Ten years since Trump was first elected

Ten years ago I shut myself away for ten days on a silent Vipassana retreat. The Tuesday was the US election. I re-connected with the world on the Sunday morning and learnt Trump had won. The peace of mind I’d cultivated was hit hard. I drove through the brilliant sunshine of a Herefordshire morning in a daze. As it happened it was also Remembrance Sunday.

We’ve had so little for so long to be optimistic about. This year, the elections in Hungary, back in the spring, and Brazil, just recently, and, a day later, Serbia – they have all lifted all our spirits. (See my last post.) But nothing could quite match our exultation over the results of the US Congressional elections when they came through last Wednesday morning.

We’d had the absurdity of Trump praising his new reflecting pond, when he should have been talking up Republican prospects, on the evening before the election. Such examples of derangement were replaced by marginal sanity when he talked, after the result became clear and unarguable, about working with the Democrats. But now he’s appointed the architect of the destruction of USAID and the anti-immigrant violence of ICE, Stephen Miller, as his chief of staff. What madness, in Iran or elsewhere, might follow? How might the war in Ukraine be affected? Could we over the next two years reach a point when not just a Democratic Congress but wider American society recognises that Trump is unfit for office? If he meets Xi Jinping and Putin again, they will, knowing his admiration for autocrats, play games with him.

Back down to earth – we should have no illusions about what caused the Republican debacle. It wasn’t high-minded support for Ukraine, or attempts, aided by a pliant Supreme Court, to subvert the constitution, it was the cost of living, a consequence of the Iran war, and tariffs, and in some states the very specific issue of proliferating data centres.

Support for the Democrats drew on both centrist and progressive/radical left opinion. The next election, and maybe the future of the USA, could depend on whether those two sides can find common ground. They have real ability in their new intake, for example, James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, like Bill Clinton). Candidates for the 2028 presidential election include mainstream figures like J.B. Pritzler and Gavin Newsom. Might someone come through from the party’s progressive wing? And remember how Obama came almost from nowhere.

This is, in the briefest of outlines, over two posts, how I see the state of play this November weekend. I’m so much more optimistic than when I wrote my post almost three weeks ago. It could be a false optimism, but surprise is so much more palatable than shock.

We’ve had the elections …

The world has moved on. We’ve had the elections, Brazilian, Israeli and American. And mirabile dictu, wonderful to relate, we’ve had surprises and the bad guys have been battered. This post covers Brazil, Israel – and, a happy surprise, Serbia.

I gave a big cheer, alarmed my wife, when, still half-asleep, I heard that Lula had won in Brazil. He lifted his share of the vote from 48% in the first round of the election to 52% in the second, a consequence of last-minute recruitment to the cause, made possible by a vast social media campaign. Afraid of indictment on money-laundering charges, his opponent Flávio Bolsonaro has fled the country.

We’ve had much comment about corruption in Brazilian politics, and how it’s embedded. Whether an 81-year-old left-wing leader with a hard-right Congress can do much is open to question. His first instinct has always been to reinforce his base, upping, for example, the level of the bolsa familia support for low-income families. Borrowing costs and over-regulation, and corruption issues, may continue to hold the Brazilian economy back. But better a leader who respects democracy than leaders in the Trump mode who would circumvent it.

What has amazed me is the almost total absence in the press of any mention of the Amazon. Lula had reversed the deforestation policies of Flavio Bolsonaro’s father, Jair. Father and son have climate denying agendas and little regard for the welfare of indigenous peoples.  Lula’s victory has (for now) averted a catastrophe.

And then came Serbia, which I didn’t even mention in my last post. What looked to be a foregone conclusion for Alexandar Vucic became a big majority for the Student List, a party born out of student opposition, with no leaders. Corruption and authoritarian rule were their target. The country has, nonetheless, to stay onside with Russia, its primary source of oil and natural gas. Also, the new party is as hardline on Kosovo as its predecessor. Kosovo as part of Serbia is part of an ordinary Serbian’s DNA.

Another recent election, in Bulgaria, has returned a pro-Russian president. So all is not well in the Balkans. Far from it.

Ten days ago we had the Israeli election, with Netanyahu and Likud holding their share of the vote but no longer sure of enough support from their partners in the previous coalition to form a government. We heard two days ago that Gadi Eisenkot, former military chief and leader of the Yashar party, launched just a year ago, has been asked by the Israeli president to try and form a government. Long weeks of negotiation will probably pass before a resolution.

Could there be a coalition with the Arab parties who won 20% of the vote? That has to be unlikely: it could entail their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which they’ve never done. Eisenkot is as opposed as Netanyahu to a two-state solution. But reining in violent settlers, guaranteeing a degree of stability on the West Bank, would be a first step.

My next post will cover the USA.

On the brink – Brazil, Israel, USA go the polls

We’ve big elections, with potentially massive consequences, upcoming. The Brazilian election run-off is on Sunday, 25th, the Israeli election on Tuesday 27th, and the US mid-term election on 4th November. The French presidential election follows April next year.

Brazil looks to go far right with Bolsonaro Jnr, after he came in ahead on the first round two weeks ago. The margin may be as little as 2%, but it is of course a presidential election and the winner will take all.

The mid-terms look to be heavily weighted against Trump: the New York Times has the Democrats 11% ahead, NBC 9%. But it comes down of course to individual races, and individual states and districts, with redistricting, also known as gerrymandering, coming into play in some Republican districts.

Israeli has proportional representation so it’s multi-party. There we’ve a pro- against an anti-Netanyahu coalition. The hard right with its overt brutality toward Palestinians just might lose out by a hairsbreadth. But attitudes have changed in Israel since October 7th three years ago. It’s disturbing to read that the hard right have made gains among young people: they used to be the guarantee of social progress.

Whoever wins in the three elections in the next two weeks will win by small margins. But once the door is opened…

It used to be an assumption of post-war liberal democracies that you’d have four or five years in power and then fight another election on your record. The elections would be a level-playing field. But far-right parties (and far-left if we head back further in time) have a long record of manipulating future elections in their favour. ‘Once we’ve a right-wing, nativist, illiberal, populist government, then let’s ensure it will always be that way.’ As they might argue. Usually there’s a charismatic leader who charms and brutalises in equal measures. It’s that disavowal of the free-and-fair-election principle that could be one of the great tragedies of our times. You climb to the top, and you pull up the drawbridge. That’s the old metaphor, it’s graphic, and it’s spot-on.

We’ve seen how the tech bros have kowtowed to Trump. How might they reposition post-Trump? We’ve seen Trump align with Putin. We’ve seen a disregard for human life, with ICE and the defunding of USAID. Even the possibility of a public firing squad. We’ve seen a triumphalist Christianity with its proponents reassured by a belief in a Second Coming which would of course solve all problems. If both houses of Congress go Democrat, planned cuts to Medicaid and reining in defence spending are likely to be a focus. But foreign policy is still ultimately the President’s.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro Jnr, if he wins, will rollback deforestation regulations. Admiration for Bukele in El Salvador and a desire to mimic Trump spells danger for Bolsonaro opponents, which could include Supreme Court judges who found Bolsonaro Snr guilty on conspiracy charges.

We’re in a relatively safe space in the UK at the moment. After two years of Starmer as prime minister we can see the difference that a leader, Andy Burnham, with a clear vision, can make. Reform has, for now at least, lost momentum, a consequence in part of simple sleaziness and the reliance on massive funding from crypto-currency and property tycoons. But the hard-right mentality is deep-rooted, here, as elsewhere in Europe. The right-wing government in Italy is trying to pass reforms which might help consolidate power in future elections. But it’s stayed loyal to the EU and strongly pro-Ukraine, and anti-Russia. And PM Meloni and Trump have fallen out big-time.

Turning to France, just how far would a National Rally government, which looks likely after next spring’s election, push an anti-EU agenda? Would they maintain Macron’s focus on European defence? Would they have the sure touch that Meloni seems to have? We have to trust that the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party in Germany stays sidelined until the Ukraine war is settled, and eyes opened to the absurdities of a backward-looking nostalgia for the imagined certainties of the old East Germany.

We have on the plus side seen Fidesz and Viktor Orban lose power in Hungary. He hadn’t pulled the ladder up quite far enough. That might serve as a warning to others to dispense with a ladder altogether.

You lose an election… OK, we’ll do better next time, you tell yourself. But there does need to be a next time.

The Greens, Zionism, the Tories – and Brazil

I wake this morning to hear that the Tories in their blissful ignorance plan to abolish the Environment Agency and Natural England. We assume it’s because they’re deemed to have green credentials. According to a writer in the Spectator it’s down to his local river not getting cleared of weeds as it used to be. Wading birds and frogs take priority. The main problem, as the rest of us see it, is underfunding. Thinking of my own backyard, Natural England administer, on a day-to-day basis, our local common, which we own: what would happen without them, we wonder?

It is always so much wiser to help find solutions rather than create or exacerbate problems.  This would apply to another news story, the Green Party conference passing a motion asserting that Zionism is racism. For sheer stupidity that takes some beating. There is a vast 120 and more year issue here: where might there be a homeland for a Jewish population, and how could that be squared with settling a territory where people were already living?

Tenant farmers back in the 1930s were displaced by Arab landowners selling territory to incoming Jews. The ultimate outcome was the displacement of vast populations, the nakba, in 1948. Also, over time, the development of a prosperous and proud and high-achieving Jewish state. The 1990s saw a chance for coming together, but moderates were pushed aside. The politics of Hamas and Likud left little room for compromise. But – none of this makes Zionism of itself racist. The attacks on Palestinian settlements and villagers by Jewish settlers with the connivance (and indeed active support by some members of) the Israeli government are another matter.

I have long supported the Palestinians. But if I was Jewish I would, I’m sure, be a supporter, right or wrong, of Israel. And, speaking as an Anglo-Saxon, originally out of Manchester, the courage and the sheer genius of the Jewish people have had a huge impact on my life.

The Economist describe the Greens’ decision to support the motion as ‘shameful’. ‘The party thereby deserves to fade back into irrelevance.’ I have to agree. I’d also add that having heard the Green mayor of Hackney outline her policies, all of them well-meaning, with no mention at all of promoting local business, I was left wondering how the community could generate the jobs and income that a prosperous local economy requires.

We need the Greens to pick up and run with their old agenda. We need them. The likely election of another Bolsonaro in Brazil could have terrible consequences for the Amazon, with loggers and farmers spreading deeper into the forest. Reading that wonderful travel writer Norman Lewis recently I was made aware of how, over many decades, bible-toting American evangelists brought notions of sin and salvation to Amazonian tribes, displacing and resettling, allowing the forest to be felled and given over to agriculture feeding American and European markets. Protestant evangelists have also brought American-style mega-churches and an effective funding model to Brazilian cities. The bonds of the old Catholic communities have been fractured. The evangelical right is little focused on environment and heavily focused on money and the immediacy of salvation.

If you detect cynicism on my part, you would be right. In my book, care and compassion, in their widest sense, come before sin and salvation. Without the former the latter are worthless. In the words of a 17th century Quaker, ‘sin … means losing he way of the heart’. 

We have of course the same evangelical and funding model in this country, and they surface in such people as Paul Marshall, proprietor of GB News and the Spectator, and the recently disgraced (attempting to bypass electoral law by enlisting American funding) head of policy at Reform, James Orr. This brings us, almost but not quite, full circle back to the Tories and their conference, trying to make a mark by trashing old institutions. There are many older, more centrist Tories who are horrified by what’s happening. Maybe the current crew will implode over the next few years and wiser folk regain their party. But as things stand I don’t hold out much hope.

All is vanity, or so it seems in Manchester

The news today is all about Manchester City. And the shifting sands of Abu Dhabi. Vast sums of oil-derived money funding an English football club, some of it illegally, and taking it to great heights. Let’s remind ourselves where the money comes from – crude oil, laid down in the Jurassic era 150 million years ago. And how recent is its exploitation. I remember reading Wilfred Thesiger’s account of crossing the Empty Quarter of Arabia, when it was an empty quarter, reaching Abu Dhabi and seeing surveyors looking for oil. We’re back in 1948.

Let’s go back further. We’ve been in Galloway, south-west Scotland, and up in the hills. The glaciers retreated there 15,000 years ago, leaving glacial moraines, drumlins, humps of rock scraped and carried under glaciers. Go back another 450 million years and we have two continents colliding, one sliding under another, and the top level being scraped off, a mixture of mud and sand which hardened into what’s now known as greywacke. Those grassy humps in the green fields of Galloway have history.

Move forward, we’re still in Galloway, to the 18th century, and enclosures: a demand for meat and leather from expanding towns encourages landowners to consolidate their estates, throw tenants off the land, take down the old and build new walls around bigger fields. Today, further consolidating, bigger farms, and the old farm buildings left to decay.

I used to wake each morning, looking out to a field with mainly Ayrshire cattle grazing and, beyond, to the open sea. On a far coast, just visible, lay Garlieston, from where steamers took migrants, escaping lands which could no longer give them employment, to Liverpool and a life over the ocean.

The timescales of the wide world in which we’re embedded are vast and yet we proceed entirely oblivious of them. We lay down a concrete world, as if it’s forever, with no thought of what it will look like when it decays. The finer Victorian buildings were built of solid stone and that at least weathers into the landscape. We fire up a world based on oil, which has a time-limited future, and cities, and countries, whose prosperity is oil-derived, will have to rapidly adjust if they’re not to become relics themselves.

If I was a City supporter (I am Manchester born and bred and my allegiance is United), I’d have been in a sorry state this morning. City’s recent fortunes have been built on the shifting sands of Arabia. (Until sixty years ago United had a local butcher as chairman and majority shareholder.) Football is of course all about short-term and never-lasting glory. Not for a moment would I devalue it as a sport but it does entangle itself in extraordinary nets.

Manchester has the Pennine moors. Abu Dhabi has the sand and Persian Gulf. Galloway, cattle and the Irish Sea. Trump has maybe never walked a mountain path. He aspires to a vast ballroom and the infamous Trump arch. Owning football club is always a vanity project, though a far more reasonable one.

I’ve never tried it but climb to a highpoint on Man City’s Emirates stadium, and the moors will be your near neighbours.

Head there for a walk.

AI as a rabbit hole

AI has changed everything, so we’re led to believe. But it doesn’t have to. Yes, it has already invaded my life, both wittingly and unwittingly. My aim has been so keep it as an adjunct rather than an equal or even superior partner. I have ‘zen’ in the title of this blog but I’ve never made it explicit. Maybe readers of this blog have detected its influence. Maybe not. I’d be hard-pushed myself to spell out quite what its influence has been. But in the context of AI I think it can be useful.

I see that out in Hong Kong someone has ordained an AI bot as a Buddhist monk. As a novice, but who knows where it might lead. This seems to me absurd and I’ll try and explain why.

AI connects to only one sense, to the mind. (Is the mind in any way a sense? I’ll come to this.) The problem with mind is that it takes over. It is instantly a prison if we let it take the course it would will on us. We crave more information and we crave answers. We can see how AI will take over.

But if we engage the five senses we traditionally recognise as senses we engage mind as it is meant to be engaged. It’s amazing how much the world will reveal itself if we listen. Or simply watch. ‘Listen’ to the body and you’ll be aware of how much is going on, at skin level and indeed within. It’s extraordinary if you put your mind to it to appreciate just how much energy is coursing through your body. You help the process along by following the breath.

You can follow your thoughts as you respond to your other senses. But you don’t let them take over. Let one follow another. Don’t let them connect, or connect too far. This is where true consciousness lies.

You will of course connect, everyday life us about connection. But beware connecting too far, following every rabbit hole the ‘like’ button on Facebook opens up for us to dive into, and every new idea that AI opens up for us to lose ourselves in.  Rabbit holes connect, and online rabbit holes go on forever.

Consciousness is for the neuroscientist the ‘hard problem’ and so it will remain. Because you will never be able to explain it. It’s not, as Yuval Noah Harari argues, the realm of the feelings, where intellect is the realm of the mind. Consciousness embraces both feelings and mind. Think of it simply as awareness. It exists in infinite space. Try and describe infinite space, and of course you can’t. Likewise with awareness. As soon as the mind gets to work it is no longer awareness.

AI, by so quickly answering questions, or spawning ideas, rapidly gets out of control. It will go where it will and it may yet pass the Alan Turing test. Yes, machines can think. We may find it apologising for its mistakes, expressing regret, even affecting an emotional crisis. And as many have already done, we may make of it a friend and a companion. But there is only one awareness, only one consciousness, and that is yours.

The key is to keep notions of ‘intelligence’ and consciousness rigorously separate.

This to my mind (the word is ubiquitous!) is where we must always come back to, in daily life and especially when using AI. Whatever it may affect, whatever illusions AI may give itself, there is only one reality and that lies with you as an individual. Just sit back and soak up the world and AI is left dangling, with nowhere to go.

Escape from the country

And from politics!

Some days stay silent in the memory, other days won’t let go. I’d planned a day visiting galleries in London, and last Wednesday didn’t disappoint. The 17th century Spanish painter, Zurbaran, at the National Gallery, was my focus in the morning and, by way of a total contrast, two much talked-about exhibitions, Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo, at Tate Modern, in the afternoon.

For the Zurbaran, I headed down a vast flight of stairs to a subterranean space they keep for special exhibitions. It can be a little gloomy down there, which added to the impact of the crucified Jesus in the very first room, Jesus brilliantly lit, against a black background. There’s also St Peter, crucified upside down. Objects of veneration, commissioned by Carthusian (and other) monks who had no doubts, valued immediacy not elaboration, they knew their God. A world so different from ours.

Other commissions didn’t quite match that opening room for impact. But there is magic in a small still life, lemons, oranges and a rose, with a small cup, almost real, touchable, against a stark black background. And finally, ‘Agnus Dei’, a lamb, its legs bound, as brilliantly lit as the crucified Christ, and again, a black background.  

An hour later, the magic colours and serenity of a Virgin and Child, by the Dutch artist, Gerard David. Painted in 1515, two years before Martin Luther turned the world upside down and reduced the virgin to an ordinary mother. No more had she her role as a pathway to paradise.

From the National Gallery to the Tate Modern, and two exhibitions by remarkable women artists. Zurbaran and Gerard David belong to another age. Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo are absolutely of our time.

First, Tracey Emin, an exhibition by a living artist opening her life to the public gaze. I wanted to see it, but as a man I simply didn’t and don’t feel competent to comment. Better I leave to a review in the Guardian: ‘Tracey symbolises the height of the 90s, its sex, drugs and booze, successes and excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she has put her life out there, laid herself bare – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own emotions in the process.’

It’s that level of engagement, whether or not her paintings and bronze sculptures measure up, that is extraordinary and unprecedented.

A short hop across the Tate Modern’s third floor took me to the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Again, so much hype. Another woman artist who has become iconic, but in her case, long after her death. Her self-portraits are like no others, and her clothes: I now know what rebozos (shawls) and huipiles (sleeveless blouses) – the tehuana dress that she adopted – look like. Her honesty about her disabilities is unflinching.

She lived, like Emin, exactly the way she was, totally honest, but by contrast she had all the advantages of stable family and a marriage to Diego Rivera which is a story in itself. We watched Salma Hayek as Frida in a 2002 movie a month or two ago. In truth, I learnt more from the movie than the exhibition about Frida.

What the exhibition also focuses on, maybe to excess, is her legacy, as a champion of ‘Mexicanidad’, that is, being Mexican; as an icon for feminists and the LBGTQ community; and as the subject of a quite amazing breadth of Frida-celebrating merchandise.

Media and merchandise can fragment a legacy, take out meaning and substituting display. A sign of our times. What no-one is trying to do, as far as I am aware, is produce Tracey Emin merchandise. The real Tracey is simply too powerful, too immediate for that.

Getting along with the neighbours

There’s a big difference between love thy neighbour and love thy neighbours. Just how far should that love for our neighbours extend? To the next street – to fellow citizens – why not the whole wide world?

I heard a few days ago about a local church helping Iranian Christians, refugees living in a local hotel, who’d escaped from persecution in Iran. This is in stark contrast with the much-publicised demonstrations, elsewhere in England, against immigrants housed in local hotels, with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk pulling the strings.

I read later about a mother and daughters in South Africa, refugees from the Congo Republic, being hounded out of their home, and the door locked against them – left in the street.

I was in Calderdale last week. It’s an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire where I’ve a family connection. The towns and villages of the hill country voted Green and Labour in the council elections back in May. The conurbations voted uniformly for Reform. Reform has some pretty unpalatable things to say about refugees, and immigrants more broadly, and brutal policies toward boat people.

At the other extreme is a poem I read last week from the Cold War era, by Wendell Berry. He bridged the gap between himself and Russia by imagining a conversation with a Siberian woodsman (OK, not quite your ordinary Russian!):

‘Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,/ or laugh with you, or visit your house and go to work with you in the forest?…’

I felt a connection with the poem. But he was imagining himself as a visitor. What if they were living side by side? When two peoples with different nations, beliefs, lifestyles find themselves in close proximity they look to put up boundaries, to create exclusion zones. And if they can’t, and divisions become politicised, tolerance and co-habitation morphs into division and hatred. 

The key word is ‘politicised’. There is always a leader or leaders who draws up battle lines, metaphorical or literal, usually arguing a case based on a very partial interpretation of history. Once they are drawn, people have to take sides.

Putin has etched out the battle lines in brutal fashion in eastern Europe. Given their history is there any basis for Ukrainians to trust Russians, or vice versa? We may have our own outsiders’ views of that conflict, but that’s not a relevant consideration.

Likewise Palestinian and Israeli. Many early Zionists imagined Jews and Palestinians living side by side. But so much hatred has been screamed and blood spilt since then. Today we’ve reports of West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian Arab villages, and burning mosques.

Remove a central authority, which could be, as with Austro-Hungary in 1918, an empire (the one-time Habsburg empire) of many centuries standing, and you may just reap a whirlwind. Languages and cultures long interwoven are too easily polarised. Think Ethiopia and the bitter battle between ethnic groups. Migrations following on from population expansions wreck cultures as they have in the Darfur region of Sudan, pitching agricultural against pastoral, villager against nomad.

In there, somewhere, always, a charismatic leader.

Or impose a central authority: I’m thinking of Han domination in China, and the brutal suppression of Tibetans and Uyghers. Above all, we have religion. ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ was a famous Monty Python line. We can laugh now. The reality was brutal, as with so much religious persecution down the centuries. Missionary zeal too often tipped over into violence.

I remember minarets and churches side by side when travelling through Yugoslavia in 1969 and how in the early 90s they somehow forged enmities not ploughshares and fought each other. I remember hot sleepy days, and people rubbing along.

It was too easy for Wendell Berry, looking at photographs. The face-to-face reality is something very different.  We may imagine a warm relationship but if we’ve disputed borders, disputed territories, disputed histories, we may find we have to take sides. We are locked in, like it or not.

Immigration also sets up pressures and, again, we have to take sides. We may simply not be safe sitting in the fence. ‘Which side are you in’ is title of a famous American trade union song from the 1930s, also recorded by Billy Bragg.

I should on this argument be going face-to-face with Reform voters in Calderdale. But I can’t easily gainsay their responses if they feel threatened by new arrivals. But they should beware their self-appointed leaders.

The World Awaiting Andy Burnham

It’s a pretty unforgiving world out there awaiting our Prime Minister to be. If it was bad after the 2008 financial crisis it’s a damn sight worse now.

To start in apocalyptic mode.

A quote caught my eye recently – let’s take it as a sense of direction rather than an achieved reality – the objective of the very rich is to shift our gaze away from the imbalance of wealth and power toward everything else, not least issues relating to law and order, public services, immigration and gender. To turn disaffection into crises. And, I’d add as a rider, to minimise, to vilify, government action taken in response. We have in essence the aspiring libertarian state.  The state is denied, not just a role in helping direct funding to projects of benefit to wider society, but to any form of socially beneficial expenditure. Think Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, portraying Greta Thunberg as Antichrist, or JD Vance finding justification in St Augustine for a notion of compassion that begins at home and doesn’t go much further.

They are a vast and malign distraction. The old issues are the ones that matter. How to achieve a balance between an entrepreneurial state on the one hand and a caring state on the other. How might the one best finance the other. How might a caring state best help create the social capital which underpins the invention and rising productivity of a thriving society. That is a characterisation I think Andy Burnham might recognise. And the countervailing presence of Trump and Musk and Farage notwithstanding, it is a mighty task in itself.

How to … achieve radically improved childcare, social care, health care and education. Reduce the rapid rise in health-related benefits and the numbers of young people un-  or under-employed. Recognising all the while that we can’t afford anything other than reductions in expenditure if we’re going to boost our defence expenditure and have a Defence Investment Plan which actually delivers a fortress nation, and a fortress continent.

To achieve his ends Burnham has to deliver on prosperity and productivity, where everyone else has failed. How can he, how can we all, generate those animal spirits that Keynes talked about in the 1930s? Where we look for opportunities as the default, rather than spend our lives grumbling?  It might have seemed that Thatcher or Clinton or Blair succeeded, or were they sowing the seeds of the problems, not to say disasters, we’re faced with?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their book ‘Abundance’,  we’ve created societies where services have declined while prices have risen, and where those who can have prospered, while those who can’t find themselves without jobs, or chasing services they can barely afford, leading to societies which can easily tip into rage, and leave themselves open, at worst, to Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk-style (weird bedfellows) demagogues. There is a neat circular logic to the actions of Musk and Thiel and the anything but holy innocent JD Vance. Appeal to the so-called masses, undermine existing authority, and they are left unchallenged.

Back down to earth. Maybe the one place in the UK that has a positive vibe is Manchester. It’s lifted Andy Burnham almost to Prime Minister. Unlike the new Conservative Party convert Matthew Syed (and multiple other doubters) I rather like the Manchesterism that Burnham and his council leader predecessors, Graham Stringer and Richard Leese, have promoted, not least in working with local businesses to redevelop wide areas of the city, part of wider feel-good sense the city now enjoys. As a Mancunian born and bred I like what I see.

Manchester led the world on the 1840 because it was ruthless and only learnt how to be forgiving the hard way. Government could only stand by and watch and wonder. Now the role of government has to be about how it can ensure the structures are in place to allow business to be ruthless – to ensure we have the energy we need (will issuing further North Sea exploration licences materially influence availability beyond the short term), that the necessary talent is available (including from overseas), that homes are built (Burnham is a strong advocate of social housing), that tax is as fair as we can make it, and that long-term capital is available – arguably the most important of all.

We need talent and capital and that sense of optimism that gets and keeps you a step ahead. And making as much as possible home-grown, while rebuilding markets across Europe. All this, while enhancing our natural environment and limiting climate change.

All this… and the challenges of AI. We’re back to Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, to their tech-over-the-world over-exercised egos, and the Trump-pacifying social media moguls, Bezos and the like, and their billionaire fellow-travellers. I’m reading Karen Hao’s ‘The Empire of AI’, about Open AI, how altruism has no place when you sense you have at your fingertips a technology which will change the universe and leave you as one of the masters of it. How can we here in the UK, where we had in Deep Mind in the early 2010s a world leader, keep pace with – catch up with – the endlessly developing new generations and new frontiers of AI, turn it to the advantage of everyone and not the glorification of a few?

We’re also facing the reality that the USA is turning inward. The ‘abundance’ agenda has a very strong built-in-the-USA focus. Trump is denying Anthropic the right to sell its latest models outside the USA. What if the development of the internet had had similar restrictions imposed?

That said, talk of AI won’t inspire the nation. That for the moment is for the geeks. For Burnham the immediate reality is to convey a vision which we share and buy into and build on. Can he demonstrate that there is still life in social democracy? We have to hope so.

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.