Across the English-speaking world, centre-left democracies are arriving at an impasse. As their support bases diverge and fracture, they rely more and more on ambiguity as a policy tool to hold it together. They offer \u201cgrowth\u201d without stipulating whether it\u2019s for Wall Street or Main Street, while promising a return to \u201cfairness\u201d without defining what that costs, or to whom.<\/p>\n
Ambiguity is a useful tool to help you win elections and hold on to power, but it is not a tool for governing. <\/p>\n
In under two years, Keir Starmer went from winning a landslide election built on the collapse of the Conservative vote to presiding over the worst local election result in Labour\u2019s recent history. Even his first minister in Wales lost her seat, the first sitting head of government in British history to do so. Amid calls for his resignation from his own MPs, Starmer doubled down on his premiership, setting out a \u201cproject of renewal\u201d. What is being renewed, exactly, remains unclear.<\/p>\n
What, then, could have stirred such whiplash? A lot of it is \u201cthe economy, stupid\u201d. Labour\u2019s coalition is split between the professional class in London and the former industrial towns in the north, two sets of interests that are no longer compatible. As a leader, the most that Starmer could offer was competence and stability, because anything more specific would have split his own coalition. But when the economy stayed sluggish, and there was no policy agenda to drive forward and no record of delivery to defend, this caught up with him. The sense of paralysis and infighting created a void \u2013 and in stepped Nigel Farage\u2019s Reform party. Yes, Reform\u2019s politics may be reductive and divisive, but that is precisely why they work. Unlike Labour, Reform is not trying to hold together an uneasy coalition of voters who want different things.<\/p>\n
The US Democrats ran into the same wall in November 2024 when Kamala Harris ran the most expensive presidential campaign in American history on a platform that amounted to offering little more in the way of policy progressiveness than \u201cNot Trump\u201d \u2013 while trying to hold together a party that spans the dizzying distance between Wall Street donors and minimum-wage workers. <\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s ambiguity looks similar from the outside, but it comes from a different place entirely. In Ireland, it\u2019s not the economy, stupid, that is tearing our political coalitions apart. Our problem, uniquely, is that we have a budgetary surplus and the money to make choices. Historically, we have never had the capacity or will to make choices, and so we never built the institutions or the capacity that choosing requires. For decades, this strategic ambiguity served us well.<\/p>\n
Why did it help Ireland while it hampered the global West? When the economy is growing, you do not actually have to choose between housing and immigration, or between American FDI and Chinese trade. If everyone is getting more, nobody is losing. Ambiguity, in this sense, is the way in which Ireland was able to postpone having to prioritise. Which is another way of saying that Ireland was able to postpone having a strategy at all.<\/p>\n
Neutrality is a good example of this. Being \u201cfriends\u201d with both China and the US simultaneously worked well when China and the US were friends with each other. In practice, this looked like Ireland hosting Apple\u2019s European headquarters while courting Chinese investment, and still managing to represent itself at the UN as the honest broker. For the last two decades, the geopolitical environment of growth through global trade allowed all of those things to coexist. These tactics could likewise be seen across the board, through Ireland\u2019s pro-EU positioning while it opted out of Schengen; or its dedication to neutrality while approving \u2013 according to reporting in The Currency<\/a> \u2013 \u20ac20 million in military-capable dual-use exports to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli Ministry of Defense during the height of its genocide in Gaza.<\/p>\n But the conditions that made this strategic ambiguity painless are disappearing. <\/p>\n The US and China are no longer friends, and Ireland will be forced, sooner or later, to choose between them. European neutrality meant something different before Russia invaded Ukraine and the continent began rearming. The EU-India free trade deal will funnel large numbers of professional work visas into the only English-speaking EU member with global tech headquarters and pharma contracts, into a housing market that cannot serve the people already here. The corporation tax model that funded the ambiguity is under pressure from every direction. Each of these demands a position and the institutional capacity to act on it. Ireland has neither, because it has never needed either.<\/p>\n Looking east across the Irish Sea, at least this vacuum produces a counterforce. Farage\u2019s politics are ugly, but he is a forcing function that compels the incumbent centre to define itself and to articulate what it actually believes. Starmer knows that sooner or later, if he fails to properly take up the centre space, it will be Farage that ends up filling it instead. That uncomfortable competitive pressure is in fact how democracies renew themselves; as the centre gets lazy, a challenger emerges to threaten the centre with replacement.<\/p>\n