Robin Ashenden

Does anyone still talk about Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who died 30 years ago today? Though the Labour party often seems keen to forget a leader who won – almost uniquely – four out of five elections, he was, perhaps more than anyone, the prime minister who ushered in the modern age.  When he stood in the general election of 1964, he was widely billed as a moderniser. Up against Tory Alec Douglas-Home – the grouse-shooting Old Etonian Earl, who described the old age pension as ‘donations’ to the elderly and had used matchsticks to understand economics – Wilson seemed like the dawning of a new age.

Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades.

To no one's surprise, this week's election results make miserable reading for the Tories, and the attacks on Kemi Badenoch have now begun. In an article in The Spectator, William Atkinson lambasts her as ‘an active barrier to the party’s saving itself,’ adding that she ‘had her chance to prove herself and has been found wanting.’  Meanwhile, there are stories in the press of senior Tories angling for her close rival, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, to take over as head of the Conservatives. Badenoch herself was prepared for this, declaring in advance that the results would be ‘challenging’ but denying they would be a comment on her leadership: ‘We had a historic defeat last year, and it’s going to take some time for us to get back on track.

As the Birmingham binmen’s strike, full on since 11 March, grinds well into its second month, there is talk of similar action spreading nationwide. A crop of lurid headlines have been appearing in the press: ‘My Mercedes was destroyed by rats’, exclaims the Daily Telegraph, while the Daily Star announces that ‘Psycho seagulls and super rats team up to spread disease in Birmingham trash mountains.’ Residents, meanwhile, have begun to complain about marauding urban foxes, and of infestations of cockroaches and ‘rats as big as cats.’ With Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner calling in the army to help with the crisis, there is, as so often with Keir Starmer's government, a sense of déjà vu: such scenes recall the darkest days of the 1970s.

The government’s recent, palpable turn to the right seems to be gaining pace. In the past few weeks, Keir Starmer has slashed overseas aid, proposed a radical downsizing of the civil service, abolished NHS England and vowed to make serious cuts to welfare. As the Labour left pick up their weapons and prepare to do battle, conservative commentators are lauding the Prime Minister as being ‘to the Right of the Tories’ and cheering him on.  For all his quiet bonhomie, Callaghan never flinched from levelling with the public when it counted The situation calls to mind an earlier Labour prime minister who died exactly 20 years ago today and took his government in a similar direction: Jim Callaghan.

Has there been a more cataclysmic year than 2025 for US-Europe relations? It started with US Vice President J.D. Vance’s ‘sermon’ to EU leaders at the Munich security conference last month – in which he berated Western Europe for its policies on immigration and free speech. The year so far has also taken in the danger of the Nato alliance falling apart after 76 years of peace in Western Europe, with the White House apparently tilting towards Russia and Trump demanding that members of the alliance such as Germany, France and the UK massively up their defence spending. This week, as the Trump regime imposes tariffs on Europe and Europe responds in kind, we’ve even seen the rumblings of a fully-fledged trade war.

Is Britain going back to the 1970s? Even under the Conservatives in 2022, the Financial Times was warning we were in danger of reliving that ‘relentlessly awful decade’. Since Starmer’s accession to power, the similarities have become only clearer.   Millionaire hotelier Rocco Forte drew the same comparison in the autumn, saying we’d ‘come full circle’ and that the new Labour government was ‘doing a lot based on socialism, but not a lot on common sense'. 'They talk about growth, but everything they’re doing is anti-growth,’ he added. Broadsheet newspapers warn us that the return to 'stagflation' – that perilous mash-up of high inflation and stalling development – is taking us right back to the dismal era of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan.

Those whose mouths have been left hanging open by Donald Trump’s pivot towards Russia in the past fortnight, and the ruthlessness with which the Ukrainians (and Europe) have been thrust off the stage, haven’t been paying attention. The love-in between the two leaders has been going on now for a decade. It started properly in 2015, when the foreplay between the two ‘strongmen’ was conducted, like so many great flirtations, at a coy distance. Trump told CBS network he and Putin would ‘probably get along… very well,’ while Putin, to show willing, responded that Trump was ‘a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt.

Things are currently looking choppy for Kemi Badenoch. Polls last weekend were bad enough, seven of them showing Reform leading the Conservatives by a point. But now it seems this gap may have widened dramatically. A poll on Thursday showed Reform pushing the Tories in to third place, with Farage’s party on 25 per cent and the Conservatives trailing on 22 per cent. It’s when Kemi speaks from her own experience that a gap between the Conservatives and Reform seems to open up ‘The message that’s coming from this is very, very clear,’ Farage has crowed. ‘Not only do we have momentum but if you want to beat Labour, if you want to get them out at the next general election, don't waste your vote with the Conservatives.

As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the audience, are a horrible echo from history, almost unimaginable a few decades ago. At Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote, nothing was morally clearcut Much of this may be due to demographic change, as sworn enemies of Israel migrate in large numbers to the West.