Good morning from Brussels. Police tried to shut down the National Conservatism conference yesterday because, in the local mayor’s words, the “far right is not welcome”. The reason provided was that there was a risk to public order.
I saw no disorder and only a relatively small counter-protest. It was a blatantly political clamp-down on free speech. The conference successfully challenged the decision in the courts last night, laying the ground for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s bullish speech this morning. You can read my report from inside the venue here.
But for now, a few thoughts on Labour’s most extensive outline of its Starmer-era foreign policy.
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If David Lammy becomes foreign secretary after this year’s election, he will face tricky diplomatic terrain. Britain’s foreign relationships have been tattered by a tortuous exit from the EU. The Global South is angry about the unfair Covid vaccine rollout and Britain’s support for Israel. A Donald Trump presidency would inject uncertainty into America’s security guarantee for Europe. Yet the biggest change, as Lammy all but admits in a 4,035-word essay for Foreign Affairs, is Britain’s relative decline. He writes:
When former prime minister Tony Blair entered Downing Street 27 years ago, the British economy was larger than India’s and China’s combined. The United Kingdom still administered a major Asian city, Hong Kong, as a colony…
Today, the global order is messy and multipolar. China has become a superpower, with an economy more than five times as large as the United Kingdom’s. But there has also been a shift in power to a wider variety of states since I was first a minister almost 19 years ago.
He recognises that the UK “cannot end this terrible conflict” in Gaza. He notes that in the UN General Assembly, countries representing two thirds of the global population have either abstained or voted against motions to condemn Vladimir Putin. The West, in other words, is tumbling down the pecking order and Britain is falling with it.
Lammy calls his strategy to steer a diminished Britain through these geopolitical straits “progressive realism”: using realist means to achieve progressive ends. The thinking, Lammy writes, combines Ernest Bevin’s gritty, practical approach, which saw the creation of Nato and Britain’s nuclear deterrent, with Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy, which prioritised human rights, climate change and international aid.
Key to the plan is restoring the UK’s international standing. Labour insiders concede that Rishi Sunak has done much to normalise relations through, for instance, agreeing the Windsor framework with the EU. But they also think that Britain must be much closer to Brussels, both through economic deals and security. Labour has been saying for a while that it would seek a security pact with the EU, as well as attend meetings of its foreign affairs council as part of structured dialogue. “European security will be the Labour Party’s foreign policy priority,” Lammy writes.
What is more interesting is that he sees bringing the Global South onside as essential to progressive realism. Lammy believes they have reason to shun the West. He writes:
Over the last decade, [the Conservatives] have undermined the United Kingdom’s standing as a development superpower with a mismanaged merger of government departments that devalued expertise and forced cuts to crucial programs. And instead of fighting for the hearts and minds of the new global middle class, they addressed this group in often offensive tones, such as when then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson publicly recited a colonialist poem by Rudyard Kipling during a 2017 visit to Myanmar. And the government compromised one of the United Kingdom’s greatest strengths – its soft power – by attacking institutions such as universities, courts, and the BBC.
Much of Lammy’s programme will comprise restoring legitimacy to British diplomacy. He wants to boost the UK’s soft power, pivot towards Europe and build a foreign policy for a more dangerous world. His plan recognises that the world, and Britain’s place in it, has fundamentally shifted since Labour last won power from the Tories. Progressive realism could, therefore, be summarised as pursuing progressive ends through a realistic appraisal of Britain’s diminished power.
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The New Statesman Podcast will be returning to the Cambridge Literary Festival on 20 April for a live performance. Grace Blakeley, the economics writer, will be joining us. And I have good news: Morning Call readers get 20 per cent off tickets with the promo code NSDIGITAL24. It would be great to see some of you there. Just click here:
Freddie’s picks
“Not long after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became Iran’s president in 2005, Netanyahu told me during a visit to the BBC office in Jerusalem that ‘it’s 1938 and Ahmadinejad is Hitler’.” Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, writes this week’s cover story on the Middle East crisis.
Finn McRedmond argues that Katharine Birbalsingh’s victory in court over her school’s ban on prayer is a victory for tolerance.
“Caledonian Road is a brick of a novel lobbed at the towering glass houses of London.” Anna reviews Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan.
How do we protect the upsides of flexibility for workers whilst providing security and union representation? What is the right balance between workers’ autonomy and worker protections? Listen here to our exclusive podcast episode, in partnership with Uber, as they approach the three-year anniversary of their recognition agreement with GMB Union, where we discuss the future of work in 21st-century Britain.
Liz Truss is getting what she wants
Here’s a thought experiment: if you really believed the world as you knew it was in peril, and that it was your purpose in life to avert catastrophe before it was too late, what would you do? How would you go about convincing everyone else – normal, sensible people who aren’t too worried about the end of the world, thank you very much – to listen to you? How would you grab their attention?
If you are Liz Truss, the answer is to write a book. Not just any book: a memoir-cum-manifesto, published a mere 18 months after she was forced from office in disgrace, with the grandiose title Ten Years to Save the West.
Much-hyped despite the embarrassingly low advance fee (Truss is reported to have received just £1,512.88, compared with the £510,000 Boris Johnson has received for his own personal reflections), the Truss guide to being prime minister for 49 days comes with the subtitle, “Lessons from the only conservative in the room”. It was destined to be comprehensively mocked long before any journalists saw the advanced pages. And it has not disappointed.
Tales including Truss’s struggle to book an Ocado delivery, a flea-infested Downing Street, Dominic Raab’s Chevening protein shakes and the prime minister’s one-woman mission to get a hair appointment have been gleefully shared and torn apart since they started appearing. “Why is she doing this?” a friend who doesn’t usually follow politics asked me incredulously after reading of the former PM’s despair over John Lewis furniture. “Does she really have no self-awareness at all?”
It’s a valid question. If one of Truss’s main bugbears is that no one took her seriously during her brief time at the top, it’s hard to see how her case will be helped by the revelation that her response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II on her second day in the job was (to quote Pulp’s “F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.”) “why me, why now”?
Truss’s lack of self-awareness is a running joke in Westminster. She has been compared not just to a lettuce (a stunt which, by the way, she finds “puerile” and unfunny), but to an AI, or a sea lion that can’t recognise itself in a mirror. Every time she gets onstage to defend her record and her ideology, she exacerbates the perception that she is not quite tethered to reality – whether it’s telling gun-toting Republicans in America that those on the right “need a bigger bazooka” to counter the “hostile environment” of woke politics, or standing up in a church to launch a new movement by the name of “Popular Conservatism” when she is pretty much the least popular politician in the country today.
Hasn’t anyone told her how utterly ridiculous she looks as she continues to disregard the market chaos caused by her “move fast and break things” approach to economics, blaming the “deep state” and the shadowy “establishment” for her own failings? Doesn’t she realise how damaging her interventions are – to her own (already mostly trashed) reputation and to her party which is still paying the price for her legacy in the polls?
Those questions are usually asked rhetorically. But for once, let’s answer them. Truss has not spent the past year and a half in a sensory deprivation tank or a wi-fi-less bunker. She must be aware of the backlash she gets every time she opens her mouth to opine on threats to the West. And yet she does it anyway. Frequently. And now with funny stories about getting US First Lady Jill Biden mixed up with the wife of the French president.
There’s an old adage in behavioural economics that if someone who is otherwise rational appears to be acting in a way that makes no sense, you’re measuring the wrong thing. The conventional answer is that Truss is far from rational (usually put in less kind terms). But sometimes Truss can be very rational – and, in fact, self-aware – indeed. One of the most revealing lines about her comes not from her own book, but from the biography Out of the Blue by journalists Harry Cole and James Heale, published shortly after her resignation in November 2022. Preparing her leadership bid in summer 2022, Truss bluntly tells her allies: “I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends.”
Speaking to people who worked closely with Truss before she entered No 10, it is evident she made a conscious choice to “lean into” her weirdness as a means of raising her profile. Look at the pro-market memes she posted on social media, a widely publicised friendship with a “sextrepreneur” who runs swingers parties, a photo where she poses like a Bond villain with Larry the Downing Street cat on her lap. (She is aware, I was told, of the rumours that swirl around her favourite necklace, but chooses to keep wearing it.) Truss spent years under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson being mocked, but also being noticed. And then she became prime minister.
So let’s go back to her book, where among all the Alan Partridge-esque anecdotes, Truss writes of her belief that “the Conservative movement across the West has been faltering for almost a generation”. And let’s go back to the Conservative Party, which is in the midst of a vicious civil war about what exactly it is and what it stands for.
Truss might not be popular, but there is a sizeable faction of her party that has decided the reason it has all gone so wrong is that the deck was stacked against them from the start. A faction that wants to figure out how to change that. A faction that doesn’t necessarily think Truss got things right, but agrees with her premise that forces outside of Westminster curtail what governments are able to do. A faction that is both desperate and open to ideas, especially if they come from “the only conservative in the room”.
Truss, I was assured, really does want to “save the West”. But she believes the first step to that is saving the Conservative Party from itself. She knows the government that succeeded her would prefer to pretend she doesn’t exist and that the mainstream of her party considers her an irrelevance. So she needs to make herself relevant again, to keep popping up with a book full of tell-all revelations about her “close relationship” with Kwasi Kwarteng (only to later deny anything romantic) and bombastic end-of-the-world rhetoric, keep grabbing attention, keep banging the drum for her ideas however deranged it might make her look.
Because if you really believed the world as you knew it was in peril, and that it was your purpose in life to avert catastrophe before it was too late, this would all make total sense. Being laughed at is better than being ignored. And this book is making it very difficult to ignore Liz Truss.
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Ben’s take
The Conservative Andy Street looks like he’s had it – or, at least, that’s what a new opinion poll on the upcoming West Midlands mayoral election says. Labour’s candidate is on 42 per cent, against Street’s 28 per cent. Note, though, that Labour is only up two points on 2021 – the year Labour got panned in elections across the country.
These are bad numbers for Street, but when the herd moves against the party of government, it happens everywhere. But lower-than-anticipated levels of support for Labour warrant an amber warning, too. The gap is 14 points. The Reform vote is 13 per cent. Can Street squeeze that?
And with that…
Jodi Dean, an American political theorist and revolutionary communist, has been suspended from her job at a college in the US after praising Hamas as an anti-imperialist force.
I interviewed Dean in 2022. We discussed what was wrong with the decision by so many on the left to prioritise identity over class. I remember trying to get her to condemn the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, with predictable futility. She reflexively descended into whataboutery by pointing to what she saw as American imperialism in Yemen.
Nonetheless, such views don’t mean she should lose her job. The state suppression of the NatCon conference and the repercussions against Dean show how threats to free speech come from across the political spectrum.
My thanks to Barney Horner and George Monaghan.
Have a great day,
Freddie — @freddiejh8
I can easily ignore Truss, as I could all my friends who voted Leave. I have more problems ignoring Boris Johnson as he has cleared out most of the serious politicians on the Tory centre and I cannot name one I would like as Tory leader after Sunak has gone.
If Liz Truss needs to keep on advertising then she could try walking around Parliament Square with a sandwich board bearing the slogan:
THE END OF THE (WESTERN) WORLD IS NIGH