The Misery Index​ , a crude measure of economic discomfort, was thought up by Arthur Okun, a neo-Keynesian who chaired Lyndon B. Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers in the late 1960s. Okun’s formula simply added together the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation. A good Misery Index might be about 5 (2 per cent inflation and 3 per cent unemployment); Britain’s currently sits at 8.8, down from 14.6 at the height of the inflationary spike in 2022.

Little of the country’s palpable misery is captured in that number. Okun’s measure is a rough one, and many refinements have been proposed, including the addition of interest rates or GDP shortfall. A measure devised in the golden age of American growth might well miss something of Britain’s decade and a half of real wage stagnation, its stubbornly low productivity or the learned helplessness of its institutions. Two other numbers serve as political barometers of public misery: Keir Starmer’s staggering unpopularity (a net negative approval rating of -61) and the sustained poll lead, since April, of Nigel Farage’s Reform.

Both factors have shaped British politics over the past year. Starmer’s perceived fragility means he has made little use of his landslide majority. Difficult decisions have been postponed, or were deferred until last month’s budget. Timidity is punctuated by spasmodic panic over Farage and authoritarian posturing over migration or crime. Backbenchers are truculent: many MPs elected on Labour’s extremely efficient 2024 vote, which was praised as strategic genius at the time, now face very thin majorities and the likelihood of wipeout at the next election. Incentives for loyalty are few. If, in January, it could be argued that the jury was still out on a relatively new government, by December that verdict has hardened. Starmer vies with Macron for the accolade of least popular European leader.

It may be cold comfort in Number Ten, but Starmer is only repeating the pattern established by Britain’s post-Brexit leaders. Each takes office lauded by the press as offering a new vision for British politics – May’s sketch of a British Christian Democracy, Johnson’s regional developmentalism as a ‘Brexity Hezza’– only to collapse on contact with reality. It’s not obvious that anyone else would fare much better. The weaknesses of Labour’s plans (where plans existed at all) were clear before their election. The manifesto amounted to little more than an assertion that Labour would grow the economy. Where weakness was acknowledged, the view of the cognoscenti was that Rachel Reeves was engaged in a bout of necessary lying and would reveal her ambitious plan for national renewal once in office. Only slowly has it dawned on the centre-left press that they were the marks in a shell game.

Plotting is rife in Westminster and significant energy is now wasted in tamping down plots to remove the prime minister. Starmer was more secure before Angela Rayner’s departure in September for dodging £40,000 in stamp duty. Rayner, popular with the trade unions and the party’s soft left, was favourite to replace him, but there was sufficient dislike of the prospect among the rest of the party to keep him in place. His main challenger from the right, the glozingly smug Wes Streeting, sits on a tiny, precarious majority and espouses a worldview repugnant to most of the voting membership (though he has recently attempted to burnish his left-wing credentials). Lobby journalists, always afflicted with political attention deficit, have recently begun to confect adulation for the stolidly authoritarian home secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

The few optimists in Labour shrug this off as mid-term noise or claim that polling numbers aren’t meaningful this far from an election: faced with a contest between Labour and Reform, the duopolistic tendency of British politics will reassert itself to the party’s benefit. This is fatal complacency. Never has so long a period passed without Labour or the Conservatives leading in the polls (the closest in living memory was the brief Liberal-SDP hegemony at the end of 1981). The anti-systemic mood is not a fleeting one.

The most consolatory interpretation is that Britain is transitioning to a model in which voters’ sympathies transfer within broad left-right blocs. One reading of Reform’s rise is that, in keeping with other European countries, an old right-wing party is being replaced by a sharper-toothed nativist party which has a more porous interface with the far right. In this, Britain is little different from France, Germany or Italy, but our electoral system struggles in multiparty contests. In 2024, this benefited Labour by splitting the right-wing vote. In 2029, it won’t.

Strategists argue that there is a solid floor of voters – between 15-20 per cent – who will never abandon the duopoly. Reality is more complicated. If the bloc thesis is correct, it suggests that Labour’s ‘hero voters’ (older white social authoritarians, on whom the party believes its fortunes depend) are largely a mirage, and its sentimental pursuit of them alienates its actual supporters. Familial class ties that once bound voters to parties have weakened. Recent research shows that those attracted to challenger parties – both the Greens and Reform – are more likely to say that their preferred party reflects their values and desired policies. In contrast, voters for the historic duopoly mostly cite the lack of a better alternative that can plausibly win. If that sense changes, the floor will vanish beneath Labour’s feet.

Reeves’s budget was sufficiently competent to stave off decapitation by either Labour backbenchers or the market, at least until the local elections next May. It was mildly redistributive, with some good measures: taxation on electric vehicles, on dividends and on gambling revenues. Imposition of a levy on property worth over £2 million, in itself unobjectionable, ducked the more difficult reform of the outdated council tax system. It’s hard to credit Reeves with compassion or boldness in abolishing the two-child limit on benefits – unanimously called for by experts in child poverty – given she did so reluctantly and only under extreme backbench pressure. Despite repeatedly stressing the centrality of growth, none of the new measures has been positively scored for growth by the OBR.

The budget has also stored up trouble for the future. It requires £16 billion in efficiencies – cuts – from non-ringfenced departments (education, health, military spending and, de facto, pensions are protected). It assumes taxes will rise in the last year of this parliament, which, for an unpopular government in an election year, would be a suicide note. The government’s determination to drive down migration also drives down migrants’ economic activity – and tax receipts. The employment rate, especially among young people, looks sickly. Food price inflation, which has been more pronounced in the UK than other countries, is sticky, and while its rate has slowed, its effect on the cost of living persists. By freezing tax thresholds, Reeves has tried to make inflation the Exchequer’s friend, shunting more people into paying more tax without increasing rates. But the trick only works if the government faces down public sector wage claims and wider use of benefit entitlements, both of which are likely to spike as a result. It is not a recipe for popularity among Labour-inclined voters.

For every budget, the OBR produces a graph that indicates what the return of a rise in the fuel duty escalator – frozen since 2011 – would mean. It is now a rather funny record of misplaced optimism, with ghost lines of rising revenue at every budget round. The cumulative total over the last decade and a half amounts to £120 billion missing from the public finances, a gift to both fossil fuel companies and the motorist lobby. The graph is predicated on the assumption, shared far beyond the OBR, that Britain will at some point return to the status quo ante and increase fuel duty. But elsewhere, in reducing its expectations of productivity gains (a basic engine of economic growth) for example, the OBR has begun to acknowledge that, in the words of a different Labour leader, that option no longer exists.

The experience of living in Britain is unlikely to change significantly on the basis of these policies. Regional inequality will remain staggering, with oases of wealth insulated from rundown streets and decaying schools and hospitals. Prices will creep upwards while wages mostly don’t. Household spending, which has stagnated since the pandemic, will continue to flatline. Home ownership will remain out of reach for many. The suspicion that someone else is benefiting at your expense will become ubiquitous. Political despair will seem inviting, as will its pathologies: violent hatred of the other, false nostalgia for stolen pasts, the isolated pursuit of self-advantage.

What does Reeves lose by not being bolder? She is constrained by her own fiscal rules and Starmer’s fragility. It’s true that she is in a tougher spot than many of her predecessors. She can’t borrow at zero cost, an opportunity squandered by George Osborne. She didn’t begin her tenure with a buoyant economy, like Gordon Brown. But popular patience has evaporated. A tendency to govern the country Labour wishes it had rather than the one it has is clear in its punishment of a successful export industry in higher education: a new levy on international students may well send some institutions over the edge. Would the government be so cavalier in its treatment of a major manufacturing exporter?

There is consensus in government that the UK has suffered from chronic underinvestment – the lowest in the G7 for 24 of the last 30 years. This is changing, and were investment ambitiously directed to explicit goals, and protected by a willingness to use state capacity, it could transform the country. Reeves has on occasion used the measures at her disposal to stamp on inflation: freezing some rail fares, for example. Her apparently relaxed attitude to stagnating household spending may derive from the belief that investment will eventually produce greater prosperity and higher living standards. (This was the argument of the Resolution Foundation under Torsten Bell, now a Treasury minister.) But ‘eventually’ is not a politically promising slogan.

Reform has benefited from right-wing realignment, but its popularity also represents a shift within politics itself. Farage’s core coalition includes ‘race realists’ – read racists – and transatlantic MAGA cultists. They may prove liabilities. James Orr, a Cambridge theologian who inveighs against Britain’s ‘invited invaders’, decries ‘toxic femininity’ and gay marriage, and admires America’s gun laws, was appointed Farage’s senior adviser in October. An advocate of an anti-egalitarian politics of national preference, which can accommodate some traditionally left-wing policies such as the nationalisation of monopolies, Orr told the Today programme in July that a Reform government would have to push through ‘very unpopular’ policies, akin to forcing ‘nasty cough medicine down the country’s throat’. It appears to have been a successful job interview.

Mainstream political strategists are hopeful that either Farage’s tendency to blow up his vehicles through egomania or Reform’s poor performance in local government will be enough – if combined with a change in Conservative leader or sufficient anti-migrant posturing by the present government – to undo the party before 2029. Yet Reform is a more considerable organisation than Ukip ever was, and Zia Yusuf, its head of policy, an unusually canny operator. The party is serious, for instance, about making gains in outer London, using a right-coded version of the Liberal Democrats’ localist strategy. Promises to rid local government of ‘woke DEI’ spending have faltered on the realisation that education and adult social care swallow most of council budgets, but only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the basis of its appeal.

Farage has been wrongfooted recently by resurfaced allegations about racist and antisemitic jibes made during his time as a pupil at Dulwich College. His denials were unusually conditional (he claims to have ‘never directly racially abused anybody’) and culminated in a bizarre press conference rant about the BBC and Bernard Manning. Liberal defences of Farage have turned on the idea that pursuing him for adolescent behaviour distracts from criticising what he advocates now. But the point is how little distance he has travelled since then.

The same anti-systemic mood that benefits Reform ought to benefit the left. The catastrophic launch of Your Party, mired in poisonous spats, contrasted sharply with Zack Polanski’s election as leader of the Greens: his relentless media schedule has led to a rapid increase in party membership. The perspective of the socialist left is rarely adequately represented in British politics or media, despite persistent popular appetite, and it’s refreshing to have someone on TV willing to defend the benefits of migration and attack oligarchy. Polanski is sometimes derided as unserious by the political centre, or as an opportunist by the doctrinaire left. A better interpretation would see his journey from Liberal Democrat to socialist(-ish) Green as a response to the failure of successive governments to improve prospects for his millennial cohort. If Polanski profits from the right advice (he is no policy specialist) and focuses on core issues – political equality and civil liberties as well as affordability – then the Greens could benefit enormously from intra-bloc realignment. The threat of this might even induce Labour to pay attention to its crumbling left flank.

Leftists sometimes argue that the collapse of the old duopoly, or the chaos ushered in by a Reform government, might widen the scope of political possibility to their advantage. Sweeping change is overdue and has been since the global financial crisis. The collapse of American norms, the bonfire of moral credibility over Palestine and the collective impassivity over climate change also seem like apposite conditions. Yet there are risks to undervaluing democratic politics. Gramsci’s now clichéd diagnosis of morbid symptoms seems to me less relevant than a 1905 warning from Jean Jaurès. Responding to the assumption that a European war would accelerate revolution, he cautioned that any such victory would be followed by ‘crises of counterrevolution, furious reaction, exasperated nationalism, suffocating dictatorships, monstrous militarism – a long chain of retrograde violences and of base hatreds, of reprisals and of servitudes.’ Much of this was true in the 20th century. It need not be true today.