How power works: An earthquake shakes British politics

Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.

There have been important elections for local government - councils - in the UK this week. The results have been extraordinary: disaster for Labour and, to a lesser degree, the Conservatives, while support for parties further to ‘the left’ and ‘right’ - the Greens and Reform - has rocketed.

Commentary, as ever, plays this event as ‘about’ politics i.e. politicians, policies and parties. It is, but only to a limited extent. Look closely and deeper reasons for the political disillusionment and anger driving voters become perceptible.

And apologies for the absence of a post last week. I’m still recovering from my op.

The Event

The governing party, Labour, performed extraordinarily poorly in the elections, as did the main opposition party, the Conservatives. Labour lost around half of the Council seats - over one thousand - it was defending. Wales has been governed by Labour since women were given the vote. Now its government will be led by the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru.

The odds that Reform might win the next General Election, still three years away, have risen considerably. Britain’s next Prime Minister could be Nigel Farage, a man who cavorts with Trump and who has a well-documented history of virulent racism (I was, by the way, two years below him at school, and he was well-known for it) and whose supporters, while they have learned not to declare their racist views out loud, are happy to express them through the dog-whistle signals that Farage himself uses. Recently, Reform leaders have said they want a body like ICE in the UK.

It’s fair to see these elections as a rupture in British politics, where long-lasting assumptions about how politics works have been shattered.

Inside the System

The conventional media has already reached conclusions about the ‘meaning’ of the elections.

First, total disillusionment and anger with Keir Starmer’s government. Predictably, Labour’s electoral catastrophe has ignited a bonfire of speculation about Starmer’s future.

Second, a fracturing of British politics into a five party system rather than two party (more than five in Wales and Scotland where nationalist parties also compete).

It seems more than likely that Starmer will soon be gone. Typically, just like his predecessors, he is personally blamed for the public’s frustration with the government. By the same token, it’s assumed that a new leader - one person - can somehow revive the Labour Party’s fortunes.

As usual, the election result is viewed through the lens of politicians’ personalities, political parties and their relative prospects.

What everyone is missing

But, as ever, we should be looking for the deeper forces at play.

When interviewed or canvassed ‘on the doorstep’, voters have said two things very clearly: they want ‘change’ (which Labour has not delivered) and, related to this, they don’t like the prime minister himself, but also politicians or ‘the system’.

This is exactly what voters told me when I ran for parliament in South Islington in 2024 (as some readers will remember). The only difference then was that voters wanted ‘change’ from a Conservative government to Labour. Only a year or two later, they now they want ‘change’ from Labour.

There are two further signals that tell a story about what people are really feeling. As is usual for local elections, voter turnout is likely to be very low, around low- to mid-thirties percent i.e. around a third of eligible voters and a good deal less than a third of the adult population. Where I live, I was surprised to see that the winning candidates often won with less than a thousand votes.

Secondly, the level of abuse and violence directed at candidates and canvassers was higher than it’s ever been. All parties reported widespread abuse, in person and online, including being chased on the street and receiving death threats.

This hostility towards politicians is paralleled by a rise in what’s called ‘anti-social’ behaviour or, less bureaucratically, hostility and aggression towards other people, like the increasing pattern of attacks on nurses or bus drivers, or the rise in violent shop-lifting or teenagers stabbing each other.

Commentators in the press do not connect these phenomena with ‘politics’ which, as usual, they think concerns only policy and politicians.

The Deeper Current

It’s striking that the rising parties, the Greens and Reform, campaign more on general sentiment - ‘change the system!’; ‘change politics!’ - than specific policies.

Aside from reversing immigration, Reform do not really have any policies, at least none that anyone can name. For the Greens too, their appeal is that they attack the system that rewards the rich and punishes everyone else (a big shift from their historically more environmentalist message, a shift pushed by the Greens’ new leader, Zack Polanski). Both Reform and the Greens, whose support is now surging, can therefore accurately be seen as ‘anti-system’ parties, one from the left, the other from the right.

Whoever is elected, whether the ‘protest’ or more traditional parties, they will not plausibly change anything fundamentally, much as they may promise otherwise. Reform will not stop immigration, most of which is permitted by family reunion and even if they did, it would do little or nothing to alter the material circumstances of those who remain which are the real cause of the resentment Farage blames on immigrants.

The Greens may introduce a wealth tax, as they promise, but it will not, because it cannot, raise much revenue or significantly reverse rising inequality. Like all the other parties, they will have very little scope to raise taxes or increase borrowing, the only two sources of money with which to do things like improve the National Health Service or fill potholes, just as the current Labour government has found. Either route, even when hinted at, can trigger rapid devaluation of sterling and increases in the cost of government borrowing in the short run, or in the longer run, capital flight and plummeting foreign investment.

Unfortunately, we can be sure that whichever party wins, they will not alter the fundamental structures that cause the problems that politicians argue about. Indeed, they will not talk about them. We can also confidently expect that whoever wins the General Election, the new Prime Minister will be widely hated before he or she even enters Number Ten.

There is a deep rage out there. You can feel it on the streets. I can feel it riding my bike around London where some trivial incident triggers disturbing outbursts of foul-mouthed anger and threats of violence.

Political parties tend not to talk about this or, if they do, they treat it as a kind isolated ‘social’ issue to be addressed either by punishment, more police or the inevitable ‘more youth clubs’. Or they pretend that the cause of social decay is other political parties or politicians, and that by replacing the current lot with someone else, i.e. them, they can fix the problem. The media don’t seem to think that what is in effect a kind of social collapse is somehow relevant to the practice they have named ‘politics’.

The theatre show that is ‘politics’ is a deliberate performance that, whether intentionally or not, serves to distract attention from the system itself. That system is of course capitalism.

It is capitalism that causes inequality and the humiliation associated with absolute or indeed relative poverty, a humiliation that the right has successfully tapped into by blaming ‘liberal elites’ (Trump) or ‘politics as usual’ (Farage) and, of course, immigrants (both).

The mechanics of capitalism today guarantee that wealth is ever more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people while the wealth of everyone else at best stagnates or, as has happened over the last twenty years, declines. The tax system does very little to modulate this intrinsic and worsening imbalance and, in reality, it cannot, partly for the reasons explained above.

It is capitalism’s promotion of ceaseless growth that is destroying the planet now and particularly for future generations. As long as any part of the manufacturing process or supply chain produces carbon, any increase in production - growth - means more carbon. This straightforward relationship is not complicated but is obscured by those who argue that decarbonisation of energy, manufacturing and transport will successfully cut emissions. They will, but nothing like enough1. Overall emissions in any case continue to rise.

Today we are told that AI will provide the solution to climate change. This is ironic because we don’t need ChatGPT or anyone to tell us the solution to climate change; we already know it. We’re just not doing it. Meanwhile, AI itself is massively increasing carbon emissions. ‘Techno-solutionism’ will continue as long as people make money out of it, and as long as the rest of us fail to act on the evidence of science (I will write shortly about why we fail to act, and it’s not only because of climate-deniers).

And it is capitalism that has torn a deep spiritual hole in our collective consciousness where many are wondering ‘what is this all for?’ (particularly when I can’t even buy a house). In the mid twentieth century, people were ready to be told that consumption would on its own improve their wellbeing, because their material circumstances were steadily improving.

Now, as those material circumstances stagnate or worsen, what was always the case is now ever clearer - material consumption does not satisfy the true needs of the human and in many ways destroys the bonds that provide life with meaning and purpose - society, cooperation, relationships, love. But instead of blaming the system, we are told that these social deficits are the fault of the individual who, through therapy or ‘self-help’ or, in the worst cases, punishment, can mitigate that which is in fact intrinsic to the system and thus to society itself.

Then the final, and routinely unadmitted, consequence of ‘the system’ of capitalism and allegedly-’representative’ democracy is that no one - not even politicians! - feel they have any power to change anything. We continue to be told - and believe - the ludicrous fallacy that putting an ‘x’ in a box once every five years amounts to some kind of meaningful political agency. The many who refuse to vote have perhaps tacitly already decided it’s pointless.

But it’s not just political agency that the system denies, it is any agency over the circumstances of our lives - the material, social and psychic realities which are products of the system and thereby pretty much immutable. This is why the few who transcend those circumstances - the successful, if rare, entrepreneur, the sports star - are celebrated, with the effect that the rest feel that somehow their failure to change their own lives is their own fault, not that of the system itself.

These are the structural causes for what appears on the surface as ‘politics’ and today is manifesting as political volatility (some call it ‘anti-incumbency’), rapid cycling through governments and leaders and overwhelming disillusionment. It is also unfortunately manifesting as rage and hatred directed at the easy targets: migrants or the car driver who swerves in front of you and sometimes politicians themselves, several of whom have been murdered in both the UK, US and elsewhere.

These phenomena will only get worse until the structural causes are properly addressed.

Conclusion

It’s a bit of a cliché of course to blame ‘capitalism’ for everything. In any critique, it’s essential to offer a reasonable alternative. And for me, the search for that reasonable alternative should start with the question, what do humans truly want or need?

From the answer to that question, you can begin to derive a political, economic and indeed social system (for capitalism is not only an economic or political system: it forms our society and social relations too). Working from these first principles, you end up with something very different from the systems and ideas that have dominated our lives for the last century or two.

What is this? This - and how the experiences of my life drew me to this conclusion - is explained in my forthcoming book, ‘There We are Human Again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism’, to be published by Perspectiva in June (and in the US in August).

But, book promotion aside, I hope it’s clear from the above why it’s essential for us to stop believing that ‘politics’ - i.e. party politics - will provide the answers to the problems we face. Politicians are themselves of course partly to blame because they are required to pretend that they can fix the problems (secretly, a lot of them know full well that they can’t).

But we are also to blame for believing them.

If you are a journalist and would like a copy of ‘There we are human again’ to review before publication, please let me know.

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