Across the English-speaking world, centre-left democracies are arriving at an impasse. As their support bases diverge and fracture, they rely more and more on ambiguity as a policy tool to hold it together. They offer “growth” without stipulating whether it’s for Wall Street or Main Street, while promising a return to “fairness” without defining what that costs, or to whom.

Ambiguity is a useful tool to help you win elections and hold on to power, but it is not a tool for governing.

In under two years, Keir Starmer went from winning a landslide election built on the collapse of the Conservative vote to presiding over the worst local election result in Labour’s recent history. Even his first minister in Wales lost her seat, the first sitting head of government in British history to do so. Amid calls for his resignation from his own MPs, Starmer doubled down on his premiership, setting out a “project of renewal”. What is being renewed, exactly, remains unclear.

What, then, could have stirred such whiplash? A lot of it is “the economy, stupid”. Labour’s coalition is split between the professional class in London and the former industrial towns in the north, two sets of interests that are no longer compatible. As a leader, the most that Starmer could offer was competence and stability, because anything more specific would have split his own coalition. But when the economy stayed sluggish, and there was no policy agenda to drive forward and no record of delivery to defend, this caught up with him. The sense of paralysis and infighting created a void – and in stepped Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Yes, Reform’s politics may be reductive and divisive, but that is precisely why they work. Unlike Labour, Reform is not trying to hold together an uneasy coalition of voters who want different........

© The Irish Times