The plan to generate revenue from areas currently used by the public is causing bitter dispute, and raises fundamental questions

In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.

The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The mood at the Reform conference was volatile and brittle. But the forces massing further to the right of the party are testament to its impact

For much of the time since Nigel Farage resumed the Reform UK leadership two long years ago, his party has been an island of relative stability in the increasingly rough sea of British politics. While other parties plunged queasily in the polls, messily purged dissidents, argued publicly about their direction and changed leaders, Farage dominated Reform UK and gave impregnably self-assured interviews. The party’s popularity moved steadily upwards, comfortably above that of all the others.

It is a paradox that a new party with wildly expectant members, not many experienced politicians and few properly worked-out policies became the pole around which the country’s political debate revolved, and yet this seemed to do no harm to Reform’s chances of winning the next general election. As with rising rightwing populist parties across the world, Reform’s tendency to make it up as it went along appeared to be not a weakness but, for many voters, much of its appeal.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

A scandal-besieged Reform still has a loyal base that won’t budge. That should free up the PM to deliver some home truths

Despite the bright start to Andy Burnham’s premiership, and Reform UK’s sudden disarray, a shadow still hangs over British centre-left politics. Labour has a small poll lead, a cautious air of confidence and a leader who seems energised rather than overwhelmed by trying to solve the country’s problems. Meanwhile, Reform is having a terrible 2026: mired in deepening funding scandals, losing winnable byelections and, thanks to the drama and novelty of Burnham’s leadership coup and new government, no longer the freshest story around.

Yet Reform UK’s support has either held up or fallen only slightly in most polls since Burnham entered Downing Street. Even in the Makerfield byelection, where he beat it more decisively than expected, Reform’s vote share and total support actually rose. Nigel Farage may have spent the year uncharacteristically avoiding journalists, or in his prickly rather than jolly public mode, but the overwhelming majority of Reform supporters, almost a quarter of the electorate, remain faithful. “Power is within our grasp!” insisted Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, at its party conference in Birmingham on Friday, and they applauded with determined gusto.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Weather forecasts once gave Britons something safe to chat about. Not any more, and that’s a problem for the experts – indeed, for all of us

In this fragmented but supposedly mild country, watching and talking about the weather forecast is meant to be a reassuring, unifying activity. Collectively, we have created and maintained a national climate narrative of small disappointments and pleasures. The first weather forecaster to appear on British TV, George Cowling, made his debut on the BBC in January 1954, predicting that “tomorrow would be rather windy”, but “a good day to hang out the washing”. For most of the 72 years since, such brief, carefully calibrated broadcasts have provided people from Aberdeen to Penzance with practical information, small talk and minor grumbles about essentially the same situation: living in a country where the weather is constantly changing, in a paradoxically unchanging way.

Yet like the traditional British climate, that common weather culture may now be evaporating. “Met Office considers issuing red ‘extreme heat warning’ across Britain while nation enjoys ‘incredible summer’,” said the headline above the forecast on the GB News website on Monday, caught between terror and delight at the latest heatwave. As the climate crisis has affected this country in more and more unmistakable but uneven ways, TV weather forecasters have increasingly struggled to find the right language to describe this transformation’s daily consequences. Their struggle influences and exemplifies that of many Britons to understand, and work out what we think about, the apparent end of the weather patterns we expected to shape our whole lives.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The prime minister’s instinct to not upset people is set against a lifelong desire to effect transformative change. The two may not sit together easily

Andy Burnham has always liked to be liked. Studying at secondary school near Liverpool in the 1980s, he writes in his autobiography and manifesto, Head North, “involved me walking something of a tightrope. Because of my mum and dad’s insistence that I should aim for university, I would largely try to keep up to date with my work. But … I realised I could often make the class laugh and that won me credit with the in-crowd. It was hard to be both a good student and one of the lads.”

As the new leader of a divided country, he is still trying to appeal to opposing interests while establishing his own, upbeat brand. “Let’s build a new national sense of unity, of common purpose and positivity,” he said in his first speech outside 10 Downing Street. After a post-Brexit decade dominated by angry rightwing politics, Labour infighting, never-ending culture wars and online acrimony, Burnham’s affable, seemingly inclusive politics has a strong initial appeal. This week, for the first time in 18 months, Labour is ahead of Reform UK in the polls. It’s possible that some voters have finally had enough of divisive politics and would like to try something different.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

At the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre broke new ground in selling readers an angry rightwing perspective. Today, most of Fleet Street is run by his disciples

In 1986, 131 years after the Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor, Max Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper’s nature and purpose. “The Daily Telegraph is … ‘nice’,” he said, “in the business of reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable.” He went on: “We are not a strident campaigning newspaper – our business each day is to seek to give our readers the fullest possible information about what is happening in the world, and to suggest what it might mean.”

In practice, under Hastings and many other Telegraph editors, this ethos produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism: often focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition, the pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as foxhunting and gardening, the interests of farmers and retired military men – and cautionary tales about more reckless lives gone wrong, often presented through enjoyably detailed reports from the divorce courts. The Torygraph, as many non-readers called it, could be inward-looking and “numbingly dull”, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the historian of British conservatism, but it was “thoroughly respectable”. Many of its most renowned figures, such as Hastings’s predecessor as editor, Bill Deedes, were “mildness itself”.

Any boost for the military will be paid for by cuts elsewhere. Britain’s new PM should be careful he is not being sold a pup

For many British voters, politicians and journalists, public spending has had a bad name since the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher’s government began its long campaign to tame the supposedly bloated state. From this perspective, the public sector wastes money, commissions unnecessary or out-of-date projects and generates endless jargon and reasons for its own existence, while delivering strikingly fewer social or economic benefits.

Constant public and private lobbying for more funds from every minister, this argument continues, has helped make the job of prime minister impossible, and raised taxes and government debt to intolerable levels. Therefore the state requires a fundamental rethink – which means its sense of entitlement needs to shrink.

Whenever major reform is proposed the media, big business and Westminster quickly conclude it’s too expensive and disruptive. This doesn’t bode well for Andy Burnham

In an old, often anxious and conservative country, the perception of risk is a potent political weapon. If a policy or a project for reforming the UK seems too risky, or can be made to seem so by its opponents, then it can usually be quickly killed off. It can be added to the pile of possible futures that never occurred.

In politics as in life, riskiness is sometimes real. To see that Brexit or Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not end well did not require huge foresight. Yet often the perception of risk is politically constructed: a reflection of powerful forces, their self-interest, and what they do or don’t want to happen.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The Makerfield MP’s surge towards No 10 is a seductive ad for the power of positive politics. How long that proves effective depends on his next moves

The creation of hope is a vital but risky part of democratic politics. Leaders or would-be leaders who arouse hope attract supporters, motivate activists, achieve momentum and win over voters – and then have a chance of holding together political parties, governments and societies in harder times. From Barack Obama to Clement Attlee, Salvador Allende to Zohran Mamdani, leaders from across the left in particular have heavily relied on hope to launch and sustain their ruling projects.

Meanwhile, an absence of hope has quickly doomed other left of centre governments. Keir Starmer’s decision, only eight weeks into his premiership, to summon the media to the Downing Street garden and tell them that “things will get worse before they get better” in the UK was a mistake from which his administration never recovered. In a society where most lives have been getting harder since the 2008 financial crisis, Starmer’s downbeat manner, however justified by the deep problems he inherited from the Tories, was not an emotional register that much of the electorate desired.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Austerity has benefitted bond traders but impoverished British society and led to the rise of populism. Is it right that we carry on adhering to their interests?

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

History shows there have been more short-lived Labour governments than long-lasting ones. The party must secure a clear, progressive legacy

In democratic countries at least, government is often about getting things done in time. Sooner or later, voters always turn on national leaders and governments fall. Even the most promising policy ideas are left unfulfilled.

With one important exception, this life cycle is usually briefer for Labour governments, since they face more opposition from the media and powerful economic interests, and more suspicion from voters as a result. Despite the party winning three times as many big electoral majorities as the Conservatives over the past 30 years, Labour governments are still seen as unnatural by many people, both outside and inside the party. And without an assumed right to rule, governments age fast.

As Trump lurches from tariffs to wars and Farage makes unrealistic pledges about immigration, their impunity needs to end

Rightwing populists always promise they will get things done when they get into power. Immigration will be halted. Government waste will be eradicated. Traditional values will be revived. National decline will be halted. National greatness will be restored. Relations with the outside world will be redrawn.

Great tasks that, for decades, have been beyond the capability and will of conventional, compromising politicians will be accomplished – and fast. Populist governments will respond decisively to voters’ accumulated frustrations, cut through bureaucracy, and avoid the delays, U-turns and half-finished projects that usually blight democracies. The business of government will be straightforward and highly productive – even heroic – rather than complicated and disappointing.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

In Mexico and Spain, leaders who have capped public costs have been rewarded at the ballot box. As another cost of living surge arrives, it may be a policy our leaders are unable to resist

Politicians are not supposed to meddle with prices. Even though much of politics is about whether voters can afford things – especially in an era of recurring inflationary shocks – ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s planned economy four decades ago, the orthodoxy across much of the world has been that only markets should decide what things cost.

As the hugely influential Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argued, in a complex modern society, information is too dispersed among potential sellers and buyers of goods or services for government to make informed and correct decisions about the prices of those goods. Hence, his disciples say, the inefficiency of state-run economies, from post-colonial Africa to the eastern bloc.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Tribalism and political ambiguity worked with a less fragmented electorate. The party must reconnect with its base – and be open to work with other progressives

Led by a probably doomed prime minister, presiding over a struggling economy, exposed by an ongoing scandal, besieged by populist insurgents to its right and left, ambushed by a war that will bring higher inflation and public debt, and predicted to win just 75 seats at the next general election, according to the website Electoral Calculus, Labour is in an unprecedented crisis. The party will have to do unprecedented things to get out of it.

One could be making its political approach both narrower and more expansive. This would require Labour to drop habits and orthodoxies which have become ingrained since the 1980s.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

A former New Labour minister tackles the question of our times with rigour and verve – but blindspots remain

At first glance, the former New Labour minister Liam Byrne is not the ideal person to explain the rise of rightwing populism in Britain and beyond, and how it might be stopped. At the end of Gordon Brown’s government in 2010, Byrne infamously wrote a one-line letter to whoever would succeed him as chief secretary to the Treasury: “I’m afraid there is no money.” Both friendly advice and an inside joke, these words were used for years by the Tories and Lib Dems to justify their austerity policies – and were arguably one of the causes of the modern disillusionment with conventional politicians. This loss of faith, and the damage to society and public services from austerity, have fuelled populism ever since.

Byrne’s short but ambitious book is, in a sense, his attempt to make amends. Yet some of the arguments and evidence he presents, in quick, confident sentences which fit his past reputation as a clever but impatient minister, are unlikely to persuade many people that he is thinking afresh. He often cites and echoes centrist authorities such as the Tony Blair Institute and Keir Starmer’s former advisers Claire Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, who have all long said that the way to defeat populism is to respect its supporters, however rightwing. Given that Reform UK has surged ahead in the polls, while Labour is regarded by most populist voters with contempt, this deference seems a dead end.

Populists blame an ever-expanding list of enemies for social ills – many of which are in fact caused by changes in our habits and social norms

One of the great strengths of populism, in all its rightwing and leftwing varieties, is its readiness to blame people. When democracies are discontented, as most are now, the old early 21st-century politics of relative consensus and moderation is seen by many voters as insincere and inadequate, as many unpopular centrist leaders have discovered. Societies are always divided between clashing interests, especially under the current, ultracompetitive version of capitalism, and populism recognises that. In some ways, it is more honest than conventional politics.

But only in some. Rightwing populism in particular relies on an ever-expanding list of enemies – from urban elites to benefit claimants, immigrants to deep-state bureaucrats, diversity officers to leftwing radicals, net zero “zealots” to mild liberals – yet this list always contains a striking omission. In Britain as in other countries, many of the social trends that rightwing populists and their supporters say they hate, and want to reverse, are partly being driven by populist voters themselves.

This dominant tradition in the party has long insisted on appeasing powerful interests. But it’s unsuited to modern times

Labour is a more complicated political party than most. For over a century, it has tried to contain warring traditions, philosophies and factions. Internal disagreements have been driven not just by personal rivalries, but by profound differences about how, and how much, to challenge Britain’s deeply embedded arrangements of power and wealth.

The party’s current crisis, while most directly caused by Keir Starmer’s political shortcomings and the chillingly selective morality of Peter Mandelson, is really the result of one Labour tradition demonstrably failing in government to meet the needs of today’s world. Often dominant in the party, especially over the past 40 years, you could call that tradition Labour minimalism.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Pre-2008, voters with prosperous and improving lives didn’t mind being excluded from the conversation. Those days are over

Who was the last politician you listened to for any length of time? Perhaps it was Andy Burnham or Zack Polanski. Or maybe it was Wes Streeting, Nigel Farage or Zarah Sultana. Perhaps your dark secret is that it was Donald Trump.

One thing these politicians have in common is that they are all unusually good communicators. From Farage’s drawling provocations to Polanski’s pithy directness, Sultana’s concentrated blasts of outrage to Trump’s mesmerising ramblings, they compel you to listen. The completely forgettable passages that voters across western democracies have associated with political speech for decades are largely absent.

Since the end of the second world war, all eyes have been on Russia. Yet Trump’s increasingly erratic, hostile presidency is shattering old assumptions

One of the things that the depleted, often denigrated British state is still pretty good at is persuading the public that another country is a threat. As a small, warlike island next to a much larger land mass, Britain has had centuries of practice at cultivating its own sense of foreboding. Arguably, preparing for conflict with some part of the outside world is our natural mindset.

Warnings about potential enemy countries are spread by our prime ministers and major political parties, intelligence services and civil servants, serving and retired military officers, defence and foreign affairs thinktanks, and journalists from the right and the left. Sometimes, the process is relatively subtle and covert: reporters or MPs are given off-the-record briefings about our “national security” – a potently imprecise term – facing a new threat.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

The conventions and rituals that define the way we do politics rapidly eroded this year – setting the UK on a course into the unknown

Was this the year that British democracy as we have known it began to turn into something else? Politicians, voters and journalists have made this claim before – when their side has been out of power for a long while, or when an elected government has been unusually dictatorial – and their warnings have usually been overstated. But this time the evidence of a fundamental shift away from a century-old status quo seems stronger.

Familiar landmarks have disappeared: Labour and Tory dominance, two-party electoral contests, the decisive power of a big Westminster majority, the patience voters usually show towards a new government, the predictable pendulum swing between right and left, the red lines between mainstream and extreme politics and even the central role of parliament.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

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