Thread by @SteveDavies365

🧵 I have the increasing reeling that UK politics is in a holding mode with lots of people desperately trying to keep the circling plane flying.
1. The Starmer government is best understood as representing the technocratic consensus that emerged after 1990 and consolidated under

Blair/Brown. Almost certainly the last stand of the conventional wisdom de jours. Will it succeed? Not impossible but unlikely because. 2. We are facing intensifying crisis on a number of fronts, public finance, public services, community relations, state capacity&effectiveness

international relations. Not to mention climate change, increasingly severe malthusian constraints and (crucially) a lack of innovation. All this requires some radical measures and departure from the kind of policies and governance we have had since the early 1990s but see 1.

3. Starmer and Reeves are clearly betting the farm on reviving growth but what if that doesn't happen (right now I would bet against it)? 4. In terms of politics there has been a realignment in terms of the views and divisions among voters, with the emergence and crystallising of

a national collectivist politics of the kind seen in several other places. However our political system and class means it has not found electoral expression yet (same is true for other emergent political identities). The result is it is going to be much more radically

anti-systemic and plebeian when it does burst out. 5. What none of our political class and very few voters are prepared to even consider is the prospect that meaningful growth will be near impossible to achieve in the near to medium future. As I have said, the likely result will

be an era of disillusionment as one kind of politics after another is tried, none brings growth and consequently the various crises get more acute. It's a challenge for all kinds of politics to think about this. End