Big day. We’re still very early in the process, with a minority of council seats declared. There’s lots of noise out there and very little sense. Some preliminary slapdash thoughts below.

So far, this is actually a pretty boring series of results

I know everyone’s very excited. The bond market is behaving like a child who drank too much Coke, bouncing around according to the implied probability of a Keir Starmer departure. The two party system is collapsing before our eyes - a phenomenon we’ve talked about for years but which is suddenly taking place vividly and at speed, right across the country.

And yet the results are honestly pretty boring. No surprises here. They confirm exactly what we expected. We are in an era of five party politics. Reform is out in front, currently securing around 25% across England and obviously doing particularly well in Leave-voting areas. So far - and again, everything can change - that’s basically in line with the polling. It’s impressive, they’re in the lead, but they are down from where they were a few months ago and not actually that much higher than the other parties, who are jostling around the 15-20% range.

Nothing has fundamentally altered. In fact, the story so far is a confirmation of the things we’ve said for months: Reform is leading, the Greens are doing well, the Lib Dems are chugging along, the two main parties are bleeding out, and people want change.

Most analysis at this point is basically a statement of your existing disposition

It’s far too early to get any sort of detail from the results, but of course that will not stop people insisting that it confirms their starting assumptions. This happens every election, and every election we tell people to stop it and they never do.

The crude version of this is that the Labour left will say Labour is losing votes to the Greens so it must turn left, while the Labour right will say Labour is losing votes to Reform so it must turn right. You can see this, for instance, from journalists like the Spectator’s Tim Shipman, who tweeted: “Whisper it quietly, but was Morgan McSweeney right to tell the Labour party Reform was a bigger threat than the Greens?” Incredible. That was then retweeted by Luke Akehurst on the Labour right, who wrote: “I’m shouting this as loudly as I can.”

Look at this image from Sky. When you see it, your brain will first think that Labour is losing votes to Reform. What else could explain those numbers? It is only once you think about it for a few more moments that you realise these sorts of results are possible without Labour losing a single vote for Reform. As plenty of others have now tried dutifully to explain - from John Curtis to Rob Ford to Adam Bienkov - Labour can lose seats to Reform by losing votes to the Greens, because the progressive parties cannibalise each other and Farage crashes through the middle. Was that a mixed metaphor? I suppose it was. I’m very tired.

Westminster is a very silly place indeed. People generally think it is profoundly silly but it is so much sillier than they realise. It is therefore perfectly likely that people will take away this message even though it is infantile, simplistic and demonstrably wrong.

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There is no plan to stick with

There’s a handful of ministers out there on the airwaves today - proper hospital pass, that one - insisting that Labour should stay calm and stick with the plan. But there is no plan. If there was, the party would be in a much better place.

The basic truth of the matter is that Starmer has no strategy, no vision, no agenda, no narrative, no desired outcome, nothing. Watching him govern is like watching a play staged by mannequins.

Imagine if Starmer had accepted in opposition that he would need to raise taxes. His majority would be smaller, sure. But the increased revenue to the Treasury would have helped reduce the interest rate on our debt, lessened the uniquely severe attitude towards us from the markets, provided a good breezy bit of headroom in the fiscal rules and helped stabilise the economy, providing for a more stable investment climate and all the other good stuff that comes with that.

Imagine if he had started his time in power with a big announcement on social care. Yes, all hell would have broken loose. But then, it did anyway, on stupid pointless little measures like the winter fuel allowance and welfare reform which didn’t help anyone. Right now, Labour would now be halfway through establishing that system. It could be in place in time for the next election. It would be sold as the single biggest change to our health and wellbeing since the NHS. Everyone would understand what Labour was for. It would have a story to tell. It would have something to be proud of.

Imagine if Starmer had taken one of the opportunities available to him and announced a massive expansion in our defence capacity. This could have taken place after Donald Trump attacked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, or after the Liberation Day tariffs, or when the war in Iran broke out. At any one of these moments, he could have levelled with the British public: It’s a dangerous new world, we’re outside the EU, America is not reliable, Britain must be able to protect itself, defend its allies and project its values. This is our great national project. It will require sacrifice, but we will do it because it is necessary. Instead, he wasted every crisis, bumbling merrily along, going nowhere.

He has never taken any of these opportunities. He clearly does not have the confidence to try and convince the public of an argument. It’s not even clear if he thinks politicians have a place doing so. He is redundant. Obsolete. He secured power at a crucial moment in our national history and he squandered it. Pissed it away. It was a precious thing and a profound responsibility and he simply wasn’t up to it.

I would be much more concerned if I was Conservative than if I was Labour

Labour is having a nervous breakdown. This looks unseemly but at least it’s rational. It is a reasonable way to behave given the situation they are in. The Conservatives are equally screwed but they are calm and that is so much worse.

We read repeatedly that Kemi Badenoch is safe in her position because Tory members like her. This is in part a result of the extremely generous coverage she receives from the right-wing press, which acts as if her ability to speak in complete sentences exhibits some sort of intellectual triumph.

The Conservatives are getting hammered out there. Absolutely hammered. Badenoch has no plan to save them. In fact, the discussion around the party’s problems is so deranged that it makes the ‘Labour should break left or right’ conversation look Nobel-prize worthy.

The Tories have lost Postcard England to the Lib Dems. All those places you go to on long weekends - benign, self-satisfied areas with good tea rooms that you can’t quite work out if you want to live in or set fire to. The Lib Dems own them now. And this isn’t even really mentioned. It’s as if it isn’t happening, as if only the right-wing Reform threat is of any consequence. Half of Badenoch’s voters are Cameronite Remainers, somehow clinging on for dear life to a party which couldn’t give a damn about them. She seems as uninterested in them as she is in the voters she has already lost.

What the hell is happening with moderate Conservative MPs? Will they ever speak up? Will they ever rise from their slumber and take back their party, or will they sit there, parroting the same old tawdry crestfallen nonsense about the ECHR and leave-to-remain?

This is supposed to be the most mercenary, win-at-all-costs party in the Western world. It’s supposed to do whatever it takes, knife whoever it must, kill whomever it desires, if it will secure victory. Instead, it resembles a happy, doddery old man in a nursing home, oblivious to his surroundings, vaguely amused by what’s on the telly but struggling to follow along, going pleasantly and without much fuss into that good night.

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By the bowels of Christ, we need electoral reform

No-one reading this will be the least bit surprised by what I am saying, but these results present an immediate pressing need for electoral reform and for that reform to take place immediately. There is now no single argument against this measure, regardless of your political views or your ideological tendency. To stand against it is to stand against all sense of logic, all commitment to reason, against mathematics itself.

Look at the result in the Exeter St Loyes ward, to take one example of many. Conservatives came in third with 25.3% of the vote, Reform came in second with 25.5% and the Liberal Democrats won with 25.6% of the vote. As political scientist Rob Ford said: “Pure chaos. [First-past-the-post] fruit machine.” These kinds of results are utterly arbitrary. They remove any sense of meaning from the vote. They remove - and this should send a shiver down our democratic spines - any sense of will.

Unless we urgently change our approach, we are going to go into the 2029 election with these sorts of results all over the country. Victory on the basis of knife-edge contests decided by perhaps a few hundred people. The disenfranchisement of the vast majority of voters, with victors representing a seat on pitiful levels of public support. Thirty per cent? Twenty-five per cent? Or perhaps even less. As party support shatters, winners will pass the post with homeopathic mandates. That is a democratic abomination and a crime against maths.

It is simply not possible to support this while still maintaining any pretence of respect for the voters. Any incoming Labour leader - and I presume there will be a new one incoming - should finally accept what most other countries recognised long ago. We need electoral reform and we need it in time for the next election.

No odds and sods this week, sorry and no podcast. But I suspect there’ll be another newsletter in the next few days when the results become a bit clearer.

Freedom is once again under attack in the UK. Labour and the Tories want even more bans upon pro-Palestinian marches; the government wants to ban young people from using social media. And worst of all, Reform wants to detain tens of thousands of “illegal” immigrants - which would of course entail the creation of the apparatus of a police state and the harassment of hundreds of thousands of others; as Chandran Kukathas pointed out, controlling immigration requires the state to reduce the freedom of all citizens.

To someone of my age, whose feeble intellect was formed in the 70s and 80s, this is weird. “In our system, under our principles, the government is there to serve and satisfy the liberties of the people” said the most influential politician of my lifetime. For her, freedom and the rule of law were essential principles - ones under attack now from our main political parties. And for her and her fellow cold warriors the virtue of the west against communism was precisely that it valued freedom.

Which poses the question: why are Thatcherite values now opposed by those who live in the shadow of Thatcher and even by some who consider themselves Thatcherite?

Part of the story, I suspect, lies in the optimism bias. Politicians are selected to be overconfident about their ability to control human affairs from the top-down; you wouldn’t enter politics unless you thought you could “make a difference”. This disposes them to be heedless of Hayek’s argument for freedom:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known....And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p56-57)

If we’re being generous, Reform’s desire to bang up tens of thousands of people is the reductio ad absurdam of this optimism bias. It over-estimates what James C Scott called legibility (pdf), the ability of government to read society - in this case, the ability of the state’s goons to distinguish between illegal immigrants and legal ones or British citizens*.

This over-optimism is reinforced by a nastier selection effect: politicians are selected to be psychopaths**. People who are superficially charming, willing to take risks, and who lack empathy are well-equipped to rise to power in politics (and business!), especially in a culture that values “strong leaders”. And psychopaths want to control others.

Although voters in general have only average levels of psychopathy, they too are prone to the optimism bias. “I never thought they’d eat my face says woman who voted for the Leopards eating people’s faces party” is a meme for a good reason. It describes, for example, those who voted for Brexit only to later complain about long airport queues and difficulties in owning their home in Spain. And the same applies to support for Reform’s mass detentions; the party’s supporters think it will be other people who get stopped and detained, oblivious to the fact that even the whitest of Brits cannot be easily distinguished from a Romanian or Pole.

Which brings us to another reason why people hate freedom; doing so is an expression of hatred for out-groups.

Immigrants and ethnic minorities, however, are not the only out-group. So too are young people. Why ban these from social media when older ones are just as likely (or more so) to be radicalized online? And mightn’t such a ban harm isolated youngsters - such as neurodivergent or trans ones - who can find a community online that they can’t otherwise? Who cares? Youngsters are the out group. And that’s what matters.

All this, however, runs into a question. None of these biases against freedom are new, as Hayek (perhaps partially) pointed out. Why then, did politicians at least feel the need to pay lip-service to freedom in my formative years when they don’t now?

In many cases, I suspect, it’s because their professed love of freedom was insincere. Talk of freedom was a way of trying to legitimize western governments during the cold war in the face of communist tyranny, and to legitimize hierarchy and the pursuit of profit. That’s why the right talked more about the lack of freedom suffered by Russians than that suffered by black South Africans, Chileans or Indonesians. It’s also why they were much keener on free markets when mass unemployment was forcing wages down than they are when those markets raise wages or threaten the profits of incumbent companies. And it’s why they have never been interested in people’s lack of freedom in the workplace. As Corey Robin has written:

When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

Also, what the right today means by freedom is instead mere narcissism - the belief that they should be free from social obligations. This is why they hated wearing masks during Covid; hate speed restrictions; oppose efforts to curb carbon emissions; and want “free speech” for racists but not for supporters of Palestine.

By contrast, it is the left that is more obviously sincerely pro-liberty: wanting to legalize drugs as Zack Polanski does, and wanting more rights to protest, are libertarian policies but they are also leftist impulses.

It’d be tempting to infer from all this that it is the left, and not the right or centrists, who are now the true champions of freedom. Perhaps so: personally, I’ve long thought of myself as having a large libertarian streak. Whether there are many votes to be had in such stance is, however, questionable.

* Alternatively, of course, it might be that they simply don’t care about such distinctions.

** Of course, this isn’t to say they are all psychopaths (or even that this is always a bad thing!), merely that there’s a bias towards them.

Westminster politics is simply stupid. That’s one inference we should draw from the latest Mandelson scandal.

If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description; you’ve not asked “what’s the shape of the hole we want to fill and who is that shape?”. One of the most prestigious jobs in government seems to have been filled with less care than an investment bank would take over the hiring of a junior analyst.

This, however, is by no means the only way in which political decisions fall far short of basic professionalism. Here are some others:

- The government ignores opportunity cost. For example, in funding Sizewell C or Transport for City Regions, in supporting the expansion of Heathrow, or in wanting to increase the share of GDP spent on the military, it doesn’t say what is being cut, or not being done, to pay for these projects. We can’t therefore know whether these are good ideas or not. That’s a failure of basic project appraisal. And opportunity cost is not the only basic economic idea of which the government seems unaware: there’s also regulatory capture, transactions cost economics and the tragedy of the commons for example.

- Shabana Mahmood claims that 350,000 “low-skilled” workers and their dependents qualifying for settlement in the UK over the next five years represent a £10 billion cost to the taxpayer. This is not only almost certainly false in its own terms, but misunderstands economics: “low skill” is the product of ideology and a low level of economic development, not just individual characteristics.

- Sir Keir Starmer seems not to understand the basics of what the job of Prime Minister should be. It should be to set out a basic strategy (”vision” if you like) for government and to resolve conflicts between departments. But observers agree that he is terrible at both of these.

- Starmer thought there were “policy levers” which he could pull and easily achieve results, only to discover that there weren’t. This is a double failure: to not appreciate history (many ministers before him made the same mistake (pdf)); and to fail to understand that policy-making isn’t a simple engineering issue but is more like gardening, an exercise in guided emergence.

- Labour’s promise not to raise tax or national insurance rates makes intelligent tax reform more difficult - for example by lumbering us with the £100,000 pa “tax trap” which deters people from working more, changing job or getting promotions.

- The government’s fiscal rule that the current budget should be in surplus by 2029-30 means that fiscal policy depends upon a forecast that is inherently volatile, with the result that policy itself is unstable. If that’s not daft enough, targeting net financial debt means that the government considers only one side of its balance sheet and ruling out the acquisition of potentially lucrative assets: a household with such a rule, for example, would never take out a mortgage.

- There’s great concern with opinion polls, without anybody asking: how is public opinion formed and changed? and is it really a reliable guide to what people really want or to good policy-making?

None of these examples are merely of individuals mis-speaking in a throwaway remark. They are instead fundamental to how the government operates, and are examples of a basic failure to understand social science and government. No sane person would run a household or business with the lack of care or intellect that the government devotes to its affairs.

And this is with the “grown-ups” in charge. If we could bear to look beyond Labour, we’d see the LibDems and Greens wanting to over-ride the price signal of high oil prices; people of all parties drivelling about the benefits system without having endured applying for PIP; and whatever nonsense comes from Reform.

Politics, then, is fundamentally stupid.

Why have things sunk so low?

It could be that what’s happening is incentivized stupidity. Just as bankers had no incentive to spot risk in the run-up to the financial crisis, so politicians have no incentive to act intelligently. Voters are woefully ignorant about basic social facts, and the media ensures that they remain so. Politicians have an incentive to pander to this ignorance. And many on Labour’s right, it seems, would rather “bash the Trots” and get a well-paid job after leaving parliament than actually win the next election.

This, however, is only part of the story. It doesn’t explain why Starmer was willing to risk losing so much political capital appointing Mandelson as US Ambassador. And anyone wanting a job outside parliament surely has an incentive to give the impression of not being an idiot. What’s more, the media was more powerful in the 90s and early 00s than it is now (at least if power is proportionate to circulation) and yet Blair and (especially) Brown managed to govern intelligently.

Something else, then, is going on.

Partly, it’s a part of a general dumbing down: just compare the BBC’s output now to (say) Civilization or the Ascent of Man. In particular, what Simon Wren-Lewis calls the “knowledge transmission mechanism” (pdf) has broken. Academics, perhaps because of pressure to publish, have retreated from the public realm to be replaced by junktanks and newspaper columnists. Whereas Thatcher would regularly refer in her speeches to Friedman, Hayek or Popper, her epigones cite nobody of comparable standing.

There’s something else. We’ve lost the conception of politics as a discrete profession in which trade-offs and conflicts of interest are managed by our representatives. Instead, politics is seen as just another retail experience where we leave bad reviews if we don’t get what we want. The public sphere has suffered from a tragedy of the commons, leaving a wasteland with no place for politicians wanting to do anything other than fulfill the orders of billionaires and shadowy donors.

Whatever the reason, the fact is the same. Westminster politics is something which no intelligent person can look upon with anything other than revulsion. We are in the position described by Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue: how to build communities to sustain intellectual life during our new dark age.

Name the deadliest of sins – cruelty, deceit, avarice – and Trump will both exhibit them and celebrate them

It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the insults that have come his way in return. It’s no longer fanciful to imagine that what an eastern European pontiff, John Paul II, did by confronting the Soviet empire in the 1980s, an American-born pope may do in the 2020s by daring to speak truth to the would-be emperor in the White House.

Of course, several heads of government have stood up to Trump too. Canada’s Mark Carney has done it most explicitly, while his European counterparts have taken a stand by refusing to join the president’s reckless, wrong-headed war on Iran. But none has the global reach of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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