Overseas: Movement Without Leverage
The Prime Minister’s trip to China and Japan was notable less for what it achieved than for what it avoided. Keir Starmer returned with modest diplomatic housekeeping: limited visa facilitation and the reopening of channels with previously frozen parliamentarians. (Rowena Mason, Guardian, 29th January 2026, What agreements have been made during Starmer’s trip to China.)
None of this materially alters the UK–China economic relationship, shifts security posture, or moves the dial on trade. The visit was calibrated to reassure without demanding. The more immediate domestic effect was procedural: Starmer’s absence neatly coincided with the need to explain why Andy Burnham was blocked from contesting the Denton by-election. The PM’s PR team, while experimenting with Tik-Tok, hope that by the time the Boss returns to Blighty, everyone will have stopped jumping up and down about Burnham. This has a fair chance of success.
Trump, Iran and the Performance of Power
Trump has deployed naval assets to the Gulf alongside familiar threats, seemingly to pressure Iran back into negotiation rather than to pursue regime change, or meaningful regional realignment, or to make “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” in any sense meaningful.
Despite the language, most analysts expect Iran to make limited concessions. This is coercive diplomacy by muscle memory, not strategy. Loud, repetitive and ultimately transactional.
Meanwhile, the continuing fallout from expanded ICE powers and restrictions on protest – imposed by novel interpretations of federal laws allowed by the Supine Court – has hardened concern about democratic backsliding in the US. (Lauren Gambino, Guardian, 21st January 2026, American democracy on the brink a year after Trump’s inauguration.)
For the UK, the significance is tonal rather than tactical. The transatlantic gap on civil liberties is no longer hypothetical.
Pubs: Gesture Politics on the High Street
One easily missed domestic item this week was the government’s so-called pub rescue package. Framed as support for local communities, it amounts to marginal business rates relief and warm words, with no structural intervention on energy costs, staffing, or demand. (Archie Mitchell, BBC News, 27th January 2026, Pubs given support package after business rates backlash.)
The result is predictable. Closures will continue. High streets will not revive. Ministers will express regret. This is not policy failure so much as policy minimalism: enough to announce, not enough to matter.
Welfare: The Decision Not to Decide
More consequential was the non-announcement that the Department for Work and Pensions will receive no legislative space in the next parliamentary session. There will be no major benefits reform, cosmetic or structural. (Chay Quinn, LBC, 29th January 2026, Starmer axes fresh attempt to slash Britain’s welfare bill.)
This reflects a deeper pattern. Welfare reform is difficult, politically unrewarding and expensive, so it is deferred. The system remains widely acknowledged as inadequate. No one in government appears willing to own the trade-offs required to change it.
This is drift by design.
Parliament: Assisted Dying and the Collapse of Pretence
Charlie Falconer (apologies, Baron Falconer of Thoroton, PC, KC) warned this week that the assisted dying bill risks being lost in the House of Lords, exposing the limits of Labour’s strategy of insisting it is not government business. (Jessica Elgot, Guardian, 28th January 2026, Assisted dying backers could use archaic procedure to bypass ‘undemocratic’ block by peers.)
That fiction is now unsustainable. Either Labour adopts the bill formally or tolerates increasingly eccentric procedural manoeuvres, potentially invoking the Parliament Act in ways that further hollow out the Lords’ already fragile constitutional role.
Trying not to choose has, in effect, forced a choice.
Reform, Leading, on Schedule: Stop Rocking those (Small) Boats
Suella Braverman joining Reform was entirely predictable and therefore uninteresting. The ideological migration was long complete. (Paul Seddon, BBC News, 26th January 2026, Braverman accuses Tories of betrayal as she defects to Reform.)
More notable is what has not happened. The “senior Labour defection” trailed by Nigel Farage has failed to materialise. Nor has Reform produced anything resembling a policy programme. Leading in the polls, it has no incentive to do so (YouGov latest tracking poll, 26th January 2025.)
Denton: Low Energy, Lower Expectations
The Denton by-election candidates have emerged with little distinction. The Conservative entry, Charlotte Cadden, is notably weak (BBC News, 1 February 2026, Charlotte Cadden chosen as Tory by-election candidate) but given the absence of realistic prospects, that may be rational.
Reform is widely tipped to perform strongly, with Matthew Goodwin often mentioned as an each-way bet (Louise Thompson, The Conversation, 30th January 2026, Labour won comfortably in 2024 but Reform could benefit from a split vote on the left.)
Depressing Realisation
This feels uncomfortably early in the electoral cycle for a government to have entered full decision-avoidance mode. Yet that is where things appear to be.
Foreign travel substitutes for domestic agency. Consultations replace conclusions. Schemes are designed to signal concern rather than effect change. Power is exercised cautiously, intermittently and with obvious self-consciousness.
As HMG Titanic sinks, the order has gone out: let the band play a distracting tune. Ask the passengers whether they would prefer to drown or freeze to death. Then no-one can complain (although we will all be dead.)
Check us out on insta @theworldofukpolitics
Leave a Reply