News from Germany. A technocratic centrist/centre-left leader was booted out of office unceremoniously after just one term. His efforts to defeat the march of a nativist and hard-right sentiments of a surging populist party - ‘lancing the boil’ - by impersonating their talking points did not work out electorally. On the contrary, a strategy of courting the far-right vote by becoming its echo served only to legitimise their claims and shift politics firmly onto the territory of the hard-right.
That was the thrust of a conversation I had with a German colleague as the dust settled on the recent elections there. What struck me is how I almost felt like I could have been talking to a future self, and how I feared we would be having similar conversations amongst ourselves here in the UK in the years to come. Reading the analysis of what has been going on in Germany feels almost like a foreshadowing.
When I think about what I learnt from 8 years in Westminster I keep on returning to the importance of something I felt acutely when it was my job to deal with the political media every day, and even more so now with the benefit of distance and hindsight. I would define that lesson as the importance of focusing on the ‘terrain’ of politics, not the minutiae that fills broadcast slots and column inches from one hour to the next.
The most important thing in politics is what ‘terrain’ politics is being fought on. The first overarching rule for any political strategist or strategist of conflict going back to Sun-Tzu or von Clausewitz is surely to at all costs avoid fighting on your enemy’s territory. “Fight your enemy where they are not” - don’t let your enemy dictate the aspects of the engagement.
So my thesis is thus: It is a truth universally un-acknowledged in Westminster that on any given day much of what MPs, advisers and journalists do doesn’t actually really matter all that much when taken in isolation.
It comes down to the signal and the noise basically. The signal is actually important, meaningful information or what is really ‘going on’. The noise is everything else that actually interferes with and clouds out the signal, stopping you from accessing it.
Working as a political advisor, MP or lobby journalist creates a sort of constant hamster wheel defined by a dopamine-fed news-cycle addiction. Everyone involved is labouring under the false pretence that this speech, press release, tweet, front page story or ‘major intervention’ is going to be the one that really cuts through, shifts the dial and really changes things out there, in the real world, amongst the ‘general public’. Admitting that this isn’t true would require a lot of self-important people to acknowledge that they really aren’t that important, actually.
In the real world, politics happens at the macro level, whereas in Westminster politics happens at the micro level. Every tweet, every unnamed ‘source’ briefing, every speech in the House of Commons, every article drafted in the name of an MP by a 25 year old researcher really matters to everyone inhabiting that world. But in the real world people don’t follow the twists and turns or the ups and downs. They experience politics as background noise - they pick up the headlines and the broad trends, not who said what on Times Radio this morning.
This leads us to the crux of the issue. If the ‘terrain’ upon which our politics is conducted is that the scourge of illegal migration is the number one issue facing our country, it is driving us to wrack and ruin and something radical must be done about it, then that is good news for Reform. No qualifications, no matter how it is framed. Just as it was good news for the AfD in Germany, no matter the specifics of what the SDP and CDU/CSU were saying.
It doesn’t matter if (and especially if) the government is saying tough things about migration, posting videos of people being deported on social media and preventing refugees from ever gaining citizenship. The fact is that this is all in and of itself playing into Reform’s hands by echoing and reinforcing Reform’s positioning. Think of the important factors as prominence and salience. The point isn’t what is being said necessarily, the point is what the debate itself is - the terms of the debate, the prominence and salience given to issues and therefore which issues are relegated and dismissed.
If this is the most salient issue in our politics then people will vote for Reform - the ‘real thing’, not the tribute act. As John Harris puts it, the government is putting itself in danger by “making Farage and his ilk sound not just as if they control a huge chunk of the national conversation, but are preferable to whatever semi-skimmed version of populist politics Labour comes up with.”
In summary the process looks to play out like this:
Mainstream parties adopting the rhetoric and policies of the far-right in an attempt to keep the far right at bay
In practise this serves only to legitimise the far-right
As a result of 1 and 2, the political conversation shifts on to the territory that suits the far-right
The far-right can and will always outdo the mainstream social democratic/liberal/conservative parties, and will always be seen as more ‘authentic’
There are moral arguments that adopting the rhetoric and policies of the far-right is the wrong thing to do. I ascribe to them, and they matter. There are also compelling economic arguments that migration is essential to the functioning of our economy, and that giving refugees the right to work instead of spending taxpayers’ money keeping them locked in hotels would make a positive contribution towards economic growth. But let us stick to the purely electoral question. Is it possible for a former human rights barrister from North London to out-Farage Farage on immigration? I can’t see it.
Let me put it another way. A day in which the Labour Party announces a crackdown on migration or Labour spokespeople in the media get through rounds of tough questioning is not actually a good day for the Labour Party. It’s a good day for Reform - it reinforces their framing, it plays into their messaging and essentially legitimises their positioning when government Ministers to all intents and purposes agree with them.
When I worked for politicians I used to keep track of how many interviews (and what proportion of those interviews) were actually about the issue we were trying to push, and how many were about other issues. The job of a good advisor is of course to help their principal to navigate difficult situations, but if that is all you’re doing then you’re actually losing. Think about our recent political history. In the 2017 election Labour did well because the ‘terrain’ that the election was being fought on was domestic issues, public services, Labour’s policy agenda etc. From 2018 onwards, the ‘terrain’ of our politics was Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s personal and political history - very bad territory for Labour to be fighting a war on. Post-Covid, the ‘terrain’ of our politics was Liz Truss crashing the economy, life becoming increasingly expensive and Conservative Ministers/MPs coming up with increasingly shameless ways to bring themselves and their positions as ‘public servants’ into disrepute.
Think about this idea of ‘terrain’ another way, through the prism of the media rather than politics per se. How the media treats and covers the news is of course important, but I would argue what is of even more importance is what the media treats as the news in the first place. Take how the BBC covers the economy for example. If you listen to the Today programme or another flagship show the chances are that coverage of the economy will fall within the confines of a pretty neoliberal, university-educated and London-centric worldview: the ‘economy’ means ‘GDP’, and right now the government needs to cut some spending or raise some taxes. A couple of people (probably a deeply unimpressive junior Minister and someone from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, both of whom went to university, work in professional jobs and live in London) discuss how the government should balance the budget. Anyone with a basic A-Level or undergraduate understanding of Economics will be able to point out the paucity of this so-called ‘debate’, but let’s discuss Keynesian Growth Theory another time.
My point is that the important thing is actually what the BBC treats as the news in the first place, and how ‘the economy’ is covered. According to official figures from the ONS economic growth was 0% between July-September 2024, and 0.1% between October-December. In other words, a couple of rounding errors in another direction and we would officially be in a recession and our politics and media coverage would be unrecognisably different - all on the basis of 0.1%. That’s a rounding error! The way that economics is covered is totally disconnected from people’s lives and their experiences - the ‘terrain’ is all wrong. Think about ‘fiscal headroom’ - a belief system based on forecasts that change and may or may not come to pass in five years’ time. This ‘fiscal headroom’ - which Sky News’ Economics Editor Ed Conway calls “made up numbers” - has somehow come to define the state of our economy and the government’s tax and spend decisions. Go and speak to some actual real people about their ‘fiscal headroom’. Everyone is more skint than they used to be and nothing works!
I would posit that for the vast majority of people, that 0.1% or whether the ‘fiscal headroom’ is 14 billion or nowt at all does not make a single shred of difference to how they feel about the economy or how they experience the economy, their rent going up, their bills going up and their lives being much harder. Yet the media and political class still continue to treat our economy as though it is a GDP figure, rather than a collection of millions of actual people with jobs, expenditure and real lives. On that topic, the government is losing support fastest among voters who feel economically insecure.
During the election campaign last summer, Keir Starmer promised to stave off the rising threat of the populist right through “deeds, not words” and making a material difference to people’s lives. Across Europe we are seeing social democrats abandoning social democracy, unable to protect the living standards and security of working class people and unable to counter the answers offered by the far-right. Germany needs to serve as a lesson and a wake up call that fighting the far-right on their terms, on their territory, in their own language is a fool’s errand.
Any other business:
In January I wrote about what happens and will happen if a Labour government defines its role as solely the administrative/implementation arm of dictats handed down by finance capital.. As night follows day the government has ended up here: U-turning under pressure from private equity lobbyists arguing they should not be taxed fairly like everyone else on PAYE whose tax taken is out of their salary before it hits their bank account.
I also wrote about Third Spaces, and now Starbucks are trying to “reclaim” third spaces according to Chief Executive Brian Niccol on an earnings call with investors. Ghoulish.
This David Leonhardt piece is an interesting dispatch from Denmark in the New York Times - one country where a social democratic government has bucked the trend and won re-election. PM Mette Frederiksen’s philosophy appears to be that leftist politics (high tax, high spending on welfare and public services etc) “depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation” - the unity of which would be undermined by high levels of immigration.
Unlike the situation in other Western European countries, the Denmark Democrats and Danish People’s Party are not electoral and political forces because “immigration no longer dominates the political debate”. We are left with the question of whether a restrictionist border policy is now a prerequisite for successful progressive politics?