2024 was a year when political certainties disappeared – and not just because of Trump. Politics, as we've known it for a long time, went into meltdown.
This is the audio vesion:
And this is the transcript:
2024 was an extraordinary year in politics.
Just remember that a year ago, we were wondering whether Rishi Sunak would drag out the general election until January 2025. We might now be awaiting that election sometime in the next month. And that was his choice.
In retrospect, I suspect he very strongly regrets going in July because of the wipeout of his party that follows, but even more, I suspect that Labour regret that he went in July because look at what has happened to them since then - an absolute meltdown for a party that supposedly won a landslide victory, but on the shallowest base that you could have ever imagined.
The dire state of British politics was made clear during the year. The Tories literally, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist and have ended up with a leader who is unpopular already in her own ranks and is clearly failing to hit a target as weak as Keir Starmer.
Starmer himself has made an absolute mess of transitioning into government, as have almost all his ministers, who appear utterly clueless as to why they actually wanted to get power and certainly can't explain what they're going to do.
Wes Streeting was the poster boy of Starmer's government, we thought in advance.
Now we're seeing over this Christmas announcements from think tanks - Labour-leaning think tanks - who are saying that Wes Streeting's planned reforms for the NHS are so delayed that they're not going to have any chance of having an effect before the next general election. And I'm sure they're right. But that is just the clearest possible indication that for all his years in opposition, Streeting had no idea what he wanted from government.
And he's not alone, let's be clear. The Liberal Democrats ended up with 72 seats in Parliament at the election. And what have they done? Nothing, as far as I can see. There has been no noise, no effective opposition, no notice. My own MP is now a Liberal Democrat, and she sent me a Christmas card. But apart from that, did she do anything of great merit for my community? I genuinely don't know.
The Greens MPs have more MPs than they had before. But they don't have Caroline Lucas, and no other real star to replace her. And their policy-making process remains in disarray.
The SNP suffered a terrible general election but are now doing much better than they expected because Labour's popularity in Scotland has collapsed again, and popularity for independence is riding high.
The fact that the SNP and that popularity for independence now appear not to be associated with each other is in itself an interesting tale of what is happening in British politics.
And then there's Reform. Reform, the most reluctant parliamentarians that we've probably ever seen. They hardly want to turn up. Some of them clearly have no idea what to do. And Farage must occasionally pay respects to his constituency in Clacton but appears to be a lot more at home in Mar-a-Lago in Florida. This is a man who has clear visions of power but, again, has no idea what to do.
And this picture of British politics in disarray is replicated around the world.
We've seen the government in France collapse.
We've seen the government in Germany collapse.
We've seen the government in South Korea collapse into total disorder with the declaration of martial law by a president who's now been impeached, with his successor now having been impeached as well.
And then we reach the USA. I'll have a lot more to say about the USA in my look forward to 2025, but at the beginning of the year, did we really think that the Americans would be mad enough to vote Trump back in? In my heart of hearts, I didn't. But they did. They have. And we have to live with the consequences.
Everywhere, the message is the same. Neoliberalism is failing. It's failing so badly that there is opportunity for the far right to come in.
We have Trump, we have Farage, we have the AfD in Germany, we have Le Pen in France, and so on. All of these people, who are populists at the very least, or worse, are there to exploit mythical divisions within society to obtain power, but just as those centre-ground politicians don't know what they want, nor in reality do those on the far right because they might be trying to dismantle things, but they have nothing to put in its place.
So where are we at the end of all this? In a truly terrifying position, I would suggest.
This has been a year where neoliberalism's decay has become very obvious, and when the answers to known questions cannot be provided by any of the existing mainstream political parties when democracy is at risk.
And everywhere, the neoliberals are offering austerity as their answer to every known question, because throughout the developed world, in all the countries that have the power to do it, no politician is doing the one thing that is really necessary to transform the societies in which we live, which is to create the money that is necessary to deliver the programmes which would transform our well-being. Everywhere they run frightened from this single greatest power that they have. And as a consequence, politics is falling apart. We have politics without vision, and we have claims from the far right which have no substance to them.
This has been a dire year for politics. Of all the years that I have viewed politics over, and that is really since the 1970s, I don't think there's been any which has offered such little hope and so many causes for concern.
But I'm not despondent. I do think things will get worse, but in the wreckage of 2024, there has to be an opportunity.
There is the chance to rebuild. And in all of those things that I've mentioned, the one thing that to me is surprising and a sign of hope is that support for independence in Scotland. An idea which stretches beyond any one political party is capturing the imagination of people even though the parties aren't.
In that one finding, and it's clutching at straws, maybe, I suggest to you there is the possibility that there may be hope because people can understand that there is a way forward if the right ideas are offered to them. Big ideas still have a chance. Our politicians have tiny, crushed ideas which are leading us nowhere.
What we have to do if we are to find hope out of the wreckage of 2024, is to find the big ideas.
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Neoliberals & neoliberism are too polite and seldom (if ever) used by the public or press;
much prefer banksters & banksterism to describe them and their behaviour .
There is the chance to rebuild as you say, and to do so using a new politics. Afuera and Happy New Year.
In his book “Utopia For Realists and How We Can Get There”, Rutger Bergman includes the following points;
It is possible to differentiate between Politics and politics. The former being “professional” politics, as found in Washington and Westminster, and the latter being politics involving regular people.
Politics is about maintaining the basic status quo by people with small Overton Windows whereas politics is about significant change/revolution involving those with big Overton Windows.
Opposition to Neoliberalism is weak to ineffectual because it is “Underdog Socialism”. Whilst expressing sympathy with those oppressed and exploited by Neoliberalists, of whatever political allegiance, it fails to expose and attack the evermore obvious failings of Neoliberalism and, not least, presents its limited opposition with such a dull narrative.
“Calling new, positive, equitable ideas “unrealistic” is simply a shorthand way of saying that they do not fit with the status quo.” (From Rutger Bergman)
Richard, have you come across this research review article regarding the synergism between neoliberalism and fascism: Patnaik, P. (2020). Neoliberalism and Fascism. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 9(1), 33-49.
An excellent article that covers a lot of your arguments.
I’ll add it to my list. Thank you.
[…] Cross-posted from Richard Murphy’s blog […]
“the one thing that to me is surprising and a sign of hope is that support for independence in Scotland. An idea which stretches beyond any one political party is capturing the imagination of people”
Then sit back, Richard, make yourself comfortable, have a glass of something nice and watch Westminster burst into to life and big ideas to save the union.
If there’s one thing they excel at it’s holding on to Scotland and Wales (they’ve lost their grip of Northern Ireland) and they will pour everything into that endeavour. Scots expect it will involve broken promises and dirty tricks. It’s what the UK government is good at.
You may be right
But it will happen anyway in the end.
‘They’ve lost their grip of Northern Ireland’…so good I had to write it again.
If you need any advice on how best to survive a tsunami of British ruling political class dirty tricks against the groundswell of support for Scottish Independence, Eamann McCann has a lifetime of doing just that to draw upon.
Many here of the post Belfast Agreement are also increasingly choosing to revisit the pre British counterinsurgency political history of NICRA (Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association) and beginning to seriously question who and what forty years of sectarian brutalities and paramilitary violence was really for.
A good appraisal. I think there is one huge thing that is required to re-establish politics that makes people’s lives better: remove and ban the influence of corporations, banks and wealth. They have no other interest other than keeping the status quo and promoting their greed.
And I wish you a very happy New Year.
More to come on this….
With regard to hope, although things are indeed grim, and I agree that democratic politics seems to be broken, and “government” (as opposed to “ruling”) seems to have gone right out of fashion, I DO have hope, that some good things can come out of the current multi-layered mess.
1. As you have noted, there may be benign side effects from the felon misogynist Trump’s chaotic presidency. Amongst those, I note his distaste for foreign interventionism.
2. At home, my main hope is that the public have already become aware of the failure of what they see as “the politics of austerity” (I’m not sure many of us really know what neoliberalism is). They have seen it red raw for 15 years and they KNOW it leads to low incomes, rising cost of living, potholes in the roads, sewage in the rivers, waiting lists in the NHS, very limited access to their GP, and lousy social care. I sense too, that they are possibly beginning to doubt the divisive scapegoating offered by the gold-hawking MP for Mar-a-Lago South.
If there was ever a time to offer an alternative vision to the British public, it is now.
And that brings me to my third hope
3. The public. Ordinary people. Omnibus passengers. People are amazing. I don’t hold with the left/liberal tendency to despise the electorate (or as failed presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton used to call them, “the deplorables”. I prefer to think of them as “sheep without a shepherd”.
My doubts relate to delivery. Because I don’t see either the people or the institutions that can deliver it. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. We have been shocked by sudden BAD developments we weren’t expecting, including political ogres that emerged from the sewers and rapidly took over. Maybe we will be shocked by good ones, people movements that are not (yet), but nevertheless, will come into existence. None of them will be perfect, none of them will tick ALL our boxes, but we can give them a hearing, and our active support, and see off the crooks who are currently trying to destroy us.
Thanks
One such potential leader is Gary Stevenson.
https://youtu.be/pgvb5GfudtE
Maybe….
“independence in Scotland”
Would Scottish Independence look like the independence of The Republic of Ireland or would Scottish independence look like the independence of Jersey and Guernsey?
“An Inquiring Yank Mind wants to Know”! LOL! LOL!
Ireland
Thanks!
Farage is the bookies favourite to form
the next Government. You understate his ambition, political nous and significance.
You do know bookies are often wrong, don’t you?
And it suits them to promote the wrong candidate, too?
Wales has some very interesting issues about the ‘permeability’ of their border that Scotland does not.
If we had a genuine ‘UK’ Government that recognised the social and economic differences between not only Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland but the different areas of England as well then I suggest there isnt a reason why the UK could not remain a unitary state.
The strange paradox of course is that Brexit both made the argument for Scottish independence at the same time as making it harder in many ways – and easier in others.
But as Brexit shows these ideas come with a cost.
I will have to note disagreement.
Ireland did not want rule dominated by the English. Why should Wales and Scotland?
Ah yes, the fable of the elephant and the mouse (mice).
Who would want to be squidged by an elephant.
One of the big ideas I would like to see catch fire in 2025 is a Universal Basic Income. It is an idea whose time has come, and it would solve so many of society’s problems.
My hope is that next year someone will start work on the only significant missing piece of the puzzle, which is how the tax and benefits systems will have to change.
@KimSJ
If you are interested in UBI I assume you have already encountered the paper of Murphy and Reed 2013: Financing the Social State: Towards a full employment economy. If not, the BIEN website link seems to have been hijacked, but this link and its download link do work:
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/16544/
(It is, of course, listed in the “Publications” section of this site, but my device doesn’t always behave as I expect and won’t pick up the link from there.)
I’m aware Richard has developed further opinions on UBI that he has posted here – if you can, search the blog. Note that the aim of the paper is “working towards full employment”.
(For what it’s worth, Richard, if it wasn’t for that paper I would never have found this blog and MMT. I’m forever grateful for that.)
UBI remains a difficult concept.
I know Howard Reed is doing more work on it now.
Greens are very clear on UBI – it is clearly a great tool to move beyond welfare.
Also Richard, I’m not so sure that the Greens are in disarray with their policy -making. Compared with other parties they’re streets ahead!
We will have to disagree on that.
They have cancelled two policy conferences in a row.