British politics is broken. The old left vs right divide no longer explains what is happening. Instead, we face a new choice: care or neglect. In this video, I explain how all major UK parties have converged on the same neoliberal economic model — and why we need a politics of care instead to fund a future worth living.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Let me put an idea to you. My suggestion is that in political terms, the left and the right are finished, and that the political map is changing.
Traditional labels no longer explain our reality, as we, as ordinary people, watching the world of politics understand it.
What we can see is that there is what I call a 'single transferable party' that seems to shift power within itself under various different brand labels over time, but nothing changes.
That's because, in technical terms, the antisocial, neoliberal economic policy that dominates the thinking of all these 'single transferable parties' is the same whoever we vote into office, and what we need, therefore, is a new dividing line in politics.
This matters for the future we must fund.
Let's be clear what the old meanings were all about. Once upon a time, being on the left meant that you were concerned with social justice and collective action.
Being on the right meant that you defended those with wealth and the social hierarchy.
The divide was centred on labour versus capital, in a sense, but you could also express it as public versus private, or redistribution versus protectionism, but that framework no longer fits the present.
The left has, in effect, collapsed. Many of those who call themselves left-wing have now, in effect, embraced market ideology.
Their fiscal rules come before any public need, as Rachel Reeves has very clearly evidenced.
Inequality is tolerated as necessary.
Unemployment is a fact of life, and government is seen by those who claim to be on the political left as financially constrained.
Social justice for them is secondary and not primary. Fiscal prudence is all they're worried about.
At the same time, there has been a transformation of the right, and let's be clear, it too has changed fundamentally.
Once upon a time, the right centred its claims to power upon its economic competence; that was what they said they could offer, and by and large, what people believed.
But the truth is that these days, right-wing politics has abandoned all of that. They have almost nobody inside their parties who understands the real world of work, or finance, or capital, or business, or anything else, and instead, culture wars have replaced their economic strategy.
They might permit continued unadulterated and unlimited wealth extraction, but they only do so because democracy is being sidelined by them in favour of finance, whilst grievance politics are used to defend privilege.
There is then a new divide; the old left-right story hides the true conflict now. The question now is actually about care versus neglect.
The right might be more neglectful than the left, but neither gives a damn about care.
Whether society protects its people or not is not an issue with which they concern themselves.
Nor are they worried about democracy and its ability to shape the economy.
What they worry about is finance and warring with each other, or with factions in society whom they have decided to blame or hate.
That is an act of gross negligence on both their parts and unites them in this common theme of neglect when what we need is care.
Care is all about the provision of collective well-being and not individualistic prosperity. In a society where care is prioritised, public goods are fundamental and not optional. Ecological limits are respected, and investment is essential, but it must serve society's needs. In other words, in a society that cares, people are enabled to live lives worth living by a state that is worried for them, and that contrasts with neglect.
In the politics of neglect that we now have, markets are given a higher priority than democracy. Inequality is treated as natural. Public services are run down to cut costs, finance dominates, productive activity is treated as second-rate, and people are treated as economic units. That is where we are.
The UK political reality is that Reform, the Conservatives, Labour, and to some degree the Liberal Democrats all embrace this common anti-social neoliberal foundation for their policies. Bond markets are treated as the real voters. Austerity is baked into their thinking, and growth is prioritised over people and planet.
In other words, even though they talk about GDP as though it is the measure of importance to them, they do not worry about the distribution of that resulting income, and they do not worry about the consequences for people yet to be born who might have to live on a planet that will bear the price of today's ill-thought-through economic policy.
They all therefore deliver variations on the same theme. The differences might be real; Liberal Democrats will most certainly be offended by being compared with Reform in this video, and I accept that the tone is different, but the underlying structure is not very much so. The wealthy remain protected in every model.
Tax justice is marginalised too often, and public investment is always constrained by the myth of a shortage of money when no such shortage exists.
Financial power, without exception, always remains unchallenged by politicians, too fearful to raise their voices to say, "We do not think you are getting it right."
And as a result, the left-right labels are failing; we only have politics that is sitting on the right where markets dominate everything. The left hardly exists. The right has lost its descriptive power as a deliverer of economic competence because we saw only too clearly during the course of 14 years of Tory rule that this was not what they had to offer, and, frankly, voters are left seeing no real choice at all.
In that case, democratic renewal is becoming hard. It's not surprising that Reform looks as though it's riding high in the polls as a result, because people are cynical and disengaged.
It's also not surprising that many on the left, are now moving towards the Greens because they have a leader who looks as though he might have a vision and an understanding of what the world should look like, and that is so rare that, of course, people are attracted to follow.
But the real question is, "Who does the economy serve?" That is the basis for a real new dividing line within our politics. We have to decide whether politics is going to be about financial markets and profit extraction, or is it going to be about life as opposed to capital? These are where the dividing lines now are.
We have to reject the bankrupt paradigm of antisocial neoliberalism, which is all about extracting value from the planet, from us, and from most working people, whoever they are, and whatever they do around the world.
They aren't interested in creating value; they're only interested in extracting it.
They're only interested in inequality being increased and social fracture increasing because that is the basis on which they can divide and rule. They undermine democracy and public purpose as a consequence, and they're fueling ecological breakdown.
There is no right for this neoliberal doctrine to continue in power. Its reign must now come to an end. We need a replacement. We need a caring centre to replace the failing centre. We need democracy to be in charge again, to take control over economic authority, which has been ceded to finance. We need public investment, which should lead and not follow markets. We need well-being to drive our decision-making. A future worth living needs a new political economy.
The old arguments of left versus right just distract from the real divide now. The real divide is between care and neglect, and it names the stakes honestly. One supports life, justice, and sustainability; the other serves wealth, power, and harm. One chooses the future, the other deals with the failed past. We need to put outdated labels behind us. We need to build a politics of care. We need to replace neoliberalism with democracy, and we need to fund services, communities, and the planet.
If we are to fund the future, the paradigm around which our language of politics revolves must change. Left and right are history, neglect and care are the future and only one of those matters. We need a politics of care.
Do you agree? There's a poll down below.
Poll
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The Scottish Green Party slogan is “For People, For Planet” it implies that the word Caring proceeds these. So they are halfway there. I struggle to define the opposite, Neglect is accurate but it does not say what they are in favour of, i.e neglect is the consequence of something. Is Self Interest and wealth protection what stands against a Caring politics. ps I love the “anti social neo- liberalism” tag but I recognise most people are unclear about Neo -liberalism.
Might our current social-economic-political set up also be described as a cross mainstream party cult which has a parasitic relationship with the regular citizenry, their children and young people?
Thanks to you and your team for promoting the proper, and so much more effective/efficient, symbiotic expectation, ethic and practices of actually democratic governance!
“Cult: a group with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular and/or dangerous”. (From Merriam Webster)
P. S. Might a genuinely analytical, less cult-like main stream media help our facade democracy?
Thanks, and re the last, yes.
I was really quite hopeful that you would be offered a formal advisory role with the Green Party just at a time when they are gaining momentum so you could have had real traction in policy. The more i read though the less likely this will happen as the Party adopts a more class war attitude. It’s classic left, splintering and internal argument when really the Greens need to rally around a strong leader who the public can identify with. But it seems that is not going to be the case. An even bigger disorganised mess is Your Party. Quite depressing the whole thing to be honest.
I am not looking for any roles.
I will hep those who ask.
I don’t see how anyone could disagree with your analysis (it’s all obvious). The question is how we break free. Jeremy Corbyn clearly cares but was soon sidelined and his joint enterprise with the eloquent Zarah Sultana is struggling.
I believe politics today is just theatre to control the masses. We are stuck in the antisocial neoliberal system. The economy answers to the bond market and corporations rule everything else. We are going back to feudalism and big business is the new King. The majority of people own nothing and give their money to make others richer. It is a sad realisation and the political theatre just distracts us from not breaking down completely. It reminds me of the saying in The Walking Dead, “you’re either the butcher or the cattle”.
Much to agree with!
The poll seems to be running in favour of People versus Finance. I think this is understandable because many people are caught up whether wittingly or unwittingly in being racketeers, holding the nation to ransom, for what the Americans call the FIRE sector (finance insurance and real estate).
You are effectively a racketeer for these various interests if you believe the government gets its spending money from taxation or the issue of government bonds or both.
This is why you got attacked by these racketeers (the Grace Blakeley’s of this world or what I call the Cannon Fodder Marxists) as soon as you agreed to do a podcast with Zack Polanski!
This is why both you and Bill Mitchell got short shrift trying to help John McDonnell the Labour shadow chancellor seven years ago. McDonnell doesn’t appear to be the sharpest pencil in the box because he was taken in by his advisers about how the government gets its spending.
One of those advisers James Meadway (now of the Green Party) was spinning the additional racketeer yarn that because of the UK’s industrial decline it was now heavily dependent upon the City of London’s financial sector and the Fully Funded Rule was vital to protect this dependency. This meant the purchase of UK treasury bonds (especially by foreigners) could no longer be threatened by the UK government running a deficit on day to day spending. If treasury bond purchases declined the pound would plummet!
In fact it makes no difference whether a government bond is owned by a domestic investor or a foreign investor the asset is held in the UK government’s central bank reserve account. This reserve account is credited with interest and paid off by the UK government’s central bank which creates money from nothing on behalf of the government.
So the UK the government creates its own currency (medium of exchange), floats this currency, and enforces tax obligations in this currency. This means the UK government can employ any unused resources that are for sale in its currency.
Clearly Zack Polanski needs to be made aware there are “racketeers” in his party wanting to subvert it and turn it into a slave of the FIRE sector. That means it will become like all the other UK parties a “Neglect” party not a “Care” party!
“Clearly Zack Polanski needs to be made aware there are “racketeers” in his party wanting to subvert it ”
And anyone thinking of joining the Greens might like to consider an article published by Bright Green (10 Oct 2025).
Titled : “The Green Party has taken a big step away from democracy”, an extract from the article sums it up :
“Within the party, we are very proud of our democracy, even to the point that it might, in some cases, slow us down. This motion takes that democracy away from our members and gives all the power to those who already have significant opportunities to influence the way in which the party operates. Members are regularly critical of the democratic systems within the Labour party, but these changes are arguably worse than Labour’s democracy. ”
The comments section to that article are worth reading too.
https://bright-green.org/2025/10/10/the-green-party-has-taken-a-big-step-away-from-democracy/
While we are in the mood for redefining things, I tried to submit a similar comment late yesterday, but I think you had already moved on. There is a problem with Modern Monetary Theory as a title for how money is created in feat currencies like the UK. Our inability to get this ‘spending before taxation’ reality across to people could be alleviated by ditching the references to MMT. It really doesn’t matter if interviewers resize the connection, an accurate definition is far more important.
MMT implies a new, untried concept that is still little more than a ‘theory’. This flaw allows those defending the current position to frame the debate around the household budget myth and divert the discussion before any progressive speaker has had an opportunity to do much more than deny belief in this fallacy. The misleading title of Modern Monetary Theory has made it really challenging to debunk the well established status quo.
Here you are rewording the empty designation of Left versus Right. We have already settled on a more appropriate word for Neoliberalism that better describes its destructive influence on our political system. Antisocialism captured the very essence of what Neoliberalism actually does. Can we assign a new title to MMT that would make its core function immediately apparent by describing MMTs fundamental role in our Feat economy? I might suggest ‘Sovereign Currency Creation’. Whatever we decide on, redefining MMT urgently needs addressing to find a more accurate descriptor for our money creation.
Noted
So let’s just call it Modern Money
I agree with this suggestion. My concern has been that the word “theory” does not do justice to MMT. When looking at the legal framework under which the BoE operates on behalf of the Government I would prefer MMS – Modern Monetary System (or something along those lines).
I fear that is too close to the current title, and ‘Modern Money’ does not emphasize that this is how money has been created by our government for decades! I am not sure that truncating MMT to just MM would be explanatory enough to force the listener to concede that we are defining exactly how money is, and has been created by our government for a very long time. I have suggested ‘Sovereign Currency Creation’ because ‘Creation’ very obviously must precede taxation, and convincing the public of that fact is 99% of the battle we face. Why not create a poll offering us a number of choices to help select the most descriptive title.
I would have a nightmare explains sovereign money creation as a term. Only my view though.
I am hopeful about the seeming collapse of the Neoliberal order and confident that people will see that Reform isn’t the change from neoliberalism but merely its last gasp. What scares me, though, is whether we can make the transition into something better, under the shadow of the all-encompassing tech industry.
Any system facing collapse will get more and more desperate, abusive, and controlling, and unfortunately for us, for the first time in history, the wealthy have an entity like Silicon Valley on their side. The tech industry is dangerous, anti-democratic, and people like Peter Thiel scare the hell out of me. Through Palantir, governments have the means to sift through our data and target dissent quietly and discreetly, digitally ring-fencing people and organisations that challenge their power. They can take control of the very fabric of society. Faced with extinction, I fear neoliberal parties will lock us into digital concentration camps, before eventually giving us over to some kind of corporate-controlled government system. It will be hard to fight an information war for the preservation of democracy using the tools controlled by the enemy. Any fight for democracy needs to have the destruction and break-up of Big Tech as one of its primary focuses.
On the digital front, The Canary ran a story the other day
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2025/11/30/facial-recognition-police-covertly/
about the police feeding into their growing (and as yet, not very reliable) facial recognition databse (for hauling in those suspected of real or invented crimes), biometric data from the Home Office passport digital photo library. Yes, if you have a British passport, that includes you.
https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/police-secretly-conducting-facial-recognition-searches-of-passport-database/
and its been happening for around 6 years.
I don’t know how reliable the story is, but I don’t recall anyone asking me for consent. I wonder if GDPR gives me the right to demand that my data is deleted from within the police system? Or maybe that right was quietly removed?
Having recently successfully assisted a friend (with a clean criminal record) to use Subject Acess Request and GDPR rights via ACRO,
https://www.acro.police.uk/s/
to get damaging arrest information about him, removed by 2 police forces, because it made random “stop & search” incidents much nastier (he is mixed race, is often driving in the small areas as a carer for his mum, including collecting prescription drugs for her, and lives in an area known for drug dealing so stop and search affects him) – this is a real life issue which disproportionately affects low income vulnerable individuals, sometimes VERY painfully.
We are losing this battle.
what did Eric Blair / George Orwell know?
Agreed whole heartedly.
Both Left and Right do not believe in investment.
As you say, the Right extracts wealth, causes inequality and uses the resulting grievances to divide and conquer, perpetuate capital gains and calls real world solutions ‘utopian’.
The Left relies on the grievances caused by lack of investment to perpetuate itself and calls real-world problem solving ‘technocratic’. It thinks that only the party elite can organise people’s emotions, that they know best. It is intellectual snobbery and patrician-ship at its worst.
Both positions are static, not progressive and thrive on ignorance. Given people like Gramsci and Friere, I find the modern Left totally unacceptable. I actually think that the Left intelligentsia hates ordinary people more than the Right!
Re your last, some undoubtedly do.
They treat them like mushrooms, to be kept in the dark abnd fed bullshit.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I also think that Paolo Friere’s seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed should be mandatory reading for all who have genuine claim to being progressive.
Once read, one will see the current appalling condition of UK state education in the bad light it deserves, and how our media gets away with its equally appalling right wing biases and nonsense.
I buy elements of it. The idea of co-creation is very powerful.
For most of my life, I used to believe that even governments I disagreed with, fundamentally believed that their role was to govern for the good of the people – that bridges shouldn’t collapse, blocks of flats shouldn’t become infernos, drinking water shouldn’t contain sewage, train tracks should be safely maintained, children shouldn’t go hungry. I might not like their politics but I trusted that they believed they were to govern in the public interest and so I felt safer.
I stopped believing that somewhere just after the beginning of this century – probably the Blair/Bush Iraq war was the trigger, plus starting to work in the third sector (faith, foodbank, community charity).
I no longer believe the government cares about my wellbeing. That reflects both a change in MY awareness, AND a serious decline in the standards of ethics and morality (no, NOT sex) in government. (Johnson & Cummings, Starmer & McSweeney – 2 sides of the same coin).
July 2024 GE made absolutely no difference to my feelings on this, I knew nothing would change. Things got worse, morally and practically.
Ideology alone won’t reverse this decline.
We need a different kind of politics, and we need more moral leaders. If the moral leaders lack competence (and they will, modern life is complicated) there are many competent helpers out there willing to help if leaders surround themselves with the right sort of people (honest critics, not scheming sycophants).
Right now I see some positives.
– A different kind of leader – Zack Polanski, if he can keep on course, if he’s a moral man.
– A different kind of politics – the “politics of care” espoused here, and the realism that knows we have to collaborate to defeat fascism, totalitarianism and hate.
– Technocratic competence, that can serve those who lead but that doesn’t seek power or advantage for themselves (no bungs, no sinecures).
There is room for other forms of progressive politics – maybe even Your Party can dust themselves off, smell the coffee and start again. LibDems cant be ignored but 2010’s betrayal must never happen again.
Imagine the possibilities if we could capture even half of those currently in the “don’t vote/won’t vote/they’re all the same” Party? A lot of them are omnibus passengers.
I genuinely enjoy your comments.
“maybe even Your Party can dust themselves off, smell the coffee and start again.”
I hope so. There has definitely been an attempt to recreate all the same-old, same-old structures of the Labour party, but there are some new fundamentals too – policy formed, debated and voted on all year round by the whole membership – which might enable the majority of those who joined to shift Your Party to a more genuinely caring stance.
I for one will do my best for as long as I can – starting with a motion to abolish Conference as a place where party business is done.
Getting together to celebrate and meet each other is a great idea, and might include educational speakers, but the real business should be getting done all the time, involving as many people as possible. We have the technologies (both electronic and procedural) to do it.
It would save a lot of people a lot of money (most of which went to rentier extractors) and a lot of public infighting.
Breaking news:
It is reported that the missing crew of Golgafranchan Ark Fleet Ship 2 were found alive and well at the weekend in a conference venue in Liverpool. They had already formed a committee to design the horse but were apparently deadlocked over a crucial issue: one hump or two…….
Apologies to the late Douglas Adams!
I’ll get me coat…….
🙂
Didn’t the Labour front bench abandon any “left” position on the economy when Blair was elected leader?
OK, the Overton window has relentlessly moved further right since then, but saying “Left vs Right is dead” is surely, as mainstream politics goes, just an expression of that window.
Of course the Corbyn era offered an alternative, but that was crushed with great determination. I’m sure Polanski and the Greens will soon come under similar “pressure”.
I agree left v right doesn’t come close.
I also agree that Your Party is a shambles and with the comments about the left relying on grievances – building something is hard work, grievance is easier. Owen Jones 2/12/25 picked up some of this in his Guardian piece. ‘The party the left desperately needs is a long time coming’.
I would suggest that what the left needs has already arrived and it’s not another party. He Owen Jones nearly got there in his article he a says “ “Max Shanly argued traditional parties reflect the evils of existing society “in their structures, practices and modes of behaviour” “ I can agree with that, whipping stops an MP in their tracks, in its current form it resembles democratic centralism (you might have to be a certain age/type to get that reference).
I would strongly suggest that those who contributed to this debate abd anyone else who wants to make common cause and work across divides to build a better society need to look no further than Jamie Driscoll’s Majority – this does political education, supports positions that most people can get behind and runs hustings to agree who is the most likely progressive to win. It is a social movement, it works with civil society groups who the old affiliation model doesn’t work for.
Instead of wasting its time on having a fight about being a new old party or something else, it is just getting on with it, building alliances and practicing what it preaches. I think it is much more in tune with the times and has more chance of success.
I like what Jamie is doing.
But Marxist class warfare – which is always assumed to end up with violent overthrow – cannot be a part of anything acceptable to democrats.
If you said And or Because….Then yes I agree.
Saying but implies a caveat and I don’t think Jamie is a revolutionary!
While I agree with much of your analysis, and the left-right spectrum has always been limited, I think it confuses things further to say they don’t exist anymore, because there are still parties who are unabashedly left in the traditional sense (and one in the UK is surging in the polls). It makes more sense to say that the traditional centre-left parties, like Labour and Lib-Dem, have moved hugely rightward, shifting the political centre as they go, and actually creating more space on the left. This is also important as their shift has allowed the right to also shift ever rightwards to the point that their main focus has become culture wars, as you describe. (My predictions are hardly ever right, but I said in the 90s that the Dems were mad to do this, because they seemed not to realise that for every step rightward they took, the Reps would take two with no end, and here we are.)
This isn’t a new idea, btw, Ralph Nader described the Rep-Dems as a single party with two heads over 20 years ago and the phenomena started in the UK with Tony Blair.
I too think a new name for MMT is needed. The word Theory worries me, for if you have “conversations” with Creationists, Flat Earthers etc, and use the words Theory of Evolution, the common response is “It’s only a Theory, ‘innit ?” It’s unfortunate that there are two uses of the word Theory. And the word Monetary is a bit shady for my liking too, because way before the word Neoliberalism came to the fore, there was Geoffrey Howe wiffling on about Money, M1 M2 M3 etc. I feel that if a new narrative needs birthing then a new description of the economic means is needed too, Economics of Care ? Less technocratic expression, after all the word Neoliberalism doesn’t really actually mean anything but is highly descriptive of the politic system of the moment.
Modern money is working for me.
When I look at the economy, I find the left–right divide deeply unhelpful. The left too often assumes that redistribution and regulation alone can generate wealth, but that neglects the fact that wealth is created through innovation and adaptation, not just by moving money around. The right, meanwhile, clings to the idea that markets are self-correcting and government should stay out, but that ignores the reality that markets are fragile, prone to failure, and often need smart rules to function well. Both sides reduce a complex, evolving system into static dogma, and that’s why I say the left–right framing is intellectually obsolete/reductive.
In terms of a goal for the UK’s current economy, I think any government could simply succeed by reducing energy, housing, and food costs etc. (ie all basic living costs), whilst also keeping the new infrastructure sustainable in the long-term and green etc. (yes a very shocking goal).
I’m a little late to this discussion, but I would suggest that we are facing a choice between ‘care or abuse’. The word neglect is too passive to describe the deliberate brutality and cruelty imposed on us by the antisocial neoliberal elite.
Noted