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Good afternoon. Cambridge has more than 20,000 students. At lunchtime on Thursday, 41 of them were encamped on a patch of lawn along King’s Parade, outside one of its grandest colleges in the centre of town. I went up for the day with George Monaghan, my colleague at the NS, to find out why. I found a microcosm of the neurotic internet brought to l…

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We are sending you this week’s cover story on the meaning of Starmerism. George Eaton has identified three core ideas that power the Starmer project: the common good; progressive realism; and securonomics. We hope you enjoy it.

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What does Keir Starmer believe in? Four years after he became Labour leader, there is an increasing understanding of Starmer the man: his complicated childhood and early family life, his personal decency, his restless ambition, his ruthlessness. But “Starmerism” remains more elusive. Does the concept amount to anything at all?

During his 2020 Labour leadership campaign, when he positioned himself on the soft left of the party, Starmer outlined ten pledges based on “the moral case for socialism”, most of which have since been abandoned or revised (an act of pragmatism or betrayal, depending on political preference). His wider past can appear little more illuminating.

As Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, noted in his recent history of the party, A Century of Labour: “There are few contributions to help reveal an essential political identity and little in the way of an intellectual paper trail.”

Starmer entered parliament in 2015 aged 52; he was never a member of what George Osborne refers to as “the guild” of professional politicians and special advisers. He was a human rights lawyer and served as director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. His time running the Crown Prosecution Service gave him a more practical focus than a pamphleteering backbencher. “He almost has an allergy to ideology, he wants to be the prime minister who rolls his sleeves up and gets stuff done,” Carys Roberts, the executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), told me.

Unlike Ed Miliband, who as Labour leader gave speeches on themes such as “responsible capitalism” and “predistribution”, Starmer avoids abstract language and concepts. He does not approach politics as if it were an Oxford PPE seminar. He has said that “Starmerism is as much about the ‘how’ as the ‘what’” – by which he means transforming how the state operates.

There is an instructive parallel here with the former Conservative MP turned podcaster Rory Stewart, who also worked outside of Westminster – as a diplomat and a governor in postwar Iraq – before entering parliament. In his recent memoir Politics on the Edge, Stewart writes that “it was at the operational level that so many of the worst problems in British government lay. Not in the ‘what’ but the ‘how’.”

It is often said, even by those who have worked closely with him, that Starmer has no politics. Some have identified Starmerism as a purely technocratic project, a perception reinforced by the Labour leader’s appointment of the Whitehall veteran Sue Gray as his chief of staff. Others characterise it as crude Blairism: pro-business, deferential to markets, irrevocably hostile to the left. The truth is that Starmerism is more intriguing and distinctive.

Through my conversations with shadow cabinet ministers, past and present Labour aides and think-tank leaders, three intellectual pillars emerge: one focused on ethics (the common good), one on economics (“securonomics”), and one on geopolitics (“progressive realism”).

But do they amount to a coherent vision?

1. The common good

“The two sources of what I believe to be right and good are family and work,” Keir Starmer said in his 2021 Labour conference speech. He spoke of how his toolmaker father gave him a “deep respect for the dignity of work”. Starmer does not usually reference philosophers in speeches, but his words recalled those of Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, whom Starmer interviewed for a 2014 BBC Radio 4 programme, Can Time Run Out for Justice?.

In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Sandel explores the idea of the “dignity of work”, arguing that it has the potential to “morally invigorate our public discourse, and move us beyond the polarised politics that four decades of market faith and meritocratic hubris have bequeathed”.

Some, such as Daniel Chandler, the author of the recent book Free and Equal, have argued that the philosophy of John Rawls should shape Starmerism. In Rawls’s 1971 work A Theory of Justice, the late US philosopher imagined a just society devised by individuals from behind a “veil of ignorance” – not knowing their own class, wealth, talents or any other personal characteristics. In these conditions, they would, he concluded, adopt what he called “the difference principle”: social and economic inequalities are only justified if they are of “the greatest benefit to the least advantaged”.

The idea has had a long intellectual afterlife, but it is far too abstract for Starmerism.

“Keir’s politics are lived politics, in my experience of him; they come from his experience, firstly, of his family – many intellectuals deny how important that is,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former director of policy, told me.

In contrast to Rawls, Sandel emphasised those “loyalties and convictions” that are “inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or community or nation or people”.

There is a similarly communitarian quality to Starmerism, not least in its attitude towards class. While New Labour heralded a post-class era – “I want to make you all middle class,” declared Tony Blair in 1999 – Starmer speaks of working-class pride, and shame. He has lamented the failure of the previous Labour government to “eradicate the snobbery that looks down on vocational education” and to “drain the well of disrespect that this creates”.

When I recently interviewed Sandel, he praised Starmer as part of a wave of centre-left leaders who have broken with the post-class politics of the “third way”, the doctrine championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.

“Olaf Scholz in Germany, Joe Biden in the United States and Keir Starmer in Britain are all emphasising the dignity of work,” said Sandel. “Not only this, they all seem to be aware of the fact that centre-left leaders in recent decades have lost credibility with working people to a striking degree.

“And this is connected to an attempt to address the resentment and sense of grievance of working people who feel elites look down on them… Scholz, Biden and Starmer seem keenly aware that what has alienated working-class voters, apart from inequality and wage stagnation, is the lack of respect, the lack of social recognition and esteem from well-educated, credentialled elites.”

Jon Cruddas, who has previously been critical of Starmer, writing that he “often seems detached from his own party”, also speaks of a decisive shift in Labour’s outlook under Starmer.

“They’ve decided to do something which is very radical, which is to re-establish Labour as the authentic party of working-class people,” Cruddas told me. “That sounds self-evident, but it’s not self-evident because over the last 30 years, both on the Labour left and right, there have been elements that say the working class is on the wrong side of history; it’s disappearing and technological upheaval means that it offers diminishing returns as a political project.

“Starmer seems to be quite confidently embracing the working class as the political agent that Labour needs.”

Starmerism is distinct from both the liberal individualism of the free-market right and the post-work utopianism of the radical left (which has advocated universal basic income as an alternative to the traditional goal of full employment). It derives political meaning from enduring institutions and values. “Keir understands what belonging means in terms of family, nation and community,” said Ainsley, the author of the New Working Class.

There are tentative echoes here of Blue Labour, the political faction that came to prominence in the aftermath of the party’s 2010 general election defeat. Starmer, its founder Maurice Glasman told me, was “at the gates of the kingdom but had yet to enter”.

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Sandel praised Starmer’s communitarian ethos: “The centre left has made a mistake in recent decades by allowing the right to have a monopoly on the language of family, community and patriotism. These need not be conservative ideas. The centre left should present its own vision of what it means to honour them, to reconnect with its own traditions of solidarity, mutual obligation and care.”

When Starmer, a devoted football fan, speaks of the values encouraged by the game – teamwork, sportsmanship, community – you are reminded of the great Scottish Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s declaration that “the socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.” But how do these ethics translate into economics?

2. Securonomics

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George and I have whittled that conversation down to something sharp and quick for you to read. This runs 2,500 words: 8 minutes. I found it fascinating as an insight into a subject I couldn’t always bear to pa…

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At the 1980 Labour Party conference, Tony Benn, Jim Callaghan’s energy secretary only a year before, took to the floor. The atmosphere was venomous, brimming with political bloodlust. It reached its crescendo with Benn’s speech. He proceeded to read out a list of ways in which the government he had been a senior member of had let down the labour movement. Roy Hattersley, a future Labour deputy leader, later described the speech as a “lie, a poisonous deceit”.

It is not hard to imagine these dynamics at the first post-defeat Conservative Party conference in 2025 – if not from the main platform, then from the stage of one of the fringe groups that now vie for ideological dominance. Further, it is not hard to imagine Liz Truss, the self-described “only conservative in the room”, playing the role of Benn.

In a sense, she is already doing so. In her millenarian Ten Years to Save the West book tour, Truss is cementing one of the biggest PR coups of the decade – by reframing her incompetence and rigidity as being the result of the “economic establishment” and “liberal deep state”.

It is easy to mock but in our vibes-first political age, Truss’s strategy is effective.

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The town of Salem, Massachusetts, has become synonymous with the witch hunt, but between the 16th and 18th centuries the Scottish engaged in the persecution of witches at a rate far higher than their American counterparts. Thousands of women were tried, many burned and killed. A mode of censoriousness – and keen policing of the public realm – is written deep into the contours of Scottish history.

This historical episode is a simple explanation for how Scotland earned its reputation for vituperative puritanism. The introduction of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act on 1 April will do little to disabuse the world of this prejudice. The legislation criminalises “threatening or abusive behaviour” intended to stir “hatred” at certain groups, defined by age, disability, sexual orientation, religion and transgender identity. The bar for offence under the act is anything a “reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”. Private conversations held in one’s home are fair game under the act.

Similar proposed legislation in Ireland has been set aside for now: the resignation of Leo Varadkar and more pressing anxieties on immigration have taken precedence. Now, the reception of the Hate Crime Act in Scotland might cause the government to abandon it altogether.

The disquiet at the new measures has been predictable: the Scottish broadcaster Andrew Neil proclaims the law an “Orwellian nightmare”; the Economist suggests it will have a “chilling effect on free speech”. There is general concern that the act will be vulnerable to malicious weaponisation by activist groups, and that it might overwhelm an already beleaguered and underperforming police force. The appointment of 500 so-called hate crime champions and the establishment of “third-party reporting centres” have a distinctly dystopian hum.

Defenders of the measures – namely its progenitors in the Scottish National Party – are insistent that this is mere overreaction to a well-intentioned law. The SNP leader Humza Yousaf has tried to mollify anxieties with the claim that the threshold for prosecution will be “very high”. The Scottish Victims and Community Safety Minister, Siobhian Brown, has offered her own reassurance: “You have to be really threatening and abusive” to be convicted of a crime, she said.

These woolly definitions of what constitutes “hate” do little to ease fears. Even if the rate of prosecutions is low, critics are unified: the mere existence of the legislation will create a climate of self-censorship and snitching, indirect penalisation of dissent and a flattened culture of one-note social liberalism. Exactly what this will mean for Scotland’s artistic production – not least the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – will soon be seen.

At the centre of the debate, as is so often the case, sits JK Rowling.

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Hannah is the Tavistock’s definitive chronicler. She wrote the book on it, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and Baillie Gifford, and she has been interviewed in today’s Sunday Times about it. Here is the story in full. The first 1,000 words run below.

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When a tiny specialist clinic opened at St George’s hospital, south London, in 1989, with just four referrals, few would have predicted what would happen in the next 35 years. Having grown to become the world’s largest children’s gender clinic, the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) will close its doors for good on 31 March. What has unfolded there over the past decade or so is quite exceptional. The service referred around 2,000 children under 18 for puberty-blocking drugs, without robust data to support that decision. When evidence emerged indicating that this medical intervention wasn’t benefiting many of the young people receiving it, the service did not change its approach. Nor did it follow up with any of its patients to see how they were faring.

Faced with an exponential increase in referrals, and a fundamental shift in the demographics of those requesting its help, Gids ploughed on. However, it buckled under the pressure of growing demand. The leadership of the service – along with that of the NHS Trust that housed it – was inadequate and shut down the serious concerns of a growing number of their own staff.

All this happened under NHS England, which was ultimately responsible for the service. As I have written in my book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, this is not a story that denies transgender identities. “This is a story about the underlying safety of an NHS service, the adequacy of the care it provides and its use of poorly evidenced treatments on some of the most vulnerable young people in society. And how so many people sat back, watched and did nothing.”

The Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) was the creation of the child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Domenico Di Ceglie. Inspired by a single case he’d worked on in the early 1980s of a teenager “who was claiming that she was a boy but in a female body”, he felt children with “these rare and unusual experiences” needed a service of their own.

The focus of Gids was never on changing a young person’s gender identity, but in supporting them and their families in whatever solution they settled on to best manage it. But Di Ceglie saw that, in some cases, by addressing other difficulties experienced by the child – perhaps abuse, trauma or low mood – the gender difficulties might be resolved too. Almost all young people referred were contending with other problems.

In those early days, the offering was largely therapeutic. It provided what might be termed now a “safe space” to talk. Di Ceglie commented to the Sunday Times in 1993 that only about 5 per cent of the young people seen at his clinic would “commit themselves to a change of gender”. And 60-70 per cent of the children were gay. Medical interventions were available in the 1990s to block puberty, but only if strict criteria were met. A young person had to be 16 and have undergone extensive therapy and thorough assessment. The distress they felt around their gender had to have continued throughout puberty, too. The drugs weren’t so much used to block puberty, therefore, but to prepare bodies for the start of cross-sex hormones. Back then, as today, the service didn’t prescribe medication itself; it referred its patients to endocrinologists linked to the clinic.

When Gids moved to its current home – the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in north London – in 1994, it was immediately unwelcome. Colleagues at the Trust felt unease at the model used by Gids, which was based initially in a broom cupboard inside the Portman Clinic. The Tavistock was internationally renowned for its commitment to talking therapies, or psychotherapy. Medication wasn’t ruled out, per se, but it was used only sparingly and where there was a robust evidence base. That just wasn’t the case for this area of care.

Formal concerns were first raised about Gids in 2005 by Sue Evans, a nurse specialist at the service and later psychoanalyst. She thought external patient support groups – the transgender charity Mermaids and the Gender Identity Research and Education Society – had undue influence (which they deny), but her main worry was how quickly some of her colleagues were referring young people for puberty blockers. While there was thoughtful work going on, she discovered others would refer after only four sessions. The cases being seen by the service, Evans says, were all complicated. It just wasn’t possible to meet someone on so few occasions and make such a serious decision.

The concerns were investigated – and written up – by the Tavistock’s then medical director. But that report and its recommendations to improve the service remained unimplemented and hidden from Gids staff – and the wider public – until 2020. It was reluctantly released following a lengthy freedom of information battle I launched, while at the BBC’s Newsnight, with the Tavistock Trust.

It would take a decade for another group of whistleblowers to emerge. By this time, the service had changed beyond recognition.

Gids was nationally commissioned by the NHS in 2009. Children could now be referred from anywhere in England and referrals, inevitably, grew. And grew. By 50 per cent each year between 2009-10 – when there were 97 – and 2014-15, when there were 697. They doubled over the next 12 months to 1,419.

It wasn’t just the numbers. The sex ratio of those being referred reversed too, from two-thirds natal male, to two-thirds female by 2015. On top of that, most were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty – not in early childhood as had been the case before. And these girls often had complex needs – depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or histories of abuse and trauma. The changes were impossible not to notice, and Gids clinicians describe how the clinic’s waiting room would be filled with self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys all with similar stories and haircuts. Many had chosen the same name too, often that of their favourite trans YouTubers.

At the same time, what Gids offered young people under its care changed significantly, too.

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The lynching happened in broad daylight, and it was widely cheered.

On the morning of 24 April 2023, police detained a busload of passengers in the Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Canapé Vert, rounding them up as suspected gang members. The men were reportedly face down on the ground when ordinary citizens, sick in every way from years of violence, terror and powerlessness, began to murder them. According to a witness, they beat and stoned the suspects, before burning them alive.

In its gruesomeness and horror, this episode of mob justice (13 men were killed) is of a piece with Haiti’s new normal, and inspired vigilante killings across the country. Insecurity was already at life-threatening, economy-shrinking levels before July 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom. Almost two years later the situation has, impossibly, worsened. Gangs originally sponsored by Haiti’s business and political elite have closed in on Port-au-Prince and are spreading throughout the country. This time they have their own agendas. The police are outgunned; according to a recent estimate, only 3,500 officers are on duty at any one time in the whole country. Amid inaction and often worse, and a policy of lethal passivity among its international “friends”, Haiti’s people have passed their breaking point.

“It’s more than insecurity, it’s more than a crisis,” one activist in Port-au-Prince told me; like others living in Haiti, they requested anonymity for fear of becoming a target for violence or kidnapping. “For most Haitians, it’s a state of terror – a state of siege.” On the day of the Canapé Vert killings, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned that insecurity in Haiti had “reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict” and called for the deployment of an international force. The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs had counted almost 70 people killed the week before.

“Kidnappers burst into a Catholic church to kidnap a parishioner,” read a headline in the 18 April edition of Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s leading newspaper. Two days earlier, the article reported, a popular television producer had been kidnapped near his house. Two days later, it was Harold Marzouka Jr, a businessman with diplomatic ties to St Kitts and Nevis, along with two companions. Their cars were set on fire. Another article described a series of killings in the northern port of Cap-Haïtien, motive unknown, with one of the victims stoned to death.

It is hard to overstate the desperateness of the situation. Haitians at every level of society have been living in daily fear – of being kidnapped, killed, raped or caught in cross-fire. Those with savings worry about going bankrupt, forced to pay ransoms for themselves or loved ones. Bricks-and-mortar businesses have shuttered – including restaurants, shops and bank branches – and the once bustling informal economy stands stock-still with terror.

The humanitarian costs are incalculable. As the expense and risks of transport have soared, so has the cost of food. According to the UN, some 4.9 million people, almost half the population, are currently going hungry. Hospitals and schools have closed. Cholera has returned, with nearly 40,000 suspected cases since October 2022.

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One recent misty morning in Taunton, the county town of Somerset, I was taken on a tour of our decaying public realm. The flowerbeds, which have won Britain in Bloom contests, will no longer be planted along the neat Victorian promenades of Vivary Park. Funding for the Brewhouse, a modernist theatre of Bourbon-biscuit-coloured brick decorated with a Shakespeare mural, is ending. At a popular café, a server with Down’s syndrome will lose the employment service that supports the job he loves. The local swimming pool was shut to make way for riverside flats and shops – where some units have sat empty for two years. A Georgian market house, home to the local radio station and tourist information centre, is “vulnerable”. A bus subsidised by the council, bearing its rusting white livery, will no longer run. Even the public toilets will close.

These were just a handful of entries on a “heartbreaking” 200-line spreadsheet the Somerset Council leader, Bill Revans, was toiling over when I visited (councils finalised their budgets in February). A burly retired history teacher and proud Somerset boy born in Taunton, Revans, who is 55, looked bereft. With his russet beard, crinkly-eyed smile and sorrowful baritone chuckle, he seemed like a reverse Father Christmas: he was taking things away, door by door.

Walking me through town, he mentioned defunding beach lifeguard coverage, school crossing patrols and recycling centres. Through a portcullis archway we reached a 12th-century castle, home to the Museum of Somerset. The yellow county flag emblazoned with a red dragon was fluttering from its roof. Even council finance for this museum was running out. “Imagine for a history teacher the prospect of cutting heritage,” Revans said.

While he was still trying to find temporary solutions and delays to some of these cuts when we met, Revans knew he was buying time. “This year, the choices are painful. Next year, they’ll be painful again, and the year after and the year after – until ultimately, the system will collapse.”

A market town redolent of old England, with its cobbled streets, Norman battlements and wrought iron gates bearing the coat of arms (“Defendamus Borough of Taunton”), had become a symbol of the new England too. Defendamus Boarded-up Debenhams.

Somerset Council – run by Conservatives from 2009 to 2022, and the Liberal Democrats for the past two years – had to find £100m of savings, £35m of which would come from cuts. Last year, it declared a “financial emergency” and is close to filing a “Section 114” notice: the local government version of bankruptcy.

Councils have a statutory duty to provide certain core services, including social care (residential and community care for the elderly, chronically ill and disabled), but can drop so-called discretionary services. These can be as fundamental to everyday life as pest control, sports facilities and youth clubs.

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Somerset is part of a wider trend. Eight councils have gone bankrupt since 2010, when the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition began its austerity programme that sliced heavily into local government. These include major city councils such as Nottingham and Birmingham – the biggest council in Europe, which has voted to make savings by raising council tax by 21 per cent over the next two years, cutting 600 jobs, and even by dimming streetlights.

Northamptonshire, Croydon, Slough, Northumberland, Thurrock and Woking have also gone under. Twenty more councils are at immediate risk. (The New Statesman’s Spotlight policy section regularly updates an online map of councils in financial peril.)

It’s not just happening in England: nearly a quarter of Scottish councils fear they can’t balance their budgets this year, and Welsh council leaders have also warned about the likelihood of bankruptcies. Crisis-ravaged councils span party colours and a range of different failings – including risky commercial ventures, financial mismanagement and bungled local projects.

In Birmingham, England’s second city, an equal-pay claim left to fester is costing the council £1.15bn. In Croydon, south London, the council set up its own housing developer – a company that collapsed and left 41 housing schemes behind that either had to be cancelled or sold on. Woking in Surrey ran up £2bn of debt on a property investment spree in hotels and high-rise flats. And Nottingham’s attempt at establishing its own energy company, the council-run Robin Hood Energy, failed because of problems with purchasing gas. In Thurrock, the Essex port town where the Tory-led borough council went bust in 2022, the council made wild bets on commercial schemes, including sinking tens of millions into solar farms as far as away as Wiltshire. Such decisions left the town without a return on its money but the private investors tasked with spending it very well-off.

On a recent trip to Thurrock, I found a town reduced to its bones.

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On 2 September 1995 the world’s biggest financial newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun of Japan, led its Saturday edition with a piece by Richard Werner, a young German economist working at an investment bank in Hong Kong. The article addressed what everyone was talking about: the recession. Japan had risen from the devastation of the Second World War at great speed, becoming the second-largest economy in the world, but during the 1980s a huge asset bubble had developed. When it popped, Japan’s economy fell into a severe, protracted slump. In his article, Werner suggested a cure: a new kind of credit creation by the central bank. He called it ryōteki kinyū kanwa, or “quantitative monetary easing”.

In the decades that followed, Werner has watched as different versions of his idea have been applied around the world: in Japan in 2001, then in the US and Europe in 2008, and at a still greater scale in 2020. The total credit created by central banks through quantitative easing, or QE, is now more than $30trn.

In the process, QE has quietly become the defining idea of our time. For the past 15 years, every major development in our economy and the cultural superstructure that rests upon it – the explosive growth of social media and Big Tech, the property boom, the gig economy, Elon Musk, cryptocurrencies, fake news, overpriced coffee, Brexit, woke capitalism, Donald Trump and yes, perhaps even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – can be related to the huge sums of new money that have disrupted every major economy.

In recent years the idea of the “widening gyre” – the loss of consensus, polarisation, the culture wars – has been part of the political conversation. QE is not just part of this situation: it is the gyre. It is the invisible gas that raises the temperature.

We have been living through a two-decade experiment enacted by largely unknown people whose power we underestimated. But attempts to end the experiment have been volatile; our politics is now, more than ever, dictated by fluctuations in the markets QE was supposed to control. We are about to find out if this great engine of inequality and stagnation can ever be wound down.

Richard Werner arrived in Tokyo at the peak of the Japanese economic bubble, in the summer of 1989, to start a postgraduate fellowship at the Development Bank of Japan. Looking back on that time from his office, a handsome red-brick building overlooking the cathedral green in Winchester, he told me about his frustration with the mathematical models and “theoretical games” of equilibrium economics, in which demand and supply balance each other out, and markets are ­rational and perfectly informed. This approach, which persists today, seemed to him to bear little resemblance to the real world. Werner preferred economic history. Theory tended to suggest the price of money shaped an economy, but in practice, Werner thought, what mattered was how much of it there was to go around.

By the end of the 1980s, Japan’s money was everywhere. Between 1970 and 1991, Japanese foreign investment had grown by 100 times. As the largest net investor in the global economy, Japan bought US computer companies and movie studios, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and the skyscrapers of New York City and Los Angeles. Pervasive in the culture of the time – in Blade Runner, Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun and even John McTiernan’s Die Hard – was the idea that the future belonged to Japan. Werner’s research focused on a simple question: where was all that money coming from?

It was a puzzle that couldn’t be answered by interest rates, which were higher in Japan than the US – meaning money should have been heading into Japan, not leaving it. “None of the theories worked,” Werner told me. But he was sure that Japan’s vast capital outflows were connected to the other great mystery of its economy: “I thought, it’s connected to the bubble.”

The bubble touched everything. When a young couple applied for a mortgage to buy their first home in Japan in the late 1980s, they were typically offered twice the value of the property. A golf-club membership could cost $3m. An airport-sized piece of central Tokyo had a greater land value than the whole of Canada. It was common for people to talk about the country’s “excess money” over dinner; in one Osaka restaurant the market predictions of the owner, a former nun called Nui Onoue, made her for a time a celebrated stock-picker, so much so that financiers loaned her hundreds of billions of yen to invest.

Werner spent months interviewing people in the Japanese financial sector, and what he heard shocked him. In bank branches, loan officers told him “wild stories” about “chasing customers, begging them to borrow money”. They acknowledged what they were doing was “crazy”, but said: “We were ordered to do it.”

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Today’s is on the Tories’ arguably dire record in government since 2010, with David Cameron having returned and this long Tory era heading into what appears to be its final year. Ivor Crewe, the author of The Bl…

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