Why have Reform's poll numbers declined? How worried should we be about Palantir? How long does Starmer have left?

Answering your questions - part two

Thanks, as ever, for so many excellent questions. Dad posted his answers on Wednesday. Here are mine. Apologies to those of you who didn’t get a response this time, but some of those questions will be covered in future posts.

Topics covered include:

• Can social democratic governments hold off the radical right given economic challenges?

• Why have Reform’s poll rating fallen?

• How long does Starmer have left?

• How worried should we be about Palantir’s contracts with the UK government?

• Why aren’t the Liberal Democrats doing better?

• What culture war shibboleths should the left repudiate to win more support?

• Should we ban social media for under-16s?

• Labour’s “boys club” and Ed Miliband for PM?

• Would Kemi Badenoch have defected to Reform if she wasn’t leader?

• Lessons from the Epstein files.

• Can constitutional conventions be saved in the US after Trump? And what might Reform do to ours?

• Why there isn’t more focus on our aging population?

• Should we join a customs union with the EU?

• Wealth taxes. Renovating Parliament. And the future of the BBC.

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Thomas Smith: My impression is that, since 2008, no social democratic government anywhere in the world has been able to deliver the kind of positive change that governments from 1945-2008 delivered, and that this is why we everywhere face the spectre of the new radical right. Is this correct? If so, what can governments and citizens do to reverse this trend? Or must we go through the 1930s and 1940s all over again?

It’s certainly true that it’s become harder to improve living standards and public services since the great financial crash, because economies have grown more slowly, exacerbated by aging populations and rising health costs. That said the correlations aren’t straightforward. Countries in Eastern Europe have seen stronger growth than Germany, France and the UK in the last decade, but the radical right has still become an important political force able to win elections. America has also seen faster growth, though it has been distributed in an extremely unequal way, and still has Trump.

Social democratic parties have also continued to win plenty of elections, as in Australia, Canada, Spain, Ireland and so on. The fundamental structural problem in western democracies is that the right has split nearly everywhere, and there’s now almost nowhere where centre-right parties can win an election without support from the radical right. In strong Presidential systems like the US and France, this is particularly problematic because the leading candidate from the right will always be from the more extreme end. I’ve written more about this phenomenon in the Observer and for Bloomberg: a big part of what’s changed is graduate professionals shifting to social democratic parties that have become less economically left-wing, leaving the right more dependent on socially illiberal voters. While we’re in this new equilibrium we will inevitably see radical right parties in power from time to time.

The only way out of this cycle is for centre-right parties to find a way to win without the radical right. But it’s hard to see how given the fracturing of their old voter coalitions. How do you win both liberal graduates open to conservative arguments on tax and spend as well as, often older, illiberal voters who often want more spending?

The growing dominance of extremists on the right puts more pressure on social democratic parties when they are in power because the risk of losing becomes existential, especially where radical right parties are explicitly authoritarian and seeking to limit democracy. This is one reason why Labour is in such a panic relatively early in its term.

Mark Goodrich: Why do you think Reform’s poll ratings have declined recently? And do you think this will continue?