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      A written constitution won’t right Britain’s wrongs | Letters

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      Gavin Esler (Here’s the key question about Britain in 2023: why do we put up with this rubbish?, 25 October) makes some good points, but his implication that we should have a written constitution, as the US does, should be resisted. There’s no more pernicious element in American life than the country’s practically irreformable constitution. Made for a slave-owning gentry republic (not a modern democracy), the constitution sports an electoral college that can, and does, overturn democratically elected majorities – often in cahoots with the supreme court, one of the world’s most nakedly political courts (and we complain about Hungary and Poland).The US constitution makes it impossible to legislate for firearms control and periodically allows an irresponsible legislature to threaten the dissolution of all federal government by withholding the revenue needed for the armed forces and civil servants. The US constitution is an affliction that Americans must bear. Let’s not have one. George Baugh Much Wenlock, Shropshire Gavin Esler says that ours is an antiquated democratic system. How can it be described as democratic at all when we have an unelected head of state, an unelected second chamber, a voting system that gives huge majorities in parliament with less than 50% of the vote?In addition, we have three different sorts of devolution to the three smallest parts of the UK and no effective devolution to the much larger regions of England. Dr Ken Hughes Hale Barns, Greater Manchester Gavin Esler’s article poses the questions “why are things so … shit?” and how it is that Liz Truss, Chris Grayling and others seem to repeatedly fail upwards? Esler proposes constitutional change as the solution. There is a much swifter alternative. Don’t vote for people who don’t use public transport. Don’t vote for people who don’t send their children to local schools. Don’t vote for people who don’t use the NHS. Don’t vote for people without links to your local community. Forget constitutional change. Politics can be that simple. Peter Riddle Wirksworth, Derbyshire Gavin Esler’s excellent article identifies the first necessary step in halting our prolonged descent into dysfunction and despair. This age-old decline will not be reversed without grasping the nettle of constitutional reform. How Keir Starmer can be so blind as to claim electoral reform especially is “not a priority” beggars belief. Dr Robert HercliffeLee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire Gavin Esler has it right. Almost every democratic country in the world except the UK has a written contract between its people and their government: a constitution. No sane person would agree to buy a house or a car from a salesman who said that there was no need for a written contract and that “their word was their bond”. And yet most British citizens seem happy to accept that situation with regards to their country. While there are plenty of other challenges facing the UK right now, a written constitution, created by the people, would go some way to resolving much of the dissembling, lying and corruption that are now endemic in our political system. It’s long past time to boot the dodgy car salesmen out of Westminster. Stephen Psallidas Newcastle upon Tyne More

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      Can Boris Johnson emulate Donald Trump and make a comeback? No chance

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      There are two very big differences between the situation confronting Boris Johnson and that facing the man with whom he is frequently compared, Donald Trump – namely, popularity and context.Johnson is weaker than Trump. First, because he is less popular with Conservative voters than Trump is with his Republican supporters. About half of 2019 Conservative voters disapprove of Johnson’s performance in office. And at the time he left office, 40% or more rated him as untrustworthy, dishonest and/or incompetent.Things haven’t improved since. In polls conducted in recent weeks, about half of current Conservative voters have said they think Johnson misled parliament over lockdown parties, while a similar share consider the 90-day suspension he received either “about right” or “not harsh enough”.A majority of Conservative voters believe it is right that Johnson has resigned from the Commons, and less than half of them say they would like to see Johnson return as an MP.In short, about half of both 2019 Conservative voters and the party’s smaller base of current supporters take a low view of Johnson in various respects. The contrast with Trump is stark – between 70% and 80% of Republican voters approve of Trump, and more than half say they will vote for him as their candidate in the coming Republican primary contest.That brings me to the second big difference – Trump’s ability to disrupt politics is enhanced because America’s system is candidate centred, while Johnson’s ability to do the same is diminished because Britain’s system is party centred.Trump won direct personal mandates from Republican voters in 2016 and 2020, and most of them seem eager to do the same again next year. If Trump prevails in the Republican primary contest, there is little other Republicans can do to prevent him running for a third time as their candidate for the White House.The British system is very different. Johnson never received a direct personal mandate as prime minister from voters at large – there is no direct election of the executive in our system. Removing a directly elected president is very difficult. Removing a prime minister is considerably easier. If Conservative MPs had had enough of Johnson, they could – and did – remove him. The Conservative party – and Rishi Sunak, its current leader – have a lot more control over who gets to stand in Conservative colours, so it is much easier for them to keep Johnson out, particularly now he is no longer even an MP.The two factors also interact. If Johnson had Trump-style popularity with Conservatives, it would be harder and riskier to exclude him. But he doesn’t, so it isn’t.There’s also the question of whether local Conservative associations might be keener on Johnson than Conservative voters overall – perhaps keen enough to back him as a candidate, or to punish (or even deselect) their local Conservative MP if they vote for sanctions against the former PM.It is possible that Johnson has a stronger following among activists, but it is also plausible that he doesn’t. After all, these are the people who will have borne the brunt of the anger at Johnson’s antics when campaigning on the doorstep, and paid the heavy electoral price for his unpopularity in recent local election rounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConservative associations have also traditionally been fairly deferential to the party leadership. They have not gone in for local deselection campaigns. While trouble on this front cannot be entirely ruled out, it seems unlikely.So some sort of Trump-style hostile takeover is unlikely. The Conservative party has higher barriers to entry than American parties, and Johnson isn’t popular enough with current or 2019 Conservative voters to fuel an uprising capable of overcoming these barriers.Johnson will no doubt retain a lot of capacity for mischief, but this is more likely to play out on the front pages of Conservative-aligned newspapers rather than in the halls and bars of local Conservative associations.Robert Ford is professor of political science at Manchester University and co-author of The British General Election of 2019 More

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      Incite, smear, divide: why are the Tories and Labour copying the tactics of America’s vilest strategist? | Nels Abbey

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      Will 2024 be a repeat of 1992 or 1997, is the (binary) question people ask: a repeat of Neil Kinnock’s shock defeat to the Tories in 1992 or Tony Blair’s triumphant landslide victory in 1997.But while we are talking about the what will happen next time, we had better discuss the how. The means matter. The means help shape society. They impact how cohesive we are, how we treat each other. The means last longer than victory or defeat. And by many current indications, the means suggest we are looking at neither 1997 nor 1992, but at a mirror image of the 1988 US presidential election.The name might not mean much, but the brutal political genius of Lee Atwater looms large over today’s British politics – to such an extent that even he would not believe it. Atwater was a highly influential strategist who helped shape modern presidential campaigning for the Republicans. Perhaps the foremost part of his legacy was the ruthless, nihilistic mainstreaming of dog-whistle racism into political campaigning. He explained how that worked.“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.” Atwater’s crowning achievement, having advised President Ronald Reagan, was masterminding Vice-President George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential election victory against the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. And to do so, he leveraged the most reliable of western tropes: the Black bogeyman. Atwater conceived and created the now notorious Willie Horton ad. The advert offered a simple juxtaposition: George Bush, a tough-on-crime Republican who believed in the death penalty for murderers, or Michael Dukakis, a wet liberal who allowed murderers to have weekend passes to get out of jail.And then came the money shot: a menacingly scary black-and-white mugshot of William Horton (his name was altered by Atwater from William Horton to Willie Horton; the intended effect is self-explanatory), a Black man who had been convicted of murder and rape in Dukakis’s Massachusetts, yet was granted a temporary release from prison pass (otherwise known as a furlough). While out on furlough he carried out even more horrific crimes. The advert did what it intended: to make Horton and Dukakis look like an inseparable couple, the Democrats and the black felon as running mates: a racist signal to rally the vote.Intentional or otherwise, I see a clear link between the Willie Horton advert and Labour’s “soft on paedophiles” attack advert on Rishi Sunak. Sadly, given the chance to pull back from his Willie Horton moment, the Labour leader stood “by every word”.But then, looking across the divide, Atwater would see much to admire in Tory politics as well. Last week the home secretary, Suella Braverman, pointed at Pakistani Muslim men with the message that she would not let “political correctness” get in the way of apprehending grooming gangs – despite the fact that her own department had found it was overwhelmingly and disproportionately white men who constituted grooming rings. But why stop there? Atwater wouldn’t. There goes Braverman apparently upholding a landlord’s decision to display golliwogs in his pub.There she goes, telling some of the world’s most desperate people that, should they dare to show up here, they’ll end up on prison barges. Just the place for the political scapegoat. Atwater would have loved those barges.In his pomp, he would have loved the intolerance, the viciousness, the very British race struggle in our politics right now: the tussle of one side to out-racist the other, to make complexity and decency look weak, often leveraging polite and innocent sounding substitutes and subtleties for race along the way – think: wokeness, political correctness, virtue signalling. Call it Atwater signalling perhaps, make a dead man happy. But ultimately we must decide if we are happy with politics conducted like this.Because the next election will have a victor and a vanquished, and the victor will feel the means justified the ends. But if both parties continue down this dark and dirty path, what will the following election be like, and the next? And what kind of country will emerge from them?Look at what devil-take-the-hindmost politics has done to America. We know it can work – that’s the tragedy. And we know where it ends.
      Nels Abbey is a writer, broadcaster and former banker. He is the author of the satirical book Think Like A White Man

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      A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast | Will Hutton

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      The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More

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      After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern | Jonathan Freedland

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      After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t governJonathan FreedlandThe farcical scenes among US Republicans have echoes in our Tory party. Both promise disruption, then deliver exactly that The US right has this week been staging a clown show that has had liberals in that country and beyond pulling up a chair and breaking out the popcorn. There has been a karmic pleasure in watching the Republicans who won control of the House of Representatives struggle to complete the most basic piece of business – the election of a speaker – but it’s also been instructive, and not only to Americans. For it has confirmed the dirty little secret of that strain of rightwing populist politics that revels in what it calls disruption: it always ends in bitter factional fighting, chaos and paralysis. We in Britain should know, because Brexit has gone the exact same way.Start with the karma that saw House Republicans gather two years to the day since they sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another: often overlooked in the anniversary recollections of 6 January 2021 is that, mere hours after rioters had stormed the US Capitol, a majority of Republican House members voted to do precisely as the rioters had demanded and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Yet here were those same House Republicans on 6 January 2023, having prevented the smooth transfer of power from one party to another – except this time, the party they were thwarting was their own.House still without speaker as McCarthy pleads with Republican holdouts – liveRead moreIt should have been straightforward. Republicans won a narrow majority in the House in November, which gave them the right to put one of their number in the speaker’s chair. The trouble was, while most backed Kevin McCarthy, about 20 rebels did not. By Thursday night, they had gone through 11 rounds of voting – the most since the civil war era – without McCarthy or anyone else winning a majority. The result: deadlock.It was a study in incompetence. A party asks the electorate to give them power; they get it and then freeze, unable to take even the first step towards using it. There’s no clear political logic to the stalemate. The rebels are devotees of Donald Trump, but McCarthy himself is a tireless Trump sycophant – patronised by the former president as “my Kevin” – who begged for and won the backing of the orange one. The pro-Trump rebels are divided among themselves: one rebuked Trump for sticking with McCarthy, while another voted to make Trump himself speaker.It’s telling that the rebels’ demands are not on policy but on procedure, seeking rule changes or committee seats that would give them more power. Otherwise, they can’t really say what they want. They succeeded in getting metal detectors removed from the entrance to the chamber, so now people can walk on to the floor of the House carrying a gun, but apart from that, and their hunger to start investigating Democrats, including Joe Biden’s son Hunter, nothing.All this has significance for the year ahead in US politics. For one thing, it’s yet more evidence of the diminishing strength of Trump among Republican leaders, if not yet among the party faithful. For another, if Republicans cannot make a relatively easy decision like this one, how are they going to make the tough but necessary choices that are coming – such as authorising the spending, and debt, required to keep the US government functioning?But its meaning goes far wider. For what’s been on display this week, in especially florid form, is a strain of politics that has infected many democracies, including our own. Its key feature is its delight in disruption, in promising to upend the system. That was the thrust of the twin movements of 2016, Trump and Brexit. Both promised to sweep away the elites, the experts, the orthodoxy – whether in Washington DC or Brussels. They were new movements, but they were drawing on deep roots. Four decades ago both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cast themselves as radicals daring to shake off the dead hand of the government.So we can hardly be surprised that those who railed against government should be so bad at it. They promised disruption, and that’s what they’ve delivered. In the US it was the chaos of Trump himself, and now a House of mini-Trumps that can’t tie its own shoelaces. In the UK, it looks different: we have a prime minister in Rishi Sunak whose pitch is technocratic competence. But that should not conceal two things.First, the post-2016 Tory party delivered just as much parliamentary turmoil and intra-party division as McCarthy and co served up this week. Whether it was the Commons gridlock of the two years preceding the 2019 election or the psychodrama of the three years after it, Brexit-era Conservatism has proved every bit as unhinged as Trump-era Republicanism. When it comes to burn-it-all-down politics, the Republicans’ craziest wing are mere novices compared with a master arsonist such as Liz Truss. The US and UK are simply at different points in the cycle.House Democrats should unite with moderate Republicans to elect a speaker | Robert ReichRead moreSecond, even with Sunak in charge, and though painted in less vivid colours, Brexit-era Toryism is just as paralysed as its sister movement in the US. The five-point plan unveiled in the PM’s new year address consisted mostly of the basics of state administration – growing the economy, managing inflation – rather than anything amounting to a political programme.And that’s chiefly because his party, like the Republicans, cannot agree among themselves. Consider how much Sunak has had to drop, under pressure from assorted rebels. Whether it was reform of the planning system, the manifesto commitment to build 300,000 new houses a year or the perennial pledge to grasp the nettle of social care, Sunak has had to back away from tasks that are essential for the wellbeing of the country. True, he has avoided the farcical scenes that played out this week on Capitol Hill, but that’s only because he has preferred to preserve the veneer of unity than to force a whole slew of issues. The result is a prime minister who cannot propose much more than extra maths lessons lest he lose the fractious, restive coalition that keeps him in office.None of this is coincidence. It’s in the nature of the rightwing populist project, in Britain, the US and across the globe. Brexit is the exemplar, a mission that worked with great potency as a campaign, as a slogan, but which could never translate into governing, because it was never about governing. It was about disrupting life, not organising it – or even acknowledging the trade-offs required to organise it. It offered the poetry of destruction, not the prose of competence.The Conservatives are several stages further down this road than the Republicans, perhaps because their power has been uninterrupted throughout. But in both cases, and others, the shift is unmistakable. Once parties of the right saw themselves as the obvious custodians of state authority: the natural party of government. Now they are happier shaking their fists at those they insist are really in charge. They are becoming the natural party of opposition. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      The right thrives on bullying ‘snowflakes’. But who will vote for it when they grow old? | Owen Jones

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      The right thrives on bullying ‘snowflakes’. But who will vote for it when they grow old? Owen JonesYoung people deprived of prosperity may represent the first generation that doesn’t grow more conservative with age Spite. When you dig down to the essence of modern rightwing politics, you’re left with little else. This wasn’t always the case. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan offered clear, coherent visions of society, even if their worship of free markets delivered economic insecurity and stagnating living standards. While today’s Tories and Trumpified Republicans remain committed to defending privileged interests, their driving ambition now seems to be deliberately provoking fury among the progressively minded, much to the delight of their supporters. It’s this tendency that led Donald Trump to denounce Mexicans as criminals and attempt to ban Muslims from entering the US; it’s the same tendency that drove the home secretary, Suella Braverman, to declare that her “dream” and “obsession” was to see a flight transporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. Cruelty is precisely the point.But this spite has found a particular target in younger British and American people, many of whom increasingly embrace progressive social values such as anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights (granted, this relies on a generous definition of youth as millennials – while the oldest members of Generation Z are only in their mid-20s, the most senior millennials have now reached their early 40s). These generations have become a common enemy for the right. The feeling is mutual. According to new research and survey data, millennials are defying a supposed iron law of politics, that we shift to the right as we age. No other generation in recorded political history has retained such an entrenched rejection of rightwing politics as they’ve grown older.The right has become its own gravedigger for two reasons. First, by building an economic model that promised individual freedom but delivered mass insecurity; and second, by intentionally and repeatedly insulting the social values of the young. British culture fetishes home ownership even while its economic policies make this an increasingly distant dream for younger citizens. Young people have also borne the brunt of austerity, being saddled with university debt and suffering the closure of youth and Sure Start centres. Yet a generation that is more educated than ever but simultaneously deprived of prospects is treated with unadulterated contempt by the right. It is, after all, labelled the “snowflake generation”, which the Collins English Dictionary has defined as “the young adults of the 2010s, viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generations”.On both sides of the Atlantic, the right fears a younger generation of economically insecure and socially progressive citizens. Commentators and politicians treat younger people as woke barbarians at the gates threatening to tear down everything conservatives hold dear. The moral panic over so-called “cancel culture” is a striking example of this: what it really boils down to is an attempt by millennials and zoomers to assert their progressive social values and reject the bigotries found among some older Britons and Americans. “Millennials are the silencing generation,” complains the rightwing Wall Street Journal, denouncing them as “perpetually offended” (what this perhaps really means is that younger people are less keen on demonising migrants or obsessing over the existence of trans people). “Millennials were woke enough … but the next generation is much worse,” cries the Telegraph, denouncing university students as “Stalinist foot-soldiers”. Younger people are more likely to defend the rights of the minorities bullied and harassed by rightwing politicians, and conservatives hate them for it.And so the British and US right have apparently condemned themselves to a political doom loop: savaging the progressive values of younger generations, and in doing so driving them further into the arms of the left. This bile may serve a short-term political purpose in rallying the core vote of the Tories and Republicans, but it seems that conservatives have thought little about what will happen as younger generations come of age politically and culturally. Perhaps rightwingers believed that the historic precedent of voters shifting rightwards with age would automatically assert itself, however much the young remained locked out of the prosperity their parents had enjoyed. What’s intriguing is how rightwing politicians and commentators alike have doubled down on poisonous invectives that alienate young people. Perhaps this is evidence of a fatalism: they know their fate is sealed, so nothing is to be gained from restraint.As a case in point, last week a British rightwing shock jock announced that she’d choose the life of professional misogynist Andrew Tate “over the life of a half-educated, autistic, doom-mongering eco-cultist” Greta Thunberg. Her use of autistic as an insult was indicative of an increasingly vicious rightwing culture, but the unapologetic loathing towards Thunberg – whose offence is to seek to prevent humanity from destroying itself – was revealing. Thunberg has become emblematic of progressive younger generations: the bile frequently directed at her speaks to a hatred and fear of those whom she is seen to represent.In building and benefiting from an economic model that has left younger people bereft of a secure future, and repelling them with a “culture war” against progressive values, British and US conservatism seems to be authoring its own demise. Young people voted for Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980s, but little over a fifth of voted for the party in 2019. While young Americans flocked to support Reagan in the 1980s, today their political icons are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The political right has treated the young as the enemy within. It may soon realise what bitter harvest it has reaped as oblivion awaits.
      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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      Joe Biden calls Liz Truss tax cuts a ‘mistake’ as political fallout continues

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      Joe Biden calls Liz Truss tax cuts a ‘mistake’ as political fallout continuesUS president rejects ‘cutting taxes on the super-wealthy’ and says he is not the only world leader critical of abandoned plan00:39Joe Biden has called Liz Truss’s abandoned economic plan that sent financial markets into chaos and caused a sharp drop in the value of the pound a “mistake” as criticism of her approach continued.The US president hinted that other world leaders felt the same way about her disastrous mini-budget, saying he “wasn’t the only one” who had concerns over the lack of “sound policy” in other countries.Biden said it was “predictable” that the new British prime minister was forced on Friday to backtrack on plans to aggressively cut taxes without saying how they would be paid for, after Truss’s proposal caused turmoil in global financial markets.His comments on Sunday to reporters at an ice-cream parlour in Oregon marked a highly unusual intervention by a US president into the domestic policy decisions of one of its closest allies.“I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,” Biden said. “I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when … I disagree with the policy, but it’s up to Britain to make that judgment, not me.”Labour leapt on the US president’s remarks. The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, said: “As well as crashing the economy, Liz Truss’s humiliating U-turns have made Britain’s economy an international punchline.“President Biden knows the dangerous folly of trickle-down economics. His comments confirm the hit our reputation has taken thanks to the Conservatives.”Biden has repeatedly poured scorn on so-called trickle-down economics and before his first bilateral talks with Truss in New York last month tweeted that he was “sick and tired” of the approach, which he claimed had never worked.Mini-budget went ‘too far, too fast’, says Jeremy HuntRead moreBiden’s comments came after weeks of White House officials declining to criticise Truss’s plans, though they emphasised they were monitoring the economic fallout closely.The US president was speaking during an unannounced campaign stop for the Democratic candidate for governor, Tina Kotek. Democrats face a tough US political environment amid Republican criticism of their handling of the economy.Biden said he was not concerned about the strength of the dollar – it set a new record against sterling in recent weeks, which benefits imports but makes US exports more expensive to the rest of the world.He claimed the US economy was “strong as hell” but added: “I’m concerned about the rest of the world. The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries. It’s worldwide inflation, that’s consequential.”Truss’s own new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has said Truss and his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget went “too far, too fast” as he effectively signalled the demise of the prime minister’s economic vision.“We have to be honest with people and we are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax to get debt falling, but at the top of our minds when making these decisions will be how to protect and help struggling families, businesses and people.”Hunt is expected to announce that plans to reduce the basic rate of income tax next April will be pushed back by a year. The cut to 19% will now take effect at the time previously proposed by Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor who was Truss’s main leadership rival.TopicsUS foreign policyJoe BidenLiz TrussEconomic policyUS politicsConservativesnewsReuse this content More

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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behind | Carys Roberts

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      While Biden is tackling inflation and shaping a green economy for the US, Britain is being left behindCarys RobertsThe Inflation Reduction Act is a big win for jobs and the environment, but Truss and Sunak have nothing similar to offer Over the weekend, US Democrats overcame months of political struggle to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, marking a major victory for the president, Joe Biden, and for “Bidenomics” before the US midterms.The bill makes the single largest climate investment in US history, with $369bn for climate and clean energy. It is expected to enable the US to get two-thirds of the way towards its Paris agreement commitments while reducing energy costs. It lowers health costs for millions of Americans. It seeks to tackle inflation by directly reducing costs for individuals and by reducing the deficit through closing tax loopholes and increasing tax on corporates and the wealthy.The act is far from perfect. It is the diminished descendant of the failed Build Back Better Act, a $2tn package that would have radically extended childcare, free community college and subsidised health insurance, but which ultimately failed to secure the support of the Democrat senator Joe Manchin (a necessity given the evenly divided Senate). Winning political support for the act has required rowing back on climate ambition and more extensive plans to reduce costs for families; allowing further drilling for fossil fuels; and carve-outs to protect private equity profits from the corporation tax element of the act. For this reason, the act will and already has come under intense criticism from activists and climate groups.However, in the face of fierce political opposition it is a major – even landmark – achievement. It is also a win for the activists and economists who have been persistently pushing and providing ideas for the Biden administration to pursue an alternative approach to the economy and environment: market-shaping green industrial strategy to create good, green jobs; social investment; worker power and incentives for employers to offer decent pay, apprenticeships and profit-sharing with communities; higher taxes on the wealthy to reduce inflation and contribute to the costs, including through a new tax on share buybacks which only serve to boost investors’ incomes. These ideas are no longer stuck on the bench.Historically the US and UK have taken a shared, leading role in the intellectual development and political implementation of new ideas and policy paradigms. Whether we think about the postwar Keynesian consensus, the neoliberal revolution of Thatcher and Reagan or the third way politics of Clinton and Blair, both countries have tended to move in lockstep. Yet right now, in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and the Conservative party leadership race in the UK, our policy paths are diverging.The US has further to go than the UK when it comes to reducing climate emissions and building economic justice. The US has significantly higher levels of emissions (on an absolute and per capita basis) than the UK and the US is also the world’s biggest producer of fossil fuels. Similarly, inequality in the US is starker, and poverty deeper than in the UK. Put simply: the land of opportunity is not delivering for too many American citizens.But Democrat leaders are pushing through a bold agenda to break through deep political polarisation and reset the shape and direction of what US economic success looks like. The irony when we compare this with the UK is that the conditions are far more favourable here for action commensurate to the scale of the climate and nature crisis, an economic strategy that prioritises everyday people and places over wealth and profits, and for extending collective provision of the things and services we all rely on. We have a head start in terms of the social democracy basics. In sharp contrast to the US, there is more consensus across parties on the need for the government to take action on the climate and nature crises. Action taken now would be far less likely to be wiped away by an opposition win than the fragile progressive gains in the US.Biden can still stop Trump, and Trumpism – if he can find a bold plan and moral vision | Robert ReichRead moreThe Conservatives, who have held power for more than a decade, have in recent years flirted with some of those ideas – from May’s mission-oriented industrial strategy to Johnson’s net zero and levelling up pledges – recognising the electoral benefits of doing so. Yet at this moment, the Conservatives are plunging in the opposite direction to their US counterparts, and debating – in the middle of sharply rising inflation and a cost-of-living emergency – policies that are catnip for the Tory membership such as grammar schools and corporation tax cuts, rather than looking around the world or at the evidence on how to address the pressing problems of our time. Truss, widely seen as the frontrunner, has fallen back on outdated tropes of financial support as handouts and has virtually nothing to say on how she would achieve net zero, both for its own sake and as a response to the cost-of-living crisis. Nothing of substance is being suggested to address the creeping, real privatisation of the NHS as those who can go private rather than languish on a waiting list.It would be wrong to point at the US and claim it has its house in order or that lessons can be read in a simplistic way. But Biden and the activists and researchers around him are ambitiously forging a new kind of economic policymaking that seeks to rapidly decarbonise, reduce pressures on family purses through collective provision, and tax wealth and profits to fund this and quell inflationary pressures. The UK government – whoever it is headed by – should take note of the new economics rather than be left behind.
      Carys Roberts is executive director of the Institute for Public Policy Research
      TopicsEconomicsOpinionUS politicsJoe BidenConservativesClimate crisiscommentReuse this content More