Author Archives: Tom Reeve

Two-thirds of the British public believe that ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth. That figure has risen ten percentage points since 2019. Trust in government is at record lows. Dissatisfaction with the NHS, with social care, with housing, with the basic functioning of the state, is at or near levels never previously recorded in four decades of the British Social Attitudes survey.

And yet support for more welfare spending has fallen to its lowest point since the survey began. Read those two facts together. The public is not saying the system is fine. It is saying the fixes on offer do not work. People have lost faith not in the idea of fairness but in the instruments that are supposed to deliver it. They are ready for a different argument. They are waiting for someone to say: the economy is a human-made system, and we can remake it.

So where are the Liberal Democrats?

I would like to introduce you to the Overtons. You will know them. They are in every policy working group, every conference fringe, every strategy call. They are the people who hear a proposal for genuine economic reform and say “that’s outside the Overton window” as if they have ended the argument rather than ducked it. They treat the boundaries of current political acceptability as load-bearing walls, when in fact they are furniture, and we are allowed to move them.

The Overtons are not bad people. They think they are being strategic. They think they are protecting the party from looking extreme. But they are reading the room they were in ten years ago. The public has moved. The Overtons have not noticed.

You can see where the energy is going. Reform UK is growing because it tells people the system is broken and someone is to blame. The Greens are growing because they tell people the system is broken and it can be rebuilt. Both of these parties, from opposite directions, are saying something the Liberal Democrats will not say: that the current economic settlement is a choice, not a fact of nature, and different choices are available.

The Overtons will tell you this is dangerous territory. They have three favourite objections. The first is that the economy is too complex to redesign, which is another way of saying we should leave it to the people who designed the current version. The second is that any serious challenge to market orthodoxy is socialism, and socialism does not work, as if the only two options are the status quo and the Soviet Union. 

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Yesterday, Keir Starmer faced Parliament to explain how a man who failed his security vetting ended up as Britain’s most important ambassador. It is a question worth asking. But there is a deeper one beneath it: how does a prime minister who presents himself as the cautious, process-respecting antidote to Conservative chaos keep finding himself in exactly these situations?

The Mandelson affair is, in miniature, the story of this government. A political decision was taken — to appoint a Labour grandee to a high-profile role. Warnings existed. Red flags had been raised. The vetting process that was supposed to filter out exactly these problems produced a recommendation to deny clearance. And yet the appointment went ahead, with civil servants apparently acting on the understanding that the prime minister wanted it to happen. When it collapsed, spectacularly, Starmer said he was furious he hadn’t been told. The civil servant who overrode the vetting was sacked. The prime minister, once again, was the victim of events – or was he?

There is a moment, presumably, just before the engines ignite, when even the most committed astronaut thinks: what on earth am I doing? But then, if they take a moment to look out of the portal at what is happening on the surface of this ball of rock and water we call home – well, who can fault them for wanting to get as far away as possible?

Four astronauts left Earth yesterday, climbing aboard what is, in engineering terms, a controlled explosion and trusting it to hurl them away from the planet at speeds no living thing was designed to tolerate. You could call it brave or foolish. But consider the alternative. They could have stayed. They could have watched the climate data worsen quarter by quarter while the machinery of international response grinds and stalls. They could have followed the wars – the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities, the devastation in Gaza, death and destruction in Iran, chaos in the Straits of Hormuz and more – and felt that familiar mixture of horror and helplessness. They could have watched democracy, that fragile and still-young experiment, being stress-tested by autocrats in countries big and small.

Strapped to a rocket for a journey further from Earth than any human has ever gone before, suddenly, looks sensible.

I imagine that what they will find up there is not escape. Not safety. Something closer to its opposite.

From orbit, Earth looks like a thought someone had and then left out in the dark. A thin blue film stretched over rock and water, suspended in a universe that is almost entirely lethal. No atmosphere. No liquid water. No margin for error. The cosmos does not negotiate, does not hold summits, does not issue statements of concern. It simply is – vast, indifferent, and hostile to everything we are made of.

Astronauts who have seen this tend to describe the same thing. Not relief at the distance, but a kind of vertigo at the stakes. The overview effect, as it has come to be known, is the sudden, visceral understanding that borders are invisible from up there, that conflicts look like nothing against the curvature of a planet, and that the arguments consuming us – which party, which nation, which version of the future – are being conducted on a single, fragile, irreplaceable rock.