Category: History

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it

Book festivals are a feature of our times. The two big festivals at Hay and Cheltenham bring in big crowds. Over the last two days in Cheltenham the subjects of events I’ve been to have included trade routes centred on ancient and medieval India, the American election, and Palestine and Gaza. They are apparently disparate but there is a link I’d like to explore.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the subject, ‘Trump: The Sequel’, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, referred to his belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian civilisation.  That set me thinking. It’s not a notion to which an Indian would subscribe. 2000 years ago, and more, India traded west, to Rome and Europe, and east, as far as China. Both Hinduism and Buddhism had their origins in India. It is a necessary humility on our part, in our modern world, that we recognise India as having a status equal with our own.

A little closer to home there is an alternative and wider appellation than Judeo-Christian and that is ‘people of the book’. It’s an ancient Islamic term that refers to religions which had a shared scripture with Islam, and that included Christianity. ‘People of the book’ were protected in Islamic countries by a legal status known as ‘dhimma’.’ There is of course a wider, non-legal status – our common humanity.

We have 1400 years of divisions between Christian and Muslim. It is helpful to be reminded of that common heritage, as I was when we listened intently to two Palestinian novelists talking about their books, and about their life stories. One growing up away from her home country, the other growing up in Israel, near Jaffa, from which her parents had been forced to move.

I am English, and a Christian. My instinct is indeed that my heritage is somehow special, focused on notions of democracy and liberty, and freedom of speech, which struggled to find acceptance anywhere in the world down the millennia. Including our own, until relatively recently. I will always argue passionately for liberal democracy and a superior form of government, but to argue beyond that, for some kind of special status, and more than that, for superiority, we are on dangerous ground. (Is Christianity inherently democratic? That would be an interesting discussion.)

Other civilisations have their own sense of their uniqueness, as places apart from others, offering a world-view no others can. The consequences can be pernicious. China defines itself against the West in terms of its four-thousand-year history, and boundaries defined as the furthest point of its past imperial expansion, which has had terrible consequences for Tibet and the Uyghurs.

There’s also a deep significance in the combining of ‘Judea’ and ‘Christian’. Christian history has until recent times treated Jews as outsiders in their midst, never escaping guilt for the death of Jesus, tolerated and too often terrorised and murdered.

Now all is changed. The Jewish people have a home, and Western and specifically Christian support. ‘Judeo’ now combines easily with ‘Christian’ and Palestine is viewed by the American and most European governments from an Israeli and not an Arab standpoint. Atrocities can be justified.

The best teachers and some of the best friends of my life were Jewish. I am a passionate supporter of the Jewish people, of co-existence of Palestinian and Jew, and I am a Zionist if Zionism had recognised the constraints that sharing territory with another people, who had occupied that land for many centuries, involved.

‘Judeo-Christian’ is at risk of being associated with a right-wing and intolerant agenda, and with a form of populism that at its extremes becomes the ‘great replacement theory’, whereby an Islamist (not Islamic) conspiracy aspires by means of higher birthrates and migration to become the dominant force in Western cultures. It is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, used so perniciously from the 1920s onwards by Hitler and others against the Jewish people, refashioned.

The testimonies of the two Palestinian novelists, talking about the lives and reading from their novels, will stay with me forever. They have lost their country, and those who choose to fight on their behalf are terrorists. Terrorists, as the Irgun were considered, fighting after World War Two for a Jewish state against the British.

Beyond October 7th, and the retribution that followed, and continues, lies a Palestinian state, and a radical cessation of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. And an end to the notion that there is anything biblical, Jewish or Christian, about the process.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it.

We’ve been here before

We think our own times unique – but we’ve been here before.

I’ve been reading Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s autobiography. He has memories, almost fond memories, of the world before 1914.

In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilised. The forces of reaction and barbarism were still there, but they were in retreat… it looked as if militarism, imperialism and anti-Semitism were on the run.

We were of course mistaken in thinking that the world really might become civilised but the fact that it didn’t does not prove that our optimism was foolish or credulous… It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality – political and social – and toward civilisation which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914. They postponed the danger of our becoming civilised for at least 100 years.

There is a terrible irony in that last line. Where they were before 1914 is not so far from where we thought we were either side of 2000.

The columnist ‘Charlemagne’ in an article in The Economist fastens on 1999 as ‘peak Europe’, when 300 of the world’s top listed companies were European, and and it looked as if China and Russia could be part of a Western-inspired economic and liberal order which could be ‘the end of history’.

We also had a sense that the forces of barbarism were still there but in Woolf’s words were ‘on the run’. We hoped, even thought, that the ‘movement towards liberty and equality – political and social’ was so strong that ‘it would carry everything before it’.

And yet … 2014, a century on from 1914, was just a year after Xi Jinping had come to power. Putin was confronting the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The enemies of the liberal order ‘had seen the risk’. Ukraine and Hong Kong exemplify the threat today. Might other countries follow the example of Hungary, and indeed of Donald Trump, as might be? Where might Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella take France if their party, Rassemblement National, is victorious in the French election in three weeks time?

Woolf, in his seventies, was looking back from the late 1960s. There’s an almost elegiac tone. Yes, the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear threat had a stark reality. But we knew what we stood for. Do we now?

We do need certainties. And, indeed, defiance. ‘Charlemagne’ ends his piece by striking exactly the wrong note. ‘Perhaps Europe peaked in 1999. Or maybe it failed to see it was already in decline.’

A cheer or two for democracy

‘The tyranny of the discontinuous mind.’ That’s Richard Dawkins, quoted by Adam Rutherford in a discussion with David Runciman about taxonomy, our human instinct to classify when in reality everything is in a state of flux. The context was the Linnaean system. It applies to plants, of course, and the way we classify racial types (with historically pernicious consequences) and also, in our own homes, the way we classify books as fiction and non-fiction and more, when there is in reality massive overlap.  

I could also apply this to our democracy, to politics, to our party system. As parties try and shoehorn policies into manifestos we can see how imagination and big ideas are constrained. We get frustrated, and yet, is there any other way to manage a democracy?

We do need to clear about what we stand for. The old divides, Tory/Whig, Tory/Liberal and Tory/Labour, had a rhythm and a recognition that power alternated as an expanding electorate dictated, however great our misgivings might be. ‘Tory’ and ‘Labour’ now don’t mean quite what they did. That of course is part of our current problem.

Politics depends on classification. We need to know where we stand, and where others likewise. But, taking the broader picture, behind the apparent certainties lay a rhythm and underlying that rhythm was a sense of progress. In our own time progress has hit the trip wire of populism.

I’m well aware of the very alternative and wonderfully cynical view of a certain Groucho Marx: ‘Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’ But while it might have a ring of truth it really isn’t helpful.

It’s getting too close to a populist’s playbook. Budding autocrats would concur. You remould the institutions and take over the media and the courts. You suppress dissent. The Orban playbook. I’m reminded of Alastair Campbell’s three Ps, populism, polarisation and post-truth, which in his view, form the foundations of autocracy.

‘Democracy’ as a classification is ancient. Aristotle and Plato differed in detail but autocracy and oligarchy glorified as monarchy and aristocracy were their preference. History shows us where they lead. Aristotle and Plato saw democracy as mob rule, which in ancient Athens was limited by strict property and men-only qualification.

We have by happy accident and occasional design and a huge amount of good fortune fashioned a working democracy which is based around a free press and honest reporting and high levels of education and awareness. It also requires high levels of integrity among our politicians. And from our popular press.

To have the kind of democracy we have – we don’t know, we don’t appreciate, how lucky we are.

Empire in the North Country

The legacy of the British Empire is everywhere. Some empires collapse in dramatic fashion, others fade away. At home, we came to terms with its demise. Or did we? Still we argue. And the legacy beyond our shores is vast. China doesn’t remember kindly the Opium Wars, and Narendra Modi has a very different concept of India, as a ‘Hindutva’ nation, to the liberal democracy we attempted via Nehru to bequeath.

My history of Hebden Bridge in the late nineteenth century (see my previous post) describes a village which cotton manufacture turned into a town. It looked over the border to Lancashire for supply and routes to market. Supply came from slave plantations before and after the American Civil War, and as the century progressed more and more from India. Raw cotton in India was shipped to England and it left the vast Indian market open to imports from England, from Lancashire mills, via Manchester. It was in the UK’s interests to keep India impoverished, the better to govern it, as Orwell characterised British policy.

We sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms. That kind of pride in Empire is a false emotion. But it was very real in late Victorian England. Trade was its lifeblood and Empire was the (initially) accidental legacy of trade. In India and the Caribbean, and later in China, trade was a single-minded and ruthless activity. But as Empire put down roots it took on a moral, and a spiritual, aspect. With that went a sense of superiority, and arrogance. And pride. We did rule the waves.

Army and government, and the Church of England, were the backbone of Empire. But while Empire was physically distant from the non-conformist populations of upper Calderdale they too made their contribution, not just through the output of their mills but also in the money, and compassion, they vested in missions to the big cities – and overseas.

Take missionaries as an example. They were hero figures right through to the 1950s. They were part of the imperial as well as Christian ‘mission’. Eric Liddell, hero of the 1924 Olympics, died as missionary in China in the 1940s. Old timers might remember the movie the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, a story of missionaries in China: it seems quaint today. But this was the old Britain, patronising without realising it, exercising an imagined and inbuilt superiority.

I’m resisting the temptation to engage in the current debate about Empire and its legacy. Save to say that I understand the anger. Also the benefits (and disbenefits) of industry and communications that came with Empire. I’ve little time for apologetics. The one lesson we must learn is that we have to look forward.

Implicit in the apparently unstoppable advances of industry and Empire were a confidence and self-belief which don’t come so easily these days. They didn’t look back. That’s the sense I’ve had researching and writing about Hebden Bridge, a small corner of the Empire in which its mighty neighbour Manchester was such an extraordinary player.

A small town in Yorkshire

The small town is Hebden Bridge, in West Yorkshire.

Politics doesn’t have a big part to play in this post. The focus is history, and a soon-to-be-published book that I’ve written. My aim has been to convey something of what life was like in a small industrial town, not all that long ago. We tend to think of our own world, our own time, as the only world, the only time that ever existed. We are wrapped up in our present – as they were then, in their own very powerful present, 150 years ago.

The book is entitled ‘A Place Apart: Hebden Bridge’, with the subtitle ‘as seen through the eyes of the Spencer family in the late nineteenth century’.

Hebden Bridge is well-known today for several very good reasons, but back then it won renown as the site of extraordinary growth, focused around the manufacture and sale of fustian, a kind of hardwearing cloth much used by miners and labourers. It became known as ‘Fustianopolis’. Out of this came many success stories as new mills and a wide variety of businesses flourished, and among them successful retailers such as my great grandfather, Joseph Spencer, a tailor and outfitter.

If your interested read further. What follows is the blurb on the back of the book. To order the book check out ‘A Place Apart: Hebden Bridge’ on Amazon. Or you should be able to order through a bookseller. The publication date is 1st March, so no copies available before then.

‘A Place Apart’ tells the story of the town through the experiences of three generations of the Spencer family. Mills dominated the landscape, along with the non-conformist chapels which gave a moral compass to people’s lives. Education was opened to everyone and, as working hours relaxed, people had time to relax and enjoy themselves.

‘The textile industry in the nineteenth century opened the Pennines to the world, and one small Yorkshire town which made its mark was Hebden Bridge. Sheltering below the moors, at a junction of two rivers, it excelled at making clothes for working men.

The book provides a valuable perspective on life and attitudes during the Victorian era, brought into an unfortunate focus in 1901 when the daughter of Joseph Spencer, a successful local tailor, found herself pregnant by a local lad. Reputations had to be preserved and the family left town. The business held on, but finally closed in 1907.

This wide-ranging portrait of the area’s social and industrial history is written by a descendant of the Spencer family, and features first-hand accounts, authoritative source material and contemporary illustrations. It provides an engaging, well-researched study of a town and its people at a time of immense change.’

**

‘This book offers a vivid account of the life of a small entrepreneur in a textile town providing an insight into the lives of those who rarely receive the attention of historians.’

Alan Fowler, formerly Principal Lecturer of Economic and Social History, Manchester Metropolitan University

‘Brilliant piece of writing. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down. A really interesting story told in great detail and with passion and pride.’

Michael Peel, local Hebden Bridge historian

**

Taking sides

I quoted from a song called The Partisan is my last post. It has a history as I’ve discovered that long precedes Leonard Cohen. It was written, as ‘La Complainte du partisan’, by two members of the French Resistance, in 1943. It was widely popular. It expressed for me the emotion of the moment, as of a week ago, but it is a song about resistance to an occupier, and freedom from that occupier is clear-cut. And the current conflict around Gaza is anything but.

Far too little is written in the English and American media about the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine, of many many centuries standing, by the Jewish immigrants who created the state of modern Israel. (The plan of course had been that Jew and Palestinian should live together in harmony, communities side by side.)

But that wrong cannot be put right by the destruction of a country, modern Israel, which has been heroic in many ways, and which I’ve long supported.

I, like so many others, am conflicted.

While l support Israel in its determination to remove Hamas forever from Gaza, I also support Palestinians seeking to create a country of their own, with boundaries which allow the old areas of settlement, in and around Gaza, and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and beyond, to flourish.

The Partisan is a song Palestinians might take up. For Israel, it would be a different song, though ‘song’ for Israelis facing what seems like an existential challenge is totally inappropriate.

Whatever our politicians say, the only answer has to lie in the UK, US and Europe identifying as much with the Palestinian cause as they do with the Israeli. And that means all of us, people and governments. Only if we do so will we ever find a solution.  A solution which both sides, those of Christian heritage, and those of Muslim heritage, can readily accept.

Amid all the terrible carnage, and the apparent intractability of the conflict, and the way in which all the world takes sides, and we polarise all the more, we have to keep that in in view.

The wind is blowing

Did Israel bomb the Al Ahli Hospital last night, or was it a misfiring Hamas rocket? If it is proved to be the latter, the Israelis are almost vindicated, in their eyes, and maybe many Americans. Also yesterday, an Israeli bomb hit a UNRWA school and at least six people were killed. Whatever the actual figure, the numbers killed by Israelis bombs in Gaza are appalling.

I won’t rehearse recent events here. We’ve all read about them. For Israelis, for all of us, the events of last Saturday week are reminders of the Holocaust. But I am also reminded of many wartime situations where the aggrieved party wreaks terrible vengeance on civilians. Whatever they say, that is what the Israelis are doing. It should be uppermost in Israeli minds. And it isn’t.

How can you have the open spaces and relative affluence of southern Israel and, across a fence, two million people living in poverty? Hamas and militant Islam have little or nil regard for human life. But Israel by its actions has given them a cause, a casus belli, and a location.

Israel and Palestine as two separate states working together, with no illegal settlements and Jerusalem a shared city. It is conceivable. Tragically, the current Israeli government continues to fall into the trap Hamas has laid for it. And the wider world takes side, and distrust between nations grows deeper.

How would I feel if I were Jewish, as so many wonderful people in my life (not least my best and wisest teachers) have been and are? Or an Israeli? And…. how would I feel as a Palestinian? As an Arab? As a Muslim?

Borders are the great curse of humanity. Our urge to possess. Or it could be our urge to reclaim. Behind and across too many borders are leaders, usually of an autocratic mindset, for whom violence is always an option, stored away, but excusable, they imagine, in certain circumstances, and of their choosing. And they are persuasive. Populist is not an unreasonable word to use.

I recalled Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Partisan’ last evening, listening to reports from Gaza.

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished

An old woman gives him shelter, but the soldiers came and ‘she died without a whisper’. Then three verses in French, and final one in English:

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we’ll come from the shadows.

I was also, yesterday evening, watching a movie, Walk With Me, about the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist and peace campaigner, Thich Phat Hanh. He wasn’t allowed back into Vietnam after 1973 by the Communist regime and he set up his Plum Village community in the Dordogne in France.

The movie is about individuals funding truth, finding their own peace. About landscape and community. But also about a battle with self, running, all the time, and arriving home. There is tacit and expressive and wonderful mutual support. You watch the seasons pass.

Isolationist? Remember that Thich Phat Hanh was an active peace campaigner, who risked his life. He died last year. He was, finally, back in Vietnam. He knew all about borders.

An act of theft

Edmund Burke, whose heyday as a politician, and as a writer on politics, was the late eighteenth century, remains today the respectable face of the political right-wing. Often quoted, and much revered.

At least he was the ‘respectable face’ until the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation came along and adopted his name for their version of far-right conspiratorial conservatism. In its own words, ‘the Edmund Burke Foundation is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.’

Simply, to my mind, an act of theft. Taking a good man down, albeit some 225 years after his death.

It is a foolish liberal who trespasses on to territory which conservatives in our time are fighting over, but Burke more than merits attention. He believed in tradition, but it was an evolving tradition, based on where we are now, and not a throwback, an attempt to return to a lost age that never was. (For background on Burke, see Jesse Norman’s excellent biography, published in 2013.)

Burke’s most quoted words are ‘the little platoons’. We should ‘love the little platoon in society to which we belong’. We are part of an organic whole, and there is a natural hierarchy. Jesse Norman expands on this to focus on the supposed faults of the Enlightenment and liberal individualism, from which he argues many of the problems of modern society emanate. It’s interesting to read back ten years and see how David Cameron and Jesse Norman were promoting the idea of the ‘big society’.

Attacks on liberal individualism can take us to some unfortunate places.

Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, in December 2019 praised Hungary’s ‘interesting early thinking’ on ‘the limits of liberalism’. (‘Short Cuts’, in the London Review of Books, 1st June 2023.) For an idea of what those limits might be, see below. Hungary is about the imposition of change, the imposition of values, Burke is about evolution.

Unlike those who claim to be his modern descendants Burke was also an astute judge of the realities of his time: arguing for financial reform, for greater freedoms and representation of Catholics in Ireland, and against the abuses perpetrated by the East India Company. If governments had listened to his wiser counsels the American War of Independence might have been avoided. And his reading of France after 1789, and how the revolution might and did play out, proved quite remarkably accurate.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the king-in-parliament as a successful modus operandi, and while the king alone might appoint his prime minister and cabinet, only with the approval of parliament could they operate with any degree of success. Political parties, in nascent form in Burke’s time, have provided the underpinning to parliamentary democracy as it has advanced over the last almost 350 years. And yet …

One feature of the new Tory Right has been an attempt to discredit parliament, witness the Daily Telegraph’s milking of the expenses scandal in 2008, and the attempt to elevate executive, or more specifically prime ministerial (Johnsonian) control.

Back to the Edmund Burke Foundation.

The recent National Conservatism Conference (NatCon, the eighth of its kind, the first in London), is a brainchild of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and attracted a lot of publicity. MPs Braverman and Rees-Mogg attended. So too, Michael Gove.

In June 2022 a group of National Conservatives put together a manifesto. Among the ten core principles: ‘the free market cannot be absolute’, the paramountcy of the Christian Bible, and severe restrictions on migration. A NatCon supporter and British MP Danny Kruger railed against faceless ‘powers that be … who are not on the side of the British people, but serve the abstractions of human rights, international law, or other signals of middle-class virtue’.

We are, with all this, living in the past – and with the danger that the future might lie with the likes of Orban and Erdogan, where parliament, media and judiciary are suborned, and where the religion of another age is called on to provide underpinning. Netanyahu it seems has similar ideas for Israel. Putin and Russian Orthodoxy is a story in itself.

For Burke ‘all the major religions were the products of custom, tradition and “long and prescriptive usage”’. (Norman, p91) He would have profoundly regretted our drift from religion but any notion of its reintroduction by diktat would have been, literally, inconceivable.  

How the NatCon Tories and how I read Edmund Burke are radically different. Let’s leave it at that.

Metropolitan – and other – elites

We’ve heard a lot of talk about elites. Am I part of one? With a university education. Middle class. Manchester-born and raised, I’ve lived in London for forty years. That may make me one of the one of the ‘metropolitan elite’.

Maybe I’m also an ‘anywhere’, someone’s who’s happy anywhere in the country, in the world, rather than a ‘somewhere’, someone whose happiest close to home. (We ‘anywheres’ are a species of public enemy.) Though, in truth, I’m both.

Then there’s Matthew Goodwin who imagines he understands the ‘ordinary working-man’, left behind in a hyper-globalised world by an elite who wilfully don’t care for his welfare. And yet – he fell in behind the free-traders, the globalisers, the Brexiteers who espoused a fanciful ‘global Britain’. Only, it seems the free traders aren’t responsible: it’s we university-educated types, who only care for themselves, according to Goodwin. Forgive our confusion.

Peter Turchin*, who I referred to in my last blog, defines four early warning signals for societies entering a disintegrative phase of a natural cycle to which all societies are prone. ‘Popular immiseration’ is the first phase, and the decline in real wages over the last fifty years can be seen as a cause of that. The fourth signal is competition and conflict between elites.

Turchin’s conclusions are based in some extraordinary statistical research but extrapolating to a natural cycle is a big leap. That said, is that what we have? A university-educated relatively liberal elite on one side and on the other a globalising free trade elite?

The curiosity has been the attempt of the free traders to get the ‘discontented masses’ on side, by adopting an anti-woke and socially conservative agenda, leading to the kind of populist rhetoric we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, though far worse on the other side of the pond.

All this talk of elites has seriously, and dangerously, muddied the waters. Societies have always had and will always have elites of one kind or another, not least a financial and business elite, which has through history garnered wealth and privilege to itself, and an educated elite which seeks to pull up the drawbridge behind it.

There’s no better way of constraining that apparently built-in drift to elitism than a functioning liberal democracy which limits their influence on our politics and cuts the biggest egos who try to weaponise opinion down to size.

A nice, neat letter to Prospect magazine suggests that the ‘white working-class’ might actually want the same things as many other people, a decent job, a nice house, good schools – and, maybe, even, a university education of their children.

Make that our focus – and apply to everyone, all classes, colours and creeds. Not just white working-class males….

*Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, published by Allen Lane

Wiping the slate clean

Finding answers was always hard but it’s now in a different league of difficulty.

I began this blog a few years back wanting to write about how we could make liberal democracy function better. Now the issue is how liberal democracy can survive in the face of China, illiberal democracies in Hungary and Turkey, the Republican right in the USA, and, just recently, the ideas promoted by the recent National Conservatism Conference here in the UK.

The issue for many is a sense of lost power. Ideas of ‘nation’ muddled with social conservatism, as if this could be the way we Brits might claw back lost influence. Language and the Premier League mislead us.

Many on the other side of the spectrum would like to renounce power altogether, renounce capitalism, renounce politics, head for utopia.

What if we could go back in time. Start again. Wipe the slate clean.

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, refers to what she describes as ‘the ancient Mesopotamian idea of a wiping the slate clean’ – a wiping out of debts to allow a society to reboot. McKinsey estimates it would ‘wipe out $48trn of household wealth in the coming years’. That I assume is just the USA.

That takes me to another theme, growth, or the absence of it, the post-growth advocates and as the Economist describes them, ‘the actual de-growers’. We stop caring about growth targets and GDP. Or we go further and actively ‘shrink the pie’.

Only, it won’t happen, can’t happen. For one we’d have to rein in population growth. And if we take that too far we’ll have a massively reduced younger generation to fund the lifestyles of a vastly increasing older generation. The answer – we voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles. Which isn’t going to happen. More likely, the world economy would implode.

Tett quotes a biologist Peter Turchin, ‘a biologist and complexity scientist who employs Big Data to study ecosystems’. Studying reams of data over thousands of years he identifies a fundamental pattern whereby an elite grabs power and ‘tries to protect itself by grabbing more and more resources’. This leaves poor people even poorer and an ’over-production of the elite’. It’s a recipe for a social explosion. Is this what we’re currently seeing in the USA?

Tett suggests the only way ‘to shift this trajectory is to re-play the New Deal policies of the 1930s and the immediate post-war years in the USA, using redistribution to reduce inequality’. She’s not saying that Turchin is right, but that the symptoms he describes are indeed deep-rooted in modern American society.

There are many other parts to this jigsaw. Climate change, generative AI, China, Ukraine. Regarding China it’s been interesting to listen to what Henry Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, has to say. Lowering the temperature is key, contrary to what the new breed of American hawks, and a good few British, are arguing. That requires building confidence step by step. Establishing and maintaining a conversation, however deep the divide.

There is in all this one constant – our liberal democracy. Hold to that and we can still find answers.