D o you ever feel as if life is spiralling out of control? As if the world’s problems are too big, or politicians too small, to get a grip on everything from rising prices to emergent threats such as AI?
If so, says the political strategist Claire Ainsley, you’re neither alone nor irrational. “It’s probably because you’ve got a lot to do, and the world is out of control,” she says cheerfully from her home in York, where she lives with her husband, an artist, and their two teenage children. But it is the politicians’ job to master fast-moving and complex events, she adds, and if conventional parties seem increasingly powerless to do anything about them, then populist alternatives will be only too ready with dangerously easy-sounding answers.
Her new book Control: How We Lost It and How to Take It Back argues that the centre-left can tackle that fatally undermining sense of impotence by rewiring government and putting people back in charge of their own lives. “We know the rightwing populists have an agenda that is dangerous and divisive. The question is what is being done to stop it,” says Ainsley, who served as Keir Starmer’s director of policy in opposition and is now a consultant for the Washington-based thinktank Progressive Policy Institute. “It’s that lack of leadership from centre-left politicians that people are crying out for.”
But there is also a more personal dimension to the public anxiety and sense of learned helplessness she describes. Ainsley appears to be a private and self-contained person, so I’m surprised when at the end of the book she says she wrote it partly for her younger self “who didn’t always feel in control”. What did she mean? “I definitely had difficulties when I was a teenager in the early 1990s. It has just struck me how much we talk about mental health problems now because we have a language for it – [myself] and my other female friends, we didn’t. But I don’t forget the young women we were, and how we felt.”
The politics of control is personal for many people, she argues, including teenagers now suffering an epidemic of mental health problems. Feeling that you have agency in life and can choose your own destiny matters, she writes, not just because it makes us feel more secure: it’s what motivates people to work hard, obey social norms or even vote. Why bother, if you think nothing you do makes any difference?
We’re speaking in the wake of doomsday warnings from AI researchers about the risk of their products wiping out humanity, a classic example of what she means by apparent political impotence. “There was no political voice immediately saying, ‘This is a problem and we’re going to take action in the following ways’ – not to tell people we’re in control of things we can’t be in control of, but to say, ‘We have a plan, we have a grip on this, and this is how we’re compelling the tech firms to take responsibility for what’s being created,’” says Ainsley, who writes in the book that parliamentary legislation isn’t moving fast enough to keep up and that big tech should be forced to fund research on AI safety.
But if strong leadership in the face of global threats is half of Ainsley’s answer, the more controversial half involves a renewed focus on social mobility, aspiration and encouraging individuals to take charge of their own lives. “It’s about taking the actions that say, ‘We’re a government that is going to back you to do well and is very comfortable with you making that progress,’ rather than what people associate with the Labour party, which is: we just want to redistribute wealth.”
In her 2018 book, The New Working Class: How to Win Hearts, Minds and Votes, Ainsley argued that politicians hadn’t kept pace with the fact that “working class” no longer just meant white men doing manual labour, but women and minorities often earning painfully little in precarious service sector jobs. That earned her a reputation for being ahead of the political curve. Starmer was intrigued enough to hire her in 2020 but she left after two years, disillusioned less with a boss she still admires than with Westminster itself. (Tellingly, one of the book’s chapters is titled The Myth of Political Control.)
“An enormous amount of effort goes on the business of the day – how to out-manoeuvre the other side – and there is much less of a focus than I think there needs to be on what happens for the rest of the country,” she says now. “Some of that is about the smallness of politics compared to how big the world has become. I think they focus on what they can control – who gets on the Today programme, who is selected as a candidate.” Starmer once publicly complained, as prime minister, of endlessly finding and pulling on levers that didn’t seem connected to anything. “The bigger argument I make in the book is that many of the means of power have been given away or drifted away over time. If you know what the right thing to do is, but your only means of doing that is to tax and spend more, you’re actually very limited,” says Ainsley, who believes that the net result is politicians making promises they can’t deliver while voters lose faith.
What surprised her most when working for Starmer was that even the then prime minister seemed curiously helpless against some of the pressures on him. “I do think Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer shared a level of integrity, of public service – they both would have wanted to do the right thing. Rishi Sunak has said himself that he did not feel saying ‘stop the boats’ repeatedly was the right thing to do because it offered a binary choice that he didn’t think was realistic. But he had to say it.”
Ainsley’s politics – she says she admired Sunak and Starmer in different ways – are interestingly eclectic. To the dismay of her mother, a longstanding organiser for the Labour party with a horror of “the Trots”, she became a revolutionary socialist at university – which lasted, she writes, until she got a job working for the Transport and General Workers Union, and realised how badly student politics fitted the reality of life on the factory floor. She moved on to run the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and it was while leading a research project there in 2015, aimed at giving people in poverty a voice, that she first got interested in the idea of control.
“One of the questions we asked was, ‘What do you feel in control of or not?’, and immigration came out starkly as something people didn’t feel in control of. There were also a number of other things that people didn’t feel in control of, but which people on higher incomes might, such as their mental health, education or the state of the local area.” The left still hasn’t fully absorbed why “take back control” was such a powerful slogan for Vote Leave during the Brexit referendum, she suggests.
In the decade since, she thinks repeated inflation spikes caused by events patently beyond British governments’ control – including wars in Ukraine and Iran – have merely compounded the sense of political impotence, not solely among the poor but increasingly among the once comfortable middle classes. “We’ve had this series of crises that people are now feeling is the new normal, and that buffer that governments might have provided feels like it doesn’t exist in people’s lives any more … It’s economic insecurity and probably cultural insecurity, people not feeling like their efforts are rewarded – if you look at the position of graduates at the moment, it’s a good example,” she says, pointing to high rates of unemployment among university leavers.
In her book, Ainsley details research suggesting populist narratives are more appealing to people who don’t feel in control of their own destinies, and that feeling part of a bigger rebel movement can increase feelings of agency. Rightwing populists in particular also benefit, she argues, from chaos and social unrest, which prompts authoritarian voters to look for someone to reassert control. To compete, leftwing politicians must show that “strong action is going to be taken by a strong leader”, but also that they’re giving power back to people over their own lives.
So how is Andy Burnham doing against those metrics? Though she says loyally that Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, laid the foundations on which Burnham has built, Ainsley thinks their successor has had a “strong start”, citing a crackdown on people listening to music without headphones on public transport – which she believes gives people who would otherwise be fuming impotently more freedom to object. He has also promised to give the electorate breathing space from rising energy bills as a small, practical step that people understand. “They’ve got much clearer understanding of how people actually live their lives – it doesn’t feel abstract.”
But she worries about the dispiriting impact on middling earners of being dragged into paying higher-rate tax by the repeated freezing of tax thresholds in successive budgets, fuelling the sense that working hard doesn’t pay. So she advocates tax breaks for retraining or going on courses to improve your skills, in order to reward workers with ambitions to move up the ladder, plus long-term tax reforms to reduce the burden on working people and welfare reform to encourage work. “The left has got very fixed on redistribution, and while there might be a fairness argument for certain tax changes, if it doesn’t create an incentive for people to earn more, or go into work, then you get a society where people feel their efforts aren’t rewarded,” she says. “I want to see a centre left that believes in the politics of progress again.”
More unexpectedly, she points to rising levels of severe school absence as a sign that school isn’t working for some teenagers. “At a point where they are desiring independence and autonomy, we expect them to comply in school with many more rules and systems than adults. And at the same time in their online life, they’re allowed to make choices – as a gamer you can choose everything,” she says. “I think the disconnection between their online and offline lives, and the stresses that are on them in terms of the education system, are worth exploring.” Though she supports banning social media for under-16s, Ainsley thinks screens aren’t the only reason teenage mental health is suffering. “I don’t think we’ve examined properly what the pandemic did in terms of the harm it caused them. We’re now telling them they’re somehow deficient because they don’t want to socialise when as a state we told them not to, and not having fronted up to that responsibility is causing the most enormous damage.”
Adults should also be wary of transmitting their own anxiety over the state of the world to more naturally optimistic teenagers, she thinks. “The narrative of my generation is imposing an anxiety upon them, which I don’t think totally resonates when you listen to young people themselves.”
In the book, she argues that a left version of “taking back control” could involve encouraging individuals to take more responsibility for their own health, giving them access to the kind of targeted advice on diet and exercise that the rich buy in from personal trainers. But is she sure that people genuinely want more control, if in practice that means being responsible for things we don’t necessarily want to do? Ainsley concedes that she argued for a similar approach to healthcare while working for Starmer, but that the idea was dropped when it met resistance in focus groups. Still, she’s confident that it’s the way forward. “On the whole, people want to do things for themselves rather than have the state do things for them.”
Meanwhile, Ainsley believes that taking back control necessarily includes controlling Britain’s borders – a position considerably more popular with the public than within the Labour party. However, she would hold open the possibility of legal migrants earning the right to settle permanently. “I don’t think it’s only about migration, but I do think you need to be able to say as a nation that we can determine who comes in and who stays, and also have a path to citizenship,” she says, arguing that small boat crossings might represent only a small proportion of immigration, but that they’re “a visible reminder that the government is not in control”. If that sounds like a curiously rightwing take on control, last year YouGov found that 58% of Labour voters have a negative view of asylum seekers arriving on small boats, while only 9% disapprove of asylum seekers coming here legally.
Does she think it’s risky for Burnham publicly to reopen the debate over Brexit and freedom of movement? “The country is capable of having a sensible national debate about it. The risk is it takes a lot of oxygen out of determining where we ourselves want to go [as a country],” she says, arguing that rejoining the EU or single market isn’t in itself a fully fledged vision for Britain. “Unless they set that vision out … we’ll just go round in circles.”
When Ainsley started writing this book, Starmer was prime minister and she had no reason to think he wouldn’t still be when she published. When I ask if she was surprised he survived only two years, a long silence ensues. “It was clear it was going to be difficult for Keir to win back public confidence, but I was surprised at how the parliamentary party went about it,” she says, explaining that she was worried it would make Labour look as chaotic as the Tories. “I do feel Andy Burnham has bought some time for Labour to get itself on track.
“That said, MPs have to get fully behind Andy, and stay behind him. They absolutely do not have another go at this.” On that, at least, it’s hard to argue.
Control: How We Lost It and How to Take It Back by Claire Ainsley (Biteback Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy for £18 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here
