Michael Chessum

‘Can’t you ping elsewhere?’ The question, daubed on the twelve-foot green fences encircling much of Brockwell Park in South London, has long been on the minds of local residents. For months, the park has been the subject of a battle over urban public space and culture. Austerity is driving it. Facing a large budget deficit, Lambeth Council is expected to cut local services by £99 million over the next two years. To boost its income, the council has been renting out Brockwell Park to Summer Events Ltd (which operates under the brand name Brockwell Live) since 2018. Between 23 May and 8 June this year, the park hosted five festivals – Wide Awake, Field Day, Cross The Tracks, City Splash and Mighty Hoopla, followed by the non-commercial Lambeth Country Show. As well as the direct revenue, the events boost trade for local pubs and music venues.

Starmer’s strategy of modest progress and alliance-building could be scuppered by the fiscal hawks in his government. Since 2008, British workers have suffered the worst wage deflation in modern history. Without significant progress on pay, even trade union leaders inclined to support Starmer will find it difficult to avoid industrial action. As Callaghan learned to his cost in the period that culminated in the Winter of Discontent, a model of negotiated industrial peace only works if government policy keeps pace with working-class demands.

Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order. On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.

An idea as radical as the nationalisation of the healthcare system, in the teeth of opposition from the medical profession, would never be entertained by the current crop of pundits and political managers. It is only by making Nye Bevan and the NHS into national treasures that our political establishment can leave this contradiction unexamined.

‘Will Britain soon get its own Geert Wilders?’ Allison Pearson asked in the Telegraph. Britain already has several, and they have been running the government for years.

The Adriana, a fishing boat, left the port of Tobruk in Libya early on 10 June in an attempt to reach Italy. It was carrying up to 750 people, including more than a hundred children. After almost four days at sea, the boat’s engine broke down and it was left stranded fifty miles off the Peloponnesian coast. In the early hours of 14 June, the boat capsized, with hundreds trapped in the hold and no one on board wearing a life jacket. This is a vision of hell. It is also a glimpse of the future.

Ducking fights on difficult issues may work in the short term, if your aim is to win the support of this or that portion of the electorate. In the long run, it is a proven disaster. The last Labour government built an economy around financial services and an electoral strategy around accepting Thatcher’s legacy. It won three elections, but provided the Tory right with the materials it needed to deliver austerity, harsher border controls and deepening privatisation.

In the early 2010s, new social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were tools for emerging protest movements; now, they increasingly act as a substitute for them. The legacy of the pandemic has been decisive in this but there is a secular process at work, too. Viral content and online tools are a good way to influence and express opinion, but they are more about building an army of spectators than any disruptive capacity.

When is it respectful not to go to work? In the run up to Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral, Tesco joined other retailers in announcing it would close all its stores ‘to allow our colleagues to pay their respects’. Center Parcs said it would mark the day by shutting down entirely, forcing visitors to find alternative accommodation in the middle of their holidays. Grieving families had funerals cancelled as crematoria and undertakers paid their respects. With NHS waiting lists at a record high, thousands of hospital appointments were postponed. For trade union members, the rules of respect flowed the other way. The Communication Workers Union cancelled its planned strikes the day after the queen died ‘out of respect for her service to the country and her family’.

At a moment when it should have been able to seize the political initiative, the Labour leadership has talked itself into a strategy of retreat. Boris Johnson has driven a train of sleaze through the Conservatives’ reputation as a stable party of government. After a decade of falling pay, wages are now plummeting in real terms. Energy bills are forecast to hit at least four thousand pounds a year by 2023, while BP and Shell have announced yet another round of record profits. The Bank of England’s interest rate hike, and predictions of a long recession, will mean more hardship for working-class people. Many, unsurprisingly, have had enough. But rather than seizing on the strikes as a way to talk about the injustices of Tory economics, the Labour front bench has squirmed.