Last week’s byelections showed that a ‘change moment’ – a chance to rid the UK of this rotten government – is within sight
By rights, the United Kingdom should be firmly in the midst of what some politicians call a “change moment”: one of those periods when the demise of a government and its way of thinking becomes absolutely inevitable.
Examples from the past are easy to cite. In some cases, such as 1945 and 1979, the change has come to be seen as almost revolutionary, marking the point at which the country was pulled away from an old set of certainties and pushed somewhere completely new, with all the sound and fury that implies. In others, such as 1964, 1997 and 2010, regime change has been important, but not quite a matter of one historical period giving way to another: a matter of serious shifts, perhaps, but not quite the kind of deep transformations of society and the economy that historians see as unquestionable milestones.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
