In a desperate attempt to save the Roman Republic and stop the growing threat of populist tyranny, in 52 BC Cato the Younger had allied with Pompey. This is even though Cato had spent the greater part of his political life fiercely opposing what he saw as Pompey’s attempts to undermine the authority of the Roman Senate and routinely blocked his attempts to redistribute land. Yet, when push came to shove, and the very system that had sustained order and liberty in Rome came under attack, Cato put aside his differences with Pompey to save the higher ideal of the Republic.
All current polling suggests Britain may be sliding towards a comparable moment in 2029. As a result of a litany of grievances that have been built up over the last twenty years, the twin evils of right- and left-wing populist collectivism are rearing their ugly faces again. Though the grievances they seek to address may be legitimate, the solutions offered by the populists will fail.
Talks of building a ‘progressive alliance’ on the left or ‘uniting the right’ (on the right) will lead to Britain sleepwalking into a permanent confrontation, a kulturkampf of competing visions of morality in which democracy degenerates and governance becomes impossible, based on the belief that your political opponent is not just wrong, but evil.
A solution would be a hung parliament with a Government of National Unity drawn from Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
The objections will be immediate and abundant, but they rest on the fiction that the three parties are separated by irreconcilable principles. In fact, all three, at their core, accept the world as it is rather than as ideology demands it should be; and also support a functioning market economy, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. None advocate a veneration or appeasement of Putin, the legalisation of hard drugs or the casual erosion of legal norms. Compared with the radically unserious, emotive and internally contradictory programmes offered by Polanski’s Greens and Farage’s Reform, the differences within the mainstream narrow considerably. It is no coincidence that populists themselves describe the older parties as a “uniparty.”
In the last decade, those three parties have directed their sharpest attacks not at the forces seeking to dismantle representative governance, but at each other, leaving the populist right and left free to colonise the space that was assumed to have been permanently vanquished. A Government of National Unity would be a reorientation of political energy.
There is also a practical economic case for a Government of National Unity. Britain’s structural problems — anaemic growth, crumbling public services, a housing crisis, decadent spending and failed immigration policies — cannot be solved within a single electoral cycle, nor can they be solved by a party that must face the electorate again and alone in five years.
Reforming immigration, pensions, welfare, defence or the planning system all require decisions that are politically painful in the short term and beneficial only in the medium term. No single-party government, however large its majority, has proved willing to absorb that cost. The Johnson landslide of 2019 produced paralysis and internal collapse. The Starmer landslide of 2024 has already descended into factional anarchy.
In modern Britain, vast majorities do not generate bold reform but ferment ideological division within the ruling party, leading to timidity. A coalition obliged to negotiate its programme openly, to defend it jointly and to share the political cost of hard choices, may be the only configuration in which those choices actually get made. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010, whatever its faults, had a defined programme, negotiated between parties, and produced the most stable five years of government since the 2008 financial crash.
This solution has got Britain out of a mess before. In 1931, Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government across party lines to make happen drastic and necessary cuts to public spending. In 1940, only Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition allowed the country to effectively confront the Nazi threat. Clement Attlee served under Churchill. Ernest Bevin — who co-founded the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which went on to become Unite the Union — ran the labour market alongside the Conservative Kingsley Wood as Chancellor. Men who had spent careers attacking one another subordinated everything to the defeat of the enemy without. Those who talk a big game about defending Churchill’s legacy would do well to remember that. The dangers to our system now come not from without but within; when the threat is this existential the establishment must unite.
This is already the direction western politics is travelling. The Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz formed a grand coalition with the left-wing SPD in Germany to exclude the hard-right AfD. Donald Tusk in Poland and Peter Magyar in Hungary defeated populism not by out-radicalising their opponents but by assembling the broadest possible democratic front. France has likewise fully transitioned into a three-way fight between the far-left, far-right and establishment centre. The one counter-example is Argentina: decades of hard-left government did not produce a correction. It produced the nigh anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei. When the left exhausts itself in power chasing ideological purity it does not hand the keys to sensible moderates but creates the conditions for more extremism. Likewise, if the Conservatives chase Reform into the ideological undergrowth of small-c conservatism, there might be nothing left for small-c conservatives to conserve.
I will concede that Cato’s alliance with Pompey could not save the Republic from the forces that led to Caesar’s tyranny. Brutus tried, but it was too late. But when the lamps of democracy were going out across Europe, it was a coalition of Conservatives, Labour and Liberals that saw this country through her darkest hour. As those lamps slowly begin to flicker again, we should remember that a National Government has worked before. It can work again.
The original image is a photograph of the Churchill National Government from the collections of the Imperial War Museum.
