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Overton's window

10/5/2025

690 words: 5-minute read

As far as political opinions go it’s generally believed that we get more conservative, more reactionary, as we get older.

It’s less often recognised that sometimes we stay the same, politically speaking, and what changes is everything around us.

That’s the gist of this letter from Dr Stephen Watkins of Oldham, Lancashire (and many thanks to son Patch for spotting it!).

Watkins is pointing out that progressive taxation, earned privilege, public service and a welfare state were so much the centre of political gravity in the early 1960s that they were the unquestioned bedrock of Harold Macmillan’s conservative politics. What’s moved, he says, is not him but the Overton Window.

I used to give lectures to University students on political ideologies - liberalism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, conservatism, ecologism. That sort of thing.

Once, when I was casting around for a way of locating the heart of English conservatism for students, I came across this snippet of a speech by the then Prime Minister John Major to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22nd April 1993.

This is what he said:

‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’.

This is brilliant.

In a handful of redolent words Major sums up English conservatism perfectly, locating England’s future in a mythical past, which most likely never existed but which has settled status in the country’s cultural repertoire.

In an idle moment the other day I came across another snippet of a speech given by a major UK politician. It ran like this:

‘People like this – they are the real face of Britain, painting a fence, running a raffle, cutting the half-time orange, or even just that gentle knock on the door that checks your neighbour is alright ... that’s real Britain.’

Who was this, I wondered? The similarity with Major’s 1993 speech was uncanny. So surely a conservative politician - current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch perhaps?

But no, this was UK Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer ransacking the conservative cupboard of myths and legends for ways of articulating his latest wheeze for confronting the extreme right-wing challenge of the Reform Party: a pot-pourri patriotism. This was a key moment in his address to the Labour Party Conference on 30th September 2025, saved up for the rousing moments at the end of his speech.

The position of the Overton Window isn’t like the law of gravity, unavoidable, ineluctable. It’s the result of political decisions taken by a succession of politicians over the past 45 years or so which have resulted in 1960s Tory voters looking like lefty radicals today. These politicians have effectively robbed us - in the UK at least - of a whole political repertoire by making it appear outrageous, extreme, impossible.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government in Spain, for example, offers a polar opposite option to Starmer. And in the UK itself, there’s the Green Party and the nascent Your Party to the left of Starmer.

The rightward drift of the Overton Window wouldn’t have been possible without actual flesh-and-blood human beings taking it there. The roll-call of shame on the left is long and depressing, and thinking through it makes one want to jump out of an actual window. So many missed opportunities, so many high expectations betrayed.

High up on the list we will surely find the current Labour Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

Here she is in 2014 at an outdoor meeting shouting that Israel’s ‘killing of children and bombing of schools and hospitals must be condemned’, and ‘we will not be silent until the Palestinians are free’.

And here she is in 2025 granting police forces powers to put conditions on ‘repeat protests’ as the government doubles down on the repression of pro-Palestine protest - of exactly the sort she supported in 2014.

It’s moot here whether it’s Mahmood or the frame of reference that’s shifted. The fact is that the blackout has been pulled down on Overton’s window and protesting genocide can land you in prison for up to 14 years.

if solzhenitsyn had had a mobile phone ...

9/16/2025

919 words - 4 minute read

I’ve just attended an excellent conference on life in concentration camps in France, Germany and the USSR during and after the Second World War.

Much of the discussion turned on the different strategies employed by ex-inmates to communicate the horror of what had happened to them: how to express the inexpressible, describe the indescribable.

If we’re looking for a common denominator in this regard I think the closest we’ll get is ‘distancing’. This might seem counter-intuitive - after all, isn’t it exactly the fine-grained immediacy of the horror that needs to be communicated? If that’s the objective then some literary equivalent of the haptic shot in cinema seems to be what’s required.

But according to Spanish Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprún, distancing is essential to effective communication of the horror. This is because ordinary language, ´factual’ language, won’t work: the quotidian simply isn’t up to the task of expressing the ineffable.

So Semprún insists on metaphor as a way of communicating what it’s like to be in possession of a body in the liminal, purgatorial, space between life and death. Metaphor creates a space in which the reader’s imagination can get to work, prompting precisely the instinctive, emotional and creative response that Semprún is aiming for.

Taking this a step further, he consistently employs fiction as a means of communicating the privations he underwent in Buchenwald and elsewhere. ‘No se llega nunca a la verdad sin un poco de invención´, he writes. ‘You never get to the truth without a little invention’. He’s come in for criticism on this score: if he admits to invention how can we know what’s true and what’s false?

But this is too literal an understanding of the distinction between fact and fiction and their relationship to the truth. There might not have been an actual Good Samaritan, for example, but the story tells a truth at least as accurately - and perhaps more so - than if he’d actually existed. And the same goes for every single fairy tale we tell our children.

So distancing, through metaphor and inventive fiction, is paradoxically a way of bringing the truth of the horror of concentration camps close to those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced them.

As the conference unfolded I couldn’t help thinking about another actually existing concentration camp at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean - Gaza. (For concentration camp it certainly is; the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as ‘a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard’).

Jorge Semprún had no way of communicating his experiences to the outside world while he was imprisoned in Buchenwald. And the same goes for all the others whose names we have come to know through their testimony: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eli Wisesel, Varlam Shalamov, Józef Czapski and Elinor Lippe, among countless others.

What these testimonies have in common is that a) they were after the event, and b) they come to us via the written word.

Testimony from the concentration camp called Gaza couldn’t be more different. It comes to us live, direct, unfiltered, immediate. And it comes to us in visual form, 24 hours a day, incessantly and unsparingly, on our TV screens, mobiles and tablets. Literary inventiveness seems unnecessary. No doubt there’ll eventually be a literature of this genocide, this second Nakba, but thanks to modern communication technology we haven’t had to wait for it.

Is this a difference that makes a difference?

You might have thought so. It’s often said that the reason Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the rest of the German web of concentration camp suffering lasted so long was that no-one knew about what was going on in them.

So what if Jorge Semprún had had a mobile ‘phone and had somehow managed to use it to broadcast the camp conditions in Buchenwald to the outside world?

We’d maybe like to think that with this knowledge the Allies would have found a way of bringing a swift end to the genocide taking place in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

But the evidence from Gaza suggests otherwise. Two years of direct visual testimony of the daily slaughter of Palestinians - mostly women and children - by the Israeli army are apparently not enough to persuade Western governments to bring an end to the carnage.

Far from it, in fact.

In the very week that a UN Special Committee has determined that Israel is committing a genocide, and concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog - among others - has incited the commission of genocide, UK Prime Minister welcomes the self-same Herzog to 10 Downing Street.

This puts the UK in direct contravention of Article 1 of the 1948 Genocide Convention which demands that contracting states ‘prevent and punish acts of genocide’. No-one - not even President Herzog - is immune from the charge of genocide - something which renowned human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is either unaware of or indifferent to.

So it seems to make no difference how testimony comes down to us - written, visual, delayed or immediate. Apparently it’s not the seed that counts, it’s where it lands. And when the soil is as contaminated by cruelty and indifference outside the camp as inside, the result is Starmer and Herzog shaking hands on the steps of 10 Downing Street while women and children continue to be butchered with impunity.

love, anger and betrayal

9/7/2025

1096 words, 5-minute read

I’m on the London Underground. Reading a book. I look up to check the station. Clapham South. Dammit. I’ve missed my stop. I close the book - source of my distraction, engrossing doesn’t cut it - and cross platforms to head back upstream.

The book in question is ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’, the latest from environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt. Jonathon has been in the game a long time (he joined the Green Party in 1974 and has since covered every possible base in the environmental movement - and invented a few more besides), so what he says, matters.

In ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ he turns his attention to 26 young Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners, all of whom have been arrested for peaceful direct action and some of whom are in prison. In truth these 26 are Jonathon’s co-authors as each of them is given space to detail their involvement in JSO, their motivation, inspiration, relationship with nature, and hopes for the future. They also reflect in their own words on the chapter themes: climate science, taking direct action, confronting the law, the emotional burden of arrest and imprisonment etc.

It’s impossible and invidious to generalise about these extraordinary young people, but four things stand out for me. First, their selflessness; there is not an iota of self-aggrandisement on display here. Second, their surprise that not everyone sees things the way they do, when it’s so obvious that not changing course will lead us to perdition. Third, the equanimity with which they accept their punishment, not because the sentences are fair but because they believe they’re doing the right thing at the right time, and in that sense they’re where they have to be.

Fourth, the road travelled. Each and every one of these protestors has started near the bottom of the commitment escalator and ridden it to the top. From there they survey an uncertain future, both theirs and the planet’s, making sacrifices along the way (though they may not see them like that) that few of us would be willing to make. At some point in that uncertain future these young activists, vilified on all sides (including by those on the same side) will be recognised for the courageous, right-minded people they are.

These 26 campaigners are just a handful of those, young and old, who have fallen victim to the government’s determination to drive direct action from the streets of the UK. Successive governments - both Conservative and Labour - have passed legislation that makes it increasingly difficult to take action (even making a Zoom call) without being threatened with arrest. (Jonathon himself has fallen foul of legislation that makes supporting the currently proscribed group Palestine Action a criminal offence).

Historical comparisons are hard to avoid. Some of the activists, and Jonathon himself, cite the Suffragettes as a source of inspiration, and it’s a measure of the government’s duplicitous insincerity that the erstwhile Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can sickeningly dress up in Suffragette colours and then pass legislation proscribing Palestine Action which uses the same tactics as those that got Cooper the vote.

The environmental movement has a very broad front and practically every tactic has been used to try to turn round the juggernaut that is leading us to environmental and social disaster. Just Stop Oil, like Extinction Rebellion, is at the radical end of the spectrum (though does anyone remember monkeywrenching?)

I think it’s fair to say that Jonathon has spent most of his political life on the moderate flank: the Green Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, founder member of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. In the light of this, one of the most poignant passages in the book is this one:

‘There may well be a climate majority out there, just waiting for the right moment to show how much they care, to demonstrate how determined they are to see their elected representatives get a grip on this crisis. But I’ve spent more than fifty years trying to reach out to that majority of citizens, if only to mobilise a bigger minority of them, and I have no illusions left - about both my failure and theirs. If we continue to rely on the same old business-as-usual theory of change, the inevitable result will be that such a majority will be mobilised only when it is already too late to make any significant difference.’

And it’s for this reason that he ‘is deeply disappointed by all those mainstream climate campaigners and environmentalists who never spoke up in support of Just Stop Oil’. It’s said that we get more conservative with age. Jonathon seems to have taken the wrong potion. A combination of lived experience and over a year spent with these extraordinary young people looks to have placed him firmly on the radical flank.

In the context of UK environmental politics this is an important moment, because concerted calls for a ‘moderate flank’ are being made by significant figures in the environmental movement, aimed precisely at the ‘climate majority’ that Jonathon has spent 50 years trying and failing to reach. Can it be ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or’? Maybe, but time spent working on the moderate flank is time you can’t spend anywhere else.

What other options are there? Years ago a university colleague of mine pointed me towards the insurance industry. After all, he said, who thinks more about the future than them? Since then, insurance has come up over and over again as a weak spot in capitalism’s armoury, as the costs of insuring against future environmental disasters rise inexorably. (Most recently for me in John Vaillant’s magnificent and shocking ‘Fire Weather’).

Jonathon imagines a worst-ever hurricane season in Florida causing state-based insurance company bankruptcies, followed by a cascade of bankruptcies up the chain to the World Bank itself. ‘That’s the only way,’ he writes, ‘as I see it right now, in which today’s suicidal capitalist system turns out, against all the odds, and at absolutely the last possible moment, to be capable of rescuing itself from itself’. That’s quite a journey from Jonathon’s 2007 ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’!

So perhaps, in the end, the Death Machine will chew itself up from the inside. Meanwhile, courageous young people, given voice here by Jonathon, are dragged through the Machine’s ‘justice system’, a system in which judges ludicrously demand that protestors show remorse before they pass sentence. ‘How could I be morally compelled to take action one week’, asks Indigo Rumbelow, ‘and then be filled with regret for acting the next?’

Back in the UK/Ussr

8/24/2025

411 words: 3-minute read

Maybe my mistake was watching an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror the day before departure to the UK from Spain, but as our spanking new train slid past the sleek glass-fronted apartments that line the track between Stansted and London Liverpool Street, I kept expecting something sinister to happen.

It was all just too good to be true.

And the (infuriating) ‘See it, Say it, Sorted’ incantation that’s been running on London trains for what seems like forever didn’t help, hinting as it does at the dark Black Mirror underbelly that the government would like us to think lurks just beneath the civilised and civilising veneer of British society.

But what are we being asked to look out for? What are we being asked to report? What will be ‘sorted’? And how?

The answer came the day before our arrival in the UK.

On that day - 9th August - over 500 people were arrested in London for carrying placards displaying the words ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. The Labour government proscribed Palestine Action in July under the Terrorism Act, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. The arrests were the most made by the Metropolitan Police in a single day in the last 10 years.

The average age of those arrested was 54, and the most arrests - 147 of them - were of people aged between 60 and 69.

So now I know what needs to be seen, said and sorted in the UK in 2025.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, are being murdered by the Israeli army, the UN has declared a famine in Gaza while Israelis BBQ just over the border, Keir Starmer and David Lammy wring their hands over the ‘intolerable’ situation in Gaza having glad-handed Netanyahu and his cronies for the past two years.

Given all this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘see it, say it, sorted’ must be aimed at keeping a look-out for those in the UK complicit in the Gaza genocide.

But no. In Starmer’s Mad Hatter UK it’s those who protest the genocide who need to be ‘sorted’.

People like this old lady.

If you live in the UK today, save yourself a Netflix subscription. Black Mirror is coming to a street near you.

culture wars - in the swimming pool

8/3/2025

It’s well known that there are cultural variations as far as allowing each other the appropriate amount of personal space is concerned.

I’ve spent most of my life in a ‘low-contact culture’ (the UK) where people supposedly feel uncomfortable if their personal space is invaded. As it happens I’m not much bothered by people coming close to me: I’m quite happy with proximity, and kisses and hugs are absolutely fine by me.

Since I now live in Spain this is a good thing because I’m apparently now in a ‘high-contact culture’ where ‘physical contact is common, and maintaining close proximity is a sign of friendliness and openness.’

But there’s another side to the personal space story - the way in which space is unwittingly occupied by the people around you. And this can be really annoying!

Here’s a rather beautiful and sensitive account of the way it works, from a young Irish man who has spent 18 months in Spain grappling with the issue of space occupation.

Every single non-Spanish person to whom I’ve shown this video instantly recognises the bewilderment: how on earth don’t they know they’re right in the middle of the pavement?! And most Spanish people clock it too …

(It’s also worth saying that once you’ve asked ‘¿puedo pasar?’ [can I get by?] the reaction is instantaneous - ‘Of course! No problem!’)

At the root of all this is a basic unawareness that bodies occupy space - and there’s nowhere I’ve found this more aggravating than in the swimming pool, doing lengths.

In the UK if you get to the end of a length and it’s obvious to the person in front of you that you’re quicker than them, they generally wave you through.

In Spain, you can spend an entire length nibbling the heels of the person ahead of you, reach the end of the length, and then see them stare you in the eyes before setting off once again at their habitual, regular and absolutely infuriating snail’s pace. It’s clear that the thought that they might let you through simply doesn’t cross their mind.

So what to do? If you can’t beat them, join them? Plonk myself in the superfast lane and hold everyone up?

I’m honestly not sure I could. Too much cultural baggage of my own for that. So at most it’s going to be a timid ‘¿puedo pasar?’ in the slow lane.

And even that may be beyond me. More likely I’ll be ploughing up and down the lengths, with the sound of clashing cultures ringing in my ears.

we need to talk about palestine and action

7/26/2025

Here’s a scene that’s being played out pretty regularly on the streets of Britain nowadays.

It features a pro-Palestine protestor holding a placard outlining their belief that opposing genocide/war crimes/the holocaust in Gaza is a not a terrorist act.

The placard is a comment on the recent law passed in the House of Commons, proscribing an organisation called Palestine Action - the first direct action group to be labelled terrorist. Support for the group attracts a maximum 14 years in prison.

The protestor in the photograph has carefully avoided the fateful formula ‘I support Palestine Action’ by writing ‘Those who take action against genocide in Palestine are not the terrorists’. The words PALESTINE and ACTION are capitalised. Perhaps that’s what drew the attention of the two policemen who are arresting the protestor.

Yes, you read that right: the protestor is being arrested for carrying that placard.

The vast majority of commentary on what’s going on regarding Palestine protest focuses on the draconian legislation passed by a supposedly progressive Labour government that seeks to criminalise it.

But any legislation needs agents to put it into action - like the two policemen in this photograph. What is their role and responsibility in all this?

Look at them closely: all the paraphernalia of the modern police officer wrapped around two tall, bearded, well-groomed young men invested with the monumental and unassailable power of the state to do things to you that you’d rather they didn’t.

When they get home these two young men see what we all see on the television, our phones, tablets and laptops: chaos at Gazan feeding stations, skeletal children, grieving mothers and fathers weeping over the white shrouds covering their children, refugees murdered by Israeli forces as they try to get food, endless bombing and indiscriminate destruction.

Then the next day they don their uniforms and go out and arrest a few more people protesting this indescribable horror.

Arresting the protestor in the photograph may not mean that the policemen agree with what’s going on in Gaza. But it does mean that they are able to ignore it to the point where they are content to action the legislation that criminalises (some of) those who oppose it.

Question: why you are arresting this protestor?
Answer: because they might be breaking the law.
Question: is there any law you would refuse to action?
Answer: no.
Question: why?
Answer: because I am bound as a police officer to action the law.
Question: if you knew that this protestor would spend the next 14 years in jail as a result of your arrest, would you still arrest them?
Answer: Yes.

In 1970 Albert Hirschman published his ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’, outlining the three options open to any of us working in an organisation some of whose activities we don’t endorse. ‘Voice’ relates to us voicing a complaint within the organisation, ‘Loyalty’ refers to us knuckling down and getting on with it, and ‘Exit’ involves us leaving the organisation.

The two policemen in the photograph are driven by Loyalty, but I'm left wondering what it would take for them to go for Voice - or even Exit?

In the 1945-6 Nuremberg trials it was determined that following orders was not sufficient defence to avoid punishment for war crimes. Our two policemen are not committing a war crime, though the people they are protecting from protest most certainly are.

Question: what did you do to stop the genocide/war crimes/holocaust in Gaza, Daddy?
Answer: I arrested a man in a wheelchair dressed as Charlie Chaplin, carrying a copy of Picasso’s Guernica dressed in the colours of the Palestinian flag, while he played an excerpt from Chaplin’s iconic speech in ‘The Great Dictator’.
Question: Why did he play that speech?
Answer: It might have been this bit. Very powerful, but absolutely nothing to do with me.

‘Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!’

I did this so you don't have to ... (versión en español)

6/21/2025

El 18 de marzo de este año, Isabel Díaz Ayuso pronunció un discurso en el Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) de Londres (fundado por Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph y Margaret Thatcher). Para quienes no hayan oído hablar de Díaz Ayuso y busquen un análogo en el Reino Unido, piensen en Nigel Farage, no tanto por su política (aunque hay similitudes) como por su capacidad para atraer la atención de los medios de comunicación mucho más allá de lo que su posición electoral justifica.

Para ser justos, Díaz Ayuso tiene más peso formal que Farage, porque mientras su partido sólo tiene 5 diputados en la Cámara de los Comunes, ella es Presidenta de la mayor de las 17 Comunidades Autónomas españolas (según el PIB), la Comunidad de Madrid. Lo que comparten, sin embargo, es su incomparable capacidad para captar la atención de los medios de comunicación en sus respectivos países.

Así que lo que diga Díaz Ayuso, importa. Incluso podría ser elegida algún día para liderar el país, tras haber defenestrado ya a un líder de su partido (el Partido Popular) y con el actual (Alberto Núñez Feijóo) inseguro e ineficaz.

Y para que no tengas que hacerlo tú, he escuchado tres veces su discurso de 20 minutos en un intento de desentrañar lo que podríamos llamar a lo grande su filosofía política.

En primer lugar, hay que destacar su originalidad y descaro. Describe sus convicciones políticas como «liberales», pero es un liberalismo muy su generis. Y para colmo se refiere al «liberalismo a la española» como el liberalismo original, puro y auténtico, mientras que otros han perdido su norte.

Hay, por supuesto, algunos principios compartidos y conocidos entre estos liberalismos - el respeto al Estado de Derecho, la separación de poderes, la afirmación de que el fin nunca justifica los medios- pero lo que destaca es el contenido antirracional y moralizante del liberalismo de Ayuso. Le interesan tanto las tripas y el corazón como la cabeza.

Así, los principios clave del liberalismo puro y auténtico son aparentemente estos: la alegría, la valentía, la generosidad, la verdad. Lo sorprendente de estos principios es que son tan superficialmente atractivos como radicalmente imprecisos, y ahí radica su potencia retórica y política. Ayuso ha dado con la receta del éxito retórico en lo que podríamos llamar estos tiempos políticos antiilustrados: hacer una lista de homilías que suenen cálidas, repetirlas a menudo (lo hace a lo largo de todo el discurso) y hacer de su imprecisión una virtud para atraer a su órbita al mayor número posible de personas.

El liberalismo moderno, tal y como lo entendemos hoy en día, tiene muy poco contenido moral: todo su sentido es que, dentro de las limitaciones de la ley y el respeto a los demás, somos libres de elegir la vida que queremos llevar. Libertad es una palabra que Ayuso utiliza con frecuencia, casi siempre de forma reductora: no somos libres si no hay donde tomar una cerveza a las 3 de la mañana. En este discurso añade una pizca de sustancia intelectual al citar al filósofo español José Ortega y Gasset y su afirmación (junto con los existencialistas) de que los seres humanos son constitutivamente libres y, por tanto, están obligados a elegir.

Esto parece impecablemente liberal, pero Ayuso se separa del liberalismo moderno cuando dice que debemos «elegir bien». Está claro que no se refiere sólo a «elegir bien» en el sentido de atenerse al imperio de la ley, porque en su discurso deja claro que hay opciones que aborrece aunque sean legales. Dos de ellas son el aborto y la eutanasia. Una tercera es el consumo de drogas (mencionado no menos de cuatro veces en el discurso) que, por supuesto, algunos liberales desean ver despenalizado precisamente por motivos de libertad de elección.

Se trata de un liberalismo moralizante que rechaza la idea del «individuo» desarraigado en favor de la «persona» nacida en una circunstancia particular que informa sus elecciones (morales) y condiciona sus posibilidades. Si esto es un liberalismo, es el liberalismo comunitario que surgió como reacción a lo que sus partidarios consideraban un individualismo excesivo que conducía al egocentrismo (un punto que Ayuso plantea exactamente en esos términos en su discurso).

El problema con el liberalismo comunitario es que tiene el potencial de restringir severamente las opciones abiertas al individuo. Para Ayuso la naturaleza de la comunidad en la que uno nace es fundamental en la medida en que condiciona y limita las opciones que el individuo puede legítimamente tomar. Las características de la comunidad que propone Ayuso son (las extraigo de su discurso): cristiana, anti-'woke', anti-izquierda, nacionalista, anti-feminista, pro-maternidad. Elegir bien en el Planeta Ayuso significa elegir de acuerdo con estos principios y los comportamientos que se derivan de ellos.

Llevar a cabo una política de tan alto contenido moral es arriesgado. La política de izquierdas es casi constitutivamente moralizante y a los políticos de izquierdas se les reprocha muy a menudo no estar a la altura de las normas morales que promueven. Esto da a la derecha un palo muy conveniente con el que golpear a la izquierda - y lo hacen en cada oportunidad.

A primera vista, Ayuso corre un riesgo similar, y en una serie de aspectos es tan susceptible de ser acusada de hipocresía como cualquier político de izquierdas. Por ejemplo, habla mucho del principio de «respeto a la vida humana». Esta es la mujer que defendió su negativa a trasladar a los pacientes mayores de Covid de las residencias al hospital alegando que habrían muerto pronto de todos modos. Una vez más, ensalza la importancia del «decoro» en política. Esta es la mujer que llamó hijo de puta al presidente Pedro Sánchez en el Parlamento y luego afirmó que sólo dijo que le gustaba la fruta (hijo de puta/me gusta la fruta). Una vez más, insiste en la importancia del Estado de Derecho. Es la mujer que grita «¡calumnia!» cuando acusan a su pareja de defraudar a Hacienda, acusación que él mismo ha confesado. Por último, Ayuso entra en combate blandiendo la espada de la verdad. Esta es la mujer que se refiere al «wokeismo» como el caballo de Troya que la izquierda está utilizando para instalar el comunismo en todo el mundo occidental. (A algunos nos gustaría que tuviera razón).

Al fin y al cabo, y a pesar de las protestas de Ayuso, el suyo no es un liberalismo. Es un conservadurismo profundo, enraizado en el catolicismo, el nacionalismo español, la idealización de la familia y la tradición. Y ella no es tan susceptible de ser acusada de hipocresía como los de izquierdas, porque nadie ha esperado nunca un comportamiento moralmente coherente de los políticos de derechas. Y menos ahora que Trump ha hecho de la antivirtud virtud. Los partidarios de Ayuso deliran tanto como los de Trump cuando la ven saltarse las normas, incluso (¿especialmente?) las que ella misma ensalza.

Qué oportuno que Ayuso haya elegido dar su conferencia en un centro fundado por Margaret Thatcher. La presidenta madrileña es, desafortunadamente, la prueba de que el conservadurismo de esta última sigue vivo y coleando en todo menos -literalmente- el nombre.

I did this so you don't have to ...

5/9/2025

1145 words - 5 minute read

On March 18th this year Isabel Díaz Ayuso gave a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in London (founded by Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher). For those of you who haven’t heard of Díaz Ayuso and are looking for a UK analogue think Nigel Farage, not so much for their politics (though there are similarities) but for their capacity to attract media attention way beyond what their electoral position warrants.

To be fair Díaz Ayuso has greater formal clout than Farage because while his party has just 5 MPs in the House of Commons, she is President of the largest of Spain’s 17 Autonomous Communities, the Madrid Community. What they share, though, is their unrivalled capacity to capture media attention in their respective countries.

So what Díaz Ayuso says, matters. She could even one day be elected to lead the country, having already defenestrated one leader of her party (the Partido Popular) and with the current leader (Alberto Núñez Feijóo) insecure and ineffective.

And so you don’t have to, I have listened to her 20-minute speech three times in an attempt to tease out what we might grandly call her political philosophy.

First off, full marks for originality and chutzpah. She describes her political beliefs as ‘liberal’ - but it’s a liberalism the like of which I’ve never seen before. And to cap that she refers to ‘liberalism, the Spanish version’ (liberalismo a la española) as the original, pure, authentic liberalism, while others have lost their way.

There are of course some shared and well-known principles across these liberalisms - respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, the assertion that the end never justify the means - but what stands out is the anti-rational and moralising content of Ayuso’s liberalism. She’s at least as interested in the gut and the heart as in the head.

So the key principles of pure and authentic liberalism are apparently these: happiness, bravery, generosity and truth (la alegría, la valentía, la generosidad, la verdad). What’s striking about these principles is that they are both superficially attractive and radically imprecise - and therein lies their rhetorical and political potency. Ayuso has recognised (or stumbled upon) the recipe for rhetorical success in what we might call these anti-Enlightenment political times: make a list of warm-sounding homilies, repeat them often (she does so throughout this speech) and make a virtue of their imprecision so as to draw as many people into their orbit as possible.

Modern liberalism as we’ve come to understand it has very little moral content: its whole point is that within the constraints of the law and respect for other people we are free to choose the life we want to lead. Freedom is a word that Ayuso uses regularly, mostly in a reductive way - we’re unfree if there’s nowhere to have a beer at 3 in the morning. In this speech she adds a dash of intellectual substance by namechecking the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and his assertion (along with existentialists) that human beings are constitutively free and therefore obliged to choose.

This seems impeccably liberal, but Ayuso parts ways with modern liberalism when she says that we must ‘choose well’. It’s clear that she doesn’t just mean ‘well’ in terms of adhering to the rule of the law because she makes it clear in her speech that there are some choices she abhors even if they’re legal. Two she refers to are abortion and euthanasia. A third is the consumption of drugs (mentioned no less than four times in the speech) which of course some liberals wish to see decriminalised precisely on the grounds of freedom to choose.

This is a moralising liberalism that rejects the idea of the unrooted ‘individual’ (individuo) in favour of the ‘person’ (persona) born into a particular circumstance which informs their (moral) choices and conditions their possibilities. If this is a liberalism at all it is the communitarian liberalism that arose in reaction what its supporters regarded as an excessive individualism leading to egocentrism (a point Ayuso makes in exactly those terms in her speech).

The problem with communitarian liberalism is that it has the potential to severely constrain the options open to the individual. The nature of the community one is born into is critical in that it conditions and constrains the choices the individual can legitimately make. Ayuso’s community is (I draw these characteristics from her speech): Christian, anti-’woke’, anti-left, nationalist, anti-feminist, pro-maternity. ‘Choosing well’ on Planet Ayuso means choosing in line with these principles and the behaviours that flow from them.

Running a high moral content politics is risky. Left-wing politics are almost constitutively moralising and left-wing politicians are very often called out for not living up to the moral standards they promote. This gives the right a very convenient stick with which to beat the left - and they do so at every opportunity.

On the face of it Ayuso runs a similar risk, and on a series of counts she is as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as any left-wing politician might be. For example, she makes much of the principle of ‘respect for human life’. This is the woman who defended her refusal to move older Covid patients from care homes to hospital on the grounds that they’d have soon died anyway. Again, she lionises the importance of ‘decorum’ in politics. This is the woman who called President Pedro Sánchez a son of a whore in Parliament and then claimed that she only said she liked fruit (hijo de puta/me gusta la fruta). Again, she makes much of the importance of the rule of law. This is the woman who shouts ‘calumny!’ when her partner is accused of defrauding the tax office, an accusation to which he has himself confessed. Finally, Ayuso goes into battle brandishing the sword of truth. This is the woman who unselfconsciously refers to ‘wokeism’ as the Trojan horse that the left is using to install communism throughout the western world. (Some of us might wish she was right about that).

In the end, and despite Ayuso’s protestations, hers is not a liberalism. It is a profound conservatism, rooted in Catholicism, Spanish nationalism, idealisation of the family and tradition. And she is not as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as those on the left are because no-one has ever really expects morally consistent behaviour from right-wing politicians. And even less so now that Trump has made a virtue out of anti-virtue. Ayuso’s supporters are as delirious as his are when they see her flouting the rules - even (especially?) the ones she extols herself.

How fitting that Ayuso should choose to give her lecture at a centre founded by Margaret Thatcher. The Madrid President is unfortunate proof that the latter’s conservatism is alive and kicking in all but - literally - name.

One shot

3/17/2025

737 words: 4-minute read

One photograph. Four men. Hal Chase (no, me neither - but I do now), Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Apparently the only photograph of the three best-known members of the Beat Generation, all together at the same time.

But when was it taken? The last two weeks of January 1945? 20-23 December 1945? 20-24 February 1946? Last week of February 1947?

And where was it taken? New York? Manhattan? Morningside Heights? Columbia? Riverside Drive? Morningside Avenue? Morningside Drive? Upper West Side?

Oh, and who took the photograph? (All these questions are answered in One Shot, but no spoilers here).

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ writes Oliver Harris, ‘What! A whole book about this one snap that everybody already knows? He really has lost his mind, or at least all sense of perspective …’

Well yes, a whole book about that one snap, and what a joyous thing to do - and to read. (Full disclosure: Oliver used to be a neighbour of mine and we shared a lawnmower). One Shot: a beat generation mystery (Moloko Print, 2024) has been described as a detective story, which it surely is. Every detective story has its detective and every detective has their backstory (is an alcoholic, gay, likes classical music, has a chequered past, feeds stray cats, votes Labour, lost her leg in a powerboat accident) and Oliver has his too. Details are unnecessary; suffice to say that he wrote this book amid a series of personal troubles that would leave most of us unable to function at all, let alone obsess about the crease in the top left-hand corner of a photograph.

But maybe the crease in the photograph, the hats and coats the men wore, the direction of their gaze, The Thing that protrudes in front of Borroughs, the snow piled up in the photoshoot pictures, and the rabbit hole investigations prompted by each and every one of these details, is what helped him to get to the end of each day - ‘the only way I knew to keep my heart from breaking so that I could care for you while I endured my own personal trials and the agonies of Mariupol and Gaza’.

(Unlikely? By my lights, not at all, as I’ve done something similar myself).

So no, Oliver, I don’t at all think you wasted your time writing this book (p.207), and nor do I think I wasted my time reading it. Anything that helps us get to the end of the day in trying circumstances is fine by me, and anyway we all like a page-turner, which this truly is. Then there’s the minor point that you’ll have cemented your spot at the very summit of Beat/Burroughsian scholarship.

But there’s another reason why, even if you’re not for some weird reason interested in the provenance and meaning of a roughly 80-year old photograph, One Shot needs to be read: that quaint old thing called The Truth. When you see a photograph caption do you assume it’s telling the truth, especially if it’s in a book published by a reputable press? Yes, me too.

Well beware. Oliver’s caption database for the Group Picture contains 30 alternatives: ‘a chaotic confusion of impossible and alternative realities which is the exact antithesis of each individual’s caption’s apparently simple objective authority’ (p.77). If ever there was a metaphor for our post-truth, alternative facts age, it’s surely Oliver’s Group Picture caption database. And if we’re looking for an antidote metaphor it’s the whole of One Shot, dedicated as it is to reducing 30 captions to one - the right one. I imagine someone digging up One Shot centuries into the future, much like the denizens in Will Self’s Book of Dave, shocked at the revelation that amid the mendacious miasma of the early twentieth century there were still people who cared for facticity.

(I get this desire. Successive biographers of Mary Wollstonecraft, through force of repetition, have the date wrong for when she lived in the house of the 18th century Platonist Thomas Taylor. This will be put right soon - watch this space).

There’s no way the young researcher who stepped into the JFK International Arrivals Hall in October 1984 could have known that forty years later he’d have One Shot at shoring up both his life and a key legacy of the Enlightenment. But that’s what he’s done in this brilliant and brilliantly entertaining book. Read it, and enjoy!

PS If you want to read a proper review, there’s one here.

To shout or not to shout?

2/17/2025

1024 words - 5 minute read

Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read have just published an article in the New Statesman entitled ‘It’s time for climate populism (as politics turns against net zero, we need to mobilise a genuine mass movement against ecological catastrophe)’.

The basic idea is sound: rather than try to mobilise people to action around ‘an invisible gas that needs to be eliminated by some future date’, talk instead about ‘direct experience, and quality of life’. In turn this implies a focus on adaptation to the effects of climate change rather than putting all our eggs in the mitigation basket - trying to get emissions down.

The shift to the ‘here and now’ advantages of climate action sounds like a very good idea, but the challenge remains as to how to make all this ‘cut through’, and in circumstances in which the rules of engagement are completely different to what they used to be.

I read the piece in conjunction with Chris Hayes’ Long Read in the Guardian, entitled ‘The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age’, and whose strapline is ‘The old model of political debate is over, and spectacle beats argument every time.’

Hayes has written a challenging explanation/exposition of the situation in which campaigners find themselves, and for which we are very ill-prepared. We’ve spent most of our lives thinking that the force of the better argument will prevail, and that the best way of making our case stick is by providing people with data and information. So, says Hayes, most of us ‘retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens. We are still thinking in terms of “debate” – a back-and-forth, or a conversation, or discussion.’

His point is that the era of persuasion-via-information is over; now it’s all about attention - and attention will be granted to those who shout loudest and create the most watchable spectacle.

He refers to George Saunders’ thought experiment to illustrate the new world we inhabit:

‘Imagine, Saunders says, being at a cocktail party, with the normal give-and-take of conversation between generally genial, informed people. And then “a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he’s got that megaphone.” The man begins to offer his opinions and soon creates his own conversational gravity: everyone is reacting to whatever he’s saying. This, Saunders contends, quickly ruins the party. And if you have a particularly empty-minded Megaphone Guy, you get a discourse that’s not just stupid but that makes everyone in the room stupider as well.

Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic …’

Any Trump-sounding bells ringing?

In this new economy of attention Trump succeeds because he makes the most noise and creates the most compelling spectacles: ‘Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing.’ Yuck, but true.

(The fact that we’ve all got megaphones now [smartphones] doesn’t help, especially when the richest man in the world has the loudest megaphone and is prepared to hand it over to the man most needful of attention).

So how does climate change campaigning fare in this new world in which ‘amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments’? Not at all well, according to Hayes:

‘Nowhere is the problem of attention more obvious and urgent than when it comes to climate change. According to our best estimates, it’s probably the hottest it’s been on the planet in 150,000 years. The effects of climate change are visible, sometimes spectacularly so, but climate change itself – the slow, steady, invisible accretion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – is literally imperceptible to human faculties. It is almost the opposite of a siren. It evades our attention rather than compelling it. None of our five senses can detect it.’

Just when we want to be at a party with a megaphone we’re talking to ourselves in a soundproofed room.

(The other problem with climate change is that it’s quite complicated, or we have presented it as such, and as Hayes says, ‘in competitive attention markets, the more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it.’)

So, as Lenin once asked, what is to be done?

Well all this leads Hayes to give two cheers to the Just Stop Oil (JSO) protestors and their actions because:

‘These disruptions are designed to make the same kind of trade that Trump pulled off so successfully. What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the Hobbesian war of all against all in the attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter.’

Did JSO work? Or maybe the question should be, is JSO working?, because it’s just possibly too early to tell. It’s certainly getting attention …

In any case Hayes’ concern might be that Climate Popularism (which is what the initiative is to be called, according to Lucas and Read), being ‘polite and civil’, will be ignored. I have no idea what ‘fucking shit up to make people pay attention’ might look like in this context, but I do believe that Lucas and Read should bear Hayes in mind as the project develops.

(The really frustrating thing is that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has an extraordinary opportunity to ‘do a Trump’, or a Thatcher, and simply bulldoze a raft of progressive measures through. But he’s doing exactly the opposite).

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