Why Labour's dissembling to win power is a gift to Nigel Farage

This week’s column comes to you from Germany where next month the country goes to the polls. However, it is not so much in the grip of election fever as election torpor, with the traditional parties led by some less-than-inspiring characters delivering less-than-inspiring messages.

Meanwhile the coming of far-right populism in the shape of the Alternativ Fur Deutschland (AfD) party casts a darkening shadow over the whole affair. My host, a long-time SPD supporter and now an activist, tells me gloomily that Chancellor Olaf Schulz thinks he can win but nobody else does.

When pressed on likely successors, she lists a number of names all of whom either do not seem to want it or to be suitable. To be a political progressive in Germany is no more joyous an experience at the moment than it is in Britain or in America.

Populists like Nigel Farage are benefiting from the public's disillusionment with mainstream political parties (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images

The parallels between the politics in developed liberal democracies are there for all to see but seem almost impossible to acknowledge. That has got to change and soon. The alternative is to allow the gap to continue to grow between electors and elected – and that gap will inevitably be filled by the populists.

There has always been a market in politics for simple answers to complex problems but when mainstream politics offers no answers, then the populist answer begins to look like the only one.

That is the context in which we should be judging some of our own government’s bigger missteps such as changes to the winter fuel allowance and the refusal to compensate the Waspi women.

In both cases, the decisions look like targeting the people that progressive politicians should want to protect, quite apart from contradicting what the party said in opposition. The cost of these decisions goes well beyond the economic one, but has a value in terms of trust in politics that is much more difficult to quantify.

Viewed from inside the poltical bubble, everything is justifiable – especially when all those inside that bubble have little experience of the world outside it. We have warned for years of the danger of a politics dominated by professional politicians but still we have built that model. Now we are seeing the danger of it.

A political system that offers total power on the basis of a shrinking share of the vote – 33.7 per cent in Labour’s case – produces a politics where parties are rewarded for dissembling. In order to win power, the Starmer Labour party had to come up with a form of words to get them through the election: “We shall not raise taxes on working people.” Only afterwards, when employers’ National Insurance contributions were put up, were people able to see this truly for what it is.

Yes, this sort of positioning gets you through the next election but with every turn of the wheel, more and more people get disillusioned and the Farages and Trumps of this world look ever more attractive.

It doesn’t have to be this way but, for as long as progressives think they can game the system, we will continue in this downward spiral.

Alistair Carmichael is Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland