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Nicely written, but are any of those statements or insights backed up by anything other than needing content for paycheck?
John Gray is pretty consistent with his analysis on liberal extremism and technocracy. Sure, some of it is speculative and therefore prone to miscalculation, but it seems to me at least that he's correct about the ideological contradictions inherent to centrism, as well as the political space that Reform are moving into.
If Starmer's project is bureaucratic and managerial about growth alone—and it seems to be—then these forces don't seem like they're going away.
For a slightly more historical/economic analysis on broadly similar themes of governance and democracy, this is pretty good:
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/07/global-economic-governance-whats-growth-got-to-do-with-it?lang=enFar from society’s purchasing power chasing too few goods and services, there are in aggregate terms too many goods and services chasing too little purchasing power. This imbalance has led to high levels of private debt, as the 99 percent borrow money for housing, healthcare, and food at the same time as firms (which cannot sell all they produce) borrow to compensate for falling sales.
The consequences are the reverse of most conventional economic commentary: overproduction, high levels of private debt, and falling incomes. Experience has shown that all of these elements lead to global financial crises.
And Keynes' intention in 1944, just to show how different our current economic conversation could be:
"in [the] future, the external value of sterling shall conform to its internal value as set by our own domestic policies, and not the other way round. Secondly, we intend to retain control of our domestic rate of interest, so that we can keep it as low as suits our own purposes, without interference from the ebb and flow of international capital movements or flights of hot money. Thirdly, whilst we intend to prevent inflation at home, we will not accept deflation at the dictate of influences from outside. In other words, we abjure the instruments of bank rate and credit contraction operating through the increase of unemployment as a means of forcing our domestic economy into line with external factors."
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branwen
Nicely written, but are any of those statements or insights backed up by anything other than needing content for paycheck?
E.g. Do we yet know what Reform's total votes received was? In 2015 UKIP got 12.6% and 3,881,099 votes. What was Reform's improvement both as a % and total numbers?
In the last election the Red Wall crumbled with trad Labour voters turned blue for at least a decade to come.
.... That is until we all experienced a never ending shit show of incompetence in the years that followed. I know it's an incredibly hard counter-factual, but if a Tory government with Cameron-levels of ability and ethics* had been in charge would it have been such a landslide? I doubt it.
My 2p is regardless of political conviction there comes a point where a population gags on the stench of incompetence and accept a change must come. I don't discount all the various shifts and other factors, but honestly this election boiled down to:
the Tories are shit and need to go X Starmer is a viable alternative
You can make it more complicated, try and draw out some interesting hot takes to save endlessly rewriting the same article since Partygate. But sometimes it just isn't that complicated.
*hilarious that is their high watermark