David Lammy’s Vision is So Awful It Gives Me Hope That Something Has Got to Give

 

DR DAVID MCGROGAN

There is a vivid quality that sometimes comes to the evening light in January. A hint of optimism in the dusk that rumours of warmth in the far distance. That light was in the air tonight. It felt as though change was coming.

The country is at an inflection point. Leaving aside the bewildered clingers-on, the old-age-pensioners in the room, the Rory Stewarts and James O’Briens and Emily Maitlisses of the world, we can all I think sense that something is dying, and that something unknown is in the process of being born. This Parliament has the feeling of an entire political framework teetering on a precipice – not just in the sense that we have a Government comprising people who are manifestly ill-equipped to govern in every conceivable way, but in the sense that an entire regime is about to be upended.

Harvey Mansfield describes a ‘regime’ as an order within which a certain ‘some’ rule over the ‘many’. This ‘some’ imbue the constitutional framework with its values and preferences, and this then informs how the ‘many’ will find themselves governed. In order for a regime to endure, the values of the ‘some’ and the ‘many’ have to be roughly aligned – or, failing that, at the very least the ‘some’ must have a plausible account as to why their rule is indispensable, so that the ‘many’ will accept them out of fear of the alternative.

We have for the last several decades been living in an age of misalignment of values. But for a long time the regime has been able to sustain itself through the ‘some’ portraying themselves as possessing the necessary competence to be indispensable. We are now reaching a point at which this is no longer possible. This is partly a problem of sheer appearances – it is difficult to portray oneself as an efficient technocrat when one is patently ineffectual at everything one does. But it is chiefly because the gap between what government says can be achieved and what is actually happening is yawning so wide that it is becoming impossible to ignore.

A recent illustration of this phenomenon went unremarked-on towards the end of last week when the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, stood up to deliver a speech in the Locarno Suite at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in which he attempted to lay out “the future of the U.K.’s foreign policy“.

Lammy is a strange and, at times, oddly sympathetic figure – a man who it is difficult to pigeonhole. Unusually for a Labour politician in the modern era he is willing to stick up for traditional family values – the importance of fathers and even the usefulness of corporal punishment – and, more unusually still, to speak with open admiration about Margaret Thatcher (which he, incidentally, did again in this Locarno Suite speech). He is in some ways the classic example of a man of immigrant background who is considerably more socially conservative than the modal voter. This gives him a slightly eccentric and surprising streak that, for all that he has a tendency towards ill-advised outbursts, at least makes him seem like a three-dimensional human being – a rarity in Labour circles.

But he is no intellectual titan, and his speech singularly fails to do what it sets out to do, which is to lay out a “strategy”. The strategy it purports to describe is the stuff of daft fantasy. It postulates a world which does not exist. It is a wheeze that is designed to impress the people whose opinions Lammy takes seriously – namely, other progressives. And its contents only serve to strengthen the fin de siècle mood that is lying across the land like a blanket.

To parse the Locarno Suite speech, one has to first cut away some undergrowth. Starmer’s Cabinet is, with bloody-minded insistence, still clinging to the story that it is here with a ‘Plan for Change’, and Ministers seem to be under the impression that merely saying these words and others like it will in itself, in the end, amount to such a project. And so it is that, even in a speech ostensibly about grand strategy in respect of foreign policy, Lammy still manages to crowbar in some lines about “fixing the foundations”, “economic stability”, “the priorities of hard-working people”, a “decade of national renewal”, and so on – even (not the first subject one would normally associate with foreign policy) “restoring the NHS”.

But once these tangled weeds have been cleared away, it is possible to discern a solid form: the strategy that Lammy sets out is what he calls “progressive realism”. This, he tells us, was the vision of Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the period immediately after the Second World War, namely:

A strategy that was both progressive and realist. That took the world as it is [sic]. Whilst working for the world that we want [sic] to see.

Setting to one side the rules of grammar and syntax, not to mention the time-space continuum, for a moment, the idea here is that Bevin managed to combine both hard-nosed pragmatism (acquiring a nuclear deterrent and entering into a transatlantic alliance) with an internationalist, cosmopolitan commitment to the progressive ideals embodied in the United Nations. He in other words managed to reconcile the competing imperatives of what Lammy calls “realism” and the desire to make the world a better place. And Lammy believes that he can do the same thing. “I want us to be looking at how we can get to a more progressive 2035,” he declares. “And that means confronting some hard truths, about the state of the country, about the state of the world, and the need for reform.” It means, in summary:

Taking the world as it is not as we wish it to be. Advancing progressive ends by realist means.

The idea, then, is the foreign policy variant of cakeism – a grand squaring of circles, in which both the national interest and progressive goals are made to align. We have to “shape 2035” while at the same time committing ourselves to hard-nosed, tough-minded decisions about increased defence spending, “relearning the Cold War manual”, engaging in “consistent deterrence” and so on. We have to develop a “modern industrial strategy” while also “show[ing] the world what a more progressive 2035 can be like” through “driv[ing] the clean energy transition”. We can in short align our own goals with those of the globe itself – securing both the much-vaunted “national renewal” and leading the world to a better future all at the same time.

Never mind that what Lammy is really talking about here – “enabl[ing] and empow[ering] change at home and through a long-term international strategy” – is better described as ‘idealism’ (the alignment of domestic and foreign policy goals) rather than ‘realism’ (the idea that states act rationally in their self interest, which he seems to confuse with basic pragmatism). What is interesting about the vision which he puts before us is its almost lunatic disconnection from, ironically, reality itself.

This is true across two dimensions. The first is sheer implausibility. Lammy made a great deal of fuss about the “power and potential” of the U.K. in his speech – and was bullish about the Government’s plans to “unlock growth”, “seize the opportunities coming into view”, “mainstream AI”, “deliver for hard-working people” and so on. It did not seem to occur to him that, almost at the very moment he was uttering the words, his colleague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was becoming embroiled in crisis as government borrowing costs rocketed up to their highest level in decades. This follows on from Reeves’s disastrous Budget, which seems to have manufactured a recession out of a combination of tax rises, profligate spending and sheer bad vibes. In short: the country is on a hiding to bankruptcy and Labour is squeezing the Hemingwayan distance between ‘gradually’ and ‘suddenly’ with alarming alacrity.

And it also didn’t seem to occur to Lammy that even as he was trumpeting the “clean energy transition” as a means of demonstrating global leadership, the country was coming perilously close to experiencing blackouts as a result of its increasing reliance on, well, unreliable renewable sources of energy. Setting aside the issue of reliability, the “clean energy transition” which Britain is purportedly leading on has in any case pushed industrial electricity costs here to the highest in the world. And this of course ties the issue together with the problem of economic fragility: there is simply no way to “unlock growth” or “deliver for hard-working people” if energy prices are so high. One dreads to imagine the suppressed chortles and sniggers in the foreign ministries at the world at the prospect of the U.K. leading anybody anywhere in respect of energy policy – it would be an act of kindness to say the idea is not credible.

“Progressive realism”, then, is a strategy inhabiting a universe where it is possible to simply say that certain things are desirable and then realise them. This is not, unfortunately (though I think it is probably very fortunate indeed) the universe we in fact inhabit. We rather inhabit a world where progressive goals actually conflict with reality and trade-offs have to be made. Lammy does not appear to understand this, or does but blithely ignores the consequences.

The second dimension of unreality running through Lammy’s speech, though, is in a sense even worse, and this is that – even if we lived in the Bizarro World in which Labour actually had a ‘Plan for Change’ and we had the national wherewithal to achieve it – no other country in the world is remotely interesting in our “leadership”. Lammy’s sentiments might have made a sort of sense during the years of fluffy pre-Iraq New Labour exuberance or, perhaps, during Obama’s initial period of sunny optimism. But his speech was in fact delivered in the context of an almost worldwide rejection of all of its predicates – globalism, progressivism, environmental alarmism, multilateralism and so on. There is barely a government left standing anywhere in the world which is interested in signalling a full-throated commitment to such values, and those that are – in France, Germany, Canada and so on – are in the process of collapse. The world has, in short, turned and left Lammy standing: ‘everybody’s changing and he just feels the same’.

“Progressive realism” is not, in summary, a strategy – it is a vision that cannot be realised and which nobody would want even if it could. But in this it serves as nice little illustration of the broader trends in British Government – namely, towards illusion, self-deception and sheer silliness. To repeat: the ‘some’ who rule the ‘many’ in this country long ago abandoned the values which the ‘many’ still largely hold dear. They were for a time able to behave as though this didn’t matter because they at least were able to portray themselves as heavyweights. But they are now no longer capable of even gesturing towards seriousness; they are made of gossamer.

Lammy unintentionally made all of this explicit when, at the very end of his speech, he reeled off a list of pivotal leaders at pivotal moments in the U.K.’s recent political history: Bevin in 1946, Wilson in the 1960s, Thatcher in the 1980s and Blair in the 2000s. He seemed to be imagining, or trying to conjure in the listener’s mind, a future world in which ‘Starmer [or, perhaps, Lammy] in the 2020s’ was being mentioned in similar lists. But setting aside the substance of policy and focusing purely on personal capability, the comparison can only have struck his audience as both laughable and tragic all at once. To come back to the beginning: an entire regime – an entire ordering framework through which a certain ‘some’ rule the ‘many’ – is about to be upended. The gap between what it purports to be capable of doing, and what is actually happening, is simply yawning too wide. Something is dying. Something else is in the process of being born.

Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.


This article (David Lammy’s Vision is So Awful It Gives Me Hope That Something Has Got to Give) was published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Dr. David McGrogan

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