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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It was a vote that shook America. In 1968, the little-regarded liberal senator Eugene McCarthy crested a wave of anti-Vietnam war sentiment to come within 5,000 votes of defeating the sitting President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. The result spurred a more formidable rival, Robert Kennedy, to join the presidential race and within two weeks Johnson had withdrawn. It was only later, when two polling experts analysed the contest, that they discovered that around three-fifths of McCarthy’s backers were protesting that Johnson wasn’t escalating the war fast enough. His vote was not so much peaceniks, the pair concluded, as “fed-up-niks”.
Britain is now experiencing its own “fed-up-nik” summer and it is reshaping the entire basis of party politics. Next month’s local and devolved parliamentary elections look set to deliver huge gains for two parties of protest on opposite ends of the spectrum. Opinion polls in England suggest the big winners will be Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the Greens, newly resurgent as a party of the Corbynite left. (Scotland and Wales have the alternative avenue of the nationalist parties.) The Greens in February enjoyed their first ever parliamentary by-election win.
Reform and the Greens’ combined support is over 40 per cent in the polls and they are whittling away at the Labour and Tory vote. While the old parties are still trying to appeal to a wide and disparate coalition of voters, the challengers can target more coherent demographic groups.
Attempts by the two old parties to claw back support by aping their policies fall prey to the McCarthy misconception. For while the challengers both have an enthusiastic core that likes their major policies, be it the immigration focus of Reform or the eco-socialism and anti-Zionism of the Greens, their primary engine of growth is fed-up-niks who believe traditional politics is failing to deliver the change many have demanded since Brexit.
This feeling was captured by Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP, in her victory speech in February. “Working hard used to get you something . . . a nice house, a nice life, nice holidays. But now working hard, what does that get you?”
And people are right to be fed up. Two decades of largely stagnant real household incomes, stubborn inflation, higher taxes for poor public services, rising youth unemployment and a general sense that the main political parties have no answers have created a feeling of malaise not dissimilar to the late 1970s. One recent poll showed just 12 per cent of those questioned think the UK is heading in the right direction.
Conservatives remain untrusted. Labour has squandered goodwill in record time. Both appear to represent a failing status quo. Green and Reform voters meanwhile share a common belief that the system is rigged against them, in favour variously of the rich, the elites and immigrants.
Understanding all this is crucial for Labour in particular. Having spent the first year of his government tacking right to neutralise the Reform threat, Keir Starmer is now under pressure to shift left to staunch losses to the Greens. Yet both strategies are flawed.
What voters are really being drawn to is confident leadership that articulates their anger and appears to offer new solutions. Calls for Labour to be more bold are often seen as demands to move left. But the audacity demanded now is of a different order. The task is to articulate a clear course and pursue it with urgency and conviction.
The answer for Labour, if there is one, is giving voters reason to believe you have credible answers. There will be tactical tacks left and right on immigration or welfare or redistribution, but the only route to reclaiming the fed-up-niks is a vision of improved services and higher living standards.
This is why Starmer’s time is running out. His government appears paralysed by the scale of the challenge. One senior Labour figure laments that at every political inflection point since the war, transformative leaders had an agenda that could crudely be reduced to a word. “With Attlee it was nationalisation; with Thatcher, privatisation or liberalisation; with Blair, modernisation. What is Starmer’s one word?”
Reform, in particular, has its one word — restoration — a rolling back of the Blairite settlement of high immigration, liberal social policies, over-regulation, bloated bureaucracy and a loss of the entrepreneurial spirit.
For fed-up-niks the temptation to roll the dice is strong. Britain’s previous economic model is faltering. They see no convincing answer to Spencer’s question. After years of empty promises from the main parties, why not take a risk on someone else?
There is, in fact, a good reason. Brexit should serve as a warning about overconfident advocates for shock treatment. The Greens’ economic outlook could impoverish the country, frighten off investment and sink the currency. Reform is working to reassure the country of its fiscal prudence, but the Trumpian instincts of the men who gave us Brexit should offer some pause.
The one hope for parties of the mainstream is that there is no single vehicle for discontent but two wildly polarised options. Yet the underlying point remains. Britain is in the grip of fed-up-niks and if the only parties that appear to offer transformation are the populist right and left then they will continue to set the pace of politics.