"Everyone wants growth. But will ... they have the courage to upset vested interests on their own side?"

"The problem is that politics is not about good intentions, but trade-offs and results. Everyone wants growth. But will ... they have the courage to upset vested interests on their own side? The government still has promising changes in the pipeline on housing and infrastructure. But elsewhere? ...

"[H]ere’s [a] strategy, one advocated in a fascinating essay from 1989. The author opens by arguing that 'politicians tend, worldwide, to avoid structural reform until it is forced upon them by economic stagnation, a collapse of their currency or some other costly economic and social disaster. Politicians tend to close their minds as long as they can … because they believe that decisive action must inevitably bring political calamity upon their governments.'

"But the writer goes on to make precisely the opposite case: 'Political survival depends on making quality decisions; compromised policies lead to voter dissatisfaction; letting things drift is political suicide.'

"Voters, he argues, 'ultimately place a higher value on enhancing their medium-term prospects than on action that looks successful short-term but which sacrifices larger and more enduring future gains … There is a deep well of realism and common sense among the ordinary people of the community. They want politicians to have the guts and the vision to deliver sustainable gains in living standards.'

"Strategically, he also advises pursuing reform in 'quantum leaps' rather than small steps; 'otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise and drag you down.'

"The whole 35-page paper, 'The Politics of Structural Reform',' is worth reading, not least because so much strikes a chord today ('Inadequate politicians see instant popularity as the key to power. If their rating slips, they feel threatened. They look for policies with instant appeal to create continuous public bliss').

"But what is most striking is that the writer is a Labour politician: Roger Douglas, who, as minister of finance — equivalent to [the UK's] chancellor — led New Zealand through one of the most bruising periods of free-market reform in any nation’s history (a programme known as Rogernomics) and saw his party re-elected with an enhanced vote share at the end of it.

"Starmer’s Labour came to power by taking the opposite of Douglas’s advice. It told the public that spending would rise, growth would rise but taxes and borrowing would not. That no one would have to feel any pain. And when that turned out to be a lie, it got hammered for it.

"Wherever the government goes next, it is unlikely to be down a path of Douglas-esque, business-friendly radicalism. But I believe — I have to believe — that the public will still reward politicians who are honest about our country’s problems and visibly try their damnedest to fix them. Because if not, what hope have we got?"

~ Robert Colville from his London Times column 'https://archive.fo/E7HXi'

"Yes, Labour has won a landslide, but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon."

Britain's 'leaders' mourn the death of the Uniparty

"Yes, [UK] Labour has won a landslide [in the British election overnight], but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon. According to the exit poll, his landslide, predicted to be the largest since 1832 in one eve-of-election poll, is in fact smaller than Tony Blair’s in 1997, although not by much (170 v 179). 

    "More encouraging, if the exit poll is to be believed, is that Labour only managed a vote share of 36%, significantly lower than in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn (40%). 

    "By contrast, the Tories and Reform won a combined share of 43%. [Labour leader] Keir Starmer has won a landslide but not a mandate – his own majority is down by 16,000 – although I doubt he’ll be constrained by that.
    "The Left of the Labour Party will point to the fact that Starmer polled fewer votes than Corbyn – we don’t know that for sure yet, but it looks likely – and dispute that Labour only won this election by tacking to the centre, just as the Right of the Conservative Party will argue the Party didn’t lose by abandoning the centre ground (which is the prevailing orthodoxy among ‘One Nation’ Tories, believe it or not). And they’d both be right, in my view. In spite of Starmer’s victory, technocratic managerialism – or 'stakeholder capitalism,' as Klaus Schwab calls it – hasn’t exactly triumphed in this election. 

    "The Uniparty – that is, the Conservative Party under Sunak and the Labour Party under Starmer – got a bloody nose in the sense that the two main parties received an even lower share of the vote – 62% – than they did in 2010 (66%). That’s a lower share than in 1983 at the height of the SDP‘s popularity (70%) and worse than in either of the 1974 elections. Indeed, lower than in 1923, when the two main parties won 68.7%. You have to go all the way back to 1918, when the Liberal Party hadn’t yet collapsed, to find find Labour and the Conservatives collectively polling a lower vote share (59.2%).

"The superficial take on the result is that the U.K. is bucking the anti-technocratic trend sweeping the rest of the globe, particularly France where we may be witnessing the death throes of the Fifth Republic. But look beyond Labour’s landslide and the real story of the last six weeks is the rise of Reform and the lack of enthusiasm for the two centrist parties. 

    "Indeed, if we had PR in the U.K., as they do in the EU, we might now be looking at a Right-of-centre coalition with a populist leader at the helm and a move away from the Uniparty’s position on immigration and Net Zero, as well as its uncritical embrace of sectarian identity politics. We may have to wait another five years before that happens, but it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Starmer’s premiership will breathe new life into this calcified ideology. Much more likely is that a succession of policy failures, leading to a financial crisis, civil unrest and rolling black-outs, will be the death knell of technocratic managerialism. 

    "In 2029, the British electoral may finally vote for real change."

~ Toby Young from his post 'End of the Uniparty'