Voters now have a real choice between two clear political paths

As the United States prepares for a landmark election on Tuesday, British politics also stands at a pivotal moment. After Rachel Reeves’s “tax, spend and borrow” Budget and the choice of a right-wing Tory leader in Kemi Badenoch, who rather strangely believes her party “talked right, but governed left” before losing July’s election, both main parties have arguably edged away from the centre ground. In a significant admission during TV interviews on Sunday, Ms Reeves accepted she was “wrong” to say during the campaign that Labour would not need to increase taxes beyond the £8bn proposed in its manifesto, insisting she did not “know everything” about the state of the public finances until she became chancellor. Labour would love nothing more than to redraw the dividing line of the Blair-Brown era: “Labour investment versus Tory cuts.” Ms Badenoch believes the tax burden was already too high under the Sunak government but insisted on Sunday: “That doesn’t mean that we have to cut public services, it means that we have to look at how we are delivering public services.” The new Tory leader will need to resist the temptation to focus too heavily on culture wars and her anti-woke crusade. Ms Badenoch’s arrival on the scene will put Labour under pressure to turn its rhetoric about public sector reform into reality; that will rightly become an important new battleground.