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As the national-anthem example indicates, Corbyn isn’t a very skilled politician—or, alternatively, he is a man of such high principle that he refuses to trim his positions at all to win votes.

In 2015, shortly after he took over as Labour’s leader, he refused to sing the national anthem—“God Save the Queen”—during a memorial service for the Battle of Britain, the air war, in 1940, in which the Royal Air Force fought off Hitler’s marauding Luftwaffe.

Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, sensed the intense public frustration and built their entire election campaign around the slogan “Get Brexit Done.”

Like Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” Johnson’s slogan was simple, catchy, and misleading.

Voters often say that they support individual policies of progressive and left-wing parties, but history suggests that getting the public to elect such parties to government requires a plausible, persuasive leader and a favorable environment.

But unlike spring's lockdown, nurseries will not be shuttered, elite sports can go ahead, and places of worship will remain open on the basis that attendees adhere to social distancing rules.

"Many parts of the health systems in the four nations are already under immense pressure. There are currently very high rates of community transmission, with substantial numbers of COVID patients in hospitals and in intensive care,"

British teachers unions criticized the "chaotic reopening" of schools this week, "while the rate of infection is so high is exposing education sector workers to serious risk of ill-health and could fuel the pandemic,"

But the country is long way from vaccinating the millions in the top priority groups mentioned by Johnson, including people "over the age of 70, all frontline health workers and everyone who is clinically vulnerable,"

Johnson suggests those groups are expected to have been offered their first doses by mid-February.

Under the national lockdown, the government will extend a subsidy program that pays 80 percent of the wages of those people — a concession that the mayors said illustrated that the government does not treat the north the same as the south.

Conservatives have a litany of other objections — that the lockdown is a death knell for the economy, an infringement of civil liberties and proof that the government lacks a coherent strategy for getting past the pandemic.

The chaotic nature of the announcement added to the misgivings. Mr. Johnson convened an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday after internal deliberations leaked late Friday. T

All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk

public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.

the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.

Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime

The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.

The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.

Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.

Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign

, this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”

Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.

His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.

No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.

Weber believed that politics and science do not mix. In the end, political decision-making has to rest on personal judgment – there is no scientific manual to tell leaders what to do.

More to the point, scientists are not well suited to making those decisions. They want the facts to speak for themselves. That is wishful thinking: facts alone cannot tell us what to do.

In politics, expecting the evidence to point the way does not reduce the arbitrariness of the outcome. All political choices are arbitrary to a degree.

The widespread consensus in March that a national lockdown was needed – shared not just by national politicians and their expert advisers, but by the public too – was not primarily driven by the science. It came from a joint conviction that things were getting out of control. Something had to be done

In the spring, Johnson could plausibly claim to speak for the country as a whole when he took drastic action. Now he speaks for almost no one. He is making his own decisions, which is what we pay him to do.

Rebellious Tory backbenchers are demanding that a higher value be put on personal freedom, which is not a scientific concept and cannot be quantified.

Manchester v London is not a problem that can be solved by an algorithm or better stats. But Johnson’s justification for his political choices is still being couched as data-driven. He wants us to think that he hasn’t abandoned the science, he has just got better at reading it.

His problem is that he can’t admit it. He has to pretend that nakedly political judgments – about who gets what, and who pays the price – are being calibrated to a more nuanced understanding of the evidence. He is weighing up a virus whose health impacts are concentrated locally against economic consequences where the effects are national.

The demand for a national “circuit-breaker” lockdown has teeth coming from the Labour leader because it is backed up by an implicit appeal to fairness. If decisions are going to be arbitrary, they may as well be easily understood and apply equally to all.

Current public support for wider measures is driven by a wish to see the same rules for everyone.

Starmer can also claim the backing of Sage. But if that was all he had, it wouldn’t be enough. The facts never speak for themselves. He’s also got personal political conviction to sustain him.

On the other side, Johnson is under attack from those who have had enough of the science altogether.

As a result, Johnson is now vulnerable on two flanks. From one side he can be attacked by Keir Starmer, who is able not only to out-science him but to do it with political conviction

The oldest question in democratic politics is: who gets to speak on behalf of whom? That is why it is so misleading to think that it is the job of politicians to speak on behalf of the evidence

Political legitimacy comes from having a claim to represent the interests of people who cannot otherwise speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, he seems to be waiting for science to come to his rescue. Whether it is a “moonshot” mass testing programme or a vaccine developed by British scientists, Johnson is looking for an unarguable scientific result to get him off the hook.

Even a successful vaccine won’t relieve Johnson of the need to make difficult decisions. How will we determine who gets it first? What will he do about the people who refuse to take it? In the end, science won’t save him. Only politics can do that.

In Poland, the government has just passed an emergency law allowing authorities to turn back refugees who cross into the country “illegally”. It is the latest development in a diplomatic standoff with Belarus, which has cynically been encouraging people from Iraq, Iran and parts of Africa to cross into the EU, in response to sanctions imposed on it earlier this year. Poland’s hardline response leaves many people trapped in the no man’s land between the two countries.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, claims this is an essentially benevolent measure: if boats in the Channel are turned around, it will eventually stop people attempting the dangerous trip in the first place. In fact, it undermines a key principle of international maritime law that makes it a duty to rescue people in distress.

In the UK, the Home Office has quietly tried to amend its draconian nationality and borders bill, currently at committee stage, by introducing a provision that gives Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if they fail to save lives at sea.

These developments are harmful in their own right, but they also set a disturbing precedent for how countries in rich parts of the world might deal with future displacements of people – not just from war and persecution, but from the climate crisis as well.

Three recent stories, from three different corners of Europe, suggest that governments are crossing a new threshold of violence in terms of how they police their borders.

This is not only a problem for today: it is a dress rehearsal for how our governments are likely to deal with the effects of the climate crisis in years to come.

a new report by the World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by water shortages, crop failure and rising sea levels by 2050.

Unfortunately, many of our politicians are primed to see displacement first and foremost as a civilisational threat. That was the logic of Boris Johnson’s comments ahead of the launch of Cop26 in Glasgow, when he claimed – incorrectly – that “uncontrolled immigration” was responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, and that a similar fate awaits the world today

In this telling, an environmental disaster that affects us all is transformed into a question of how the wealthy and powerful can preserve their privileges.

they are backed up by a burgeoning border security industry. A recent report by the Transnational Institute warns of what it calls “the border-industrial complex”, a growing multibillion dollar industry that ranges from security infrastructure to biometrics and artificial intelligence. The global market in fences, walls and surveillance alone is projected to be worth $65-$68bn by 2025.

Richer parts of the world have already begun to militarise their borders, a process that has accelerated in response to the refugee movements of the past decade.

What’s required, instead – beyond action to reduce emissions – is a plan to help people adapt to changing living circumstances and reduce global inequality, along with migration policies that recognise the reality of people’s situations

A major new US study commissioned by the Biden administration recommends new laws to protect climate migrants, but it is strikingly light on detail.

No one, not entrepreneurs nor Whitehall officials, can predict the state of the energy sector in 30 years’ time.

But discussions over the cost are almost irrelevant because centralising all these decisions will shut down the market discovery process, meaning we’ll never know if cheaper, better routes were available.

We still don’t have a clear estimate from the government on the cost of reaching net zero by 2050, though the Office for Budget Responsibility put the total cost at £1.4 trillion in July. The Treasury this week warned UK households and businesses face the prospect of new taxes in the coming years to help meet the targe

Rather than gazing into a crystal ball, his officials would abandon their obsession with specific choices or sectors.

opportunity costs affect economic activity in unseen ways. Money spent on pumps today is money that cannot be spent on hydrogen boilers tomorrow, which may be a better solution. Jobs filled in green sectors are jobs unfilled elsewhere.

Perhaps Johnson should come down on the side of a border-adjusted carbon tax. It arguably offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the speed and scale necessary.

there’s no indication so far that anything this reasonable will replace current decision-making.

Support may soon give way to hostility if government remains stubbornly committed to its current approach.

The idea that, if we are to halt climate change then we need to start doing things differently, is no longer a fringe view.

What the two cases have in common, critics said, is a lack of accountability on the part of the main actors.

With so much at stake, especially in a year in which the queen is celebrating 70 years on the throne, royal watchers speculate that Andrew will seek his own settlement with Ms. Giuffre. Who would pay that settlement, and with what money, are already questions being asked by British newspapers.

But that does not mean she is without influence. Legal experts say the monarchy, because of its longevity and constancy, can have a moderating effect on the most extreme forces in politics.

If anything, her disciplined adherence to social distancing rules — captured most poignantly when she grieved alone in a choir stall at the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip, last year — is a vivid contrast to the prime minister’s after-work socializing.

Mr. Johnson seemed, more than any of his predecessors, to grasp this fact. His knack for not apologizing was remarkable. His breezy denials induced a sort of cognitive dissonance in the minds of those accusing him — Was there some fact they had missed? Were they going mad? Was he? — and permitted supporters to make their own denials, too. In recent months, it produced a sort of moral vacuum in Britain’s government, in which nobody seemed to have the power to hold the prime minister to account.

In 2019, the Conservatives captured areas like Burnley, in Britain’s postindustrial “red wall,” and Labour polled poorly in Scotland, once another heartland, losing out to the Scottish National Party.

And while the Conservatives lost badly in recent local elections, Labour has made only limited progress, with smaller parties doing well.

He promptly promised that he would resign if he were fined by the police — in contrast to Mr. Johnson, who suffered that fate in April but refused to quit.

In the 2019 general election, parts of England that for decades had voted for Labour switched en masse to the Conservatives, allowing Mr. Johnson to recast the political map just as Donald J. Trump did in the United States in 2016.

Even he accepts that Labour is not yet in a solid, election-winning position.

“It looks like modest progress because it is modest progress,” said Mr. McTernan, while adding that it was still a “massive rebalancing” after the 2019 defeat.

So Labour is hosting a series of town-hall meetings where uncommitted voters are asked what would lure them back to the party.

“It broke my heart in 2019 when I watched communities where I grew up and that I call home turning blue for the first time in history,” said Ms. Nandy, referring to the campaign color used by the Conservatives.

The reason, she thinks, is that politicians spend too much time in London and too little “on people’s own territory having conversations with them about things that matter to them.”

“I don’t think anyone is expecting full policy across the board until the time of the next election,” she said. “A lot of what we need to do is about rebuilding our relationship with the country and setting out our values, and people need to get to know the Labour Party again.”

“I know so many progressives who think that politics is like a football game: If you have a 10-point plan on health and your opponents only have a five-point plan you win 10 to 5,” Mr. McTernan said. “You don’t.”

To succeed, the party needs to convince people like Ged Ennis, the director of a renewable energy company that equipped Burnley College with solar panels. He has voted for Labour and the Conservatives over the years, but opted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 2019.

“I think what he needs to do is to be brave and to be really clear about what he wants to deliver,

His place in the history books, however, is secured. He will forever be the libertine whose pursuit of personal freedom and “control” saw his countrymen robbed of theirs.

Last year he went to the UK for a month and ended up staying nearly eight, finding an antidote to American’s poison.

“I still haven’t fully recovered from my stroke, and what goes on in this country, I couldn’t talk about it. I got in the middle of it. Tucker Carlson [a host on Fox News] was killing me every fucking night.”

also invited UK journalists to disseminate a warning: don’t let British politics become as polarised and debased as the American system.

“You still like each other, you still respect each other, you still value public debate: your democracy is still functioning,”

“Ours has seized up and I don’t know how to get ours flowing again. Be thankful that you don’t have our poison … I’m very afraid of the American system being hopelessly damaged.”

“If I didn’t die, I’m not afraid any more, so you will hear me criticise people I never would have criticised two years ago. What are they going to do to me? It can’t be any worse than what I’ve been through and, when you become more fearless, it makes life easier to navigate.”

“I know that you guys are critical of the UK in recent times for being too American in your elections. You’re not. We are becoming more and more superficial. You are still substantial.”

Later he plays a video clip of one of his US focus groups descending into angry shouting and recriminations, a glimpse of a society that seems to be falling apart. He comments: “The worst of the worst. This is my warning to you. This is shit. This is a disaster and it will come to you if you let it happen.”

Today, after the catharsis of his stroke, Luntz finds plenty of blame to go around. He casts a harsh light on the media, social media and his own younger self. In an infamous 2003 memo, for example, he advised George W Bush’s Republican party to abandon the phrase “global warming” in favour of “climate change” because it is “less frightening”

“Biden does not understand the hopes and dreams of the average American,” says the messaging expert, who remains on the centre-right. “He does not empathise with them. His team is ideological rather than emotional and so he’s missing all this. It’s how people feel even more than how they think; feeling is a deeper emotion and Biden is not connecting to them at all.

Luntz argues that he overpromised. “He created unrealistic expectations. He’s a very arrogant human being and very flawed and the combination of flaws and arrogance is a really unhealthy cocktail.”

Wasn’t Biden supposed to be Mr Empathy? “There’s nothing about him that screams empathy. There’s everything about him that screams someone who’s already made up their mind.”

He identifies six issues that will determine voters’ choices: crime, immigration, shortages, prices, education and the January 6 insurrection. “Democrats have a huge problem on five out of the six.”

“Boris Johnson has written more books than Donald Trump has read. Boris is the real Trump. He understands the hopes and dreams of the public. He gets the historic context. He can wax poetically about 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago and two years ago. Trump could not do that.

The Great Rethink. It is a study of America voters’ attitudes and disillusionment with their leaders. “The only thing we agree on is that politicians suck,” Luntz says. “If you’re American, this is a very depressing time right now.”

nother offers some words to use (I am your voice, accountability, fact-based) and words to lose (agenda, I’m listening, transparency).

Luntz argues that even in a polarised society such as America, every parent asks the same question: will my child/grandchild be happy

Perhaps rather optimistically, he urges politicians to focus on children as “the great unifier”

“If you want to bring people together, you do it over their children. You guys are divided on just about everything; this crushes that divide. This brings people together and it’s not been done before.

Brexit, the arrival into the fold of so many former Labour voters, and the Johnson style of government has shaken all of this up.

One former minister under Mr. Johnson told me last week that he thought the Tories were becoming more like Labour under the socialist leader Harold Wilson of the 1960s and ’70s. So, are they the high spending, pugnaciously patriotic party of Mr. Johnson and his new voters; a party of fiscal rectitude and small government … or what?

Parliament is the sovereign apex of the nation’s democratic government. Its credibility depends upon the executive telling the truth to MPs, and through them the nation. If Johnson did not do that, especially in the circumstances of a killer pandemic in which obeying the rules was so paramount, he must pay the price.

That he ought to have erred on the side of strictness – in the way that the Queen and so many millions of others so visibly did – seems never to have occurred to him.

Strangely, though nonprofits are increasingly expected to perform like businesses, they do not get the same leeway in funding that government-contracted businesses do. They don’t have nearly the bargaining power of big corporations, or the ability to raise costs for their products and services, because of tight controls on grant funding. “D.C. is full of millionaires who contract with government in the defense field, and they make a killing, and yet if you’re a nonprofit, chances are you aren’t getting the full amount of funding to cover the cost of the services required,” Iliff said. “Can you imagine Lockheed Martin or Boeing putting up with a government contract that didn’t allow for overhead?”

When faced with dwindling funding, one response would be to cut a program or reduce the number of people an organization serves. But nonprofit leaders have shown themselves very reluctant to do that. Instead, many meet financial challenges by squeezing more work out of their staffs without a proportional increase in their pay:

“There is this feeling that the mission is so important that nothing should get in the way of it,”

These nonprofit employees are saying that their operations depend on large numbers of their lowest-paid staff working unpaid overtime hours. One way to get  to that point would be to face a series of choices between increased productivity on the one hand and reduced hours, increased pay, or more hiring on the other, and to choose more productivity every time. That some nonprofits have done this speaks to a culture that can put the needs of staff behind mission-driven ambitions.

In the 1970s, 62 percent of full-time, salaried workers qualified for mandatory overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. Today, because the overtime rules have not had a major update since then (until this one), only 7 percent of workers are covered, whether they work in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere. In other words, U.S. organizations—nonprofit or otherwise—have been given the gift of a large pool of laborers who, as long as they clear a relatively low earnings threshold and do tasks that meet certain criteria, do not have to be paid overtime.

Unsurprisingly, many nonprofits have taken advantage of that pool of free work. (For-profit companies have too, but they also have the benefit of being more in control of their revenue streams.) B

nonprofits like PIRG, for example, have a tradition of forcing employees to work long, unpaid hours—especially their youngest staff. “There’s a culture that says, ‘Young people are paying their dues. It’s okay for them to be paid for fewer hours than they’re actually working because it’s in the effort of helping them grow up and contribute to something greater than they are,’” Boris says.

“Too often, I have seen the passion for social change turned into a weapon against the very people who do much—if not most—of the hard work, and put in most of the hours,” Hastings recently wrote on her blog. “Because they are highly motivated by passion, the reasoning goes, they don’t need to be motivated by decent salaries or sustainable work hours or overtime pay.”

A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 nonprofit employees by Opportunity Knocks, a human-resources organization that specializes in nonprofits, in partnership with Jessica Word, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that half of employees in the nonprofit sector may be burned out or in danger of burnout.

. “These are highly emotional and difficult jobs,” she said, adding, “These organizations often have very high rates of employee turnover, which results from a combination of burnout and low compensation.” Despite the dearth of research, Word’s findings don’t appear to be unusual: A more recent study of nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada found that turnover, one possible indicator of burnout, is higher in nonprofits than in the overall labor market.

for all their hours and emotional labor, nonprofit employees generally don’t make much money. A 2014 study by Third Sector New England, a resource center for nonprofits, found that 43 percent of nonprofit employees in New England were making less than $28,000 per year—far less than a living wage for families with children in most cities in the United States, and well below the national median income of between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.

Why would nonprofit workers be willing to stay in jobs where they are underpaid, or, in some cases, accept working conditions that violate the spirit of the labor laws that protect them? One plausible reason is that they are just as committed to the cause as their superiors

But it also might be that some nonprofits exploit gray areas in the law to cut costs. For instance, only workers who are labelled as managers are supposed to be exempt from overtime, but many employers stretch the definition of “manager” far beyond its original intent.

even regardless of these designations, the emotionally demanding work at many nonprofits is sometimes difficult to shoehorn into a tidy 40-hours-a-week schedule. Consider Elle Roberts, who was considered exempt from overtime restrictions and was told not to work more than 40 hours a week when, as a young college grad, she worked at a domestic-violence shelter in northwest Indiana. Doing everything from home visits to intake at the shelter, Roberts still ignored her employer’s dictates and regularly worked well more than 40 hours a week providing relief for women in crisis. Yet she was not paid for that extra time.

“The unspoken expectation is that you do whatever it takes to get whatever it is done for the people that you’re serving,” she says. “And anything less than that, you’re not quite doing enough.

Foreign Minister Boris Johnson used the phrase when he was campaigning for Brexit to refer to Britain having both control over immigration and free trade with the EU.