With a buzz of activity in parliament and mandatory back-to-school metaphors, a new political season opens in Westminster, but is that where politics really happens? Yes, in terms of people making policy and law in buildings that are world-famous for that purpose, the SW1 postcode is where it is at.
But the heart of the machine beats with a weak pulse. The UK state is heavily centralised by the standards of most democracies, yet the people at the centre don’t feel powerful. Ministers can’t enforce bin collections in remote areas or call a halt to Middle East wars but they are made to feel answerable for all that is ill in the world, from hyperlocal to geopolitical.
Convention portrays the chancellor as commander-in-chief of the nation’s economic wellbeing, but her arsenal of fiscal weapons has limited range in a world of volatile global markets. A gust of headwind from gilt traders blows Rachel Reeves’s budget plans miles off course.
With control of the purse strings, the Treasury at least feels a grip on something. In Downing Street, the prime minister complains of levers that don’t connect to anything, civil service channels that are blocked, missing links in the chain of command. It doesn’t take much for No 10 to feel besieged, under pressure to react to every adverse twist of the news cycle at the risk of surrendering still more control of the agenda.
Policymaking gets distorted by the demand for eye-catching announcements – another migration crackdown – with diminishing returns. A ceaseless, hostile roar carries from engines of online fury to newspaper front pages to BBC bulletins, drowning any message the government might want to transmit.
These are the conditions that allow Nigel Farage, the routinely absent MP for Clacton, to rival Keir Starmer, the actual prime minister, for the title of Britain’s most influential politician. The Reform UK leader has overcome that constitutional disparity in status by amassing power in the sprawling, informal, networked space where 21st-century politics happens.
After a summer recess spent making hostile political weather for refugees, Farage has skipped Westminster and the resumption of Commons business. He is in Washington DC, bad-mouthing Britain as a benighted land of repression, where free speech is suffocated and dissenters are locked up. In support of that claim, he champions the cause of Lucy Connolly, who was jailed in the aftermath of anti-immigrant riots last summer. She called for people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers and pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred.
Farage’s message is intended to curry favour with Republicans in Congress, White House officials and big tech bosses who hate the UK’s online safety law, which imposes duties on social media platforms to restrict children’s access to harmful material. The Trump administration treats any requirement to regulate digital content as an aggression against American liberty and free enterprise. There could be retaliation in trade sanctions.
An opposition leader travels to a foreign capital where he trash talks his home country and denounces its government in terms that solicit punitive action from a capricious despot. Under most circumstances there would be a domestic backlash against that kind of disloyalty. But Farage plays politics to his own rules, refereed by a partisan media that shares his disgust with modern Britain and calls the contempt patriotic. He is under no pressure to offer credible policy solutions to the complex problems he cynically exploits. When his rickety ideas wobble under scrutiny, as with last week’s pledge to pay the Taliban for taking shipments of refugees, including women and children, he changes the subject without penalty.
Meanwhile, Starmer toils under the obligation to have plans that might actually work, which even in the best-case scenario can’t produce results fast enough to keep pace with the digital conveyors of doomscrolling public dissatisfaction. No one thinks Labour’s first year in office followed the best-case scenario.
The prime minister’s frustration at slow progress has triggered a round of new advisory appointments and a reshuffle of Downing Street job functions. Tim Allan, a Tony Blair-era veteran, comes in as the new director of communications, a role no one seems to keep for long in the Labour leader’s entourage. Darren Jones, formerly chief secretary to the Treasury, gets a newly invented job as chief secretary to the prime minister. He is tasked with unblocking pipes, connecting wires across Whitehall so Starmer can pull a lever inside No 10 and see something happen on the ground, for a change.
In a generous interpretation, this is evidence of Starmer grappling with structural inadequacies of the British state that have thwarted most of his predecessors to some extent. It is consistent with his record as an incremental problem-solver who learns on the job, building the plane while flying it, shredding passengers’ nerves in the process, but somehow landing safely in the end.
Keepers of that optimistic flame are a dwindling bunch in the parliamentary Labour party. It is easier to find anxious MPs who think the origin of the problem has not been a machine that refuses to do what the prime minister wants, but a leader who arrived in office not knowing what he really wanted from the machine. The difficulty getting the government’s message across has not been deficient comms strategists but incoherence in the agenda. There still isn’t a clear destination, the plane is losing altitude rapidly and the air keeps getting more turbulent.
Those concerns will set the mood at Labour conference. This, too, is a seasonal ritual. The show goes on the road. The political circus arrives in Liverpool, Manchester, Bournemouth, or wherever. But the vibe is Westminster on tour.
Loyal ministers will announce minor policies no one will remember. Someone’s marginally off-message “bold vision for Britain” will set the fringe sizzling with leadership speculation that will come to nothing. The prime minister will give a hotly anticipated speech that hardly anyone outside the hall will notice. There will be running commentary on channels no one is watching, looking for gamechanging moments in a niche sport with few fans outside the secure zone.
Then it will be back to SW1, the familiar rhythm of parliament, the Downing Street “grid” of announcements, building towards a critical budget in November. Maybe the message will get clearer with a new team in place. Maybe systems will now work faster and voters will start to notice the delivery of better government. And yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that the problem goes much deeper; that politics delivered through the rituals of Westminster has lost the crowd and power, draining from the centre, is mustering elsewhere.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
