690 words: 5-minute read
As far as political opinions go it’s generally believed that we get more conservative, more reactionary, as we get older.
It’s less often recognised that sometimes we stay the same, politically speaking, and what changes is everything around us.
That’s the gist of this letter from Dr Stephen Watkins of Oldham, Lancashire (and many thanks to son Patch for spotting it!).
As far as political opinions go it’s generally believed that we get more conservative, more reactionary, as we get older.
It’s less often recognised that sometimes we stay the same, politically speaking, and what changes is everything around us.
That’s the gist of this letter from Dr Stephen Watkins of Oldham, Lancashire (and many thanks to son Patch for spotting it!).
Watkins is pointing out that progressive taxation, earned privilege, public service and a welfare state were so much the centre of political gravity in the early 1960s that they were the unquestioned bedrock of Harold Macmillan’s conservative politics. What’s moved, he says, is not him but the Overton Window.
I used to give lectures to University students on political ideologies - liberalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, conservatism, ecologism. That sort of thing.
Once, when I was casting around for a way of locating the heart of English conservatism for students, I came across this snippet of a speech by the then Prime Minister John Major to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22nd April 1993.
This is what he said:
‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’.
This is brilliant.
In a handful of redolent words Major sums up English conservatism perfectly, locating England’s future in a mythical past, which most likely never existed but which has settled status in the country’s cultural repertoire.
In an idle moment the other day I came across another snippet of a speech given by a major UK politician. It ran like this:
‘People like this – they are the real face of Britain, painting a fence, running a raffle, cutting the half-time orange, or even just that gentle knock on the door that checks your neighbour is alright ... that’s real Britain.’
Who was this, I wondered? The similarity with Major’s 1993 speech was uncanny. So surely a conservative politician - current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch perhaps?
But no, this was UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer ransacking the conservative cupboard of myths and legends for ways of articulating his latest wheeze for confronting the extreme right-wing challenge of the Reform Party: a pot-pourri patriotism. This was a key moment in his address to the Labour Party Conference on 30th September 2025, saved up for the rousing moments at the end of his speech.
The position of the Overton Window isn’t like the law of gravity, unavoidable, ineluctable. It’s the result of political decisions taken by a succession of politicians over the past 45 years or so which have resulted in 1960s Tory voters looking like lefty radicals today. These politicians have effectively robbed us - in the UK at least - of a whole political repertoire by making it appear outrageous, extreme, impossible.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government in Spain, for example, offers a polar opposite option to Starmer. And in the UK itself, there’s the Green Party and the nascent Your Party to the left of Starmer.
The rightward drift of the Overton Window wouldn’t have been possible without actual flesh-and-blood human beings taking it there. The roll-call of shame on the left is long and depressing, and thinking through it makes one want to jump out of an actual window. So many missed opportunities, so many high expectations betrayed.
High up on the list we will surely find the current Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
Here she is in 2014 at an outdoor meeting shouting that Israel’s ‘killing of children and bombing of schools and hospitals must be condemned’, and ‘we will not be silent until the Palestinians are free’.
And here she is in 2025 granting police forces powers to put conditions on ‘repeat protests’ as the government doubles down on the repression of pro-Palestine protest - of exactly the sort she supported in 2014.
It’s moot here whether it’s Mahmood or the frame of reference that’s shifted. The fact is that the blackout has been pulled down on Overton’s window and protesting genocide can land you in prison for up to 14 years.
I used to give lectures to University students on political ideologies - liberalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, conservatism, ecologism. That sort of thing.
Once, when I was casting around for a way of locating the heart of English conservatism for students, I came across this snippet of a speech by the then Prime Minister John Major to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22nd April 1993.
This is what he said:
‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’.
This is brilliant.
In a handful of redolent words Major sums up English conservatism perfectly, locating England’s future in a mythical past, which most likely never existed but which has settled status in the country’s cultural repertoire.
In an idle moment the other day I came across another snippet of a speech given by a major UK politician. It ran like this:
‘People like this – they are the real face of Britain, painting a fence, running a raffle, cutting the half-time orange, or even just that gentle knock on the door that checks your neighbour is alright ... that’s real Britain.’
Who was this, I wondered? The similarity with Major’s 1993 speech was uncanny. So surely a conservative politician - current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch perhaps?
But no, this was UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer ransacking the conservative cupboard of myths and legends for ways of articulating his latest wheeze for confronting the extreme right-wing challenge of the Reform Party: a pot-pourri patriotism. This was a key moment in his address to the Labour Party Conference on 30th September 2025, saved up for the rousing moments at the end of his speech.
The position of the Overton Window isn’t like the law of gravity, unavoidable, ineluctable. It’s the result of political decisions taken by a succession of politicians over the past 45 years or so which have resulted in 1960s Tory voters looking like lefty radicals today. These politicians have effectively robbed us - in the UK at least - of a whole political repertoire by making it appear outrageous, extreme, impossible.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government in Spain, for example, offers a polar opposite option to Starmer. And in the UK itself, there’s the Green Party and the nascent Your Party to the left of Starmer.
The rightward drift of the Overton Window wouldn’t have been possible without actual flesh-and-blood human beings taking it there. The roll-call of shame on the left is long and depressing, and thinking through it makes one want to jump out of an actual window. So many missed opportunities, so many high expectations betrayed.
High up on the list we will surely find the current Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
Here she is in 2014 at an outdoor meeting shouting that Israel’s ‘killing of children and bombing of schools and hospitals must be condemned’, and ‘we will not be silent until the Palestinians are free’.
And here she is in 2025 granting police forces powers to put conditions on ‘repeat protests’ as the government doubles down on the repression of pro-Palestine protest - of exactly the sort she supported in 2014.
It’s moot here whether it’s Mahmood or the frame of reference that’s shifted. The fact is that the blackout has been pulled down on Overton’s window and protesting genocide can land you in prison for up to 14 years.
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