Category: Politics

A few recent disasters

Let me run through the list of recent disasters.

The Northern Ireland Protocol: this was meant to be a solution but became, predictably, a disaster when the DUP derailed the Northern Ireland assembly. The Tory right wing have further stirred the waters. The DUP continue to deliberate. Sunak, patching an agreement with the EU, is doing his best.

Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. Handing them over to a known anti-lockdown campaigner like Isabel Oakeshott is hardly credible. Her publishing them, an act of betrayal, dishonesty – she should be scorned, not welcomed. Oakeshott is one of those unfortunate breed of libertarians who would look out for themselves at the expense of others. Claiming public interest. On the other hand… we have a sense of how government works. It gets personal. Everything does. (And in this case unpleasant.) But keep it out of WhatsApp messages.

Sunak heads to France, he and Macron embrace, and we are, the Brits and the French, the friends we always should have been if Brexit hadn’t got in the way. But that’s drowned out by ….

Braverman’s refugee bill, which is nasty in its objectives, in effect denying refugees the right to claim refugee status, and in its language. And then we have…

Gary Lineker’s comments comparing Braverman’s language to that used in Germany in the 1930s. We’re not talking about the Holocaust. We’re talking about inflammatory language, and that Braverman is guilty of, and by association all her acolytes in government, including Sunak.

So much stems from this deep-rooted fear of outsiders. By closing our nearby borders we, by some marvellous sleight of hand, open them again to a more distant world, who, because the world long ago moved on from Empire, hardly cares if we exist.

Patriots – pater, father – so supporters of the fatherland. Make that motherland as well. Children retain their family loyalties, but they grow up. Nationalists – holding on to an unchanging idea of nation. And never growing up. And in our case nation gets muddled with Empire, and we have a breed of writers and historians, including Jeremy Black, Robert Tombs and Nigel Biggar, who find it hard to move on, and do themselves and the rest of us a massive disservice.

Lineker: we have to support him. He’s someone who is living in the present, not the past. And he has the right understanding of the BBC. He can speak out. So should others be able to do, in a private capacity. Anyone who remembers the Blair years will remember the hostility shown by left-wingers to the BBC. That’s how it’s always been. Let everyone speak, and chart a middle course. The BBC will sometimes get it wrong, but leave it alone.

Let everyone speak, give opportunities to everyone seeking refuge to find that refuge … but at the same time, hold to the middle ground. If we’re not centred, we fall apart.

Ukraine, Russia – and the world

Do I head to Northern Ireland with this post, or to Ukraine, or to India, or stay back home…? Northern Ireland, and that absurd boast from Rishi Sunak that Northern Ireland now has the best of both worlds. It can trade with open borders with the rest of the UK, and with Europe. Just as we all could do before June 2016. We will leave it there.

Ukraine: the issue our government should be focusing on. Instead we have and will have more of that ruinous Brexit aftermath.

It was my privilege with many of my fellow villagers to attend a Ukraine evening at the Ukrainian Social Club in Gloucester, which dates back to immediately after the Second World War. One highpoint was the dinner, with local dishes, beginning with borsht and ending with a layered coffee cake. Next came an auction, with a highlight being a very fine birch-wood clock, retrieved I believe from a bombed-out factory. It will in the near future have pride of place on the wall of our village hall. And, finally, a concert: solo violin, accordion, a Cossack dancer of extraordinary style and agility, and singing – adults and children – and Oksana in a long white dress and silver boots leading us, it seemed incongruously, but maybe not so, in the chorus of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

They were fundraising, we have to remind ourselves, for a war. Even Switzerland has to re-think its historic neutrality, though it’s not there yet. But more than that, we had a sense of a country, a culture and a language, and a thriving democracy (corruption issues notwithstanding). The contrast with their eastern borderlands, and with events in Donbass, is so extreme. And yet, Russia is the land of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam.

(Thinking of Donbass … Shakhtar Donetsk are one of Europe’s leading football teams, but they no longer play in Donetsk. In 2014 they moved to Lviv and now are playing matches in Kyiv.)

And they love their Shakespeare in Russia. I thought of Shostakovich’s curiously-named opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The story is very different from Shakespeare but we have Lady Macbeth (she is planning a murder) as a universal trope or archetype. But I’m assuming any hint of the subversion of an existing order would be too much in Putin’s Russia, as it was in Stalin’s.

We went to Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest last Thursday. Prospero and Ariel are played by women, and quite brilliantly and convincingly so. There was a very special and personal link between them. Could we imagine a woman playing Prospero in a Russia where gender roles are increasingly narrowed down to the old male and female and ‘there-shall-be-no-other’ split?

We are curtailing our imaginations, we are losing creativity. Erdogan imprisons any journalist with a creative and thereby critical take on the country’s fortunes. He’s an example to Narendra Modi, responding to a recent highly critical BBC documentary with a police raid on BBC offices in India, on the grounds of tax irregularities. A charge of corruption is the reason for the arrest of one of the leaders of a rising opposition force in India, the Aam Aadmi party.

Istanbul’s mayor, a leader of the main Turkish opposition party, has been sentenced to over two years in prison for ‘calling members of Turkey’s supreme election council “fools” in a press release three years ago’. There’s a crucial election coming up.

Rupert Murdoch admits that his TV channels in the USA went along with the Trump lie about a stolen election. They are polishing their hate figures in the USA, polishing their anger. There’s a very relevant comment in an article by William Davies in the current London Review of Books. He highlights Donald Trump’s ‘affective state of seemingly constantly being on the verge of losing his temper’, adding ‘a sense of danger and excitement to his political career’. ‘Boris Johnson, by contrast, always appears to be on the verge of bursting out laughing’. Both approaches win converts, as we’ve seen only too well.

We have to be watchful on all sides and everywhere. Republicans in Congress are challenging the levels of expenditure on the Ukraine war. Maybe they aren’t as foolish and sinister as Trump in his cosying to Putin, but they haven’t fully bought into the reality that this is where democracy, as we understand it, stands or falls.

The reality is that democracy is for many, on the right primarily but also on the left (think Lopez Obrador, known as ‘AMLO’, in Mexico), seen as the way to power, and once they have that power they are keen to pull up the democratic drawbridge after them.

Bring on the Ukrainians: they are focusing our minds. We can see where our complacency might lead.

Travelling in India …

I began my last blog with a few words which may give a misleading impression.

‘All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to.’

We returned from a two-week holiday in north-western India six weeks ago.

‘On the surface.’ I left open what might lie below the surface. India as envisaged by Nehru and the Congress Party in 1947 was to be a secular, non-aligned state. Nehru looked to the West, but also to communist Russia. India was partitioned, with terrible consequences, and the tension between India and its neighbour Pakistan is palpable, seventy-five years on, even to short-stay visitors. The army’s presence, in the areas where we travelled, is everywhere.

Over the last seventy years the Congress Party has gone into sharp decline and the fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP, has taken hold of the levers of power, at a national and increasingly local level. The BJP under Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014.

In 1992 Hindu activists destroyed a mosque, at Ayodhya, on a site widely believed to have been the birthplace of the god Rama. If this act was symbolic of an India reconstituting as a Hindu state, the 2019 decision of the Modi government to revoke the status of Jammu and Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim territory, as a self-governing entity, and the transfer of power to the central government, was, and is, widely seen (outside India) as brutal act of suppression of Kashmiri, and Muslim, aspirations. Also pertinent is the 2019 legislation extending the National Register of Citizens to the whole country which would have the effect of leaving several million Muslims stateless.

Our own sampling of Hindu opinion during our stay in November suggested a disdain toward a Muslim population which is more and more ghettoised as threats and sometimes specific acts of violence increase. The irony of Delhi’s and Agra’s great tourist locations being Mughal and therefore Muslim forts and mausoleums, not least the Taj Mahal, seemed lost on our (otherwise splendid) Hindu guides.

All that said, India remains a functioning democracy of not far short of 1.4 billion people. We were in Shimla on election day for the state of Himachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly. We chatted to a friendly BJP teller outside a polling booth. (The BJP were noisily confident, but in this particular election they lost – and Congress won.)

The mood among the Hindu population was positive, almost aggressively optimistic. The economy is growing fast, and Modi, like him or not, is an influential figure on the world stage. The contrast I made in my last blog between the UK and India is for real.

And yet … quotes from my travel journal are apposite here:

‘Am I soft-pedalling on Modi too much? What of the Hindutva nationalist philosophy of the BJP? The Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy is no friend of the BJP. She writes in a recent book of essays of how “the holy cow and the holy script became of the chosen vehicles of (Hindu) mobilisation”. The “holy script” is Hindi…

… In The Times of India I read about a move to convert Christians among the Adivasi, India’s indigenous tribes, to Hinduism. Shivaji, the 17th century Marathi leader, is celebrated not least in movies as a Hindu proto-nationalist. The Shiv Sena movement, the leader of the local branch of which was shot the day before our arrival in Amritsar, is radical in its advocacy of a pure and dominant form of Hinduism. Muslim culture, and the Muslim population, which existed side by side with Hindu culture for many centuries, is under unrelenting pressure. And yet Bollywood still has many Muslim stars.’

Arundhati Roy, as an outspoken opponent of a regime increasingly hostile to dissent, lives dangerously. She sums up the situation, as she sees it, succinctly as follows. (The RSS is the ideological arm of the BJP.)

‘The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of a National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions all they need to do is pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villain, Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi infiltrators or anyone of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors.’

India has a militant China on its Himalayan border. It needs a strong army and a strong leader. You could argue it now has both. And a growing economy. But the cost in terms of its move away from the secular and open society that Nehru aspired to has been a high one.

Beyond the Red Wall

Travelling in India last month I was struck by the continuing interest in the UK. All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to. And a concern for us, as for an old friend who’s not in the best of health. (Unless it’s cricket, where they acknowledge we lead the world at the moment.)

An Indian commentator (Swapan Dasgupta, writing in The Times of India) refers to a distinction made by Tony Blair between party activists and ordinary voters. With the UK and USA in mind Dasgupta continues: ‘It is largely the angry and dogmatic Right and Left who have the time and inclination for political activism. …. They can inspire the faithful but ordinary voters aren’t driven by doctrinaire concerns. The problem is that no-one can define what they want. Hence the appeal of identity politics as a fallback. Caught in the pincer movement of woke and the menacing xenophobic, liberal democracy should be worried about its own future.’

Applied to the UK, how did this work out?

The economic crisis and the years of austerity which followed brought to the fore deep divides in the UK. They were defined in various ways: north/south, city/country, as levels of education, ‘somewheres’ vs ‘anywheres’ in David Goodhart’s contentious formulation. The European Reform Group and Farage and sections of the media weaponised this divide. Notions of ‘Global Britain’ held back by the EU’s restraining hand gave a false economic credibility to the argument.

Janan Ganesh writing in the Financial Times has a useful take on the same subject. ‘People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe, they join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it. The sense of belonging, of group membership, is what hooks people…’

Come the 2019 election the group identities born of the Brexit ‘debate’ and the Brexit vote were firmly established.

Sebastian Payne’s Broken Heartlands (published 2020, revised 2021) focuses on the 2019 election. Interviews across the Red Wall (northern seats which switched to the Tories in 2019) with MPs, activists, business figures and a few old political warhorses attempt to explain why people voted as they did.

The explanation doesn’t lie in hyped-up fears over immigration – that was Brexit. It is, Payne concludes, twofold. Two personalities in fact. Johnson’s can-do enthusiasm, focused on get-Brexit-done and levelling up. And Jeremy Corbyn. That takes us back to 2010, when Ed Miliband diverted Labour’s focus away from the New Labour path and opened up the way for Corbyn’s disastrous election.

Payne’s new-Tory-MP interviewees, with their big plans for their constituencies, have reason to feel embarrassed. They’ve been relying on the magic money tree, which the last sane chancellor, Philip Hammond, had kept well-locked away in a cupboard. They’ve also been mesmerised by Johnson.

Where do we go from here? All sides of the argument are focusing on the regions. Andy Burnham, Andy Street and Ben Houchen, mayors of Manchester, Birmingham and Tees Valley, are cited as examples of what can be achieved at a regional level. We’ve also had Gordon Brown’s recent report on the regions for Labour, with its big ideas, not least an assembly of the regions replacing the House of Lords.

The polls suggest people are looking to Labour for answers – but primarily for want of alternatives. They are not convinced. Sebastian Payne approves a simple formulation, arising out of a conversation with Neil Kinnock. If Labour could ‘manifest itself as the “security” party, in terms of personal security, employment, education, enterprise, national security… it would be capable of getting over the identity demarcations that produced the referendum result’.

High-flying sentiments but the emphasis is wrong. Enterprise would be a better starting-point than security – enterprise supported by education, and enterprise put in the service of transforming social care and health care more widely. Business entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, and government agencies, working side by side.

Payne quotes a striking statistic: ‘just 17 per cent of over sixty-fives voted Labour in 2019…’ Security might be a watchword for the over 65s but it is surely more important to get young people engaged, and young people voting.

Politics needs to be about challenge, even exciting. (A big ask, given where we are at the moment.) It is extraordinary how the younger generations have been left out of current arguments and deliberations. If we’re to break out of our small ‘c’ conservative mindset and take on the future they have to be put centre stage. They deserve their own ‘triple lock’.

Good books, bad politics

Book festivals are, to vary a phrase, a long time in politics. We’ve just emerged from the ten-day long Cheltenham Literature Festival. While we listened there were few ripples out there in the wider world. UK gilts prices were going through the roof. Markets were in turmoil.

First off Friday evening was Jeremy Hunt, yes, that Jeremy Hunt, talking about his new book ‘Zero: Eliminating Preventable Harm and Tragedy in the NHS’. The book has been described by a junior doctor (writing in The Guardian), one of the strikers who vilified Hunt during their 2016 strike, as ‘a thoughtful, serious and well-written book that tackles an immensely important subject’. That’s how he came over to us listening in the Town Hall. He’s serious, and means well. He was Health Secretary for six years, the kind of long stint more government ministers should have in office.

Hunt became Chancellor of the Exchequer just six days later. Looking back there was an almost charming innocence about proceedings.

Saturday lunchtime, we listened to Cheltenham-born writer Geoff Dyer talking about his new book, ‘Growing Old With Roger Federer’. We reach the point in life here we have to move on, admit the great days are past. Federer is the exemplar, doing it gracefully. He is 41, Dyer early 60s. Dylan, one of Dyer’s heroes is in his 80s. After the session we headed out into the sunshine talking about our own icons (Dylan being one), and the likes of Mick Jagger and how in that one case the rules don’t quite apply. (But, Mick, they will, in time, even to you!)

(As an aside, let me mention David Foster Wallace’s essay on Roger Federer quoted by Brian Phillips in a 2016 New York Times article: he ‘advances the impossibly ambitious, totally doomed and thrillingly beautiful idea that high-level spectator sports serve an aesthetic and even quasi-spiritual function, namely to reconcile viewers to the limitations of their own bodies.’ We can muse over that wonderful notion as we contemplate our own physical decline!

Later that afternoon we heard Justin Webb talk about his new book (‘The Gift of a Radio’) with a full-on chirpy Nick Robinson. Justin and Nick work closely together on the BBC’s Today programme and are obviously great pals. Justin smooth, with an upper middle-class mum who ‘lived’ that status. Nick set himself up as a northern terrier. Drives a Ford Capri. (No, he doesn’t, but Justin is a little bit on the smooth side, in, of course, the nicest possible way.)

Sunday evening, getting dark, and the festival site quieter. I drove in specially to hear Geoff Dyer and others talking about Jack Kerouac, author of ‘On the Road’, and leading figure of the Beat Generation. It’s one hundred years since he was born. ‘Still Roadworthy? was the title of the event. Yes, the answer, the book still strikes chord. I looked up quotes back home. How about, ‘What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.’

Back down to earth…

Monday, a panel discussion focused on the topic, ‘Can Economics Save the Planet’, with Oliver Balch chairing, and Gillian Tett in full flow. Can economics shake off its obsessive focus on numbers? Are we at another turning point, where the ‘dismal science’ experiences its own green revolution, going way beyond the ‘green-washing’ of ESG (Environmental Social and Governance). Can we really have ‘green growth’? And what of the ‘no growth’ school, which argues that we can only save the planet by adopting a no-growth approach. But is that, for a moment, given all our crises and our nine billion population, remotely realistic?

After regrouping for tea and cakes it was the turn Chris Patten and Hong Kong refugee and hero Nathan Lee, talking about Hong Kong, taking their cue from Patten’s Hong Kong Diaries. But their focus was on Hong Kong now, and Nathan’s experience, and the territory’s future – and should we ever have trusted the Chinese. And now of course we’ve Xi Jinping. We cannot hide from the threat he poses. Or autocracies more widely, BUT what impressed was how neither Nathan nor Chris seemed born down by gloom. Nathan is a fighter – as we must be, fighting for liberal democracy.

Tuesday drilled home the same point. It was ‘Ukraine day’ at the festival and we listened to novelist Oksana Zabuzhko (‘Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex’, ‘The Museum of Abandoned Secrets’) talking with Rosie Goldsmith. Oksana is unstoppable, she has to deep-think herself into her replies in English (Ukraine her first language, Polish second, English third, Russian fourth…) and then she engages, and talks non-stop. Western Europe doesn’t know Ukraine, doesn’t even connect to it as part of Europe. Security is what Ukraine’s needs once and for all, in the face of Russia’s repeated predations… We had to clear up after World War Two, now we have to fight and do it again. We haven’t faced up to dictators, in Russia or China, and (reprising last evening’s message) we must.

Thursday morning, it was the turn of Steven Pinker, talking about his new(ish) book, ‘Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.’ He’s wonderful on cognitive biases, picking up from the work of Daniel Kahneman. His big question: can we by the exercise of objective reason get to something approximating to objective truth? After Chris Patten and Nathan Law, and Oksana Zabuzhko, he did come over as somewhat detached from the real world. Is the world really less violent? Can that argument be sustained? ‘Progress’ has surely only re-contextualised violence. Putin and even more Xi Jinping are by their own lights eminently reasonable.

Late afternoon, we’re into the festival again for the BBC champion ‘explorer’ (though that word almost demeans him) Simon Reeve. He was brilliant. The cerebral chat of Pinker replaced by the humour, the goodwill, the openness, the experience crossing frontiers, geographical and personal, of someone who has travelled where the world hurts.

That evening, the big news: Kwarteng is out, and our old friend Jeremy Hunt is in. And the great unwinding has begun.

Friday morning, a conversation between a long-winded Times writer (good for contrast!) and a brilliant, mercurial, unstoppable, wonderfully detailed and informed Anthony Beevor, author of ‘Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921’. Violence lay at the core to the 1917-21 implosion, Lenin single-minded in 1917, when everyone else hesitated. Single-minded again, Lenin and Trotsky, when the Reds took on the different allegiances that made up the Whites. A conflict characterised by the brutality which seems to be a continuing part of the Russian psyche when it comes to the exercise of power. Despite its length, 592 pages, a must-read: there are big issues involved, not least relating to Ukraine as it is today,

Saturday morning, a panel discussion with ‘Crisis: Ukraine and Europe’, as its subject. Bronwen Maddox in the chair. Support by way of armament is crucial. So too popular support, despite privations which lie ahead. Can we hold the alliance together? Is Macron, arguing that France wouldn’t use its nuclear deterrent in the current conflict, a weak link? Or is he just adding to the uncertainty – which is what we of course want Putin to feel. And what of those countries which still sit of the fence. Why, and how can we change their minds? We can’t change Xi Jinping. But what of the rest of Asia, and Africa?

Our last festival visit: the actor Hugh Bonneville, star of Downton, Paddington, and Notting Hill, and much else. A complete contrast – we were ‘VIPs’, courtesy of my friend Hazel, so got a free book. Hugh was brilliant: laid back, unassuming, funny, full of theatre insights and stories.

We needed that, needed him. Take a break! Even Rings of Power (Tolkien re-worked, re-fantasised for Amazon Prime) which we watched that evening is, if we take it seriously for a moment, about the rise and fall of civilisations, about good versus evil. I shall take one of Michael Bond’s Paddington books to bed with me tonight!

A not-so-warm welcome for our new PM

As we change prime ministers, a few thoughts.

Let’s start with integrity. Journalists at the self-described ‘right leaning’ GB News weren’t like the BBC, ‘because at least they got their facts right’. This was Liz Truss a few weeks ago. A throwaway line from one of the candidates in the Tory leadership debate. No more than that? Or Truss, in pursuit of Tory member votes, peddling a ‘fake news’ agenda.

Emily Maitlis just now setting up her own podcast with Jon Sopel is good on the subject. Politics she argues has changed fundamentally and journalism and broadcasting haven’t caught up. ‘We haven’t realised that when people say fake news they are trying to disorientate you and demean your work, so they can ignore any scrutiny you put them under.’

I jib at calling the new incumbent ’our PM’, just as I did with Johnson. Playing the ‘fake news’ game is, let’s not beat about the bush, pretty base. Not that she would understand for a moment the deeper implications of what she said. She’s doing no more than her predecessor did during the Brexit debate. Plus ca change…

Another cheap line from Truss: the jury is out on whether ‘Mr Macron is Britain’s friend or foe’. A quote from the poet Ian Duhig’s ‘Fauvel’s Prologue’ applies:

‘De Gaulle would snigger; he well knew
The tactic of imperialist Brits
Who ruled by inculcating splits.’

Tories of the current dominant persuasion have this preference for enmity over amity, for two fingers rather than a handshake.

Facts are one thing. What about opinion? Maitlis is also good in this subject. The BBC back in Brexit time tried to balance argument. But their notions of balance were politicised.

‘Balance is a word we always used at the BBC but balance is complicated. If it takes me five minutes to find ten economists who think Brexit is a terrible idea, and five hours to find an economist who says it will be absolutely brilliant, then having one of each side isn’t balanced.’

The Daily Telegraph carried an interview a few days ago with someone who might claim to be ‘the one economist’. (Though to be fair there are a few hanging out at the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange and the Adam Smith Institute – low-tax ‘free-traders’ all.) I’m thinking of Patrick Minford, one-time advisor to Thatcher. He rails against the Treasury’s short-term rules ‘in which borrowing mustn’t happen’.

But with massive support about to be announced for energy bills, £100m or more, and built-in increases in health and social care expenditure, and defence, and other areas, which will push borrowing to an even high level, maybe unsustainable as the Institute of Fiscal Studies has warned – how and where do we cut?

Borrowing as a proportion of national debt was 41% in 2007 and 74% in 2010, and it’s 99% now. But Minford remains cool. ‘Solvency doesn’t mean we should be paying off debts tomorrow. It means a long-term strategy in which state spending is consistent with our tax revenues…’ Minford argues for the importance of infrastructure, health and education, ‘but ‘state spending has to be controlled’.

‘The NHS has to be made more efficient.’ One good example. For Minford and far right opinion more generally this is an ancient mantra. And we can all agree. But they see it in market terms. The competition-led Lansley reforms under Cameron were a miserable failure. So where now for ‘efficiency’. The focus should have been then and must be now on the better integration of health and social care. What chance Truss?

A recent Telegraph leader laid into Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Confederation, for highlighting the impact of the energy crisis on the NHS. Focus on reform and leave the energy crisis to others was the deeply unhelpful conclusion.

Taylor, policy advisor to Tony Blair, author of a key report for Theresa May on employment practices, and for fifteen years chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, is one of the people to get behind to help reform the NHS, someone with a skill set and experience way ahead of anything the government, or a Telegraph leader writer, could offer.

Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, reminds us of the wider context. ‘Public spending that yields clear economic and social returns, including spending on the welfare state, enhances the performance of the economy, but beyond a certain point the cost is greater than the return and government spending begins to crowd out private sector economic activity and the tax base that public spending depends on.’

It’s an old-as-the-hills mantra. ‘Crowding out the private sector.’ And it might have applied in the days of mass nationalisation. But the state these days works, and has to work, in different and much more productive ways – working with the private sector.

Ultimately, we’re back to the old small-state low-tax trickle down shibboleths. Free traders argue that recent Tory governments pushed up taxes and obsessed about borrowing. The wrong targets they think. They argue for a diametrically opposite approach. At the same time they miss altogether the real focus, which has to include maximising opportunities in markets close to home – far more important than the Antipodes. Also, the Chinese aren’t a bunch of free traders. And the Americans have a vast internal market. We’re 70 million, and on our own. We need to get real.

Let’s see how the next year or two pan out. I think Truss and her team will find that they are radically disconnected from realities. Also, that they simple lack the ability to carry their policies through. They’ll jib at Civil Service resistance – from people who have to be cautious because they know the implications of foolishness.

They’ll also increasingly divorce themselves from the levelling-up cohort within the party. To argue that levelling up has to come from improved economic performance will not cut the mustard. The regions have been promised some evidence of jam now, or in the foreseeable, and they won’t get it.

Truss is also on record as saying that people outside London don’t work hard enough and, going back to a book she co-authored in 2012, that British workers as among the ‘worst idlers in the world’. ‘If you go to China it’s quite different. There’s a fundamental issue of British working culture.’ Yes, we are falling short compared to our neighbours on measures of both growth and productivity. I’d agree absolutely we need a more entrepreneurial spirit in this country. But blame the workers??

From all I’ve seen I have to conclude that Truss is simply unqualified for the job, a woman lacking the experience and the ability, and connection with realities, that we have a right to expect from our prime ministers. The same applies to her cabinet, a right-wing rump which has self-excluded the wisest and brightest in the wider party.

Do I (and so many others with me) misjudge? Time will tell. But I thought I’d put marker down, against which I can judge her in future time.

The Tory leadership debacle

How can we best create a compassionate and enterprising society, that functions for the benefit of all? That, surely, is a question we could all agree on as a reasonable starting point.

But not the Tory leadership candidates. All they talk about is a smaller state, alongside low taxes and their assumed natural concomitant, high growth. Compare Denmark, Sweden and Finland: all outperform the UK despite higher levels of taxation. And check out the Legatum Prosperity Index, with its wide-ranging criteria: the northern European countries come top, and we are thirteenth.

Only one candidate seems to recognise that there is a big price to pay for tax cuts. In an inflationary environment any stimulus, in the form of lower taxes, is more likely to lead to higher prices than higher incomes. Inflation pushes up interest rates… We have a growth crisis, that’s where we should be focused, and at its core is our low productivity, historically, and compared to other countries.

[‘Between 1995 and 2007 output per worker grew by around 2% a year, roughly matching the rate in the 25 richest members of the OECD. But during the next 12 years that figure for Britain was a dismal 0.4%, compared with an average of 0.9% among the rest.’ The Economist]

Moving on. You’d have thought arguing for an education system which reaches down to all levels, which achieves that balance between science, technology and culture, not just maths and English, on which a successful civilised country has to base itself – you’d have thought that might get a look in. Has anyone mentioned education? (We’ve had six education secretaries in the last six years, the longest in post a mere two years. Any good ideas come from the Civil Service, not from government.)

One benighted candidate has argued for 20% cuts across the board. NHS? That would be operating expenditure. Nurses, doctors, technicians, cleaning staff…

Or we avoid cuts, but still cut taxes, and build up deficits in the same gung-ho way that’s now argued on the Republican side in the USA. Civil service: reduce by 20%. That’s existing policy. But remotely deliverable while retaining efficiency in government? This old notion that cuts somehow generate efficiency. The ‘low-hanging fruit’ as it’s described (unless it’s the increased numbers of civil servants required to handle Brexit, no longer needed now that the damage is done) is long gone.

Climate change and conservation. The most important issues of all last autumn…. now hardly mentioned. Levelling up: of minor concern to most Tory members, so sidelined. Income redistribution: leave that to ‘grumblers’ like Thomas Piketty.

That wonderful word, ‘cakeism’. Having your cake and eating it. Small state, low taxes, and economic nirvana.

Two rallying points, both highly contentious. Brexit and immigration. Brexit: a ‘done deal’, yet half the nation still against it. Though accepting that up to a point it’s ’irreversible’. (We have a minister still seeking out those mythical mini-beasts known as ‘Brexit opportunities’.) EU cooperation: for the birds, if you believe Liz Truss, our over-promoted foreign secretary. Immigration: appalling policy, and a brutal Rwanda ‘solution’.

Arrogance, cakeism, scandal, self-interest (who really cares about levelling up?). They should guarantee that the Tories will lose the next election, if Labour and the Lib Dems (the one up north, the other down south) don’t mess up.

(The Economist reminds me of that famous quote from the Renaissance humanist, Erasmus. ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ We have to make very sure that we never inhabit the land of the blind, however much the right-wing press might seek to lead us there.)

Candidate selection procedures it seems automatically exclude the brighter, more socially committed, more hard-bitten real-world candidates. Would anyone of real ability want to put themselves forward? He or she, more likely than not, would have to deceive any selection panel should they have wider goals or a broader sense of our shared humanity – shared across all classes, all races, all countries.

So we’re back to that wider issue – our shared humanity. Who we are in the world. Not just as a nation, but individually. The financial crash, Brexit, Trump, Covid, Johnson. The old certainties challenged.

And now with Ukraine – under existential threat. Just 1,300 miles away.

Humility. A difficult concept for the Tory tight. A little would go a long way. We might then come up with serious answers as opposed to all this embarrassing braggadocio.

‘Avoid anyone with ideas’

Isabel Allende in her wonderful novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, highlights the extraordinary achievement of Pablo Neruda in arranging the transportation to Chile of two thousand refugees from the Spanish Civil War on an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, in August 1939. The decision on who or who not should be accepted lay with Neruda. He cast his net wide to include ‘fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual labourers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas.’

A cross-section of working populations would today look very different, but there is one category which governments feared, now as then, and that is ‘anyone with ideas’.

The market as understood by neoliberalism, epitomised probably better than anywhere else by Pinochet’s Chile, after the 1973 coup, but still pervading so much of Western, and especially American, society, has little time for ideas. Chile is a classic case where ideas, and freedom of expression, were pitched against market forces, and market forces won.

Tom Clark focuses on neo-liberalism in an excellent book review* in the current edition of Prospect. One point (of many) that caught my attention: ‘….a lot of the neoliberal agenda can be thought of … as akin to the historic enclosures of common land, excluding some in order to strengthen the property rights of others’. Readers of my blog will remember my review of Nick Hayes’ ‘The Book of Trespass’. Tom Clark goes on to remind us of ‘the American intellectual property regime that (prior to a 2013 court ruling) developed to allow 4,300 genes to be patented as if they were inventions’.

At an everyday level we have ‘other audacious enclosures’ which ‘have blocked most Britons from watching live football of TV and obliterated awareness of cricket from the young’. (Recent England internationals on free-to-air channels have been so bad that watching is best seen as an act of penance. Cricket on the other hand has been superb – and should have been out there on free-to air TV.)

Isabel Allende in ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ sums up the situation in Pinochet’s Chile succinctly. ‘The government had decided public services should be in private hands. Health was not a right but a consumer good, to be bought and sold.’

This ties in neatly with Clark’s conclusion: ‘Only with a “property first” rather than a “freedom first” reading of neoliberalism can we …. grasp how [Friedrich] Hayek would defend the 1970s coup against an elected socialist government in Chile, which brought Pinochet’s murderous regime to power.’

The irony is that ‘ideas played an important part in the neoliberal story’. Its great proselytisers, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, thrived in that environment. But in Chile the coup closed off debate, closed out ideas, put an end to freedom of expression. Property (traditional landowners and American-owned mining companies) usurped freedom, when ultimately, in a democracy, the balance has always to be toward freedom.

The ‘audacious enclosures’ referred to above may seem small beer by comparison but as we’ve seen they are part of the same debate. Market forces are part of our lives, they drive our economies, but when they’re allied too closely with wealth, to property in the form of land and investments, as opposed to the incomes each of us earns, on our merits, in each generation, they over-reach – and the challenge lies in containing that over-reach. And for that we need, more than ever, an open market in ideas.

* ‘How the rich ate us’, reviewing books by Francis Fukuyama and Gary Gerstle

‘A man without trust’

See also my last post, ‘The Mandate of Heaven’.

In the West we have no over-arching sense of the political and spiritual spheres conjoined. They have over two millennia been mutually engaged but never (despite the Papacy’s best efforts) combined in one individual. ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God, the things that are God’s.’ (Matthew 22, 22.) The divide is clear. Think back to the Papacy versus Empire, in the Middle Ages, or Henry VIII versus Rome, ultimately a marriage squabble, in 16th century England. Secular and spiritual rest uneasily, or at worst, violently, together.

Our politics in the UK have long been pragmatic, mercantile, self-interested. God treated as a justification ex post facto. Our political system, and that of other Western countries, is underpinned not by divine sanction but by the rule of law. Compare the Confucian order, where there is no place for a legal system as we understand it. Confucius believed in moral education as the best way of creating a just society.

However radical their differences it is true to say that at the heart of both systems, Western and Confucian, lies the basic concept and imperative of trust. An acceptance that justice will ultimately be done. Tibet, the Uyghurs, and most recently Hong King, all demonstrate how far China, where moral education is equated with the diktats of the Communist Party, has departed from Confucius.

Michael Wood, in ‘The Story of China’, quotes from the diary of ‘an old Confucian farmer, teacher and mine manager’, Liu Dapeng, writing near the end of his life, and under Japanese occupation, in the 1930s.

‘The superior man must be trusted before he can impose labours on the people….Confucius said, “I do not know how a man without trust can get on.”’

The old order was already under terminal threat.

*

But Confucius does have relevance for us, here in the West. Trust remains a universal requirement of open government and, if we define ‘superior man’ as someone who governs, and with no wider sense, we can see how it might apply to our own time, to our own politics, in the UK, in early summer 2022.

We have no mandate of heaven in our politics. We elect MPs to a House of Commons, we don’t elect a ‘president’ as they do over the Channel, with parliamentary elections following later. The MPs have the mandate. And they need to ensure that the ‘superior man’ is someone we can trust.

This you might argue is no more than a squabble, a ripple on the vast ocean of history. But ripples are indicative of what lies beneath. Without trust in individuals, and more broadly in a political system, people will disengage. Liberal democracy is a balancing act and trust is required to maintain that balance. Take away that trust and the way is open for the apparently simple and crude solutions of the populist.

We need only look across the pond to the USA to see the consequences, actual, and still worse, potential, when trust breaks down.

The Mandate of Heaven

By what right does any person or group rule over any other? Or any dynasty? I thought it worth taking a brief look at China, with the help of historian Michael Wood. See also my next post.

Chinese emperors as far back as the Western Zhou, circa 1000 years BC, governed under a ‘Mandate of Heaven’, linked to a specific astronomical event, a rare five-planetary conjunction that occurs every four or hundred years. A king who acted tyrannically would arouse the displeasure of heaven, disturbing cosmic harmony.

So was born the notion of the sage-king, preserved in our time in the person of Mao, and now Xi Jinping. Challenging that notion in the 19th century were the very down-to-earth British, who speeded the decline of empire in their demand for trading rights. Sea power and weaponry ensured victory in the Opium Wars and humiliation for the empire after the Boxer Rebellion.

Wood’s splendid book, ‘The Story of China’, draws on his remarkable TV series of that name, and provides as close as any history can a visual sense of China as it changed – towns and cities achieving unmatched levels of prosperity and civilisation only to collapse before barbarian invaders – over four millennia.

At the heart of the story lies Confucius, still the great sage as he has been for 2500 years. For Confucius the ideal ruler must be humane and learned. ‘Chinese thought, it may be said, has revolved around two central questions, the harmony of the universe, and the harmony of society, cosmology and politics.’ (I’m quoting from Wood’s book.)

‘As for the role of the intellectual, the key was to determine the Way (dao). When the Way is lost, the sage has a moral duty, above all else, to reform society, to set the away back on track, to define the tradition and advise the prince.’

We have no sage, no Confucius. But we did have Socrates, and indeed Plato, who shared with Confucius the ideal of power vested in a wise ruler, a philosopher king. Karl Popper in the aftermath of World War Two (‘The Open Society and its Enemies’) made clear how damaging that notion has been in the West, and we see in too many countries how dangerous it still is. ‘Wise rule’ descends into tyranny.

Comparisons between China and the West can be instructive. But any presumption on the part of a Westerner that he or she understands China is foolish. We have no notion of a ‘mandate of heaven’, now vested in the Chinese Communist Party, woven into our national psyche. Our ‘mandate’ has to be our democracy, and specifically our parliamentary democracy.

We are the ‘barbarians’ at the gates of China, and they at ours (‘ours’ being the West, broadly defined). Is it too alarmist to say that only one can prevail?