Relaunch (or Back to Beveridge)

From the scale of the individual, to the national and above, plenty of people might be taking their resolutions for 2026 a bit more seriously than usual. The British Labour government. The Democrats in the USA. Macron in France. Just a few examples of people whose minds will be thinking of how the new year could bring a turnabout in their fortunes. And with opportunism so rife around the world (and the cause of some of the headaches faced by those names I just reeled off), it also seemed good timing for The Teapot Papers to make an unbidden comeback!

Almost Man

Why, in these turbulent times, should anybody read The Teapot Papers? Just another dose of ramblings from another obscure corner of the Internet1. I’ll return to obscure corners later, but to address that question first: I think I offer a useful perspective because I’m an Almost Man. I was active in politics, but never a big players. I’ve worked in the public sector and the private sector, had good careers, but not quite hit the upper echelons (yet). So, left bumbling around in the masses, getting jostled in the peloton, I am to some extent just another one of the voices asking what on earth is going on. But my voice is perhaps a little more worth listening to because I’ve been on the edges, in the circle around the tent. Sometimes I’ve even been on the inside pissing out, but more often I’ve been splashed with the spray from the never-ending pissing contest going on inside. So I know slightly more about what is going on and perhaps, more usefully, I know the thinking going on because I’ve been there doing, or at least trying to do that thinking.

I’m an Almost Man though, not a Has-Been Man. I haven’t retired. You might say I’ve temporarily left the field of battle, at least as an active combatant. I’m still following the action though, like a Tommy who’s bought a Blighty and is reading the broadsheets to try and keep up. So this relaunch of The Teapot Papers is me dipping my toe back into the fight, because I still believe it is one worth fighting and I’m frankly appalled at some of the tactics being deployed.2

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Niches and narrowcasting

How could I add anything worthwhile from my obscure corner of the Internet? Well, to some extent, that is part of the problem. The late Jonathan Sacks made the point that broadcasting is being replaced with narrowcasting:

Nobody is trying to broadcast anymore. Narrowcasting is the business model, with everybody - writer and reader, creator and consumer - finding their niche. No wonder then, that it is becoming harder to create a unifying vision, whether for a company, an organisation or a country.

Nobody is trying to pitch a big tent. The difference is, the right know that they don’t need a big tent. They just want a winning electoral coalition. No tent required means no point wasting time on a big vision. It is just a series of carefully calculated plays, from a playbook designed to divide and conquer. The epitome of this is the ultimate transactionalist Donald Trump. I recall an episode of The Rest Is Politics US where Anthony Scaramucci is explaining Trump’s awareness of his unpopularity, even when he was a businessman and media celebrity. Far from seeing this as a problem, he would apparently proudly boast that he just needed 50% of people to like him and he’d make enough money from them. In his political iteration, this simple approach to popularity has just become 50% of the electorate plus one.

Has it ever been thus?

Writing this off as a rightwing approach, or a recent trend, might be a bit convenient though. Looking back to some of the political movements or figures which are now heralded as visionary or in some way defining, such as Reagan in the 1980s or New Labour in the 1990s, are we just assuming that the people behind these movements were doing anything more than just building a winning coalition? Because Hilary Clinton in 2016 could definitely be seen as a politician playing the coalition-building game and it didn’t work for her. But no, I’m fairly certain there were some visionaries who aspired to build a narrative and pitch a big tent, realigning politics in some way, even if they were just pretending to themselves to be something more than transactionalists.

At least there used to be some pretending. Even now, the pretending is barely deserving of that verb. For sure there are some figures in and around the Trump machine who might have a visionary bent, but even the man himself openly admits that he doesn’t see politics in that way. He is, after all, the master of the art of the deal. In the UK meanwhile, with Reform it is thinly veiled grievance politics. There is no vision, other than perhaps a rose tinted smokescreen alluding to a past that never existed. A past before all those migrants came over here spoiling things. Which, coincidentally, ties to that wonderful Stewart Lee routine which popped up on my feed the other day, where he deliciously skewers the lunacy of the anti-immigration lobby in a country which has only ever been populated by successive waves of migration over millennia.

And pretending is at least something. Labour just aren’t bothering. There is no vision eighteen months in and to be honest there never was one. They won a landslide by constructing an electoral coalition around just not being the Tories. That was the extent of their ambition: not being a Conservative Party which, to borrow John Major’s wonderful phrase, had overstretched the democratic elastic and was almost guaranteed to lose with the only question being how badly. Tom McTaigh, I think, did a profile of Keir Starmer one year into his premiership in which Starmer basically said he didn’t see any fundamental problems with the country, it just needed better management. What saddens me more about this reduction of political leadership to managerialism is that the managerialism has been barely competent (too kind?).

So you have a Labour government acting like kids in a sweet shop with all the money in the world, but no idea what to do. Of course, they would defend themselves by saying that they don’t have all the money in the world and that is why they’re in their predicament. But they do have choices - they have political currency - more choices than it would be politically expedient for them to admit to having. Many of the restrictions to their choices have been from where they’ve tied themselves up in knots. Like the bunch of fiscal promises they made, all part of their careful calculation to sell themselves as ‘not the Tories but hey, still economically competent’. In hindsight - of course in hindsight - they’re probably ruing those promises because they probably didn’t do much to add to their gigantic landslide. But this is the price you pay, the price we all pay, when you lack vision. Vision requires a boldness and a bravery, which may go some way to explaining the absence of one, and it requires risk. By telling people what you’re for, you risk alienating some who don’t like it. The only solution to this is to stand for nothing and hope you get away with it. Labour are not getting away with it and the UK is poorer for it.

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Relaunch, or Back to Beveridge

‘We could just as easily make it differently’, as the late David Graeber reminded us. It doesn’t have to be this way. Certainly with a majority like the Labour government in the UK possesses, they can (still) rewrite the rulebook. But if we are going to have a relaunch, what does that look like? I would argue that you start by asking the big questions. What kind of country do we want the UK to be? What kind of country do we need the UK to be? How do we tackle social and economic inequality? How do we play our part in tackling the climate and ecological emergency?

There is plenty of work on this front, but one transition which appeals to me is how we shift our mindset from one of growth to one of thriving or flourishing. In the 21st century, knowing what we know about our planetary boundaries, the quest for never-ending growth seems fatally flawed. Policies promoting the accumulation of wealth within a grossly unequal society also seem to lack any moral basis. Should we not look at our systems, holistically, to see how can create conditions for every single person to flourish?

Walter Isaacson’s masterful little book about the ‘greatest sentence ever written’, in the US Declaration of Independence, recounts Benjamin Franklin’s belief that the purpose of an economy was to serve the needs of a good society. The 250th anniversary of that document would be a timely moment to realign policy this way. Putting people, communities and society first. How can we ensure people are living meaningful lives, with freedoms and choices, while not costing the earth?

It is not too hyperbolic to refer to our current era as a time of crisis. Conflict rages around the world, in the Ukraine, Palestine and beyond. We have the continuing emergence of AI which nobody fully understands the implications of. The climate crisis is being increasingly ignored, despite ever-graver warnings from scientists. And the political status quo in many countries are struggling to respond to the disruption of right-wing populism. During the Second World War, while London was under the Blitz, the government established the committee which would publish the Beveridge Report.

Patching is what we’re currently seeing in the UK and around the world. Patching isn’t working and it wasn’t going to work. If in one of Britain’s darkest hours a ‘comprehensive policy for social progress’ could be initiated, then there are no excuses for the lack of political leadership or imagination we’re currently witnessing.

It is time for a relaunch, starting with (some of) the big questions:

• How do we make accessible and affordable housing realistic for all?

• How do we adapt our education system to serve human flourishing instead of purely economic growth, especially with the uncertain implications of AI?

• How do we reframe work in the 21st century, as a source of purpose and financial independence?

• How do we cope with an ageing society, not least in terms of health and care?

• How do we support parents and families, not least in an age of declining fertility?

• How do we establish a fair and mutually beneficial migration system?

No wing of the political spectrum owns any of these questions. The right might shout loudest about some of these topics, but they’re not making any positive case. They don’t want the future, they want a return to the past. The positive answers come from the liberal centre (like the Beveridge Report): giving people freedom but also expanding choice and opportunity to make that freedom worth having. Weaving positive answers to those big questions together becomes a vision. It becomes a story of a future Britain we would want to live in.

That’s the case I believe in, of a positive vision for Britain’s future, and which I will try to explore through this relaunched, revitalised version of The Teapot Papers. In keeping with our original iteration though, it is intended as a contribution to an open conversation. I look forward to that conversation with you.