Power, trade-offs, and governing under constraint
I’ve spent much of the last fifteen years advising ministers and governments on international relations, across different countries and in different capacities. Hard Labour comes out of that experience. It’s about the choices that sit behind foreign policy: what governments are prepared to pay for, what they’re prepared to tell people they’re paying for, and what happens when those two things don’t match. Which, in practice, they rarely do.
It’s a writing project about British foreign policy and about the domestic choices that sit underneath it: procurement, industrial strategy, energy, the question of what Britain actually makes and whether that matters when things get difficult. These are usually treated as separate policy areas run by separate departments but a decision about where to build frigates is a decision about whether Rosyth or Barrow has a future. A decision about offshore wind development is a decision about what leverage Putin has over you in a crisis. But Whitehall doesn’t think about it that way, and mostly neither does the commentary around it.
The project grows out of an essay I wrote for - Hard Labour: Foreign Policy for an Age Without Guarantees - and the first Substack post, Governing Without Illusions, lays out the argument at more length. The territory is broad: America and what the end of pretence about the transatlantic relationship actually means, Europe and the politics of defence, China and why Britain still hasn’t worked out what it wants from that relationship, and the unglamorous question of whether we can still build things domestically when it turns out we need to.
I’m focused on Labour in government because that’s what I know and because there is a tradition in the party, associated more with Attlee and Bevin than with anyone since, that grasped something now largely forgotten: that the welfare state and credible defence were not in competition. They depended on each other. A stable international environment needed hard power and alliances that worked because both sides got something concrete out of them. Bevin understood that. He also understood that the Americans were never in it for sentimental reasons - their commitment to European security always rested on American calculations of American interest. What has changed is not that reality but our ability to pretend otherwise. Trump has made the transactional nature of the relationship impossible to ignore. The next president might be more diplomatic about it. The underlying shift won’t reverse.
Jeremy Corbyn did real damage to Labour’s credibility on the world stage. Keir Starmer had to rebuild it and the caution required was probably the price of winning. But Labour now has a serious majority and the argument I keep coming back to is that the party can afford to be bolder about using it and willing to make choices that involve visible costs and say plainly what those costs are for rather than deferring them, or dressing up avoidance as strategy.
Posts come when I have something worth saying, not to a schedule. If you’re interested in what actually happens when foreign policy runs into fiscal constraints, institutional habits, and the politics of governing with limited room, this might be worth your time.
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