Labour needs to build a renewed common life based on covenant, not contract. The first in a series following the Makerfield by-election.

This essay was published on my substack today.

I. The unravelling

“When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

– TS Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

Everything, everywhere, all at once, seems to be going wrong: social discord, democratic fatigue, economic woes, outsourced and failing public services, a lack of decent work and concern about AI, ecological degradation, large regional disparities, an inability to get houses built, local government strained to breaking point, tense relationships between communities, and a third of children living in relative poverty.

Those who maintained hopes that the 2024 General Election would be the reset we all wanted have been disappointed. Why? Because ‘the fundamentals’ of our political system remain unchanged. More in Common’s 2025 report Shattered Britain shows how this has created a sense of despair – a crisis of trust in political institutions, exhaustion from political instability and cost of living pressures, and rising threat perception.

We should not despair. I find it a deep privilege not just to be a legislator, but to work on behalf of the people and place that I represent. North Northumberland is the most beautiful part of the country. As I visit different parts of the world, for all their beauty and wonder, I never get tired of eyes lighting up when I tell them that I am the Member of Parliament who gets to represent North Northumberland.

I’ll be posting the rest of this essay in the coming weeks. Don’t miss out:

I have such hope for its future and, for however long I can represent it, I want to help steward it well. It should be a great place to grow up in, grow old in, to raise a family, a place of good work, and a place of community. My hope for North Northumberland also grows into hope for the nation. The good that is found here – and many other good things beside – are found all over our country. Many people feel that same love for their place, their work, and their people, but they do not always feel hope in our common story. Our national psychology is at present strikingly pessimistic.

Our Labour government was elected, in part, in the hope of a return to a more stable, ‘business-as-usual’ approach. We’ve done some positive and very necessary things. We saved, and are now nationalising, British Steel – a bold decision based on the reality that some parts of our economy are too important to be left to the international markets. We have reduced NHS waiting lists, showing that with the right investment and leadership a public health system can work. We have banned Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions (the single biggest cause of people becoming homeless). We are bringing down migration, promoting cohesion, and investing in neighbourhoods that have been left behind.

We should not despair.

But all this is not enough – so far, we’ve managed changes at the margins, when voters are increasingly impatient to break out of the perceived doom loop of a whole system that doesn’t deliver. The only politicians many will now listen to are those lashing out at the failures of the system – even when many of those same politicians are the ones who built that very system. Populisms of the left and the right offer compelling stories – simple answers to complex problems. Meanwhile, the Labour Party contemplates the fate of social democratic parties across Europe. If your only vision is a more effective state, but the state itself is now distrusted, then you are unlikely to receive public support.

However, it is incumbent on us to remember that the difficulties of the Labour Party – or any other party – is not the problem. Nor is all this a matter of perception, as if we could find our way out of this predicament by being better at communicating our achievements. We could line up dozens of good policies introduced by this government, yet the backdrop of a country frustrated by a sluggish economy that is leaving many communities behind would remain. This has left a sense of national alienation and fracture.

Whoever leads the Labour Party and the country, to govern well in the middle decades of this century requires that we understand what has gone wrong and why. It is deeper than policies and personalities. We are in the middle of a national breakdown of morale and a loss of belonging, brought about by fractures in the economy, state, and society.

If your only vision is a more effective state, but the state itself is now distrusted, then you are unlikely to receive public support.

II. The fractures of economy, state and society

The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that we are each like a letter in a book: alone, we have no meaning, but joined together in families, communities, and nations, we become part of a shared story. His point was simple and profound: life must be lived with reference to one another. But people now feel that there is no book. There is no confident national story in which they can understand their place. We must understand that this is to do with a failure of leadership across the domains of economy, state and society.

In 1950, services accounted for around 50% of total output in the UK – now they make up more than 80%. De-industrialisation and the shift to a service economy left whole regions with insufficiently stable work, degraded civic infrastructure and – importantly – diminished esteem. We have allowed and encouraged this drift, with no vision of what a strong and inclusive economy would look like. Bereft of better ideas, Westminster has largely been in the business of offering more or less generous palliatives via welfare, paid for in the main by the lopsided success of London and the Southeast. A large part of the New Labour answer to this was to encourage young people to enter the ‘knowledge economy’. (Those same voices now advise us to enthusiastically embrace the technology that will replace whole swathes of the knowledge economy.)

Now is a time for vision and leadership, but no-one seems to be grappling with issues as they are. We have allowed our industrial base to shrink, leaving us incredibly vulnerable to the technological wave that is now building (and an inability to meet other national priorities around security). There is a state version of this problem. People have a sense that the state is now incapable of rising to their priorities. Whether it is meeting house building targets, securing borders, or tackling crime, people see failure and powerlessness. Some of this is, no doubt, a matter of perception and the narratives of bad faith actors, but much is not.

‘People have a sense that the state is now incapable of rising to their priorities.’

Massive outsourcing – which began in the 1980s but has continued under Labour governments – has produced a system which is oriented not towards the best public outcomes, but to the enrichment of shareholders, without elevating real competition or supercharging investment. There are myriad examples, but consider the cost of children’s residential care. The National Audit Office found that councils on average spent £318,400 on each child placed in a children’s home in the year ending March 2024. It’s the worst of worlds, with services that are high cost and low quality – a dysfunctional market system.

We used to talk about welfare paternalism, but this is no longer an appropriate metaphor; the state doesn’t feel like a mother or father, but a teenager on minimum wage not doing their job because they’re too ensconced in their mobile phone.

Meanwhile, there is also a social – even moral – version of this fragmentation which we have ignored, if not exacerbated. Trades unions, pubs, family farms, churches, high street shops, local associations have declined. Mobility and personal advancement have been prioritised over community. Multiculturalism, for all its achievements, ignored the need to create a genuinely common life. The family has suffered, to the detriment of millions of young lives, and now birth rates are at historic lows. Public policy has tended to treat citizens as consumers served by a centralised, transactional state, reinforcing individual entitlement rather than mutual responsibility. We have championed personal freedom at the expense of the relationships and institutions that sustain a common life.

We have been told that this – the way of combined social and economic liberalism – is the only politics that fits the modern world. But now the public are rejecting that consensus, and it is being severely tested by events.

This is not an analysis that belongs to the political left or the right, but to anyone sensitive to the actual reality of life in the United Kingdom in 2026. We are a discouraged, cynical, tired, and dis-United Kingdom. This is not Cool Britannia but a Sad Britannia, expressed not by brash Britpop or the confident and colourful Olympic opening ceremony but by Cold War Steve and Sam Fender, whose tragic song Seventeen Going Under about alienation and decay in the post-industrial North-East was one of the smash hits of 2021.

III. Liberalism really did fail us

For nearly half a century, our leaders’ political imagination has been shaped by different shades of the same creed. An economic liberalism that holds that the rational decisions of participants in a free market will produce the best outcomes, and a social liberalism that argues that the individual is sovereign, and that the state should in turn support and promote individual freedom. The political right has led with economic liberalism, and the political left with social liberalism. They have mixed and matched these creeds in what amounted to a second post-war consensus – sometimes a slightly smaller state, sometimes a slightly larger one, but all the while operating with a view to freedom, of a kind.

The consensus has made us ‘free’, it has even made some of us wealthier – and it has experienced a degree of popularity. Now it is rejected by a growing number of voters on the left and the right and we ought to ask why. Is it that they’ve ‘never had it so good’, but haven’t realised? Or is it that they recognise the failures and fractures of the liberal political economy, and too many inside the liberal political consensus have not?

There is a moral complaint against what some have called double liberalism. It equates freedom with detachment: detachment from place, from inherited norms, and from one another. The market-oriented Right and the socially progressive Left have both acted as if the individual is most free when least encumbered by obligation or belonging, when free will is paramount over all other considerations – take the recent debate over assisted suicide, for example.

Thatcher’s comment, ‘there is no such thing as society’, was darkly prophetic, and many have colluded in the long process of making it a reality. The pursuit of personal liberation and consumer choice has in fact bred conformity, isolation, and now political fracture.

But there is also a practical complaint to be made against it – that it does not work, or at least when unfettered it becomes victim to its contradictions. There is freedom of conscience, but only when you think the right thing – and so a free society becomes socially coercive. There is freedom of capital – but only for the rich – and so a free society is unable to redress the power of wealth to beget wealth. There is freedom of movement, but particularly to ease the supply of labour – with the result of a divided and anxious society. Are we really surprised that the liberal political centre is being attacked from all sides?

The question now is, what is the politics that is fit for this moment? What statecraft can bear the weight of the unresolved failures of the past, and the complexities of the present, but the uncertainty of the future?

***

The stranger in Eliot’s poem asks the kind of deep question which we should be asking. What is the meaning of this city? Do we huddle close together because we love each other – or merely to make money from each other?

For half a century, we have given the wrong answer.

The temptation, for Labour especially, is to think the task is to merely reset the social contract: fix the state, deliver the services, restore trust in institutions. Necessary, but not sufficient. The social contract was always a limited idea. A contract is transactional. It defines what the state owes the citizen and what the citizen owes the state. It is enforced, not lived. And when the state struggles to deliver, as it does now, the contract collapses, and there is nothing underneath it.

But there is another vision: ‘covenant’. A covenant is different. A covenant is not a transaction but a commitment — to one another, not just to the state. It begins not with rights and entitlements but with belonging: the recognition that we are bound together, that we need each other, that the common good is everyone’s business. You cannot opt out of a covenant the way you can cancel a contract.

It is the difference between a society of customers and a society of members.

That is what we need to build. Not a better-managed state delivering services to individuals but a renewed common life, rooted in places, families, institutions, and shared responsibility. The posts that follow try to sketch what that looks like in practice.