The government spent this week outlining a series of morally depraved proposals on asylum seekers. Each day another vicious, spiteful announcement. Each day, another step towards the ravine’s edge.

Stripping asylum seekers of their jewellery when they arrive. Deporting children. Keeping proven refugees in a state of perpetual administrative limbo for decades, so they can never put down roots or have any sense of security. The sort of thing someone proposes when they have lost any lingering sense of decency or moral vigour.

This series of interventions was treated as a rare moment of success for the government. “Shabana Mahmood’s asylum crackdown landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream,” the Politico newsletter reported. The government had managed to control the news agenda, which apparently is what matters now. It won supportive front pages in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph.

The core thing to understand about these policies is that they will not work. Indeed, they are not even meant to work. On a basic logical level, it is obvious that they will not. Mahmood claims they will deter people arriving in small boats. But the policies are not as severe as the previous Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, or its refusal to process asylum claims at all. That did not deter arrivals. Why should the new policies do so? They won’t. In all probability, Mahmood knows they won’t. She doesn’t care.

You can see the practical ambivalence about all this in the lack of detail. The government has no real idea of how it would go about seizing people’s jewellery. It cannot describe how it would assess assets or forcibly secure them. There is no value threshold. But then, the jewellery proposal is not designed to work. It is probably not even really designed to be implemented. It is designed to be heard.

The policy is eerily reminiscent of the Nazis, who stripped Jews of their belongings at the camps. It also has a faint echo-memory of abuses during border disputes, such as Partition. It has a kind of fascist shimmer, a sense of cold-hearted bastards doing cold-hearted things, of people who have built walls around the parts of themselves which were once home to universal human feeling. That is not considered a defect. It is considered an advantage.

Apart from being immoral, Mahmood’s policy agenda is empty. It resolves nothing. It fixes nothing. And it therefore means that this interminable debate will continue, becoming ever more poisonous by the year.

What happens when we look at other areas of policy, at the things the government is expected to be getting on with? What happens when we look at social care, or prisons, or hospitals, or all the other things which we have forgotten to talk about due to our inflexible obsession with the immigration issue?

Here we find a similar fundamental quality. Unlike immigration, there is no sense of poison. Ministers do not feel the need to self-define as watercolour Nazis when it comes to hospital appointments. Nor is there such a focus on communication. But there is the same sense of foundational ineffectiveness: of policies which do not exist, or have not been properly thought through, or have no plan for implementation, or which simply will not work.

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This week, the Institute for Government (IfG) published its Performance Tracker 2025. It is an invaluable appraisal of government performance across the policy landscape. It offers one of the clearest tests of Labour performance and the state of the public sector.

It found solid progress in just one policy area, which is children’s social care. This is one of the instances where the government actually set out a clear plan for reform - creating new regional care cooperatives, controlling profiteering, emphasising early intervention, supporting families, reducing residential care reliance and improving data sharing, all of it backed by a fairly generous funding settlement in the spending review. “The plans,” the IfG concluded, “represent a serious attempt to move the system in a better direction”. Nice, reassuring words. If only there was more reason to use them.

There is some limited progress in other areas. The government took urgent action to address the prison crisis when it came to power, using an emergency measure to release some prisoners after 40% of their sentence. It then commissioned two substantial reviews, by David Gauke and Brian Leveson, on addressing the prison population problem and case backlogs, and accepted most of the recommendations. The ensuing sentencing bill is now making its way through parliament.

And yet even here, the IfG is unconvinced. They found that the current proposals “will certainly not be enough to get prisons out of their permanent state of crisis and support meaningful performance improvements”. Further reforms are expected in a police white paper, which was initially promised for last spring. It’s nowhere to be seen.

On the face of it, health seems like an area of government clarity. There’s a ten year health plan, which aims to provide community-based, preventative and digital care. Performance is trending upwards in hospitals, more GPs have come online and fewer hospital staff are leaving their jobs. The dashboard contains numerous indicators flashing green. But when you look a little deeper, this policy area starts to become disturbing.

Health secretary Wes Streeting announced that he would abolish NHS England, merge its functions into the Department for Health and Social Care, and reorganise Integrated Care Boards. That alone is an immense act of structural change. The NHS England decision was announced suddenly last March, with little clarity about how it would be delivered - symptomatic of a lack of thought in opposition about what the government wanted to do.

There is little evidence that the government has considered how those plans will interact with its other reform initiatives, such as the decision to introduce major structural changes to local government by phasing out district councils. Doing this at the same time as merging NHS England and changing the Integrated Care Boards will be immensely disruptive. It will consume the next four years. “Large swathes of staff in the NHS and local government will spend most of this parliament thinking about how to make this transition and whether their job is safe, rather than how their service can work more effectively,” the report found.

In other areas, public services are being actively worsened by the Labour government’s behaviour. Take adult social care. We have a good understanding of the problems in this sector. But instead of doing anything about them the government has commissioned yet another review, due to report in 2028. That means any difficult conversations about funding would take place just before the election, when it is least possible to have them. They have essentially decided to perpetuate a culture of nothingness. They have ensured that nothing can happen this parliament and that nothing is likely to happen in the next parliament either. Another lost decade.

That would be bad enough, but the government’s obsession with immigration means it is also committed to ending the care visa route, which provided the largest source of staff in recent years. What are the consequences of that? Staff shortages. What are the measures to address these shortages? There aren’t any. There are plans for fair pay agreements, but none for how to implement them or the funding consequences of doing so. If they were to work, they would entail higher wages, which would have to come from users or local or central government. But there is a refusal to even concede this point by ministers.

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It’s now been 16 months since the election. It’s 40 months until the next one. The government is running out of time. It is pissing it away.

It is unforgivable that so many areas of policy enjoyed no planning at all in opposition, with the party basically coming in and trying to work out what it wanted to do once in government.

It is unconscionable that the government still does not have a clear philosophical or political position to provide consistency to its behaviour. It is currently pushing for devolution in some departments - like the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government - and centralisation in others - like the Ministry of Health and the Home Office.

But most of all, it is unpardonable that Labour is spending time promoting hateful policies which it knows will not work, instead of doing the actual work of government which the country requires.

This is the classic Westminster madness, the prototypical bullshit pantomime: full of noise and activity and bluster and nothing underneath it.

We have spent the last few weeks discussing whether Rachel Reeves will break her election commitment on tax. And yet there is an equally important mandate which is never mentioned: the overall purpose of the government. Starmer went to the country on a seriousness ticket. He pledged grown-up government - competent, unflustered, diligent, with a sense of social responsibility. This was the encapsulation of his appeal, which voters then supported in droves.

He specifically did not pledge to pursue a rabidly anti-immigrant policy agenda. He has no mandate for that. He did not pledge to provide vacuums in place of policy initiatives, or back-of-a-fag-packet ideas which he knows are ineffective, or half-conceived system-level reform without a clear plan for implementation. He has no mandate for that either. In fact, quite the opposite.

There have been worse governments than this - of course there have. But there might never have been one which was quite so deceptive. Tony Blair promised to govern as a dead centre prime minister, with a conservative view on economics and a wish to increase equality of opportunity. That’s what he did. David Cameron promised to pointlessly and illiterately slash spending. That’s what he did. Boris Johnson promised to govern as an amiable and cynical clown. That’s what he did, to the cost of tens of thousands of lives. I might not like it. I might wish to Christ it had never happened. But you can’t accuse him of mislabelling the prospectus. He positioned himself as a clown, the country elected a clown and then we were governed by a clown, as demanded.

Starmer presented himself as a serious man for serious times. What did we get? More clown.

But still. They won the grid. The proposals “landed exactly as officials hoped in the media bloodstream”. So well done them. Round of applause. Maybe that’ll save them when the country next goes to the polls. But I very much doubt it.

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Odds and sods

This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or you can subscribe on Spotify.

My i newspaper column this week was on the update to the immigration stats and when we might start asking ourselves about why people leave Britain, rather than merely why they arrive.

This week saw the third and final episode of Origin Story’s history of the Labour party, covering Michael Foot to Keir Starmer. It’s an absolute beast of a thing, which encompasses two of the big Sliding Doors moments of the post-war era - the 1992 election defeat and the death of John Smith. Subscribe on your preferred podcast app, or watch it below.

Culture pick this week is Game, a tight, nasty and very fucking weird British thriller which just came out in cinemas.

It won’t be for everyone. Its opening half hour is an incredibly claustrophobic experiment in entrapment which makes you feel every second of it. But it then shifts into a deranged sequence of events which really have no direct cinematic comparison. At certain points, the screen is filled with psychedelia, humour and threat, as if the filmmakers are intent on making the maddest potion they can conceive of and setting it loose in the world. You will never know what it is about to do. It is functionally impossible to predict. And in the middle of it is the Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson, as this bundle of paranoia, madness and good-old-boy humour - a film-stealing bit of weirdness and menace. This was a reminder of what people can do when they are utterly committed to their sense of creativity and authenticity. A short, vicious, lunatic delight.

Right, that’s your lot - fuck off.

Most of the people who run Open Source projects are mortal. Recent history shows us that they will all eventually die, or get bored, or win the lottery, or get sick, or be conscripted, or lose their mind.

If you've ever visited a foreign country's national history museum, I guarantee you've read this little snippet:

King Whatshisface was a wise and noble ruler who bought peace and prosperity to all the land.

Upon his death, his heirs waged bloody war over rightful succession which plunged the country into a hundred years of hardship.

The great selling point of democracy is that it allows for the peaceful transition of power. Most modern democracies have rendered civil war almost unthinkable. Sure, you might not like the guy currently in charge, but there are well established mechanisms to limit their power and kick them out if they misbehave. If they die in office, there's an obvious and understood hierarchy for who follows them.

Most Open Source projects start small - just someone in their spare room tinkering for fun. Unexpectedly, they grow into a behemoth which now powers half the world. These mini-empires are fragile. The most popular method of governance is the Benevolent Dictator For Life model. The founder of the project controls everything. But, as I've said before, BDFL only works if the D is genuinely B. Otherwise the FL becomes FML.

The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings. They become tyrannical despots, lashing out at their own volunteers. They execute takeovers of community projects. They demand fealty and tithes. Like dragons, they become quick to anger when their brittle egos are tested. Spineless courtiers carry out deluded orders while pilfering the coffers.

Which is why I am delighted that the Mastodon project has shown a better way to behave.

In "The Future is Ours to Build - Together" they describe perfectly how to gracefully and peacefully transfer power. There are no VCs bringing in their MBA-brained lackeys to extract maximum value while leaving a rotting husk. No one is seizing community assets and jealously hoarding them. Opaque financial structures and convoluted agreements are prominent in their absence.

Eugen Rochko, the outgoing CEO, has a remarkably honest blog post about the transition. I wouldn't wish success on my worst enemy. He talks plainly about the reality of dealing with the pressure and how he might have been a limiting factor on Mastodon's growth. That's a far step removed from the ego-centric members of The Cult of The Founder with their passionate belief in the Divine Right of Kings.

Does your tiny OSS script need a succession plan? Probably not. Do you have several thousand NPM installs per day? It might be worth working out who you can share responsibility with if you are unexpectedly raptured. Do you think that your project is going to last for a thousand years? Build an organisation which won't crumble the moment its founder is arrested for their predatory behaviour on tropical islands.

I'm begging project leaders everywhere - please read up on the social contract and the consent of the governed. Or, if reading is too woke, just behave like grown-ups rather than squabbling tweenagers.

It is a sad inevitability that, eventually, we will all be nothing but memories. The bugs that we create live after us, the patches are oft interrèd with our code. Let it be so with all Open Source projects.

The tactics that gave Labour its huge majority in 2024 were no preparation for government – and the prime minister has proved he has nothing more to offer

The mood among Labour MPs these days follows Edgar’s law. This states that the scale of any misfortune can only be measured against unknown future disasters. As Shakespeare has the banished son of the blinded Earl of Gloucester say in King Lear: “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’.”

According to Edgar’s law, there is no opinion poll so gloomy for Labour that it can’t be followed by one even bleaker; no fiscal forecast so bad that the Treasury can’t aggravate it with contradictory signals on tax; no misgivings about Keir Starmer that can’t be amplified by malevolent briefing about a leadership challenge; no social policy so nauseating to the party faithful that it can’t be made grosser still with a relish of cruelty.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

There’s a set of unspoken rules underneath the surface veneer of media coverage.

One of those rules is that an election victory by the populist right proves that they have an intuitive understanding of the instincts of the electorate which liberals must humbly try to adapt themselves to. An election victory by progressives, on the other hand, is a freak aberration which will inevitably be reversed, probably due to the hubris and naivety of those who just proved triumphant. Victories on the left are contingent and transitory while victories on the right are abiding and profound.

This was the tone after the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York this week, along with other Democratic successes in Virginia and New Jersey. It was also the tone after Holland’s liberal candidate Rob Jetten upset expectations and beat back Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom.

In fact, the triumph of the far-right is not inevitable. They can be beaten and they regularly are. Each progressive triumph at the ballot box provides a learning opportunity.

The media will largely ignore this information in favour of a set narrative. Many progressives will ignore it too, out of a tribal hatred of either centrism on the one hand or socialism on the other. Establishment Democrats tried to undermine Mamdani and have almost certainly learned nothing. The British online left, however, is obsessed with him, treating him as a direct continuation of Jeremy Corbyn, even though he reveals much more about Corbyn’s weaknesses than his strengths.

Let’s take a better look at these campaigns, without preconceptions. I’m going to put the policy to one side for a moment and just focus on communication. It throws up three vital lessons.

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Happiness

The first and most important attribute we saw this week was joy. Mamdani seems to have smiled for so long, for his entire life, that there are these permanent dimples on his cheeks. He has the face of a man who is going to age well, someone who is content within his soul. Similarly, I have never seen Jetten frown. I’m not sure he’s even capable of it. He seems to live with a permanent smile - a little more professional than Mamdani perhaps, but authentic, unforced, natural.

There is a jolliness test in politics. Does the candidate want to scold the voters? Or do they want them to have a good time? This is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. It is one of the reasons why Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s actually quite telling to see so many old Corbyn supporters insist on the similarities between him and Mamdani. It’s true that there’s some rhetorical overlap - both talk about billionaires and the one per cent, both self-describe as socialist. But in terms of emotional appeal, they occupy different universes.

Corbyn despised the press. He treated it like a conspiracy out to undermine him. He sneered and snarled, his every comment an appeal backwards towards his supporters, not forwards towards those he needed to convince. He looked angry, vigilant, desperate for the camera to be off him. This is a problem because when voters encounter the candidate they do so through the camera, and the hostility therefore looks like it’s directed at them.

Mamdani wants the camera to come in. He is pleased to see it. He wants to reach through it to those on the other side. I mean, my God. Look at him talking to Sky News - a delight - and tell me Corbyn would have been able to do that.

Corbyn supporters say this is because the press was out to get him and it kinda was. But that was the same for Mamdani. The press will go for figures on the left. It’s up to you how you choose to handle that. Responding with irritation allows their attack to be more successful than it might otherwise have been.

One of the things progressives most struggle with about Donald Trump is that he is ultimately on the party-guy end of the jollity spectrum. His manner is comedic. If you’re on the same level as him - in other words, if looking at him doesn’t make you want to vomit up your fucking soul - then there is something amusing about the fact that no-one, himself included, has any idea what’s about to come out of his mouth. At his most effective, Nigel Farage is also a party guy. The fags, the pint, the easy laugh. It is all tremendously mannered, of course, but well cultivated and effective.

Now however, it’s getting harder to remember the joke. Trump rules by paramilitary thugs taking people hostage in the street. Farage is having to straighten himself out to look prime ministerial. The background noise is increasingly bleak: stubborn inflation, economic instability, a generalised sense of national decline across the West.

Those easy genuine smiles from progressive candidates, that sense of warmth and optimism - it’s probably the most compelling emotional appeal you can make right now. It’s a promise. It says: We can make things OK. Things don’t have to stay this way. We can make it less miserable, less fraught, less poor, less hateful. More joyous. In the words of Jetten’s campaign slogan: “It can be done.”

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Tailored electorates

The Democratic party has tied itself in knots arguing about the relative advantages and dangers of Mamdani but the reality is perfectly obvious and perfectly comprehensible on the basis of this week’s results alone. In Holland, Jetten hardened his party’s asylum policy. In New York, Mamdani proudly projected a sense of diversity. Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia were won by establishment-backed Democratic party moderates. The mayoral race in New York could appeal to a different electorate.

We live in a terribly stupid world, so these results are met by people saying that their model - compromise or principle, moderate or radical - is the only one which works anywhere, as a blanket approach. In fact, the lesson is that you pick the right candidate, with the right message, for the right area. And you create local political organisations with the freedom to do that.

Would you pick a self-proclaimed socialist to run in a swing state in the US? Probably not. Should you be relaxed about a radical figure in a liberal city? Probably yes.

Progressives benefit by having lots of different variants put in front of the electorate. Jetten’s asylum policy aims at a middle of the road compromise involving out-of-country applications under the auspices of UNHCR as well as day one language classes. He says Dutch people “just want to decently host people fleeing war and violence, but also be strict with the rotten apples who ruin the system”. It’s not language that I like and nor do I approve of out-of-country applications, but you can see the effort to find a defensible middle position on the issue. It is superior to the moral and strategic muddle we see from Labour. Similarly, many of Mamdani’s policies would not be helpful in London, others may be.

The basic problem comes when progressives view their differences as weaknesses, not strengths. Mamadami runs by being proudly multicultural. I love that about him. I love that his family looks recognisably like mine and the world he inhabits looks recognisably like my own, at a time when those values and lifestyles are being attacked. I love that London Mayor Sadiq Khan emphasises the diversity and patchwork elegance of my city. But I am not under the illusion that this would be a sensible campaign approach in the North-East of England.

The national campaign, in any country, will naturally be a compromise of sorts. Local campaigns can have different flavours and textures. There is no need for moderates and radicals to insist that their preference operates best across the political landscape. It doesn’t. They don’t. Embrace the diversity of the progressive alliance, rather than sabotage it.

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Modernity

Both Mamdani and Jetten are something new. It’s not that they are politicians of the social media era - we’ve had that since at least 2016. It’s that they are politicians of the online video era. They’re Instagram and TikTok politicians. Jetten first changed from a routine cut-and-paste professional politician to a sensation after TikTok montages of a fictional romance in the Dutch parliament. His Instagram game is strong: professional, carefree, upbeat.

Mamdani is a social media triumph of simply unprecedented quality. He is a delight to watch and listen to, possessing that vanishingly rare quality of being a politician people actively want to hear more from. He was always going to struggle to get a hearing from the press or even TV, but he could sidestep that problem and go online, appearing on accounts that are the modern equivalent of Saturday night prime time for his demographic.

Whenever he did it, he emphasised the most valued quality in the modern information ecosystem: authenticity. Who else would say that Spanish is “kicking my butt” in a pitch to Latin voters, or show outtakes of him mangling the language? No-one. And that’s why he is brilliant, the perfect example of how to communicate politically at this precise moment in time. He makes everyone else look ancient.

We cannot train politicians into being as charismatic as he is or as comfortable in their skin or as nice to look at. But we can have communication strategies that are based on the 2020s rather than the 1990s.

Consider how far away any politician in the UK is from occupying this space. Farage performs best on Tiktok, but he is successful only in being better at it than everyone else, which is not hard. Green party leader Zack Polanski does OK, but like Farage, he gets his clicks by repeating a set of firm, slightly conspiratorial, political slogans. He still communicates in what is ultimately a fairly old fashioned way, as if he is doing a party political broadcast.

Labour’s communications policy is based on securing op-eds in newspapers which hate them, for a readership which does not exist. Everything operates according to a schedule which is so dated it is covered in cobwebs: a Sunday morning interview with Laura Kuenssberg, a place on Question Time, and a slot after 8am on the Today programme.

There is no fresh thinking about how to reach a new set of voters, there is no attempt to find the people who can operate in that space. There are millions of eyeballs online and yet the vast majority of British political attention is spent on the dwindling audience on TV and in print. It’s mad, on a basic mathematical level. It’ll be even more mad when the voting age is lowered to 16.

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There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken about election results this week - a sense of inevitable defeat cultivated in the overall media narrative, an intemperate battle of tribal animosity between progressives. But there are extremely useful practical takeaways from what we’ve seen. Joy and hope are powerful, even radical, in an era of doom. Moderates and radicals should be relaxed about which approach is best suited to a given area and try to learn from each other, regardless of their differences. Effective political communication is possible online, with powerful results, if we dare to think outside of the traditional communication structures.

We can learn all these things if progressives are prepared to learn from one another, rather than try to batter each other to death over minor differences. Is that likely? No. Why change the habit of a lifetime? But we can at least hold out some hope. It’s a good week for it.

Odds and sods

This week’s i newspaper column was on Rachel Reeves’ newfound honesty about tax and the urgent need for widescale reform of the system.

This week’s episode of Origin Story was part one of our epic history of the Labour party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. An endless tragicomic cycle in which right and left try to murder each other, succeed, fall apart, are murdered in turn, and then begin anew. 125 years of history made as breezy and effortless as possible, complete with pitch-dark humour and an abiding sense of the pointlessness of it all. What else could you ask for?

I’ll be doing two events next week. The first is at the Festival of Higher Education, where I’ll be discussing universities as a cauldron of liberalism. This is why the populist right despises higher education. It’s why even Labour doesn’t dare to defend it anymore. Because these institutions equip people to assess information critically, think for themselves, and question authority. No wonder they’re so hated.

The festival is extremely diverse, addressing every aspect of higher education, from policy to funding, values to practicalities, domestic to international. Skills minister Jacqui Smith will be there as will the chair of the Office for Students. If you’re involved in higher education in any way at all, it’s basically the place to be. Tickets are available here.

The other is Origin Story Live, where we dig into the weird, weird world of left and right. In part one of the show we’ll ask why conservatives are losing their minds by exploring some of the weird right-wing thinkers who have influenced the likes of Kemi Badenoch and JD Vance. And in part two,we’ll continue season eight’s story of socialism by looking at rising stars like Mamdani and Polanski. We’ll also rip into some of the misunderstood buzzphrases that are making our political discourse stupider by the day.

Culture pick this week is the new series of The New Gods by writer Ram V and artist Evan Cagle. I am a bit obsessed with Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga. It’s my happy place. A lot of this is simply down to the names. How the fuck do you argue with names like the Anti-Life Equation, Big Barda or Granny Goodness? You can’t. How do you argue with their design? You may not.

The New Gods is essentially an anti-fascist parable in the form of a cosmic epic. Kirby was a veteran of the Second World War, but he was writing during the 60s, in defence of hippies and young radicals. He wasn’t one of them, but he knew who his allies were.

This latest iteration of the story has all the poetry and grandeur you could ask for, with masterful storytelling from V and scenes of impossible beauty from Cagle. The only flaw is that the ending is very, very abrupt. But then: what a small price to pay. One of my favourite bits of the comics universe is back and on form. I’m feeling properly lucky about it.

Right, that’s you’re lot - fuck off. Have a lovely weekend.

Geoff Mulgan has written a great piece on the shortcomings of a centrism which wants “to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic.” I agree that Mulgan is right to call this a dead-end. I want to argue, though, that it is a dead-end in its own terms: a genuinely realistic competence would see that a government cannot survive merely by aspiring to competence.

Charlie Munger once said something very wise and important:

One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it.

And even the best politicians’ circle of competence is inherently small simply because human affairs are complex and unpredictable and our knowledge limited. They are confronted with what Thomas Homer-Dixon called an ingenuity gap: “a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.”

This is one of Reeves’ problems. Her fiscal rules oblige her to ensure that “the current budget must be in surplus in 2029-30” and that government debt be falling as a share of GDP then. This means that fiscal policy must be set on the basis of the OBR’s medium-term forecasts. But forecasts are usually wrong simply because the future is unknowable*. What’s more, a good forecast will change randomly. This is because it will embody all available information and so will change only because of unpredictable surprises which are by definition random - which in turn means that fiscal policy will change randomly. Any Chancellor therefore risks having to make policy reversals and appear to be not in control of events, as Reeves is now doing. Unless they are lucky, their claim to competence will thus be undermined by events. Which is an especial problem if competence is all you are offering.

You might think the way out of this dilemma is to abandon fiscal rules and instead set fiscal policy to control inflation. This, however, merely replaces reliance upon a forecast for the public finances with a reliance upon one for inflation. This is an improvement because inflation is less unpredictable than government borrowing, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

The fact that governments cannot predict and control extends far beyond economics, however. Adam Smith famously said there was a “great deal of ruin in a nation”. There will always be some hospital that fails, or some outbreak of criminality, or some mistakes somewhere in the public sector. A government that claims competence will get the blame for these.

Especially, of course, if it is not a right-wing one. For example, there were 377 prisoners wrongly released in 2023-24 and 2024-24 and an average of one a week in the years before then. Such incompetence under a Tory government got little publicity. But the release of two prisoners recently means, says the BBC, that the “buck stops with Lammy” in a way that it did not stop with Chalk or Raab or Lewis or Buckland or Gauke or....

I fear a similar thing will be true of immigration. This has fallen sharply recently, and is expected to drop much further. It is unlikely, however, that the right will give Labour credit for competently “controlling our borders” More likely, any crime committed by a migrant (and such crimes are statistically inevitable) will trigger a moral panic.

People mocked David Cameron for warning of “chaos under Ed Miliband”. But he was right. A paperclip going missing at the Department for Rural Affairs would have been “chaos” under a Miliband government. The Tories wrecking the economy and public services, on the other hand, was “drama”, which is what lobby correspondents want.

There’s something else. The competence that a government needs has changed, and is more demanding now.

In the decades before the mid-00s, the job of macroeconomic policy was mainly to avoid egregious errors** and so free-ride upon an economy that was growing by 2-3% a year and generating rising tax revenues.

But that world has gone. In a stagnant economy, competent government requires that policy-makers find measures to raise trend supply-side growth or to raise taxes whilst doing as little economic harm as possible. These are much more demanding tasks, perhaps even impossible ones. The bar for what is “competent” is much higher now.

In theory, the government could acknowledge all this: that there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation; that human affairs are unpredictable; and that capitalism isn’t working as it used to. It could, for example, abandon the utterly silly reliance upon point forecasts and instead base policy upon upon the range of possible outcomes; things like the Bank of England’s fan charts should be more politically salient than they are.

I’m not sure, however, that any government could actually do this. Part of politicians’ professional deformation is to be overconfident about their abilities, and to not know the edge of their own competency. Nor, of course, would such a recognition of reality be acceptable to our debased and moronic political discourse. And of course, talking about the failures of capitalism is well off the agenda.

What centrists offer, therefore, is not so much competence as competenciness - a claim to be in control founded not upon realism but instead upon centrist utopianism, a belief in a world that is perfectible if only the right people were making the right policies. This is of course a profoundly ideological position, and a mistaken one. A truly realistic and competent politician would see it as such.

* The purpose of a forecast isn’t to tell us what events will occur. It is to tell us how surprised we should be when they do occur.

** Something the Tories failed to do, triggering recessions in 1980 and 1990.