Things Can’t Only Get Better

This week: I have bloody well had it with the sodding Labour party. Also: an early modern way of having too many browser tabs open; and some maps dropped on other maps.

I am not, at time of writing, in a good place. I say that partly because I’m ill again, with what feels suspiciously like a relapse of whatever godawful gastro thing I had a couple of weeks ago, and the recurrence is vastly more unnerving than the illness itself. More than that, while I have a pretty lovely life by any sensible standard of freelance journalism life¹, it remains an inescapable fact that if I don’t work I don’t get paid. Being too ill to think, let alone work, is thus a problem. And on top of that, I also have a lot of guilt about cancelling on people, even though I know from experience that someone telling you they can’t make that meeting after all is actually one of best things that can possibly happen in a working day. Anyway. My week sucks.

But of course, the sudden bout of whatever-the-f*ck is not the only reason I’m not in a good place. Another is that the place I am in is Britain, where the governing party seems to have convinced itself that, “the far right is correct. Vote Labour” is in any way a winning strategy. Struggling as I am to formulate any thought longer than a sentence, I’m just going to list all the reasons this is awful.

• The government has made clear on a number of occasions now that, if the choice is to stand with vulnerable people, or to side against them to impress a bunch of Labour-voting bigots who may exist only in its head, then it’ll choose the latter every time.

• This is as strategically idiotic as it is morally abhorrent.

• Although the Reform surge is real and terrifying, it is not clear that many of the people voting for Farage and co have voted Labour in a long time, if at all.

• The party is actually losing far more voters to the LibDems and Greens.

• There are also far more of those voters left to lose.

• Trying to impress the right by telling voters on the left to f*ck off , as if they have nowhere else to go when they very obviously do, might possibly pose some electoral risk.

• It’s also possible that many of the voters that the Labour party is trying desperately to keep onside will be dead by the time of the next election, if they aren’t already.

• This speech might actually be worse than Theresa May’s infamous “citizens of nowhere” one² because, even if that did communicate to a huge swathe of Britons that the Tories didn’t want their vote, “community is important” is at least a coherent and defensible intellectual proposition in the way phrases like “island of strangers”, “incalculable damage”, or “a squalid chapter of our politics” are not.

• It’s all very well to “ask why parts of our economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour”, but when big parts of the answer are “many NHS and essentially all social care workers are underpaid”, the obvious follow up question is, “What plans does the government have to address that?” (During the weekend broadcast round, home secretary Yvette Cooper alas couldn’t point to any.)

• In fact it’s possible that the horrendous rhetoric is being used to cover for the fact that the actual policy changes are relatively small.

• They’re also more likely to get smaller than bigger, as the health and care sectors, universities, and business get their act in gear to lobby for changes.

• Promising an authoritarian immigration crackdown and then delivering not very much might also possibly pose some electoral risk in the future.

• Not to mention some potential PR risks in the present, as witnessed by a series of front pages in which the liberal press scream at the government for being shitty to immigrants, while the right-wing press complain they’re not being shitty enough.

• Just once it would be nice to hear a senior British politician say “immigration is good actually”.

• Winning support from Robert Jenrick is never a good sign.

• Whichever geniuses came up with this strategy should be fired because they’re not up to the job.

Look, even though I think borders are fundamentally silly and in an ideal world we wouldn’t have any – I can recommend a good book on the subject, if you’re interested – I do understand why the government isn’t adopting my position on this one. Immigration has surged since 2020; it brings challenges to public services and housing supply, as well as economic benefits and cultural enrichment; and the government does need to think about such things for both “running the country” and “getting re-elected” reasons. I’m an outlier. Doing what I want is a vote loser.

But even if we leave aside both economic reality and basic human decency, which we shouldn’t, a set of policies that raise the salience of the issue while not actually addressing it seems all but guaranteed to piss everybody off at once. Telling people that immigration was the most important issue while simultaneously failing to reduce it is one of the many reasons the Tories lost. Repeating that trick, with Nigel Farage waiting in the wings – and making clear your own voters can f*ck off while you do so – goes beyond incompetence and into negligence.

I got very excited about politics in the run up to last year’s election. In some quarters this was mistaken for enthusiasm for the Starmer project, rather than a purer excitement about seeing the people who’d messed up the country lose. But I would, if pushed, have said I thought things would get better. The Tories were out. How could they not?

Well: now we know. A Labour government – a Labour government – is not only governing badly, but is doing so in such a way that sets up something even worse. Yet while there may be no shortage of other parties for alienated left or liberal voters to vote for, none of them look like they are within a million miles of being able to form a government.³ This is as good as it’s going to get. And it sucks.

There’s a reason a relapse is more unnerving than the illness: because you start to worry you’ll never get better at all.

An Early Modern Way of Having Too Many Browser Tabs Open

In his 1978 radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams came up with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a device, roughly the size of a book, that would fit in your pocket yet contain an entire computerised and slightly sarcastic encyclopaedia. At the time, such technology felt incredible.

It took only a couple of decades for reality to surpass it. In your pocket, every day, you likely carry a device through which you can access, if not all the world’s books, then vastly more of them than you’re ever going to be able to read. If that doesn’t appeal, you can also use it to play music, watch films, talk to your nearest and dearest, start pointless fights with strangers, contribute to the rise of or fight against fascism, or enjoy this very newsletter. It’s quite, quite mad.

So it’s easy to forget just how recently that our access to information was limited not merely by availability or cost, but by the limitations of the physical world. It’s barely a generation since an entire encyclopaedia contained multiple heavy books that you couldn’t possibly hope to carry around. Even switching from volume to volume to compare entries would have been impractical.⁴

Unless, of course, you had one of these: