It has become one of the more reliable features of modern British politics that if Keir Starmer were to announce that gravity will continue operating for the foreseeable future, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage would immediately demand an inquiry into whether Britain has been over-reliant on gravity and might benefit from a more competitive alternative.
This is not opposition in any meaningful sense. It is muscle memory. Labour says something, anything, and the response arrives fully formed. No need to examine the detail, still less to concede that a proposal might be broadly sensible. The only requirement is distance. Preferably noisy distance.
Take Europe. Labour edges towards the fairly mundane proposition that reducing trade friction with our largest market might help the economy. This is not exactly a leap into federalism. Most countries manage it without surrendering the Crown Jewels. Yet within minutes we are told this is a betrayal, a slippery slope, the long march back to Brussels. The possibility that exporters might simply prefer fewer forms is treated as dangerously subversive.
Or digital ID. A problem exists, a solution is proposed, imperfect but arguable. The response is instant and absolute. Not “this needs tightening” or “here is a better model”. It is immediately inflated into a civil liberties catastrophe. One imagines the same critics would be astonished to discover that much of the developed world has somehow survived the experience.
Foreign policy, though, has provided the clearest example. When the Iran conflict broke out, both Badenoch and Farage were initially in full Churchillian mode. Stand with allies, confront the regime, why is Britain not doing more.
Then reality intruded.
The public was unconvinced. The economics looked grim. The prospect of yet another Middle Eastern entanglement landed badly. And, rather awkwardly, Labour’s cautious line - stay out, keep it defensive - began to look less like hesitation and more like basic competence.
At which point the tone shifted. Calls for a more forceful response gave way to a sudden enthusiasm for restraint. Not quite a formal reversal, but close enough that the destination was identical. Starmer did not so much move as wait, and they eventually arrived where he had been standing all along.
That is the pattern in its purest form. Opposition as reflex works perfectly well until events require consistency. At that point, the need to remain opposite collides with the need not to look completely detached from reality. The result is a hurried shuffle back towards the position that was being dismissed only days earlier.
Even where the underlying problem is agreed, the instinct remains inversion rather than thought. Labour says increase defence spending while keeping welfare intact. The reply is that the poor must be trimmed to pay for it. Not because this is the only workable answer, but because it is the cleanest possible contrast.
Tax provides the purest hypothetical. One suspects that if Labour were to announce the abolition of taxation tomorrow, the response would not be cautious approval. It would be a demand for higher taxes, collected more vigorously, on the grounds that Starmer had clearly got there for the wrong reasons.
This would all be harmless theatre were it not so limiting. Sensible policy occasionally requires the awkward admission that the other side has a point. At present that appears to be politically unaffordable. Agreement is treated less as judgement and more as a lapse.
So we get a politics in which positions are not formed but selected, like opposing shirts in a football match. Labour lines up on one side, Badenoch and Farage sprint to the other, and the detail is left somewhere on the touchline.
The Iran episode merely exposed the flaw. When events refuse to cooperate, when the “opposite of Labour” turns out to be politically or economically untenable, there is nowhere to go except quietly back towards the thing you spent the previous week denouncing.
And so we continue. Labour proposes something middling and practical. The opposition declares it absurd. Until, occasionally, reality intervenes and they find themselves, with minimal ceremony, arguing for precisely the same thing.
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