The world convened this week to scan a horizon bleaker and darker than any we have known for nearly a century.
Economic turmoil. War and rumours of war. Grim intimations of humanity’s erasure at the robotic hands of artificial intelligence.
These were the challenges which pre-occupied the leaders who gathered for the United Nations General Assembly over the past five days.
And our own Prime Minister? Well, Andy Burnham offered his – very personal – view of how to break free from history’s constraints and reshape embattled Britain this week. By announcing he wanted to bring back boozing on football terraces.
Given all the inequalities and injustices scarring our world, the PM had lighted on the one scandal that required action this day. He could down a pint while watching rugby league in the stands at Everton’s Hill Dickinson stadium but not when the round ball game was on.
But he would bring back hope, one glass of Boddingtons at a time.
Martin Luther King marched on Washington because he had a dream of a future free of prejudice. Ronald Reagan went to Berlin and pledged to tear down that wall. Margaret Thatcher emerged from the wreckage of the Brighton bombing to affirm that democracy would never bend to terror. And Andy Burnham returned from the UN determined to get one in for the lads.
Andy Burnham offered his view of how to break free from history’s constraints and reshape embattled Britain. By announcing he wanted to bring back boozing on football terraces
It is hard to overstate how serious are the crises facing our country – and the world. And even harder to credit how inadequate the British Government’s response appears to be.
The country’s vital national interests – our prosperity and security – are engaged and threatened by wars in Europe and the Middle East. Our economy is in intensive care, with our debt problems metastasising. Growth is anaemic and almost all the vital signs are negative. We are haemorrhaging tax income as the wealthy flee and the talented look elsewhere.
The country they leave behind is increasingly polarised, with masked mobs on extreme Left and Right inciting violence while a toxic identity politics spreads online targeting Jews and questioning the patriotism of past prime ministers based on their skin colour.
Artificial intelligence is ushering in changes to how we live, work and perhaps even endure, more momentous than any previous industrial revolution. Scientists call it a Cambrian moment, recalling the geological age when the globe was convulsed, species became extinct and a new world emerged.
Faced with these swirling, accumulating, dangerously connected crises, our Government meets in Liverpool this weekend for the Labour Party conference proclaiming ‘Hope Again’ – but their programme is a confection of irrelevant trivialities and counter-productive nostalgia, without either the intellectual depth or moral grit to meet this moment.
When we faced our Darkest Hour in 1940, Churchill promised we would get through it with blood, sweat and tears. Labour are now offering us fluff, hype and beers.
In his first few weeks in power, Andy Burnham sought to offer balm for our economic pain – capped bus fares, a few quid off the gas and leccy bills, better terms on our Netflix deal. But these interventions do not begin to address, indeed they even seem to belittle, the scale of the storm our finances face.
As a country we owe our debtors £3 trillion, almost equivalent to everything – everything – our country produces in one year. That is £100,000 per household.
The amount we pay just to service that debt is £100 billion every year. That means for every £100 you pay in tax, £10 goes to international financiers with no benefit to Britain at all.
Money that could be spent on health, education or defence only going to make investment institutions richer. And that amount is rising – as the price we pay to service that debt is going up, because those financiers feel our Government is fundamentally unserious about addressing that burden by bringing spending down.
The moment of truth will come at the Budget, fixed for just over a month’s time. So far remarkably little has leaked about the Government’s proposals for that reckoning with fiscal reality.
But that is not because there is Fort Knox-like security over the Chancellor’s masterly planning. It’s because there is no plan. And therefore nothing to leak.
As The Spectator’s Political Editor Tim Shipman revealed this week in a brilliant inside report, Treasury civil servants have been given next to nothing to work with by their political masters to deal with our crises. Instead of the Chancellor pulling rabbits from his hat on Budget day, he is the rabbit – frozen in the headlights of the oncoming debt juggernaut.
One of the biggest weaknesses in our faltering economy is the high level of energy prices. They spiked after the war in Ukraine ended access to cheap Russian oil and gas for Europe. And now oil and gas supplies from the Middle East are choked off as the Islamist ideologues in Iran and their Houthi allies have their bloody grip on vital waterways in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea.
Our position was already perilous: thanks to Ed Miliband’s policies, in Britain we have the highest business energy costs of any developed economy. That is the main cause of manufacturing decline in contemporary Britain. And a daily undermining of Andy Burnham’s nostalgic dream of re-industrialising the country.
But there is some relief visible on the horizon. I can see it from the bedroom of my mother’s home in my native Aberdeen. Thanks to North sea oil and gas, Britain used to be a net energy exporter.
Millions of barrels of both oil and gas are potentially extractable from the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields in Scottish waters. Ed Miliband has, in the past, set his face against any use of those riches because of net zero fundamentalism. Andy Burnham may have moved Miliband from the energy department but he has not moved an inch towards liberating those resources.
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Is our government failing us by prioritising trivial issues over real crises facing Britain today?
Smoke billows above the city after Russia struck Kyiv, Ukraine, in a renewed attack on petrol stations, shipping and railways which left at least two dead on September 23
A decision on both fields has been delayed, yet again, for fear of offending north Londoners who might vote for Zack Polanski in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election because Andy Burnham isn’t Lefty enough.
When Margaret Thatcher was doing what was unpopular, but right for the economy and country, in the early 1980s, she wasn’t deterred by by-election losses: the Lady was not for Turning. Andy Burnham is not so much turning as burning through any credentials for strong leadership he once had.
Because it’s not just on energy that he has put placating the Left ahead of what is right for the nation. The ill-judged sanctions he and Ed Miliband have imposed on Israel may have pleased the Guardian newspaper but they have profoundly disheartened the guardians of our security.
As the Chief Rabbi warned, they have been welcomed by Islamist fanatics. Earlier this week I was in Manchester, speaking to a Jewish community still mourning those killed by terrorist violence at Heaton Park synagogue a year ago.
As we gathered, news had broken of another planned massacre of Jewish citizens in Manchester which had just been averted by swift police action. The third such terrorist atrocity planned against that population in as many years.
It is terrible beyond words that the Government, even as its foreign policy is cheered by Hamas, has to spend millions more on higher walls and more policing to protect our Jewish neighbours.
But none of us are immune from escalating risk. As Tim Shipman also reported, in another chilling dispatch for The Spectator, security chiefs and even diplomats have warned ministers that these sanctions undermine the security and defence co-operation which we and our Gulf allies need in ever more dangerous times. Hamas exultant, Iran defiant, Houthis rampant – but our Government more concerned that it is getting favourable social media clicks from Corbynites. TikToking our way to oblivion.
The security situation we face is not an easily containable single threat which can be massaged away by the new ‘disinformation unit’ the PM announced this week as our contribution to protecting the West.
Both the Polish and French Presidents warned their peoples this week of accumulating dangers from Russia – now locked in an alliance of subversion with Iran and North Korea and bankrolled by totalitarian China.
It was revealed on Thursday that Russia has been preparing the capability to launch drone strikes against France, Italy and Spain from the ships of its ‘shadow fleet’ – an armada of tankers and other vessels which it operates under foreign flags of convenience. The Russian shadow fleet is bigger than any nation’s navy. And it operates by stealth and subterfuge across the globe. Russia is also paying for organised crime groups to conduct sabotage across the West while vital infrastructure – from Germany’s airports to our own cyber network – comes under assault.
This week Sky TV has been screening an exercise – the Wargame – in which I and other ex-politicians run through the options available to this country in the face of Russian escalation.
The most chilling moment was the bald revelation from General Sir Richard Barrons – the man this Government asked to lead a review of our defences – that we have at best two weeks’ fighting capability in our armed forces.
Ukraine has now been under attack from Russia for more than four years. We can only defend ourselves for 14 days. The need to rebuild our defence and security structures has never been more vital than at any time since 1938. But the money we need just isn’t there – when debt is ballooning – without steep spending cuts.
Kemi Badenoch has argued, rightly, that means reining back welfare so we can keep our country safe. But Andy Burnham has said he will not cut social security to fund national security. He will carry on paying general personal independence payments to people who choose not to work while the independence of our nation itself is increasingly put at risk.
And this blind attachment to high state spending, endorsed by union cheers and hard-Left applause, is a descent into socialist nostalgia just as the foundations upon which our economy and societies have been built are being re-modelled at warp speed.
Artificial intelligence, as I said, is a technology whose progress is accelerating beyond the control and understanding of even the most brilliant Silicon Valley sages.
Again this week, the Australian Government found it had been hacked by rogue technology created by Sam Altman’s OpenAI lab without any human either authorising, or being aware, of what was going on before it was too late.
This is only the latest break-out by AI agents, after the infamous recent Hugging Face hack, which has generated understandable fears of a technology we have created becoming not a powerful tool for progress but a force that will humble us all.
The parallels with the ‘gain of function’ research into viruses in Wuhan labs which prefaced the Covid pandemic should give us all reason to question whether we can truly control what science can unleash. The finest minds in the tech world are almost at one in arguing that we need guidance and guard-rails across nations to ensure that this amazing computational power can be a force for good – solving problems, curing diseases, improving productivity – rather than a scourge.
Even as they accumulate huge wealth and power themselves, they fear for the future. With Trump apparently heedless of the risks, and China’s Xi determined that his nation should not fall behind in any tech race, the risks are enormous. But here in Britain, Andy Burnham’s first act was to dismantle the government department charged with shaping our response to this challenge and leave it all to one junior minister.
A previous Labour leader, Michael Foot, made his journalistic and political reputation during World War 2 when he authored a furious polemic – The Guilty Men – naming and shaming those who had failed to prepare Britain for the horror and bloodshed of global conflict.
Now our current Labour leadership risk becoming the Guilty Men of their time. Like the hollow politicians of the Thirties, they allow economic whirlwinds to blow while pouring themselves another comforting drink, they fear to rouse us to resolute action because the political time is not yet ripe, they prioritise the appearance of relatability over the substance of hard decision-making.
In the words of one of the few politicians in the Thirties equal to its dangers, Winston Churchill, this Government is ‘in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent’.
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