As politics blurs into entertainment, the loudest mouths draw the most eyeballs

Back then, their economy was larger than that of China and India. Combined!

I (re)learned this astonishing factoid from David Lammy's thoughtful piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs: "The case for progressive realism: why Britain must chart a new global course."

Lammy is Labour's presumptive foreign secretary.

He argues for a progressive reapplication of Britain's exemplary soft power which he says has been trashed by Conservative isolationism and attacks on "universities, courts and the BBC".

Instead, he says, Britain should "champion multilateral causes, build institutions, defend democracy [and] stand up for the rule of law".

Along with climate change, the colossal rise of China and to a lesser extent, India, is the story of the 21st century.

Arrogant assumptions of unchallenged Western dominance built on superior internal cohesion have been among the first to fall.

These inward fractures now shape our politics in multiple ways: collapsing trust, the trashing of norms, institutions and laws, dramatic electoral swings, and the enabling blight of reckless populism - by which I mean the emergence of political demagogues better at exploiting problems than fixing them.

In the immediate term, UK voters appear set to steer firmly back towards the middle in what will be a remarkable recovery for Labour under Keir Starmer's supposedly uninspiring leadership. At the election less than five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn had led Labour to its worst defeat.

Long-term, though, the result on July 4 could still redraw Britain's political landscape on the conservative side in ways which bake in future volatility.

Some fear the Conservative Party could be replaced by Nigel Farage's rebadged Brexit party (UKIP), now called Reform. Or forced to merge. Farage is scoring major media time in this campaign, despite not being a member of Parliament nor having a single MP elected under his banner.

There is a degree of karma here. It was the electoral heat of Farage's fervent anti-Europe populism in 2013 that led to the foolishness of David Cameron's promised Brexit referendum and thus to much that has gone wrong for Britain and the Conservatives ever since.

Clearly, in the business of appeasement, what goes around comes around - usually with an even bigger hammer.

Should such wild fluctuations and realignments be concerning?

Probably. Like the weather, they seem to be in tune with the times as voters unhook themselves from major parties, shared media, agreed facts and common values.

Across the Channel, things could get even wilder. Catastrophically, President Emmanuel Macron responded to the shock rise of hard right forces in the recent European parliamentary elections by calling snap parliamentary elections at home.

Evidently, he figured this would act like a dose of smelling salts, awakening French voters to the madness of extremism. Instead, Macron's avowedly centrist party seems headed for a hammering as the parties of right and left each clump and ossify at the extremes of the spectrum leaving the centre void.

Polls suggest Macron faces a major political humiliation and the likelihood his last years in the role (his final term ends in 2027) will be marked by rolling combat with ideologues and xenophobes.

This may be the biggest own-goal since, well, since a month ago when Rishi Sunak decided to go early. And of course, since Cameron before that, who was gone as PM the morning after the 2016 referendum.

As the cadence of news and politics increases, contradictions are easily overlooked.

For example, while it might be excusable to forget 1997, it was only in March that the Albanese Labor government was in the dock for committing to a $1 billion investment in a domestic solar PV industry and another in quantum computing.

Under its Solar Sunshot program, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the Clean Energy Financial Corporation would apply return-on-investment criteria to foster the domestic manufacture of solar PV panels.

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In high dudgeon, the opposition, media and sundry economists lamented the heinous doctrinal crime of "picking winners", declaring it to be no business of governments.

Now, though, in the radiant luminosity of Peter Dutton's uncosted nuclear announcement, Labor's modest investments suddenly look more like chump-change.

Sloughing off his party's reverence for low taxes, small government, low risk and a unique private sector efficiency, Dutton's political answer to the emissions challenge his party has long denied is to pick the mother all winners - seven federally built, owned and operated nuclear power plants. The costs are eye-watering, the potential for blowouts, enormous.

Conservatives have forgotten Margaret Thatcher's quip about the problem with socialism being "you eventually run out of other people's money".

Essentially, conservatives have ditched incrementalism for dramatic, radical and socially disruptive change. Think of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and now Dutton.

Quaint values of civility, unity, respect for courts and electoral outcomes are now more often defended by centrists and social democratic parties.

As politics becomes synonymous with entertainment, one is reminded of what W.B. Yeats wrote in his great modernist poem of 1919, The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."