There is a resonance to the timing of the British general election campaign, overlapping as it does with the European Football Championship. At the time of writing, it remains possible that Sir Keir Starmer will enjoy the blessings of an England win in the Euros and a Bank of England interest rate cut in his first fortnight as prime minister. The former is less likely than the latter.
Watching a foreign election is always a bit like following an offshore football tournament. We might have a favourite team, but the stakes are lower and we can relax and enjoy the sound of the crowd; perhaps even reflect in our own winter of discontent that it’s even more grim up north.
Compared with the US, where it can be hard not to feel that the end of the tournament might be the vortex that brings about the end of the world, British politics, even in its current crazed, impoverished state, feels familiar, especially to the generations of New Zealanders who have been temporary immigrants to the Old Country.
The same goes for the political media. As the US presidential election nears, American cable news will become more awful. MSNBC will present its droning parade of former US prosecutors and Fox News will go about its core business of a creating a parallel universe where gravity works differently.
In the UK, in contrast, the commentary is frequently better than the game.
They’re certainly having a good time on the News Agents podcast, a sort of rebel league formed by Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and the boyish Lewis Goodall after they all quit the BBC in 2022 in frustration at the “impartiality” rules the organisation was applying to restrain its editorial teams.
A recent episode featured David Yelland, former editor of the Sun, and asked, “Can Rupert Murdoch still decide how Britain votes?” In general, asked Sopel at the top of the show, “Do newspapers still count?”
Not so much, thought Yelland, offering the bracing statistic that the average British newspaper reader is now 64 years old. The time-honoured tradition of Labour leaders humbly seeking the leave of the Murdoch press to form a government seems to be ending before our very eyes, and although “the Sun has to at least appear as if it’s in control”, he believed Rupert Murdoch’s heirs might not be as game to continue the fight. And it could be irrelevant in five years’ time, when Yealand predicts 75-80% of a younger electorate will want the economic benefits of the closer relationship with Europe the Conservative press has sworn to oppose.
Europe, of course, offers its own complications. In a recent interview with the ABC in Australia, exiled Tory Rory Stewart (who, like Yelland, has his own podcast, which is a theme in itself) invoked recent election results in Germany, France and Italy to characterise the populist shift that has dragged his old party, probably permanently, to the right, where it is shedding the votes of alarmed centrists and those who regard immigration as the great threat. Stewart observed that voters attracted by populist messaging also don’t have much time for the orthodoxies of economic liberalism.
They’re more concerned with culture wars than balancing budgets or pricing climate emissions. There is “no space” in Europe and America for anything like Australia’s green-centrist Teal independents, he concluded.
In a recent column for Sp!ked, an online publication that has championed the closing of the gap between the culture warriors of the left and right, its “libertarian Marxist” founding editor Mick Hume declared that England football coach Gareth Southgate “is the Keir Starmer of football”. We may have to wait until the end of the tournament to find out what that actually means.
