacDonald, but there are obvious parallels between today’s politics and the first Labour government. The kingdom remains disunited and the Scottish and Irish questions are unresolved. Russia is a malign threat to Europe and factions on the left are considered Putin apologists, just as there were Lenin apologists long before them. Keir Starmer, who served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, won the leadership with support from the far left, but, like MacDonald, has repositioned himself as a pragmatic moderate traduced for his excessive caution.
After the Corbyn years, the party is working assiduously to rebuild confidence on defence and security, as MacDonald did. The perennial question is: can Labour be trusted with the nation’s finances? Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, is committed to fiscal restraint, and so was Snowden, who admired William Gladstone. (Leonard Woolf quipped that Snowden was about “as progressive as a member of the Junior Carlton Club”.)

The first Labour government lasted for nearly ten months. It’s a wonder, in retrospect, that it endured for so long when in the Commons it faced what Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics, called “two oppositions” that could have combined to bring it down at any moment.

Labour lost 42 seats at the October 1924 election, but its overall vote increased while support for the Liberals collapsed: within a decade George Dangerfield had written his celebrated book The Strange Death of Liberal England. The old political order was shattered. A new two-party system had been born. The wild men were here to stay.

Kate Forbes: The Rooted Nomad

December 6 2023 / The New Statesman

​Will the SNP’s Kate Forbes ultimately be forced to choose between politics and God?


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Wayne Barnes: sport, the courtroom and social media hate

December 1 2023 / The New Statesman

As an international rugby referee, the English lawyer has faced sustained abuse and death threats. Now he is fighting back against the negligence of the tech giants


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Rachel Reeves: is she trapped?

November 26 2023 / The Sunday Times

There was nothing in the autumn statement that Rachel Reeves and her shadow Treasury team did not expect. The headline moves by Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, were tax cuts for voters and businesses while stating that the share of public spending in GDP will fall slightly to 42.9 per cent by 2027-28.

He failed to mention, of course, that the tax burden was at its highest level since the Second World War and we are grappling with the largest reduction in living standards since records began in the 1950s, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. Nor that the UK has the highest debt-interest costs of any big economy.

Hunt has an emollient style, but is ruthless. He wants Labour, the self-styled party of the NHS, to answer a simple question: would it be prepared to reverse the tax cuts or recalibrate its public spending commitments? If not the former, then how will it fund the Labour state in straitened times?
Reeves understands the traps the Tories are setting, which was why, in May, she pulled back on the proposed £28 billion-a-year plan for capital spending on green growth, saying it would not be implemented at least until later in the next parliamentary term. “No plan can be built that is not a rock of economic and fiscal responsibility,” she said in June.

Reports yesterday that Keir Starmer wants to scale back the plan even further — or abandon it altogether — were dismissed by aides close to both the Labour leader and his shadow chancellor. “There is nothing between Keir and Rachel on this issue,” I was told. “We are fully committed to our plan and the speculation is nonsense.”
Is it really? Starmer and Reeves are nothing if not pragmatic and, I suspect, commitment to the £28 billion a year green pledge will remain open-ended rather than have a fixed date of delivery: Reeves has said that a Labour government would not borrow to fund day-to-day spending and would also reduce the national debt as a share of the economy. She believes in the potential of the energy transition to create jobs and revitalise regions, but will not make promises she cannot fulfil.

Her next move? Ahead of the general election, I expect she will rule out raising income tax, VAT and national insurance in the next parliament.

That would be a defensive move consistent with the leadership’s caution. What about something radical such as wealth taxes — on land, property and other static assets, as many on the left would wish? When I asked Reeves about wealth taxes, she ruled them out.

But Labour remains anxious — and the question of tax is at the heart of the matter. The leadership is haunted by past defeats: not just the abject collapse of the Corbynites in 2019 but more pertinently Neil Kinnock’s 1992 loss to John Major. That election has been studied obsessively by Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief strategist, who also urges colleagues to read Edward Fieldhouse’s recent book Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World.
The fundamental message Labour has taken from the 1992 defeat is: don’t raise taxes. John Smith, then shadow chancellor, proposed to do just that by pledging during the first week of the campaign to increase the top rate of income tax from 40 per cent to 50 per cent, as well as national insurance for higher earners. “Higher taxes and higher prices” — that was “Labour’s double whammy”, as the Conservatives framed it in a ubiquitous campaign poster featuring a pair of boxing gloves. The punches landed. Major returned to Downing Street with a 21-seat majority.

In May, when I travelled to New York and Washington with Reeves, we spoke about why Labour would not make the same mistake. She was in the US to introduce herself to Janet Yellen, the first female US treasury secretary, and other financial leaders. But she had another purpose: to show that she belonged in this company and had a serious economic plan for Britain.

Early one morning, at the Peterson Institute in Dupont Circle, Washington, she gave a speech in which she declared the end of liberal globalisation “as we know it” and outlined her vision for what she called “securonomics”. We had entered a new era of geopolitical competition and active government, she said. Labour believed in an interventionist state and the new modern supply-side economics (which the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik calls “productivism”) and was more in tune with the spirit of the age than were the Sunak Conservatives.

The day before, as we talked on the train to Washington, Reeves cried a little when she mentioned a girl called Natalie who had been the first pupil from her state school to go to Oxford. As a teenage chess champion, Reeves had competed against public schoolboys who blithely discussed the Oxbridge colleges they were going to. She was intimidated by their sense of entitlement. They came from a world she did not know nor understand. Her parents were not graduates and Oxbridge, for Reeves, seemed out of reach. Until Natalie showed her, through discipline and hard work, it was not.

What does this tell us about the kind of chancellor Reeves will be? First, she is deadly serious when she says she wants to create an economy that empowers “working people”. She is scornful of the carelessness of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng and of their reckless tax-cutting mini-budget. She despises incompetence and profligacy. But she also accuses Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor, of making unfunded spending commitments during their 2019 campaign.
Second, she dislikes unearned privilege: she is entirely relaxed about imposing VAT on private schools as well as abolishing wealthy “non-dom” status for foreign nationals.

But she knows “closing tax loopholes”, as she calls them, will not be enough to rebuild the diminished public realm. She knows too that the Tories are no longer trusted on the economy but that Labour must win people’s trust. “If people don’t trust us, we will not make it,” said one adviser who has the word “trust” written on a Post-it note on their computer.

In the months ahead, Reeves’s message will be more of the same: fiscal discipline, a strategic state powering the nation’s productive capacity, and public-service reform. And she will keep asking voters the same question: do you feel better off than you did 13 years ago?

None of this will excite the left, which has been inflamed by the Gaza conflict and yearns to govern a country that does not exist, but it should be enough to win an election against an exhausted and fractious Conservative Party.

Caution and fear define Labour

October 8 2023 / The Sunday Times

One afternoon during the Labour leadership contest of 2015, I visited Liz Kendall at her Westminster office. Her candidature was being cruelly caricatured as “the Blair Witch Project” and it was obvious even early in the campaign that she would lose, although some of the party’s smartest strategists were on her team.

Her campaign was being managed by Morgan McSweeney, now Labour’s campaign director, and I was greeted at her office that day by Pat McFadden, now national campaign co-ordinator. Also working for Kendall was Matthew Doyle, now Keir Starmer’s director of communications, and she had the support of emerging MPs such as Wes Streeting and Peter Kyle, now both prominent in the shadow cabinet.

In the end, Kendall was humiliated in a contest won resoundingly by Jeremy Corbyn: she finished with just 4.5 per cent of the vote (for a while afterwards her personal Twitter handle was “4 per cent Liz”. Despite their political differences, Kendall formed a close personal bond with Corbyn as they toured the country, and after her defeat she retreated quietly from the frontline and did not become embroiled in the civil war that consumed the party until its epic defeat at the 2019 general election.

Corbyn and the radical left may have emerged from the 2015 contest victorious but in retrospect the ultimate winners turned out to be Liz Kendall and her closest allies, who today have iron control over Labour’s general election planning and strategy. Call them Blairites, centrists or whatever but they have vanquished the left, unified the party and are remaking it as a formidable and disciplined election-winning machine.

In September Kendall completed her comeback by being promoted to the shadow cabinet as the new shadow work and pensions secretary. “Liz is the ultimate symbol of our return to the centre ground,” one of her senior colleagues told me.

Labour strategists spent much of last week observing, with horror and fascination, events at the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester. Despite Rishi Sunak’s positioning as the self-styled candidate of change against a failed consensus – a hard sell when your party has been in power for 13 years – many Conservative MPs are acting as if they have already lost. Different factions from the reactionary populist right to the Trussite libertarians are competing to shape the post-election identity of a fractured party.

“The Conservatives’ desperation makes them very dangerous,” one shadow cabinet minister told me. “Not least because they are flirting with a new kind of post-truth conspiracist politics.”

Labour is bracing itself for relentless personal attacks on Starmer in the months ahead over his record as Director of Public Prosecutions, his previous support for Corbyn and what the Tories consider to be his “flip flopping” on key policies. But Labour is prepared and emboldened to occupy the moderate centre ground, forcing the Tories even further to the right.

Labour would agree with the Tories’ Reginald Maudling who once quipped that England is “a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour”. That is why the Starmer leadership, once he had taken full control of the party, has been largely about creating reassurance. Ed Miliband was never trusted by the electorate and Corbyn even less so.

Starmer is a hesitant radical. Before Labour can be radical, he knows it must first be trusted on defining national issues on which it has been traditionally mistrusted: the economy, security, defence, law and order, immigration.

But an overwhelming desire to reassure can also lead to excessive caution, to Labour being forced into what the shadow cabinet member describes as its current “defensive posture”. Labour wins well when its leader has an instinctive feel for what George Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country and can articulate a sense of national purpose or mission. “We were looking towards the future,” Clement Attlee once said of Labour’s 1945 landslide victory. “The Tories were looking towards the past.”

Speaking to the party conference in 1995, less than two years before he became prime minister, Tony Blair was also looking to the future. “I want us to be a young country again with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to, not resting on past glories, fighting old battles,” he declared.

Blair is a progressive; he believes the arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. I think he is wrong but that is irrelevant. Inspired by the Clinton Democrats, he knew the kind of country he wanted to lead back then: liberal, meritocratic, unburdened by the past and open to the world. A country that would embrace the new market-driven globalisation and serve as a transatlantic bridge between the EU and the United States. A “young country” no less, led by a new party: New Labour.

What kind of country does Starmer want to lead? He still hasn’t told us. “Keir is not a Blairite,” one of his closest allies said last week. “He’s a centre-left pragmatic, problem-solving type. But he is ruthless about winning.”

No one doubts that Keir Starmer wants to win. Comprehensive victory for Labour in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election last Thursday confirmed that he leads a government-in-waiting. But he needs to do more, starting today at the party’s conference in Liverpool. He needs to find a different register, to quicken the pace, to inspire as well as reassure. Above all else, as well as occupying the centre ground, he needs to convey a sense of hope and common purpose and pull Labour out of its defensive posture.

Shaktar Donetsk: The Barcelona of the East

We Play On: Shakhtar Donetsk’s Fight for Ukraine, Football and Freedom

By Andy Brassell

October 1 2023 / The Sunday Times

In October 2012 Chelsea, the then European champions, played Shakhtar in a Champions League group game at the Donbass Arena, a 52,000-capacity, state-of-the-art stadium which Andy Brassell in his fascinating new book likens to a huge shining “spaceship” that had landed in the old mining city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Brassell was at the game, but I remember watching it on television and being astonished by the brilliant fluency of Shakhtar’s fast-paced, intricate passing game. They had four young Brazilian players in the team, notably Willian and Fernandinho, as well as the Armenian forward Henrik Mkhitaryan – all three of whom would later play in the English Premier League. Shakhtar won 2-1, and afterwards I remember thinking: What is this team? How on earth did they become so good?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, wrote Joan Didion. The story Brassell wants to tell is about how one football club, the “Barcelona of the East”, came to symbolise the modern history of Ukraine in the post-Soviet period. It is a story of nation-building and the struggle for recognition, of ostentatious consumption, and, in its final chapters, of a war for national survival.

The club from the Russian-speaking industrial east of the country was for a long time known in Ukraine as “the Brazilian team” because of its many Lusophone players, tempted to Donetsk by the promise of fame and riches. The club is owned by Rinat Akhmetov, an ethnic Volga Tartar and billionaire oligarch. Under his fanatically ambitious leadership, Shakhtar aspired not only to be the best team in Ukraine and indeed eastern Europe, but one capable of winning the UEFA Cup (which it did in 2009) and even the Champions League. But Akhmetov, the son of a miner, wanted much more than on-field success: he wanted Shakhtar to be representative of something bigger, “to show the world what Donetsk was, what Ukraine was” and what the independent nation could achieve and offer the world.

Brassell is an expert on Ukrainian football, and he has written a fan’s account of Shakhtar’s rise and present misfortune. He has interviewed the club’s leading officials and many of its most notable former players and managers, including Mircea Lucescu, the Portuguese-speaking Romanian who in a 12-year stint as coach did so much to establish Shakhtar’s signature attacking style, and Roberto De Zerbi, now in England at Brighton. He appears not to have spoken to Akhmetov, however, and writes deferentially about the mysterious oligarch, describing him variously as a “genius” and “visionary”.

In recent times, Shakhtar have suffered a kind of double exile. In 2014, as conflict intensified in the contested regions of eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian troops the club abandoned its cherished stadium and relocated to Kyiv. The Donetsk Oblast was not officially annexed by Russia until 2022 but as the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic it was under the control of Russia-backed paramilitaries from 2014.

From 2014-2020 Shakhtar’s “home” matches were played in Lviv and Kharkiv; more recently, until the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, they were played in Kyiv. Brassell describes in the opening chapter, “Escape”, the desperate flight of the players and their families, in cars, coaches and on trains, from their base at Hotel Opera, in downtown Kyiv, to western Ukraine, Poland and Romania as Russian tanks advanced across the country.

Last season Shakhtar’s Champions League home matches were played in Poland, which meant the players enduring 10-hour coach journeys from their new base in Liviv; this season they will be played in Germany. The club no longer dreams of winning European football’s glittering prizes. War has circumscribed its ambitions while firing its desire to represent more than one city and one region, as it once did. The Brazilians have departed and in their place is a squad of mostly young Ukrainians who choose to speak Ukrainian rather than Russian and, especially when competing in Europe, carry the good will of much of the nation. None of the players have fought in the war but they all have friends and family directly affected by the conflict.

Shakhtar (no one now uses the full name) have become “more than a club” – the slogan popularised by Barcelona, a long-time vessel of Catalan pride and nationalism. As a mass-casualty war of attrition grinds on and civilians are targeted everywhere by Russian air strikes, Shakhtar, once of the east but now a club for the whole of Ukraine, play on. They play on, as Brassell reminds us, largely because of the “sacrifices of the Ukrainian army”. “The most important [thing] is to play,” says Darijo Srna, a Croatian who played for Shakhtar and is now the sporting director, “to show the world that we are still alive, that we are fighting, that we are living, that we will have a good future.”

Liverpool’s German manager Jurgen Klopp describes football as the “most important of the least-important things”. Sometimes it is more than that. Sometimes it is a mirror in which we see the face of a nation reflected. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm once put it, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” Shakhtar Donetsk: no longer the Brazilian team nor one even based in Donetsk, but truly more than a club, in this time of war.

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