But what’s it *for*?

This week: come on, Labour, surely you can do better than this. Also: some noteworthy nicknames for Russian monarchs; and a still extant dinosaur.

Eighteen months ago now, much of the internet shouted at me for a column in which I suggested that victory would enable Labour to set the terms of debate. Seven months into this government, it’s starting to feel unnervingly like the people doing the shouting might just have had a point.

Perhaps those leading the government lack the media management skills necessary to take full advantage of the powers brought by office. Perhaps they are suffering from the problem faced by many Labour governments down the decades, of feeling themselves squatters in the corridors of power. (No Tory, no matter how incompetent, ever knows this feeling.) Or perhaps my critics were right: the leadership had shown us who they were, and I should have believed them. Whatever the explanation, though, all too often, this government seems unnervingly comfortable with allowing the right wing media’s framing to go unchallenged.

No wonder he looks disappointed.

There have been good things: the biggest is planning reform, a willingness to stress that this country needs infrastructure and housing and windfarms, and the blockers who object will just have to lump it. Elsewhere, though, there’s been a lot more muttering about the need for sound public finances than the need to stop the state falling over. Rachel Reeves has declined to make the uncomfortable but accurate argument that her predecessor’s tax cuts were unaffordable, and that it is better to take one, big political hit now than to slowly bleed out through a thousand public service crises.

Ministers keep talking about the need for a reset in relations with Europe – but over the weekend, home secretary Yvette Cooper dismissed the idea of youth mobility scheme as “not the right starting point”, even though it’s hard to imagine a smaller or less justifiable concession, and that without such concessions there is no reason for Brussels to give us anything. Someone in government, meanwhile, is briefing how annoyed they are that Liz Kendall is taking her sweet time finding ways to cut benefits yet further in a cost of living crisis, and a bunch of MPs whose seats are threatened by Reform are calling on the government to be noisier about how mean it’s being to immigrants. None of it is particularly edifying.

No one of any seniority seems willing to say anything in defence of the welfare state, that immigrants are people, or to express the minute possibility that Britain will be better off working with Europe than getting pushed around by Trump. They’re not making arguments in favour of duty or solidarity, or a national mission to rebuild what the Tories destroyed. All too often the pitch seems to be slightly more competent management of the rubble.

I’m far from the first to ask this, but – what do they think we elected them for, exactly?

Leaving myself open to another wallet inspection, I can see a couple of possible reasons for this terror that somebody, somewhere, might think a government by an ostensibly progressive party could be seen as doing something progressive. The one favoured by the left is: they don’t want to. This is always who they were. Maybe. There are few in the Labour party of whom I think that’s true, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the clique around the leadership is entirely from that group.

Alternatively, perhaps reading the list of decisions above as a continuing attempt to resist appearing progressive is a sort of category error. Most of those things are, in themselves, understandable attempts to avoid bad headlines. Perhaps they were never intended to form a single, anti-progressive message. Perhaps the issue is there is no message.

That would fit. But I think it’s something else, too. I think they’re fighting the last war.

One of the most obnoxious phrases to come out of the last election campaign was the notion of “hero voters” – older people in the Red Wall who’d once voted Labour, but probably backed Brexit and had since shifted to Tories. These were seen as a particularly important group of swing voters, on the purely mathematical grounds that these were the Tory seats Labour most needed to win, and a vote won from the Tory pile was effectively worth twice one won from elsewhere.

That’s fine, so far as it goes: but my problem here is not the maths, but the English. The phrase “hero voters” suggests, well, heroes: that these people weren’t merely useful, but right in some way. It flatters them and the opinions they happen to hold, no matter how unpleasant. It feels a lot like the government is still trying to align its message and policy with those beliefs, governing in line with their prejudices against migrants, Brussels and benefits.¹

The problem – electorally, I mean; morally, there are others – is that this group aren’t necessarily going to be the key votes in the next Labour coalition. More than that: parrot their views at every turn, and you risk losing voters elsewhere – to the LibDems over Europe, or the Greens over benefits. If the country is not on a clearly upward path by 2029, there’s no reason to think Labour will hang on to those who don’t share progressive values anyway. Is it really worth focusing entirely on them, at the cost of driving other, more natural supporters, away?

The alternative, surely, would be an honest conversation about the geopolitical choices we face in the age of Putin and Trump. To be clear about the scale of the crisis in public services, and the fact we’re all going to have to pitch in to fix it. To explain that this country benefits from immigration, for reasons of both culture and demographics, and that large chunks of our economy would collapse without it. (You’re unhappy now? Try living in a country that people don’t want to live in.)

The alternative would be to stop treating people who don’t believe in those things as heroes, and to have the courage of what I hope are still the Labour party’s convictions.

The election is still years away, and will anyway be won or lost on whether the government actually manages to fix things. It’s not going to do that by appealing to the base instincts that got us into this mess in the first place.

Some noteworthy Russian nicknames

I’ve been watching The Great, which

1. is great (DYSWIDT), and

2. has had me googling random bits of Russian history, even though its maker Hulu describes it as “anti-historical” and the opening credits describe the show as “An Occasionally True Story” or, on one occasion, “An Almost Entirely Untrue Story”.

During my travels down the rabbit hole, I found myself perusing a list of Russian monarchs, where I noted the existence of Vasily the Squint, a disputed claimant to the title of Grand Prince of Moscow from 1434-35. “That’s an interesting nickname,” I thought. “I wonder how he came by it?” So I looked it up and it turned out that the way he came by it is either because his brother Dmitry refused to accept his rule, allied with the man his dad had deposed – Vasily the Squint’s cousin, Vasily II the Dark – and together they fought a war, deposed our Vasily, defeated him, imprisoned him, then blinded him; or because he was cross-eyed.

I think, on the grounds that squinting is not going to do you much good at the point you’ve been blinded, it’s probably the latter explanation.

Incidentally, in 1446, Dmitry had Vasily II (Grand Prince of Moscow, 1425-62) blinded, too, which is why everyone calls him “the Dark”. The fact he successfully retook the throne and then ruled for another 16 years suggests to me that Vasily II was not a man to be trifled with.

Anyway – all this got me wondering whether there were other Russian monarchs with interesting and/or macabre nicknames. Buckle up.