Category: Politics

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.

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.

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).

Donald Trump and political nostalgia

11/9/2024

1235 words - 8 minute read

So Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States of America. In 2016 when he became the 45th President I think few of us believed he’d become the 47th. But he has - and with a bigger majority than first time round.

How? Why?

For those on the left it’s tempting to reach for the ‘they just don’t get it’ card, referring to the undereducated rednecks who, with just a little bit more instruction (from us) would see the light and vote properly next time. It’s been a while since I went down that route myself, believing instead that the votes for Trump (or Orbán or whoever) signify something more and other than simple stupidity.

So the title of Rafael Behr’s article in the Guardian’s 6th November issue caught my attention: ‘Left, right, Harris, Trump: all prisoners of political nostalgia in an era few understand’. The title suggests that it’s not only the right that’s got it all wrong, but the left too. Promising. So what is it that we’ve got wrong?

The usual answer is that we don’t take Trump voters seriously enough, but Behr is on a different tack. He argues that the problem is nostalgia - nostalgia for an analogue age when politics was about ‘real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions, meandering conversations, small talk … the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together.’

That’s all gone he says, and we must get used to a world in which ‘politics [is] played in digital mode’. And that means getting used to the ramifications of digital politics: where there is more polarisation and where ‘differences of opinion are accelerated into irreconcilable enmities.’

Behr is of course aware that correlation doesn’t mean causation, and that profound disagreement existed well before social media came on the scene. But it’s also plausible to say that ‘a very online culture, marked by short attention spans, narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow demagoguery than with representative democracy.’

Behr claims that his article ‘isn’t an elegy for some pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’, but it’s hard to read it as anything other than that. And why not? Where’s the shame in yearning for enlightened public discourse in place of ‘elections as a cry of rage or exultant self-actualisation’?

But is this possible in an age of digital politics, an era in which deliberation seems to have given way to demagoguery?

Well a couple of days ago Stan Collymore, ex-footballer, ran an experiment in this vein. On his X account he posted his political principles as a ‘traditional Labour voter’ and then invited those who disagree with him to explain why. His tone of voice is itself unusual - and welcome:

‘in the spirit of amistad rather than name calling (we've all done it, politics is important and tribal after all), why do you vote Republican or MAGA, Reform or Conservative and what am I fundamentally missing in my world view that (certainly in the case of right of centre parties globally on the rise) I should consider?’

Collymore’s analogue-style invitation was well received: ‘The sort of post we need to see more of, Stan’, ‘Stan, this is a very reasonable post and request’, ‘Smart of you to look outside your knowledge base’, ‘I’m glad to see you take the approach of listening’, ‘Lovely post’, ‘Brilliant question. And well put’. And so on and so on. This is anecdotal evidence for a wish to debate and deliberate, of course, but evidence nonetheless.

One response in particular, from ‘Cromwell’s Ghost’, got me thinking about how far this analogue invitation might fare in a digital environment. It’s a lengthy and thoughtful response which amounts to a punchy endorsement of a broadly Reform programme. Part of the reply reads as follows:

‘We don’t give a damn about net zero and climate change. The climate has been changing since before the dinosaurs to cause the ice age and changing since then to melt it and reheat the planet. Only megalomaniacs think we should be trying to control temperature.

We don’t care about carbon emissions. CO2 is essential for plant life and an essential building block for things like coral. The more the merrier.’

One bit of this response is demonstrably false. CO2 is not a building block for coral. It’s true that the oceans absorb CO2 but that only makes them more acidic. As a result less calcification occurs which, according to the US National Science Foundation, makes it harder for skeletons - and therefore coral - to grow. In other words the exact opposite of what Cromwell’s Ghost says.

I used teach a theory of democracy called ‘deliberative democracy’, the nub of which is that decisions are made according to the ‘force of the better argument’. For it to work people need to be prepared to cede the point if they’ve been shown to be wrong. In matters of value this is obviously difficult to work through because there are often no standards by which to judge right and wrong.

In matters of fact, though, things should be easier. And a case in point is the mistake made by Cromwell’s Ghost regarding CO2 and coral. Would he be prepared to accept the correction? Would he be any less prepared to accept it in the digital world than in the analogue world? If he accepted it might it shift his attitude to climate change? Or has the idea of ‘alternative facts’ so taken root that what the US National Science Foundation says about CO2 and coral has as much weight as Net Zero Watch (the rebranded Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s best-known climate change denying agency)?

(I’ve written to Cromwell’s Ghost to ask if he’s prepared to accept the coral correction. If I hear from him I’ll report back. Update on 25 November 2024: two weeks later and I've not heard a word).

Why is this important, on the threshold of another four years of Donald Trump? Because - yes - I’m nostalgic. Nostalgic for a time when truth and falsity mattered, when disagreement invited dialogue rather than demagoguery.

So rather than avoid nostalgia we should embrace it, recognising the value of what we are nostalgic for - the regulative ideal of a ‘pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse’ - while acknowledging how incredibly difficult it will be to recover that ideal in a world where the old-fashioned idea of rival interpretations subject to debate has given way to tub-thumping cris de coeur that brook no argument. (I've discussed elsewhere the need for, and challenges associated with, putting social media at the service of a dialogic politics of listening rather than sucking the lifeblood from it).

It’s hard not to agree with this paean to the capacity to change one’s mind in the light of new evidence:

‘One of the most important skills I see in successful (and good) people is to constantly reevaluate assumptions. They make predictions based on various inputs, some of them unknown, and reevaluate based on what they got right and wrong. They trust people not because they're always right - no one is - but because if you're constantly seeking the truth it's easy to identify those who are doing the same.’

So who is this enlightened soul? Immanuel Kant? No, it’s JD Vance, the next vice-president of the United States, explaining how he decided that Donald Trump is not ‘cultural heroin’ after all, but the man best qualified to further the interests of the American people.

Deliberation doesn’t mean you always get what you want. And that’s actually part of the point.

Ukraine - land for peace?

5/24/2022

538 words: 4-minute read

The war in Ukraine has been going on for just over three months and there’s no end in sight. Frustrated by Ukrainian resistance, Russia is focusing its efforts on the east and south of the country and it seems to be employing tactics used in Syria, laying waste to whatever gets in the way. The enormous civilian suffering is plain to see, and the collateral damage is spreading further and wider in the form of hikes in energy prices and world food shortages (especially for the poor). Somalia and Benin source 100% of imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Egypt 82%, Sudan and Lebanon 75%, and Libya 50%. As Tom Stevenson writes in the London Review of Books, 'The longer the war continues, the greater the certainty of hunger'.

In addition the geopolitical stakes have risen enormously with Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO after decades of neutrality. So the downsides of the conflict are obvious: clear and increasing local, regional and global instability. You’d have thought that everyone would be trying their hardest to end the war.

Against this backdrop the decision by western countries to supply Ukraine with ever-increasing amounts of weaponry at ever-increasing levels of sophistication is hard to understand, because this does nothing but prolong the war and the suffering and instability that goes with it. The defence is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and nations should be free to determine their own fate rather than have it determined by force of arms. Of course, but with sovereignty comes responsibility, and we should be asking what the responsible course of action is at this juncture. How should sovereign Ukraine act, now?

The answer is: land for peace. Long touted as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle needs to be dusted off and applied to the Ukraine war. It is absolutely clear that the war will not end by one or the other of the combatants achieving total victory, so compromise is in any case inevitable. Far more will be lost than gained by putting off what is going to happen anyway - more dead and wounded, more senseless destruction, more starvation, more energy poverty. All of this could be avoided by a responsible exercise of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

I hold not the smallest candle for Vladimir Putin, but well before the Ukraine conflict the West really should have paid closer attention to Russia’s concerns regarding its southern flank. It should have been made quite clear that the exercise of Ukrainian sovereignty did not include it joining NATO. Had it done so, the conflict would likely have been avoided. However, we are where we are: Putin’s plan has blown up in his face, thousands on both sides have been killed and wounded and we are all experiencing the collateral damage caused by the conflict - the poor and vulnerable, as ever, more than anyone. And the west must take its fair share of the blame - especially leftwing cosmopolitans who have somehow misplaced their objections to overweaning conceptions of national sovereignty, and are backing to the hilt Ukraine’s conception of what it means.

So let’s focus on stopping the war rather than punishing Russia - down to the last Ukrainian. Every extra weapon given to Ukraine delays the peace talks that will inevitably take place. Every day of delay is a day of more suffering and destruction. And the only people truly rubbing their hands with glee are Western arms manufacturers.

Que vaut la vie sans libertÉ?

2/14/2022

‘Que vaut la vie sans liberté?’ reads the placard. It wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of a revolutionary leftist in 1968 Paris, but it’s Nice 2022, and it’s the right not the left that’s flying the freedom banner.

During the pandemic the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer aternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.

As a result the word ‘libertarian’ has been completely appropriated by small-state liberals. At one time the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

What’s life without liberty? is a question the left has forgotten to ask. It needs to do so, quick, before the freedom train runs away for good.

What is to be done?

2/4/2022

935 words - 5 minute read

Politically, economically, socially and ecologically, the status quo is a disaster.

In times gone by the left would be demanding radical change and the overthrow of a corrupt and moribund system that thrives on inequality, doubles down on surveillance and corrals and infantalises entire populations in the name of a spurious ‘security’ that kills us in our tens of thousands and calls it a success.

But the left - the experimental, bold, emancipatory left - is hardly to be seen.

Unaccountably and indefensibly, it’s the right that flies the banner of rebellion. Of course their rebellion is disorganised, reactionary, short-sighted, founded on rumour or worse, and ends up strengthening the very forces it claims to oppose. But the lesson the left could draw is that they’re confrontational, disruptive, and visibly angry.

When the left does get onto the streets - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, the Sarah Everard vigil - it brings down the predictable wrath of the repressive state apparatus but fails to draw the appropriate conclusion: that progress through passive resistance is, right now, an illusion. As someone said recently, it’s all blah blah blah.

So the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the practice of revolt to the right. Stunned by the advances of the right in the culture wars, and allowing it complete control of the language that used to drive emancipatory politics - the language of freedom - the left’s feeble response has been to defend the status quo for all its worth.

In this sense the pandemic has been a disaster for the emancipatory left. Rather than oppose policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all. Sometimes, indeed, it asked for more of all these things.

This vacated a huge tract of political territory called ‘freedom’, and the right marched in. So it’s the right that’s in the streets, the right that attracts disadvantaged and disillusioned young people desperate for change, the right that is scandalous, subversive and countercultural.

Tragically, the word ‘libertarian’ has now been completely appropriated by small-state liberals, and even leftist commentators automatically elide libertarianism with right-wing politics. At one time the left would have fought tooth-and-nail to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

Maybe the left has given ground on freedom so it can double down it on its own unique calling card: equality? But no. Once again the pandemic has caught the left with its pants down. In the past two years the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while 160 million extra people have been plunged into poverty - defined as living on less the $5.5 a day. The left’s reaction? To flood change.org and 38degrees with toothless demands while, in a two-fingered simulacrum, the 100 richest people in the world ask to pay more taxes.

The right is everywhere the left should be. But instead of fighting for these spaces and recapturing the language of disruption and rebellion for itself, the left is static, sclerotic, like rabbits in the headlights of an onrushing car, frozen into immobility by its incapacity to think creatively about either the present or the future. Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a war of manoeuvre (physically overwhelming the state’s coercive apparatus) and a war of position (fighting it on the terrain of culture). Give the overwhelming physical power of the state he recommended a war of position. The left has taken him at his word and the result has been downward spiral of navel-gazing while the capitalist state leads us towards a disaster of species-destroying proportions.

If the emancipatory left stood for anything it was for universal liberation. But in its determination to champion special interests the left has completely lost sight of the universalist demands against which to hold the status quo to account. An example: better treatment for women in prison? Of course! But a univeralising emancipatory left would have one question and one recommendation.

The question: what does ‘better’ mean? It can't be ‘treat them like male prisoners’ because conditions in UK prisons are appalling. If it’s ‘treat them differently because they are women’ this is also music to the ears of defenders of the status quo, because it leaves 95% (the percentage occupied by men) of what is quaintly and absurdly called the prison ‘estate’ completely intact. Some universal standard for 'better' is needed, and it can't be deduced from the condition or experience of any one group, collective or protected category.

The left-libertarian recommendation: reduce the prison population by at least half (prison numbers in England and Wales have increased by 84% since 1990, from 44,975 to just under 83,000). And then turn the rest into schools (50% of the prison population is functionally illiterate).

Tactically inept and strategically naive, that’s where the left is right now, with every single move captured, appropriated and defanged by the very forces it’s trying to oppose.

So where now?

Maybe here.

And here.

political cross-dressing

9/21/2021

530 words: 4-minute read

Leftist progressive environmentalist George Monbiot is shocked that there are antivaxxers among his acquaintances. Something ‘weird’ is going on, he says, whereby the curiosity, scepticism and suspicion typical of people on the left has driven those selfsame people to adopt rightwing versions of this language, so much so that ‘some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon’.

He’s right, that’s weird.

He goes on, ‘The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc … Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it’.

Right again.

There’s more: ‘The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism’.

Monbiot is right about that too.

‘It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism’, he writes, ‘This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right’.

Absolutely.

He concludes: ‘Left and right political parties have swapped their language. Now the right talks about liberation and revolt. And the left talks about security and stability’.

Acute. Brilliant. A perfect summary of the confused and confusing state of ideological play in liberal-capitalist countries like the UK today.

What’s missing, though, is the recognition that the left has contributed to this state of affairs by allowing the right to arrogate to itself the language of freedom and liberation in the two key events of the past few years: Brexit and Covid.

By the time Covid turned up the Brexit battle was over, but the left hadn’t learned its lesson. Instead of debating, designing and exemplifying a left-libertarian approach to Covid it went full throttle for an ironclad lockdown, leaving the door marked ‘freedom and liberation’ wide open for the swivel-eyed right of assorted denialists and anti-vaxxers to walk right through.

And some on the left, as Monbiot recognises and bemoans, have followed them.

But the answer is not to accuse these leftists of ‘falling for’ false idols, of ‘succumbing’ to conspiracy, or of some fatal ‘confusion’ that can only be put right by attending to the high priests of correct leftist thinking.

The answer is to focus unerringly on that sweet spot where freedom AND security are located.

In the Covid case, this would have been to point out that a properly funded NHS and social care system, staffed by properly rewarded professionals (all this representing SECURITY), would have allowed family members to be present as their relatives passed away instead of dying lonely and isolated (representing FREEDOM). The left were all too ready to allow elderly people in care homes to be kept in segregated solitude for months on end - ‘collateral damage’ to be stoically accepted for the sake of an unwavering commitment to an uncompromising lockdown.

So yes, it’s weird that some of George Monbiot’s freedom-loving acquaintances have turned to the right. But this was never going to help.

where is the libertarian left?

4/5/2021

479 words; 4-minute read

It’s become a commonplace that Covid has amplified features and fissures in society that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged.

For instance there’s the importance of people who keep things going without us realising: shop workers, parcel deliverers, lorry drivers. If reward is a function of indispensability, we now know that these people are poorly rewarded. (Though the UK government’s 1% pay rise for nurses shows that recognition by no means leads directly to justice).

Then there’s the dispute over the role of experts, and attempts by populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to sideline them in favour of quack remedies or downright Covid denialism.

We always knew that wages are awarded in inverse proportion to a person’s usefulness to society and that populism is dangerous, but it took the glare of Covid to make these things unavoidably obvious.

But there’s another fissure that was barely visible pre-Covid yet which has come to define much of the reaction to the pandemic: the gulf between libertarians and authoritarians. Unfortunately, and with potentially disastrous post-Covid consequences, the libertarian position has been entirely dominated by the right, leaving the left defenceless as the capitalist state arrogates more and more power to itself under cover of Covid darkness.

Over the past twelve months it’s been something of a surprise to see how readily people on the political left have lined up behind disciplinary policies and practices that in normal times they’d have fought tooth and nail. Whether it’s increased police powers, enhanced surveillance, Covid passports or the criminalising of information, leftists have either waved through repressive measures or raised the stakes by suggesting how helpful even more repression would be. Voices on the left calling out these measures have been few and far between.

Most disturbing of all is the shock horror these same people display when a bill comes before parliament increasing police powers and curbing the right to protest. What, one wonders, did they expect? Politically literate leftists shouldn’t have to read Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben on states of exception to know that regimes will always take advantage of emergency to intensify their authority.

It’s taken Covid to bring both the outright and the naive disciplinarian left out of the woodwork, and as the Covid crisis draws to a close it may be too late to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle. It wouldn't be too bad if ceding a libertarian approach to Covid to the right had just left it in the hands of crazed denialists prepared to go to the wall for the right not to wear a mask. But actually it's made possible the government's truly scary Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, waved through in the wake of the softening up offered by Covid 'necessities'.

In sum there is huge gap where the left should have been designing, advocating and enacting a progressive libertarian approach to Covid, and the authoritarian capitalist state is gleefully sailing straight into it.

Notes from a cliff-edge