Tom Clark
Regarding oneself as apolitical is itself a political position, and in Britain it’s very often been a winning one, too. “I’d vote for anything that was broadly sensible” explains one newly-former Conservative to Gaby Hinsliff on p20. Quite a swath of a nation that used to be known for moderation as well as reserve continues to feel the same way. And yet the days of the “what counts is what works” pitch of David Cameron, Tony Blair, and long before them Harold Macmillan, suddenly seem to belong to another world. The autumn conference season saw the Labour Party move from a social democratic programme towards a more thoroughly socialist one, and a new absolutism creep even into the programme of the Liberal Democrats, with their new pledge to revoke Brexit without bothering to rerun and reverse the 2016 referendum.