Farage is lying in wait.Britain cannot afford to see Starmer fail Jonathan Freedland

This government must not fail. Let's get that clear from the start. If Keir Starmer does not succeed, too many British voters will conclude that both the traditional parties, Labour and Conservative, have proved useless and that it is time to try something else with that something else being nationalist populism.

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If this Labour government goes down, what comes next will be Faragism, either as a Reform UK-Conservative hybrid or neat and undiluted.

That is what's at stake. For evidence, you need only look at our fellow democracies suffering that precise fate. The US has turned back to Donald Trump, while France is witnessing the slow death of Emmanuel Macron's brand of centrism, as Marine Le Pen stands by. Germany's Social Democratic party-led coalition collapsed last month, and polls show the SPD lagging behind the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Last Thursday, Reform edged ahead of Labour in a survey for the first time - and was only two points behind the Conservatives. Britain enjoys no special immunity from this contagion.

Anyone who fears that prospect has to hope that Labour can somehow buck the anti-incumbent trend, that it can show that at least some of the answers to the woes of 2020s western life lie within the political mainstream. To do that, its chosen remedies have not only to work, in the form of good stats and healthy performance indicators - they have to be felt to work, in the texture of voters' daily lives.