There have been four topics on the news agenda this week: the strikes on Iran; the defeat of the assisted dying bill in the House of Lords; the catastrophic cuts to British international development spending; and the rise of the populist One Nation party in Australia.
Different continents. Different policy domains. Different political cultures.
Yet, I’d argue they reveal the same underlying crisis. Not a crisis of policy, but a crisis of political culture – an inability to handle tragic choices.
Let us start with Iran. The regime has been, since 1979, loathsome, radically anti-Western and has always had the ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz, develop nuclear options and strike the Middle East.
Hawks have tried for decades to make these reasons to attack it. But ultimately, US presidents and their allies held off in favour of a messy containment.
This meant accepting a lesser evil. Iran remained a country which could cause great harm. But the alternative of trying to eliminate it would probably be illegal and would almost certainly make the world poorer, more unstable and more dangerous.
That was the conclusion for almost 50 years. Then, almost a month ago, the US administration followed Israel in rejecting any idea of containment. Extreme paranoia about the actual military threat that Iran could pose was combined with extreme confidence about their capacity to neutralise it.
All the second- and third-order risks were dismissed. What once seemed prudence was dismissed as cowardice. Something fundamental changed.
This same pattern runs through the savage cuts to international development spending. People always felt – reasonably – that our budgets were under pressure and that aid was not always effective (and at times corrupt).
For decades, political leaders acknowledged that there were hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. One pound there could make a hundred times more difference than at home. There were security arguments, soft-power arguments.
So we compromised by spending almost all our money at home, but still reserving less than one per cent of our GDP for international aid.
Even when the UK hit extreme crises – the oil shocks and stagflation of the 1970s, the 2008 financial crisis – that spending continued.
Now Donald Trump has abolished USAID entirely. Keir Starmer has not only failed to reverse cuts to aid, he has deepened them.
The UK is not only spending less on international aid as a proportion than Trump’s USA. It is spending less than any previous UK government since 1970.
All this, as my The Rest Is Politics co-host Alastair Campbell noted on our show this week, with hardly any public outcry.
In the past, leaders were able to defend complicated international policies. They were able to avoid binary choices. Realists and idealists shared a common set of assumptions.
So what happened?
Partly, a breakdown of institutions. This is certainly true internationally. The UN is at risk of financial collapse, leaderless and – with Trump and the Board of Peace – simply swept aside. Nato security guarantees are weaker than ever. EU enlargement is stalling and populist nationalists are circling.
At a national level, all of this is even more extreme. Overseas aid has partly collapsed because two of the national institutions central to its popular appeal in terms of ethics and international solidarity – churches and trade unions – have been weakened.
And it is worse with parliaments and courts. Populism – whether from Trump, Orbán, Reform or One Nation in Australia – is essentially weaponising mistrust and fury at the old institutions.
Some of this anger is justified – see the 2008 financial crisis and the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But for the populists, Parliament, the constitution, human rights protections and courts are seen not as guarantors of democracy but as “woke”, as “enemies of common sense”.
The assisted dying bill fits this pattern in a different way.
Once, the House of Lords would have been regarded as a place for ethical reflection. It would have argued that the elected government can always force its will, but that the Lords has a right to block a private members’ bill which lacks government backing.
Whether or not you accept that argument, the problem is that tolerance for constitutional precedent and parliamentary procedure is now so low, and trust in the Lords so depleted, that the argument cannot get a hearing. A small group of peers, tabling 1,200 amendments, has made it almost impossible to distinguish principled scrutiny from procedural sabotage.
Across all four areas explored in this piece, a similar pattern appears.
What were once understood as political virtues — the capacity to tolerate ambiguity, make long-term arguments, respect institutions and accept lesser evils consciously — are now presented as process, cowardice and evasion. Coercion, punishment and radical action are offered as strength.
But the world hasn’t changed. International development and immigration will always raise tough questions. Assisted dying will always provoke profound conversations about the sanctity of human life and coercion. War will always raise fundamental questions about justice and horror.
Politics is about navigating incommensurable uncertainty – choosing the lesser evils and making the tragic, unpalatable choices.
But we cannot put our faith simply in new individuals. As we often argue on the podcast, we need to rebuild our institutions. These should be based on better electoral systems, on tighter social media rules, on much tougher financing rules, on citizens assemblies, and reform of the House of Lords (and for me the House of Commons too).
And somehow, to reframe these institutions, we need to recover a shared moral space – which might once have been religious, but which might now be focused on secular values, human rights and democracy.
Our laws, institutions and processes exist to balance and protect these, allowing us ultimately to tolerate and even sometimes compromise with people who disagree with us profoundly and even sometimes disagreeably.
This essay was first published in The Rest Is Politics newsletter. For weekly reads like this, sign up here. And for exclusive analysis, thoughtful writing and bonus podcast episodes, become a member of The Rest Is Politics+
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