Month: Apr 2025

How could it have come to this?

I’m focusing here on Trump’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired attack on universities and where it might take us. Mindful always of where it might lead in the UK.

They are portrayed as bastions of privilege and wokeism. Deny funding is the Trump approach, until they cave in. But if 80% of academics are left-of-centre, how can a 180-degree turn be effected, one which is focused on wokeism broadly defined and freedom of speech reversed? The aim is to disallow issues of gender and race and promote attitudes to family and sex from a bygone era, applying a crude pseudo-Christian justification. In effect a forced conversion and a meek acceptance of a new power and ideas structure. In that context some research programmes may be retained. But who is to decide what is worthy and unworthy? What programmes would lose out? Or lose their essential continuity?

More than that, could America’s lead in research and its implementation survive under a different regime, denied the self-belief that drives it? Turn academia into a state-sponsored Chinese-style mega bureaucracy? But that requires state funding, which will never be forthcoming under Trump.

Columbia University caved in to Trump’s financial threats. Harvard is holding out and taking the Trump administration to court. Harvard have to hold. They all do. 400 university presidents recently signed up to a statement condemning ‘unprecedented government overreach and interference’.

Higher education is characterised as an elite activity. That gives opponents an opening. Elites which self-perpetuate down generations invite attack. How can endowments continue to be encouraged without conveying privilege on the donors?  If that was an issue easily sidelined it needs to be front of stage now. More broadly, how can access be widened?

But privilege, in truth, isn’t what it’s about for Trump. In the same way it isn’t for Orban as Hungary’s far-wing populist trailblazer. It is about the transfer of power to a moneyed rather than academic elite. To a power which dictates to academia not only what it should study but what academics should believe.

The Trump/Heritage approach is, like Brexit, window-dressed to appeal to a socially-conservative population which can easily be manipulated into believing that woke and privilege are somehow two sides of the same coin. Remove one and you remove the other. The reality is that privilege would remain but find a different home, in Silicon Valley and indeed, should tariffs allow, a Wall Street resurgence. The old blue-collar regions will remain as outcast as before. New AI and Silicon-charged inspired investment will go elsewhere, and not to the benighted rust belt.

China is not an example to follow. They have made an extraordinary success of state-directed capitalism, and they have instilled a sense of urgency into elite workforces with remarkable skill and commitment levels, but at a cost in terms of freedom no free society should ever contemplate.

It could be argued that Trump and Orban populism is only Chinese-style autocracy dressed up for a post-liberal post-democratic dispensation. Liberal societies die when illiberal parties win over electorates, innocent of what they might be about to lose, and then pull up the drawbridge behind them.

I’m trained as an historian, a field currently open to all ideas and persuasions. Let governments control academia and history and all its kindred subjects within the humanities could be twisted into the tame service of the powers that be.

Where are we now??

I abandoned my blog a few months ago. ‘Abandon’ feels like the right word. The liberal world was already in crisis and that was before the profoundly illiberal Trump was re-elected. So much has happened since. It’s more than I could do to resist the temptation to put down a few thoughts on where the world is now.

What kept me awake last night were jail sentences. An American resident illegally deported and now imprisoned in a brutal Salvadorian jail. No, he won’t be returned to the USA, said the Salvadorian president, Bukele. Trump standing alongside smirked a complicit smirk. Does Trump care that Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, and main rival to Erdogan in Turkey, has been locked up on absurd corruption and terrorism charges? Would Trump look to stymie some future presidential challenger if he had the chance? There’s no certainty he wouldn’t. You could argue that nepotism and the accumulation off family wealth are Erdogan’s stock in trade. Looking no further than the role of Trump’s own family, and their financial transactions, and to bitcoin, might one not say the same about Trump?

Imamoglu would have known the risks and yet he stayed the course. There can be no certainty that he will ever be released. Think of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s now 26 years in jail. The title of Ahmet Altan’s book was ‘I will never see the world again’? He did. He was released. Arrested on a whim. Released on a whim.

Courts in Russia hand out long prison sentences for any kind of anti-government expression. Five years for associates of Navalny. Sixteen years for a social media post.

The four freedoms of the European Union, allowing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, allied to freedom of expression, now stand out ever more clearly. Giorgio Meloni in Italy has surprised many by holding true to them, albeit while pursuing a socially conservative agenda. Where might a National Rally government take France if elected next year? What of Orban and Hungary? He’s taken over both the press and courts. Will that be enough to ensure his re-election next year? Might we have another Poland, where the populist Law and Justice government was voted out in 2023?

Law and Justice in Poland, and Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, are both opposed to abortion and wider gender rights. The National Rally in France claims to be an ardent supporter of women’s rights. It supports abortion. But many in its ranks disagree.

On the subject of gender, here in the UK we have had today had a Supreme Court ruling stating that the legal definition of a woman has to be based on biological sex, which is not what supporters of transgender rights had been hoping for. The decision was, I think, inevitable. The safe spaces argument has cogency. But the issue won’t go away.

Staying in the UK. We have Reform still polling 25%. How will that convert into votes come next month’s local elections? Any support for Trump’s tariff agenda will surely be a vote loser, but his attitudes to gender and race, his scorn for academia, his taking down of ‘elites’ and bureaucracy, may well appeal. And that puts Farage on strong ground, even if he hasn’t through his political life ever propounded a sane, considered and politically workable policy. A focus on investment and social mobility has to be the way to handle social division. Not disruption for its own sake

We should be focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, and, as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary has bravely tried to do, on Sudan. Helping Ukraine produce the weapons it needs, as well as supplying from our own stocks. Holding Putin to account for the incredible number of his own Russian soldiers killed in pursuit of a very personal vision he has of restoring the old Soviet hegemony. (Yes, we were at fault for being far too slow to recognise this was his intent. And for our Western arrogance. But that story is not for here.)

Also, holding Netanyahu to account, as we should the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and government forces in Sudan for the appalling loss of life they’ve inflicted. There is also Taiwan, and what China might yet do. We’re now in the crazy position of taking sides with China in a trade war against Trump’s USA, when Xi Jinping’s China is the most illiberal society of all.

Even truces or cease-fires can be hard to imagine. In Sudan, Arab versus non-Arab divisions in Darfur have been intractable for decades. In Israel/Palestine divisions go back a hundred years. For Ukraine/Russia it’s many hundreds of years. The UK and the EU working together on defence, and the UK and France, Starmer and Macron. That at least has to be positive.

Tacking another tack, what of Starmer’s benefits policy? His return to the old Blairite and especially Cameronian agenda of reducing benefits. There’s been a massive increase since 2019 but it’s argued that we’re only now approaching the level of benefits enjoyed in some other Europeans countries. At the same time, there has to be a reason for this surge in the take-up of benefits. Are we genuinely less healthy, physically and mentally? I can see both sides but there are good reasons why a financially straitened government has to take the action it’s taking.

Tariffs are our current obsession. It seems we might, in the UK, escape the worst of them. We shall see. But such minor straws of good fortune in the current whirlwind are no more than straws. As I said many times in this blog we must deep-anchor our liberal values, personal, social and economic. I think we have currently a government with as good a chance of handling our current crises as we’re likely to have. That is a small mercy.