The Firewalls are Falling all over Europe

Today's Times essay on the Anywhere/Somewhere power balance in light of Starmer's "island of strangers" speech (draws heavily on my post European populism post of April 30th)

“Nigel Farage is right, please don’t vote for him,” is how one dispirited Labour supporting academic summed up Monday’s white paper on immigration.

My own reaction was “two cheers for Keir”. As a former Labour member who left a decade ago partly thanks to the party’s enthusiasm for mass immigration I was happy to see him embracing most of the arguments that we sceptics have been making for 20 years: the pace of cultural change is too fast, the economic benefit is over-estimated, the pressure on public services and housing under-estimated, too many visa routes are abused, many of the benefits of immigration have been privatised while the costs are nationalised.

Credit where it is due: Labour’s white paper is challenging two of its core constituencies, universities and the health/care system, and we will hear loud complaints from both over the coming weeks. Yet overall these are only modest changes to migration flows that will give some extra impetus to the decline that began after the last Government’s hand-brake turn on its initial visa nonchalance. They will allow Labour to claim it has reduced numbers by half in a couple of years but will not be enough to win back many Reform voters.

So how much further can Labour go? Will human rights legislation, central to Keir Starmer’s own legal career, be next on the block if it stands in the way of progress on illegal immigration? Can a quintessentially liberal graduate, ‘Anywhere’, party appeal once more to its old ‘Somewhere’ voters without twisting itself too far out of shape and trashing any credible voter coalition.

Let me explain my vocabulary. In 2017 I published a book, The Road to Somewhere, attempting to explain the populist revolt in light of Brexit and the first Trump election. I described two main worldview groups in rich countries: the Anywheres (about 25% of the population), the highly educated, often mobile, people who value openness and autonomy and are comfortable with change; the Somewheres (40 to 50%), the somewhat small-c conservative people who draw their identities more from particular places and groups and tend to be discomforted by rapid change. (This sounds binary but I found many varieties of Anywhere and Somewhere and an ‘inbetweener’ group straddling the two worldviews.)

These education-based value divides have not fully eclipsed the old socio-economic basis of political conflict but they have shifted the battlefield onto the more psychological terrain of security and identity issues - immigration, national sovereignty, group attachment - which are both more emotional and harder to compromise on.

So, in the light of Reform’s electoral breakthrough, and Labour’s attempt to steal their clothes on immigration, what does the balance of forces in European and UK politics look like through that Anywhere/Somewhere lens?

Somewhere-based populist parties, mainly leaning to the right, have surged in almost all European countries since the turn of the century - wreaking electoral havoc on mainstream parties of centre-right and centre-left - and have participated in, and in some cases dominated, governments in several countries including Italy and Poland. The UK’s populists came late to the party but having helped to win the Brexit vote they then shattered the Conservative party in the 2024 election and are now threatening to do the same to Labour.

Much attention has focused on the extremist roots of some populist parties but growing support has moderated their outlooks – see Giorgia Meloni in Italy or Marine Le Pen in France – and allowed them to occupy that ‘missing majority’ position vacated by mainstream parties by leaning to the left on economics and to the right on most other things. There is no successful populist party, at least in Western Europe (with the possible exception of parts of Germany’s AfD), that does not sign up to the basics of the liberal constitution: the rule of law, individual and minority rights, electoral democracy, race and sex equality.

What one might call ‘decent populism’ looks unstoppable in the medium term partly because the conditions that have given rise to it are becoming even more entrenched.

Both Anywhere and Somewhere worldviews are perfectly good and proper. The problem for our democracies is that the Anywheres have been too dominant. And whether from the centre-left or centre-right - what the populists deride as the ‘uniparty’ - they have defined the common good in ways that reflect their own interests.

They have been broadly pro-globalisation and comfortable with high levels of immigration; they have preferred universal human rights to national citizen preference; they have been ready to sacrifice national sovereignty on the altar of economic efficiency and European integration; they promote mass higher education and knowledge economy ‘London/Paris/Berlin’ jobs before vocational training and industry; they are content to pursue net zero even at the cost of much higher energy costs; and have overseen the crumbling of state capacity, and GDP growth, thanks in part to the over-zealous regulation promoted by an expanded ‘lanyard class.’

Populism is the democratic push-back against these Anywhere priorities. But they remain entrenched. Mass immigration continues, partly driven by the needs of ageing societies, with less numerous but more aggravating illegal immigration trampling on secure borders thanks to the universal rights framework established after 1945. Deindustrialisation also continues, driven by a uniparty consensus favouring the dash to net zero.

Meanwhile, not only has the expectation of generational improvements in living standards been disappointed in most of Europe but wealth is increasingly centred on a few metropolitan centres. French historian Pierre Vermeren calculates that the 12 biggest metropolitan centres in France account for 25% of the population but 60% of national wealth and more than two-thirds of high earners, not to mention almost all of the political and media class.

The UK has an even more unbalanced economy with only one town outside London, Bristol, making a positive fiscal contribution. The demoralisation felt by many citizens in the periphery is reinforced by the perception of a rapidly changing ethnic demography and the failures of integration, especially of Muslim minorities.

There are many stories for populists to tell and they can now tell them in a new media landscape by-passing elite filters. The recent prominence of extreme liberal causes, such as BLM or trans activism, has provided a constant source of offence for populist “rage entrepreneurs” to exploit.

The upshot is that Somewhere populists have placed limits on Anywhere power and shifted national priorities in many countries, see the greater focus on illegal immigration. And note the evolution of Emmanuel Macron’s stereotypically Anywhere party En Marche in 2017 to today’s more hard-edged Renaissance.

This Somewhere veto has led to a kind of impasse. The power of populist parties and opinion has prevented the further liberalisation of economies and societies, at both the European and national level, but the populists are not yet strong enough to impose their own agendas. It is reminiscent of the stand-off in mid-1970s Britain between organised labour and business/the middle class, before Margaret Thatcher broke the log-jam.

So, can the Anywhere/Somewhere impasse be broken? The Conservatives had a chance in 2019 to shape a new Anywhere/Somewhere settlement and blew it. Can Labour do any better?

The opening of European societies over the past 30 years brought many benefits. The Anywhere baby-boomer settlement - often led from the centre-left - produced decent levels of GDP growth and upward mobility (though never again achieving the levels of the post-war decades), a new phase of European integration promoted by German unification, big advances for women and ethnic and sexual minorities, and the start of the energy transition. And the Cold War victory enabled a further (now reversing?) shift from warfare to welfare economies.

But this settlement has now breached the limits of democratic consent and created too many losers. In economics it elevated the consumer above the producer and the knowledge economy too far above the industrial one. In politics it required transferring too much power from national politics to supranational institutions or courts.

The political alternative to uniparty Anywhere liberalism surely starts with refocusing on national citizens and national sovereignty, both economically and politically, while acknowledging the continuing necessity of high levels of international co-operation and interdependence. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society but the form that openness has taken has benefitted Anywheres far more than Somewheres.

Propelled by the Trumpian winds blowing across the Atlantic, and the need to respond to the disrupter populists at home, European politics requires a new democratic settlement. Such a settlement needs to accommodate that ‘missing majority’ of decent populism: a social democratic-conservative hybrid leaning somewhat to the social market left in economics and somewhat to the right on social and cultural issues.

This hybrid, sometimes labelled ‘post-liberal’, is also a reaction to modern liberalism’s reticence on many human needs: for belonging and community, for tradition and authority, for status and recognition for those who cannot thrive in the cognitive meritocracy race, for meaning and purpose in a post-religious age.

Mainstream liberalism has tended to see such concerns as beyond politics, a matter for private individuals. And many individuals endowed with agency and self-control do flourish under modern conditions. Others are left demoralised, especially in a world with weaker families, widely available drugs/alcohol and the constant distracting hum of the internet.

When life was visibly improving for the majority the silences of liberalism mattered less. Now, the combination of several unforeseeable events - the 2008 crash, Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukraine energy crisis – plus the sclerosis of low fertility/ageing societies requiring ever higher taxes have dampened spirits. Compare the optimism that even non-political people felt about New Labour’s thumping victory in 1997 with the justifiably low expectations accompanying the 2024 Labour landslide.

It is possible that Labour’s high command will press on from the white paper and steal even more populist clothes. A Somewhere-sensitive moderate left politics of recognition based around the priorities of the average provincial voter, rather than highly educated metropolitans, would focus on: reviving the abandoned levelling up programme; vocational training and good jobs for people of average ability; privileging national citizen access to housing, work and the social state with the help of digital IDs; ensuring welfare support incentivises work and enterprise and is focused on those who really need it; rewarding parenthood and supporting stable families; securing orderly, crime-free neighbourhoods.

This requires not a victory of the Somewheres, to replace that of the Anywheres, but rather a rebalancing and a new compromise between different interests and outlooks. The moderate left should offer itself as a bridge between what is best in both worldviews.

Progressives can take comfort from the fact that a new post-liberal era does not mean retreating to an illiberal one. In the UK only 6% of the population believe that you have to be white to be truly British and only 9% still believe that a man should go out to work while a woman stays at home to manage the household.

Leaning to the right on culture means focusing on those areas where the uniparty has most egregiously ignored public opinion - above all on immigration and national sovereignty - not on rolling back sex and race equality. National identities and solidarities remain central to most voters and still provide the main source of political legitimacy for the burden sharing challenges coming down the track.

And there is one European country where the main party of the centre-left has grasped this: Denmark. “High levels of immigration undermine cohesion while imposing burdens on the working class that affluent voters largely escape,” Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Danish Social Democrats, said recently.

Her party beat off the populist Danish People’s Party by borrowing its tough immigration and integration policies and won re-election in 2022, (contrary to the liberal story line of the acclaimed TV drama Borgen). Denmark remains a high-trust, socially progressive country with a generous welfare state and moderate levels of immigration.

It used to be said that it was easier for the right to follow voters left on economics than for the left to follow them right on cultural issues. I suspect that remains true. Starmer’s speech on Monday will have been felt as a personal violation by many Labour MPs and activists. And going Danish is easier in a small country that already has a broad consensus on not opening up too much and whose courts do not prevent deportations.

If Starmer talks Somewhere but continues to act Anywhere, he could hasten a Labour implosion. On the other hand he has another four years to show some governing competence in a turbulent world and Somewhere voters may forgive his progressive past if he can deliver on some of their priorities, maybe helped by a collective, Europe-wide reform to refugee laws. Such a shift could be made palatable to the left by linking it to a beefed-up labour inspectorate with teeth, a big new national training initiative, and finding creative ways of taxing the unproductive rich.

He might also benefit from the fact that Reform, like many new right parties, is something of a personality cult and could fragment. Its incoherent programme will come under more scrutiny and, despite Farage’s efforts to keep out extremists, so will some of Reform’s zanier representatives.

The Anywhere/Somewhere impasse will be broken gradually, if at all. Populists will continue their onward march at the ballot box, and firewalls against them will fall all over Europe, both in politics and the middle-class pubs and clubs. Somewhere priorities will no longer be marginalised whether represented by populist parties or absorbed by mainstream ones. A breakthrough into national government in the UK looks possible, most probably in coalition with Conservatives. But, unlikely though it sounds, I’m tempted to place a few quid on an Angela Rayner/Nigel Farage coalition. If it happens its origins will be traced back to Starmer’s “island of strangers” last Monday.