March 2009, the month I joined the New Statesman as a 22-year-old, was a different political time: a Labour chancellor raised taxes on the rich, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, urged the government to move left, Nigel Farage led a populist right insurgency, and the SNP ruled Scotland. It’s customary when leaving a publication to reflect on how much has changed, but I’m more struck by what has remained the same.
The financial crash began an era of crisis and flux that has never ended. There has been no Attlee, Thatcher or Blair to serve as a punctuation mark. Labour’s landslide majority in 2024 offered it the best chance to deliver a new settlement. This government, as I’ve often noted, has diverged far more from the Conservatives than most observers suggest: it has raised taxes by £66bn, loosened its fiscal rules for investment, revived public ownership and radically expanded workers’ and renters’ rights. But because such policies have not been embedded in a wider social democratic project, they have felt more disparate than they should. Voters, civil servants, MPs and even ministers have too often struggled to discern Labour’s direction.
“You have a government unburdened by doctrine,” declared Keir Starmer in his first speech as Prime Minister. There is now a consensus on left and right that this mindset was a mistake. Aspirant leaders including Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting have all used recent months to tell us what they believe. John Maynard Keynes, who served as chairman of the New Statesman from 1931 until his death in 1946, was right when he argued that ideas are “more powerful than is commonly understood”. The best politicians, as Attlee and Thatcher knew, wield them to their advantage.
One policy with which Labour still has an unhappy association is winter fuel payment cuts. Back in August 2024, I used an NS column to warn of a gathering storm among MPs and voters. Having returned to their constituencies for the summer, ministers told me of their alarm at being reprimanded in supermarkets by lifelong Labour voters.
We had, I noted, been here before. In 1999, New Labour was excoriated for raising the state pension by just 75p (the economy was booming at the time). “It was a public relations disaster,” recalled Gordon Brown in his memoir. “Your average Rottweiler on speed can be a lot more amiable than a pensioner wronged,” wrote Tony Blair. Here, then, is another political lesson: history is your ally.
As a teenage devotee of the NME and Melody Maker, I originally wanted to be a music journalist. I’ve since tried to moonlight as one, writing on acts including Radiohead, Nick Cave, Oasis and Massive Attack during my time at the NS. For me, like many others, the weekly music press, which fused high and low culture, served as a gateway to politics and philosophy. Sometimes on Wednesday afternoons I still mourn its loss – and remember with relief that this country retains an unrivalled weekly political press.
My first major interview for the NS was with one of our own, Christopher Hitchens, who I met in May 2010, a month before he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He was generous with his time, allowing me to spend two hours with him at his hotel in Marble Arch. To my partial surprise, he spoke of his regret at never entering politics: “I did want to run for parliament. Tavistock Labour Party could have had me if it wanted. I could never quite imagine myself winning, but I’m very sad I never fought a campaign.” (Another political lesson: try to live without regrets.)
We stayed in email contact until shortly before his death in 2011. I’m sometimes asked by friends what Hitchens would think now. My answer? Look at the clues he left us. In 2008, following Russia’s invasion of Georgia, he warned of the danger that the return of “great Russian chauvinism” posed to Ukraine. He would have been revolted by Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin and, in the spirit of Thomas Paine, have railed against his abuse of the US constitution. As for the UK, he may have had varied opinions of today’s Labour Party but would have been proud of its enduring solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
On the final page of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, Hitchens’s hero, writes of his return home having been shot in the Spanish Civil War: “And then England – southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage underneath you, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.”
As well as being one of the most moving passages in the English language, this, I think, speaks to the special place that the NS has always enjoyed in British culture. It’s been a privilege to be part of it and, in these troubled times, to honour what endures.
George Eaton was the New Statesman’s senior editor (politics)
[Further reading: The public is turning against the student loans system]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment