The Saturday Read: Let it come on home
Inside: Biden, Southgate, Hooters, and Labour.
Good morning. Welcome to the Saturday Read, the New Statesman’s guide to politics, culture, books, and ideas. This is Jason, together with Finn, Nicholas, Pippa and George.
The dark farce of American politics took another strange turn this week at the conclusion of the 75th-anniversary Nato summit in Washington, when Joe Biden introduced Ukraine’s war leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, as “President Putin”. Keir Starmer, the new British Prime Minister, was standing with other world leaders just behind the American president, and his response to Biden’s latest gaffe was to fiddle awkwardly with the waistband of his trousers.
This week in the magazine, a post-general-election print special, my colleague Katie Stallard, in Washington, reflects on why the Starmer era will be defined by foreign affairs – including a likely Trump presidency – and I write about how the spectacular defeat of both the Conservatives and Scottish National Party have left Labour as the one, last truly national party in Britain: now dominant in Scotland, Wales and much of England. Britain looks more stable than at any time since the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
There has been, too, a palpable change in the social atmosphere. Voters were weary of Conservative dysfunction and misrule and Rishi Sunak and his party were duly punished. Could Gareth Southgate’s England enhance a growing sense of these being new times by defeating Spain, another fragile kingdom beset by secessionist movements, to win the Euros in Berlin on Sunday evening?
Southgate and Starmer share some similarities. They are both cautious, pragmatic men from the home counties. Their speech patterns and diction have a certain low-toned flatness. Their lack of radicalism and charisma have been repeatedly noted by their detractors. Both men like long-term plans and are not easily knocked off course or destabilised by events or social media mob rage. Starmer believes in mission-led government and Southgate has long been an advocate of the FA’s Player Pathway system, under which players move from the Under-21s or younger representative age groups to the national senior squad. Both men are patriots but also progressives. You could call them left conservatives. When I consider the style of Starmer and Southgate I am reminded of a remark by Eileen Blair, George Orwell’s first wife, made in a letter to a friend. George is writing a little book, she said, as German bombs fell on London during the Blitz of 1940, “about how to be a socialist while Tory”. Left conservatism – a winning politics for these times.
Will slow and steady also win the crown for Southgate as it did for Keir Starmer? We shall know soon enough.
The picks…
Good morning, Nicholas here. With the UK election over, the NS has been freed up to cover far more relaxing topics: the slow-motion car crash of Joe Biden’s election campaign and England’s Euros final, for instance. We haven’t forgotten about Westminster of course – Edward Docx has written one of our favourite essays this week, on Keir Starmer. As ever, thanks for reading and have a great week.
1—“Biden will step aside.”
Laugh-or-cry stuff from across the Atlantic this weekend, but the clamour from inside the American left for a clearly ailing president to step aside is growing deafening. We turned to Lee Siegel to unpack a chaotic week in US politics for our weekend essay, which ranges from the impotence of the liberal media to whether George Clooney will be the one to unseat Joe Biden. NH
In all the media coverage of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the national crisis the country now finds itself in, one aspect of the emergency has been left out. The American media, once powerful enough to put in motion Nixon’s eventual downfall with the New York Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers – a damning history of US involvement in the Vietnam War – has become virtually powerless. Or to put it painfully, and more precisely, the New York Times itself, once the proud flagship of American liberalism, has been emasculated.
2—“His inner life is occluded. Has he got one?”
The personality question, or the character conundrum, hangs over our new Prime Minister. We still don’t feel like we know the man. Neither terms of endearment nor disparagement stick to him; “kind-hearted football-dad” and “ruthless grey bureaucrat” both slide off. Here, Edward Docx has a crack at a literary reading of Starmer, in an essay that starts with Shakespeare, and lands Starmer somewhere among the Angry Young Men, the ambitious and incandescent working-class antiheroes of the 1950s. NH
The masculinity portrayed on stage and television during the 1950s is illuminating here. Walled in. Silent where possible. “Actions not words,” as he said in the Downing Street speech. Emotionally reserved. Stoic. Strong moral compass. Quiet giants of self-reliance. Capable of handling difficult situations on their own. Dealing with the situation. A masculinity that affects understatement, declines engagement; judge me by my actions; there won’t be a show.
3—“Southgatism has slowly, rather combatively come to the fore.”
In the heady summer of the 2018 World Cup, Alex Niven coined the term “Southgatism” to describe the modern, optimistic national mood that the English football team seemed to both create and reflect. As we prepare for Gareth Southgate’s second Euros final tomorrow, we asked Niven to revisit the term, and to tell us how English football and politics have cross-pollinated in the years since. NH
As in the Sixties and Nineties, Southgate’s 2018 England team seemed to briefly point the way to a unifying strain of Englishness that was authentic, inclusive and successful… After a shaky start probably due to banal on-the-pitch problems like Bellingham’s positional play and full-back/wing-back selection quandaries, Southgate’s England team have grown and grown during the course of Euro 2024 to once again become a fulcrum for national hopes and dreams.
4—“Labour will not be a silver bullet.”
In Starmer’s first week he made some overtures to prove his party was serious on Northern Ireland. It’s a welcome departure from the Conservative Party’s truculence on the place. But Labour will soon learn (I lament) that the region’s problems do not start nor do they end in London. FMcR
Unionists and nationalists alike lament the years of Conservative austerity which left public services in the north in disarray: the NHS is the worst-performing branch in the UK (half of the patients wait a year for treatment, compared with 4 per cent in Britain); earlier this year 170,000 workers shut down almost all government-funded services in protest of low wages; 27 per cent of workers in the north are employed by the state. Politico summed up Northern Ireland in 2024 with a typically rosy disposition: “A land of misery.” Labour can raise wages and increase subsidy all it likes – but this does not change the fact that the north’s economy is on palliative care.
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The Gail’s constituency
I was amused to learn from Bagehot – the Economist’s flagship Britain column – about the Liberal Democrats’ campaigning strategy (though, as Bagehot insists, it was just a “rule of thumb”). Anywhere, outside of London, with a branch of Gail’s was targeted by party activists, and targeted hard. The café chain is the jewel in the crown of bourgeois fast-casual dining, Waterstones for baguettes. And its loyal adherents, as it turned out, are a neat analogue for the archetypal Lib Dem voter: wealthy, probably from the south-east, and a sucker for high-quality cedar furnishings.
Gail’s – first opened 19 years ago in Hampstead – is on a rapid expansion mission. As of April there were 131 stores across the country, and this year it plans to open 35 more. It is backed by a US private equity group, Bain Capital. This is no humble neighbourhood joint. It’s a sourdough hegemony with eyes on every middle-class enclave in England. As our business editor, Will Dunn, wrote earlier this year, behind our beloved British high streets is a lot of American cash. Strip back Gail’s warm interiors, friendly branding and laminated pastries and you will find ruthless corporate zeal.
But no need for the Liberal Democrats to be so cynical – in fact, they should be buoyed by the café chain’s ambition. Gail’s has found a captive audience. Where they go, the Lib Dems should continue to follow.
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5—“National Rally thrives on French weakness.”
The final French election results on Monday were difficult to parse. The hard-right were up, but not on top; the left similar; Macron’s centrist alliance was down, but not out. But one thing is for sure – Marine Le Pen’s National Rally are now an integrated part of French politics. Here, Bruno Maçães posits a deep historical explanation for its rise, and the ascent of populism more generally: European decline. NH
Historically, European fascism was born of an inebriation with power: colonial power over the world, technological power over nature and, ultimately, human power over history. Le Pen’s populism is the exact opposite: it calls for a return of the state because France needs a strong hand to survive in a cut-throat global environment. The new European populism is very close to the kind of third-world nationalism that ruled the peripheries of the global system throughout the 20th century. Which makes sense if we think that Europe is moving to a periphery of its own.
6—“The life of a child is more important than art.”
Upon her death in May, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro enjoyed an almost Tolstoyan moral stature. Two months later, it has been revealed that she sided with a boyfriend who was abusing her daughter, against that daughter. Megan Nolan explains why this reckoning is so hard for readers. Munro had laid no explicit claim to moral authority, but her work had won it for her. GM
I found myself thinking, in the aftermath of these revelations, about something I had noticed several times in Munro’s work over the years, which was a kind of assertion of the right to be happy; to identify your pleasures and then hold them tight. She wrote once, in her 2004 collection Runaway: “Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.” In Dear Life she wrote: “The thing is to be happy… No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances.” I once read these stubborn claims to contentment as inspiring and defiant. The wilful determination of her words now echo at a very different pitch.
7—“The world is getting better and better.”
We need babies by the horde and we need them yesterday. Hannah asked the demographer Paul Morland how we might turn on the toddler tap and dodge the looming population crisis. Housing and childcare won’t do it, Morland says: people have children when they’re excited about the future. GM
Today, he is sceptical that government policy can achieve population growth. “Ultimately, my appeal is to people, it’s not to government. We will not even start to move forward until we have a government that says we have an issue.” Paul Morland wants a grown-up conversation, “without hysterical finger-pointing and ad hominem attacks”. He thinks the fertility crisis has wrongly come to be seen through a culture-wars lens: he was told his Times article displayed “a touch of the brown shirts”. “Agree with me, disagree with me, argue with me, whatever. But to say that makes you a fascist is very immature.”
8—“WFH (Working from Hooters).”
Hooters, the American restaurant chain famous for its scantily clad waitresses, is closing 40 branches across the US. When the news broke, Kara Kennedy was already out the door and on her way to her local branch in rural Virginia. Kara writes a dispatch from the front line, and contends that Hooters is one of the last remnants of pre-internet America. FMcR
The thing about Hooters is that you're compromised the moment you walk in the door. You’ve come in for some chicken wings, maybe to catch the game on TV. But there are loads of places to serve these needs. By choosing Hooters you’re confessing: I want all of these things, with cleavage on the side. You could lie, but it’s no good. Playboy really did have some great articles; some of the best, in fact. But no one believes that as an explanation for buying an issue. The middle-aged maths teacher who joined me as I sat outside tried this. I asked him if he thought it was sad that Hooters all over the country were closing down, without even telling their staff. “Oh, that’s crazy. But I just came here because of all the traffic on the highway. It’s not somewhere I’d usually come.” Right. “Not a bad place to be stuck,” he added.
9—“A crisis of legitimacy is foreordained.”
Now the election hot takes are exhausted, it’s tour d’horizon time. From his watchtower, John Gray delivers a typically astute survey: the people’s army of Nigel Farage and Reform are ready to march on the Labour positions; in the distance, the global order continues to rupture. But, more fundamentally, Starmer and his party continue to cling to a programme of politics voters do not want. To misquote The Leopard, while everything may appear to have changed, much too much has remained the same. NH
After this deceptively definitive election, all talk of Labour being safe in office for a decade or more can be consigned to history. Labour’s landslide is an ending, an artefact of astute strategy and a dated electoral system, not a new beginning. Five years on, if the government lasts that long, Britain seems destined to be back where it was in the dying days of the Tories – poorer, wearier and less secure, with the change of regime that is so much needed still to come.
George’s Best of the Rest
Telegraph: Kyle Clifford served in army and had convicted murderer brother.
WaPo: Modi hugs Putin in Moscow.
Alice Gribbin: The serious artist.
Witold Rybczynski: The case for rebuilding.
Spencer Kornhaber: Zach Bryan’s message to men.
River Page: Don't put politics in a horror film. Shut up and scare me!
Alisha Dietzman: Significant obsessions and Milan Kundera.
Southgate lookalike German police officer gets serenaded. Southgate, you’re the… two?
And with that…
Should he stay or should he go? Gareth Southgate has suggested that, should England fail to win the Euros this time around, he “probably won’t be here any more”. But yesterday the Times reported that the FA were desperate to convince him to stay for the 2026 World Cup. The FA’s “charm offensive” will be led by the chief executive, Mark “Bullingham” (not, apparently, a riff on the player who occupies such a charmed position in the public consciousness that Southgate will probably never sub or drop him, however he plays). But why would Southgate want to do it? In this tournament he has experienced the true villainy of England supporters for the first time. The early group games in particular were coloured by a nasty rancour between the manager and the fans. They’ve slandered him to their tellies at home; they’ve done their utmost to soak that pristine white polo shirt with beer in Germany (Southgate phlegmatically described the atmosphere in the stadium as an “unusual environment”).
Britain is an advanced democracy – not in the sense of highly developed, but in the Biden-esque sense of aged, withering. And consequently its leadership roles from politics to football are marked by a culture of fierce anti-deference. Achievement is met with ingratitude; failure by the most vicious scorn. Whatever happens tomorrow, Southgate will always be too boring and too cautious for some. If he can be convinced to stay, it’ll be testament to his rare belief in public service, one that we’ll pine for when he eventually goes.
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Biden has clearly heard the call for him to step down yet he has triple downed that he is in the race to stay.
Every passing second he stays in the race works against the Democratic party.
Come on.
We hold these truths to be self evident that Trump must not be allowed to win the Presidency in November and for that purpose Joe Biden must hand the Presidency to Kamala Harris who will defeat Trump. Similarly, at home we hold that Labour will be boring, will revitalise the economy, remove the limitations of only two children of a family getting child allowances, will restore the budgets of the NHS, education, social care, the environment, the Armed Forces, et al. It just takes time, good fortune, good planning, patience and the ability to absorb the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.