A false dawn has broken, has it not

A year on from the election, and things aren't inspiring

This email comes to you at 04.47 on 5^th July. Exactly a year after the declaration that pushed Labour over the line into a majority. They’d go on to win nearly a hundred more seats as the results crept in through the morning, achieving arguably one of the greatest election victories in British history. A year on, and the situation feels far from triumphant.

Some of this is misfortune. To begin with, Labour inherited enormous fiscal challenges and struggling public services. Some consequences of Tory failure were apparent from the outset. Others, like the prison crisis, rapidly erupted. The tragedy in Southport and the resulting riots swept away any chance of a Labour honeymoon. The election of Donald Trump, again, proved a further destabilising force.

Yet there is also a real sense that Labour have played a bad hand poorly. There remains a real sense of listlessness, of power without a project. Frankly, Labour seems to have wandered into a similar mire that the Tories took a decade to find. The government has achieved some of its aims, but has blundered into silly errors and, now, U-turns. It has failed to develop, let alone sell, a cohesive narrative of what it is doing, for whom, and why. As polling shows, it is a struggle to retain public confidence.

The consequences of this look bleaker than ever. Labour’s failures are not just dragging them down, but are undermining the whole system. Their lack of success points towards a brokenness in our politics and empowers those who thrive on it. On both right and left, populist, anti-politics backlash seems to be the real winner, and this points to an ever-greater danger in 2029. The consequences of 2024 look like increasingly volatile politics, charting a trajectory towards further instability and failure.