War Actually

To mistake Keir Starmer for Hugh Grant in Love Actually once may be regarded as a failure of imagination; to do so a second time looks like a pathological delusion. The determination by the Guardian to cast Starmer's supplication before Donald Trump in Washington this week in the most positive terms was shared across the media spectrum. Ahead of the meeting there was much talk of the need for Starmer to "seize the opportunity"; afterwards, loud praise for his success in "walking the tightrope" and coming away with as much as could be expected. In fact, Starmer got nothing of substance. Neither, for that matter, did Emmanuel Macron, indicating that the once more popular entente cordiale, mooted as the foundation of the new European security order, is not something that even registers in American calculations. Both meetings were reported almost exlusively in terms of Trump's casual asides, his words parsed for significance like the utterances of an oracle. Maybe Putin will accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine; maybe the UK will not be hit by the same tariffs as the EU. In reality, Trump was merely toying with his interlocuters, a point made clear when he defied them to call him a liar by claiming that he'd never described Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a dictator.

Civility in politics is not just an instrument for circumscribing the legitimate. It also functions as a polite fiction that obscures the reality of naked power. Trump isn't a mad emperor who has been conned into walking around with no clothes on. Rather he is the naked depiction of American imperial might: demanding obeisance from allies and treasure from the weak. He is a performer who loves giving a performance and demands to be the centre of attention. In contrast, Starmer is lauded by his biographer for not being a performer, but Tom Baldwin fails to understand that the PM is highly performative, in the proper sense of that word, it's just that his promises are rarely kept. The British political establishment understands Trump to this extent, which is why the invitation for a state visit made in the name of King Charles was an important trinket, even though it highlights the limited options available in any future trade negotiations. Maybe we can avoid all that chlorinated chicken by offering to make Trump the Earl of Troon. Today will presumably see the President of Ukraine sign the terms of surrender. The question now appears to be whether the presence of American corporate staff in and around the countries mines will be sufficient to constitute a de facto US security guarantee. We are firmly into clutching at straws territory.

There was never any real doubt that the endgame for Ukraine would be dismemberment. Russia lacks the materiel sufficient to defeat and conquer the entire country, and had little interest in absorbing a hostile population beyond the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. Ukraine in contrast lacks the manpower sufficient to push the Russians out of the occupied territories and has quietly accepted for some time that Crimea is never going to return to the fold. The only question was how much of the country could it hang on to and that in turn meant how much could it securitise through Western finance. The US hasn't fundamentally changed its policy under Trump, he has merely made the reality explicit. The military support was always a financial loan, not a donation, which meant that the US had an interest in the preservation of most of Ukraine as a debtor. Likewise, the salience now of those mineral deposits is less in their market value than the fact that a lot of them lie in the east, which means that the US has a vested interest in Ukraine recovering as much territory as possible from Russia. Of course, the other possibility is that Russia will keep the territories but allow American corporations access to them, which would incidentally mean an end to sanctions. It's just business.

From Washington's perspective, the angst of European countries over the end of the fiction of NATO is no more than a sideshow to its geopolitical pivot to Asia and its determination to quieten down both Ukraine and the Middle East. The desperation of British politicians and journalists to conjure up an Anglo-French nuclear foundation for a new European security alliance is a sideshow to that sideshow. With Trump's economic focus on tariffs against the EU and China, not to mention Canada and Mexico, the UK is merely an afterhought in terms of trade. In short, the UK simply doesn't matter on the world stage at the moment, despite the attempts by the political parties to talk up the significance of Diego Garcia. This was captured inadvertantly by the Newsnight journalist Nicholas Watt who claimed, ahead of this week's meeting, that "Labour figures" were hailing it as Starmer's "Falklands moment", which is obviously absurd as a parallel but does highlight the desperation to define this aimless administration. The consensus seems to be that "wartime leader", or perhaps this generation's Ernest Bevin, is as good as it's going to get, which shows how divorced from reality our politico-media caste is. Predictably, Watt reported the aftermath of the meeting in terms of an "ecstatic" Downing Street despite admitting that it had won precisely nothing in return for its "unprecedented" offer of a state visit.

Inasmuch as the Falklands War has a lesson for us today, it is in the manner that America's partisan support for the UK over Argentina during that conflict led to disillusion among Latin American countries where many, even in government, still clung to the myth of the US as an anti-colonialist power. The parallel today is with the growing disillusion of European nations about America's geopolitical interests. Again, the reality has always been privately acknowledged: America first in trade isn't a novelty, it will never impose a two-state solution on Israel (which is why that fiction can be supported in Europe) and its priorities now lie around the Pacific. The problem is accommodating this publicly in a political culture still wedded to Atlanticism and comfortable in its return to Russophobia. The reconfiguration of trade has been underway for over a decade now following the end of high globalisation and it's clear that of the major trading blocs it is the EU that will benefit least from the new order. Attempts to position the EU (or more bathetically the UK) between the US and China have come to naught, essentially because the US refuses to see Europe as a peer rather than as a collection of client states.

As in Ukraine, there is a recognition that Europe must provide greater security in the Middle East as the US disengages, but there is no willingness to countenance a fundamental change in policy that might destabilise the current balance of regional powers (Iran is to be contained, and Saudi Arabia and Israel indulged). With Washington openly subscribing to the idea of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Europe must construct some other moral basis for its public stance of unstinting Zionism, hence Germany's adoption of Israel's security as a staatsraison has become generalised in a European intolerance of all things Palestinian. It would be easy to dismiss the common political drift to the right in the EU as the result of the failures of the traditional cartel parties to "get a grip" on immigration, but this would be to miss the undercurrent of resentment towards the US for having created the "immigration crisis" through its actions in the Middle East and North Africa. There is a sense among the European political establishment of having to clean up America's mess, and that dates from long before Donald Trump's first term in office. This is why being lectured by J D Vance, the US Vice-President, over free speech and the failure of governments to respond to popular concerns about immigration, is particularly galling. 

In the UK, where Atlanticism remains strong and cleaning up after America has long been instinctive, the chief irritation this week is that the cost of rearmament will be paid for by cutting foreign aid. Former Head of the Army Richard Dannatt outlines the conventional view: "diplomacy, development and defence are not competing priorities – they are complementary". But this is a framing that quietly excludes the role of trade, not least in weaponry. Aid money has a tendency to partially return as arms deals, so this may just be a case of cutting out the middle man. Now ensconced in the House of Lords, Dannatt can be blunt: the government "may well have to break its own fiscal rules and either raise taxes or increase borrowing. We may all have to share in the cost of doing the right thing." Obviously the Chancellor has no intention of raising borrowing, so you might wonder who that "all" is and how exactly the cost will be shared. Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times helpfully notes that foreign aid must be cut to justify tax rises on working people, and that funds should also be freed-up through a "culling" of NHS officials and tougher welfare rules. In other words, higher taxes on incomes, not wealth, and no let up in austerity camouflaged as reform. Starmer's "triumph" is likely to prove as evanescent as all the previous attempts to gve this government a sense of purpose once those realities hit home.

NATO and After

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian thinks that NATO was founded on the defence of shared values and that a parting of the ways with the US may now be inevitable because of the American turn towards a populism that shows more sympathy for Russia than Europe. But NATO was never about the defence of democracy or nebulous freedom, as should be clear from the authoritarian dictatorships than it happily accommodated at various times (Portugal, Greece and Turkey). It was about the restraint of the USSR and (covertly) a mutual defence pact against communist success in domestic Western European politics. The Ukraine War has shown Russia to be a paper tiger that offers a negligible military threat to Europe and none whatsoever to the US. Everybody knows this and security arrangements will adjust accordingly. For all the urgent talk about increasing defence spending, the secular trend of a decline will continue once the war has ended. Wintour's emphasis on a "firewall" against populism indicates that the political dimension will remain uppermost in the minds of the European political establishment, but you can be sure that this won't be limited to excluding the far-right. If anything, absorption of the far-right is on the cards.

Trump's intervention has called into question the rules-based order, but this ignores that the USA has always refused to accept that the rules applied to it as the hegemon, and has done so regardless of who was in the White House. The ultimate rule has always been that might makes right. As Wintour continued later: "Sir Alex Younger, a former head of M16, argued Trump had ushered in a rules-free amoral world order in which the only commodity that mattered was raw power. “We have moved from a world of rules and multilateral institutions to strongmen making deals over the heads of weaker, and smaller countries,” he said. “This is our new world. This is Donald Trump’s world. The key psychological pivot we have to make is to that world. We are not operating in a systems world any longer, but an incentives world.”" While liberal commentators fulminate about appeasement and the 1930s, the more useful historical analogy for the slow erosion of NATO is the gradual dismantling of the Concert of Europe across the nineteenth century. We are moving from the age of Metternich to that of Bismarck, as realists have been insisting since the fall of the Berlin Wall, contradicting the many liberals proclaiming a perpetual peace.

But the value of the parallel is less to do with the notion of great power rivalries or "carve-ups" after 1848 than in the idea of a looming "policeman" guarding against disruptive tendencies which persisted beyond the end of the Concert. Then the threats were republicanism, national self-determination and socialism; now they are mass immigration, DEI and socialism (the one consistent spectre). Vladimir Putin's foreign policy has always aimed to revive the idea of Russia as a civilisational bulwark against the decadent West, an idea that owed as much to Tsar Nicholas I as Comrade Stalin, and he has found common cause now not just with J D Vance and other authoritarian conservatives but with native movements against le wokisme and immigration. If nothing else, it is amusing to see the confusion of groups such as Blue Labour as they simultaneously advocate the staunch defence of Ukraine and hob-nob with American reactionaries. This highlights the extent to which European politics over the last 30 years has been a "vacation from history", complacent in the face of geostrategic shifts - the decline of Russia and the rise of China - and obsessed with the parochial reconciliation of liberal economics and social conservatism. The early signs are not promising that the Trumpian disjuncture will lead to much more than regular meetings and portentous communiques.

If the United States believes that the greatest threat to its global hegemony is China, and if it also believes that its interests in the Middle East are best served by the regional defeat of Iran, then Russia would be a far more useful geostrategic ally than Europe, despite its relative decline. There is an obvious congruence of interests. Putin's is to weaken US support for Europe and to fragment the interests of the European states in order to give Russia more latitude in its "near abroad". But that is a strategy born of weakness, a weakness made all too apparent in Ukraine. The expansion of NATO and the EU to include Eastern Europe and the Baltics means that Russia has already lost the geostrategic battle over spheres of influence. It also means that while the US will ignore Russia intimidating Ukraine, it holds the monopoly on intimidating NATO members, as Romania is finding out. The likely failure of Europe to offer Ukraine any meaningful "security guarantees" simply reinforces the fact that the country was never seriously considered for membership of the EU and its dismemberment is not seen as an existential threat to the European order. The withdrawal of the US is a threat to Europe, but this should be seen more in terms of the reconfiguration of capital relations than in the disappearance of a security guarantee. 

One of the more useful comments on the last few days came from Yanis Varoufakis in his "leftist jester at the court of liberalism" role. Amid the tearful hyperbole and wild prescriptions in the Guardian, he focused on Trump's economic-cum-geostrategic plan: "His tariffs are a negotiating tool to get foreigners to revalue their currencies, to swap their holdings of short-term for long-term US debt, and to magnetise European chemical and mechanical engineering conglomerates (eg BASF and Volkswagen) from a stagnating Europe to a boisterous United States." This is a view implicitly shared in the more considered capitalist press, which has been concerned by European industrial and technological stagnation for over a decade. As Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times put it: "Europeans need to start preparing fast for the day when the US security guarantee to Europe is definitively removed. That must involve building up autonomous defence industries. It should also mean a European mutual defence pact, outside Nato, that extends beyond the EU — to include Britain, Norway and others" (but not Ukraine, you'll notice).

The US demand for European states to increase defence spending is self-interested, but not in the simplistic sense of "burden-sharing": there is no appetite in Washington to reduce American defence spending, as the priorities of Elon Musk (a major recipient of Pentagon money) make clear. Rather Washington expects much of that increased European spending to be directed to American arms manufacturers. Trump's executive order to suspend enforcement of the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which was passed in 1977 in the wake of the Lockheed arms scandal, is a signal that every means will be used to boost the interests of American capital. Europe is not so much a geostrategic theatre as a developing market in this perspective. The approach that the US will take will be informed by the standard operating practices of its multinationals, particularly those in the energy and mining sectors: coercive extraction of natural assets (already the price being asked of Ukraine), the demand for impunity from local laws and regulations (Vance's attack on Europe's legal integrity was pretty transparent), and the completely unfettered mobility of capital. No wonder Amazon, Meta and the like are on board with the administration.

The strategic issue for the UK is not the percentage of GDP that is devoted to defence - the mooted rise to 2.5% - but the use it is put to. An aircraft carrier in the South China Sea isn't much use for the defence of Europe, let alone Ukraine, and it wouldn't make that much difference to the US strategy in East Asia and the Pacific either. What does matter in Washington is Airstrip One and its forward operating bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan achieved anything, it was to convince the Pentagon that the British military is at best of marginal use and at worst a positive burden, but it has some nice real estate. Integrating them more closely operationally would best be achieved by buying American arms, rather than trying to maintain an independent arms sector that is obliged to sell to American clients like Saudi Arabia to keep afloat. The challenge then is not simply to the Treasury to find more money, but to the coherence of British Atlanticism, hence the attempt by Paul Mason to reimagine NATO as a British-led coalition that can reassure the US that the European flank is well-guarded, and incidentally to recast Keir Starmer as a modern Ernest Bevin (the parallels made with Harold Wilson as recently as 6 months ago now appear laughable, but drawing a line to Bevin seems much more risky given Ernie's well-known anti-Zionism).

Everyone agrees that Europe needs a major economic stimulus, and many have noted how the Russian economy has adapted to sanctions (an extreme form of tariff) and being put on a "war footing". Some thought that the green transition would provide this stimulus, but the decision of the centre-right to opportunistically oppose much of it (largely at the prompting of the reactionary press) has made that politically problematic. Likewise, there is no consensus on large-scale investment in public infrastructure, particularly public housing, even if specific business-friendly projects, like a third runway at Heathrow, will get state backing. In this climate, "building up autonomous defence industries", as Rachman suggests, makes sense. This doesn't necessarily herald a return to what David Edgerton, in the British context, referred to as the Warfare State, let alone to Paul Mason's daydreams, but it does provide a programme, likely to be acceptable across most of the political spectrum (e.g. including the German Greens), for a major domestic industrial stimulus whose costs can be funded by a combination of collective EU bonds (the same mechanism that many on the left proposed for the green transition), public spending cuts and higher taxes, but without jeopardising the dominance of capital markets or property prices. That Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves immediately spotted the political opportunity this presents explains the alacrity with which the PM announced "our" readiness to once more put boots on the ground.

What's Up?

Katy Balls, the Spectator's resident Tory-whisperer, might seem an odd choice to present the Guardian's commentary on the latest Labour WhatsApp scandal, but the paper has long outsourced topics that might compromise its own political desk (there are plenty of Labour right factional chat groups that include both politicans and journalists). An added advantage is that it allows for an ecumenical approach, hence Balls can set the brouhaha in the context of a Westmister-wide addiction to chatting shit. What was notable by its absence in Balls' brief survey of the history was the infamous leak of the WhatsApp messages of the Labour Party HQ group that plotted against Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader. Balls does mention Corbyn, but only in the context of a separate group that provided an early outing for the clown troupe that would become known as Change UK. Given that the HQ group leak prompted an independent inquiry by Martin Forde, you might have thought it worth highlighting, not least because the personal attacks on the likes of Diane Abbott in the "Trigger Me Timbers" group clearly continued a theme. 

One explanation for the omission is that this latest example had no strategic or policy substance to it, allowing Balls to characterise such communications as an example of poor impulse control and the sort of backbiting that constitutes the chaff of daily political journalism. What the Forde Report revealed was, among other things, evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the conduct of the 2017 general election campaign for factional ends. If there is one thing that has characterised the Starmer regime it is the absolute determination to avoid having the party's factional disputes aired so publicly again, hence the alacrity with which the whip is withdrawn the moment an MP steps out of line. Andrew Gwynne will no doubt look suitably contrite while he sits in the sin bin but he can expect to be welcomed back into the fold once he has served his time and displayed good behaviour. After all, Starmer has made it clear that even lefties can be rehabilitated if they keep their noses clean, though some of them can also expect to be squeezed out before the next general election through deselection, something Gwynne will probably be spared.

If the substantive arguments that characterised previous Labour governments - from incomes policy to membership of the euro - are notable by their absence today, this doesn't mean that factional spite and jockeying for position have taken a back seat. This week's revelations about Rachel Reeves's questionable expenses when working for HBOS and her sexed-up CV are actually old news but they've been revived both because Starmer looks increasingly like a one-term Prime Minister and because others in the cabinet don't fancy Reeves taking over from him either before or after the next election. The implicit charge against her is that she isn't as competent a manager as she claims, rather than that she is drifting towards the left or has questionable judgement on how how high to jump when Washington barks. It's politics reduced to office politics, which is arguably a summation of this government with its vapid mantra of "Growth" and its insistence that greater process efficiency, from the Competition and Markets Authority to local planning decisions, can deliver it.

The dynamic behind all of this is the publication of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's Get In, a follow-up to their Left Out.  While the earlier book portrayed the 2019 general election defeat as a "betrayal" of Labour's constituency by the naive left, their latest gossipy offering revels in the skill by which the party right, and in particular Morgan McSweeney, won power first in the party and then at the 2024 general election. This obviously elides the contingent luck of facing a shattered Tory administration and a split on the right occasioned by the rise of Reform, but it also ignores the extent to which that same Labour constituency was cynically betrayed through a series of pledges made by Starmer to win the party leadership that were then steadily binned, resulting in fewer votes at the 2024 general election and a share of only 34%. That opinion polls now have Labour on around 25% simply emphasises the point that while journalists may be in awe of McSweeney the public have steadily turned against Labour and are perhaps disillusioned with representative politics more generally (turnout has fallen from 69% in 2017 to only 60% last year.)

What Maguire and Pogrund's book makes clear is that Starmer is despised by many in the PLP and in particular by the Blairites who think that he has served his purpose: the clean-skin with few moral scruples who was needed to finally seal the left's tomb. With the old right, represented by Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, deemed too stupid to govern and the soft left little more than a punchline, the Blairites feel that their time has come again. The memory of Liz Kendall's dire performance as their flagbearer in 2015, garnering only 5% of the membership vote in the leadership election, has been washed away, and the woman herself given free rein as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to tell us that too many people on benefits are "taking the mickey". This is ironic not only in the sense that forcing the disabled to take crap jobs does not constitute a credible strategy for growth but also in the sense that, as Maguire and Pogrund make clear, the Labour Party has been taking the piss since 2019, something the electorate appears to have clocked long before the media.

The name in the frame as Starmer's most likely successor is the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who is in many ways similar to the Prime Minister, particularly in his opportunism and eagerness to please business interests, but who at least doesn't need the help of a voice coach to humanise him. But while the lad with the colourful East End family background may seduce the media with what passes for emotional intelligence in their circles, he does not offer a departure in terms of his politics from either New Labour (directing NHS funds towards the private health sector) or the current shift towards a Reform-adjacent Blue Labour (criticising the NHS for pulling the "immigration lever" to recruit foreign doctors). If the latest WhatsApp nonsense tells us anything, it isn't that the Labour right is made up of horrible people - we already knew that - but that their factionalism was always a substitute for a meaningful politics. Being an arsehole is an end in itself, hence Trigger Me Timbers' performative arseholery.

Just as getting Brexit "done" served to obscure the lack of a meaningful Conservative Party programme after a decade of self-defeating austerity, but quickly evaporated as the reality of a pointless government became all too plain after the Covid pandemic, so the insider revelations of Labour Party politics since 2015 are now being promoted way beyond their intrinsic value as a distraction from the lack of a meaningful programme of government. But arseholes being arseholes can only take up so much newsprint and airtime, hence the Guardian finds itself once more legitimising the far-right by its obsessive focus on populist incivility and poring over the receipts for donations to Reform, as if rich men funding reactionary politics was newsworthy. We are cursed in the UK with a dumb government and an anti-intellectual and bitchy political class, and the chief reason for that is our awful media, most of which is owned by other rich men keen to advance reactionary politics. As the nominally liberal opposition to this, the Guardian has played its part by offering an insipid centrism that celebrates the political void and now presents the political class as addled teenagers, glued to their phones: victims of social media who deserve our pity.

Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.

It's All About You

Jonathan Liew's midweek column in the Guardian starts with sarcasm - "Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card" - but doesn't manage to advance much beyond it, unless you consider the Punch-style whimsy - the idea that you can be a football writer and know almost nothing about the leading referees - as an improvement. What the column doesn't do (well, obviously) is talk about the Myles Lewis-Skelly red card, other than to imply that those who have questioned it were guilty of hyperbole: "That was almost certainly not the worst decision you’ve ever seen." Liew has some self-awareness in an otherwise self-regarding piece: "nobody needs another sensible middlebrow columnist explaining in deeply patronising serif font that, actually, it’s the fans who are the problem here." But this is merely the downpayment on his final conclusion that "much of the stigmatisation of referees is a sublimation of other grievances: fan disenfranchisement, rising prices, malign owners, useless administrators, a sport that at an elemental level no longer works for us." Everyone and everything else is to blame.

At heart, most Guardian sports journalists prefer other sports to football - cricket, rugby, tennis, you get the idea - so their attitude towards the game is one of barely-concealed class disdain mixed with professional ennui. Compare and contrast the coverage whenever cricket or rugby are in "crisis". The class angle is obvious when you see Liew equate anger over refereeing standards "with “two-tier policing” and “legitimate concerns about immigration” as something over which the little people can obsess." In suggesting we shouldn't dismiss such concerns he is not just being patronisingly ironic in Guardian house-style, he is reverting for comic effect to the newspaper's atavistic view of football fans as part of an uncultured mob. There are plenty of people angered by Michael Oliver's decision who voted remain in 2016 and would support greater generosity towards asylum-seekers today (some may even be fans of cricket). That these issues are not of equivalent political or social importance does not mean that one in particular should not be addressed.

By submerging refereeing into a general bleat about football as a rapacious industry and football fans as unreasonable consumers, Liew seeks to dilute the issue of the PGMOL's high-profile errors and questionable use of VAR. The latter has raised standards, but by winnowing the chaff it has also highlighted arbitrariness (the Lewis-Skelly red card could have been challenged by Darren England at the time). Liew's plea that referees "should be anonymous" is both irrelevant to the issue of poor judgement and the inadequate recourse when referees get it wrong. VAR has helped, but it has been implemented in a way that seeks to protect the referees rather than the integrity of the game, hence the long delays and poor communication. Despite his disdain, even Liew cannot help but admit that the quality of refereeing is a legitimate concern (sic) and one that has become more pronounced as the referees have lost the anonymity that he cherishes. In his words, the PGMOL has become "a sort of floating body in the ether, run neither by the Football Association nor the Premier League and thus answerable to nobody but its own insatiable main-character energy".

In the event, Arsenal appealed the red card and it was duly over-turned by the independent regulatory commission. This wasn't unexpected, given the near-unanimity among ex-players and coaches (who provide the bulk of the 5-man commission) in the aftermath that it was a yellow card, but you don't have to be paranoid have to wonder whether the game's "guardians", such as the FA, may have been irked by the outcome and whether that may have contributed to what in football parlance is referred to as "a bit of afters", with Arsenal charged for failing to control their players. The media management of the fallout included the report that Michael Oliver's family had faced social media abuse and threats, the aim apparently being to paint the referee as the real victim, which is never a smart strategy. The coincidental Sun interview with David Coote, which linked his well-known troubles with the pressure of being secretly gay, likewise came across as special pleading on behalf of the referees obliged to survive in "the macho world of football". The whiff of thuggery is never far from the surface in media descriptions.

The Guardian, in the person of Barney Ronay, cast a typically withering glance in the direction of Coote's revelations and his choice of newspaper in which to make them, including the now standard ironic self-deprecation ("why is this person in the Guardian newspaper now complaining"). Not only did he criticise the grubby motives of the Sun ("monetising Coote's distress"), but he also suggested that associating homosexuality with bad behaviour would not encourage other gay referees to come out, which is a fair point. But that negative association is also being made by Ronay, albeit in a deniable "look what this other paper printed" fashion. Just as Jonathan Liew's column didn't need writing, so neither did Barney Ronay's, and both can be accused of making themselves the main character in their relationship with football, as well as chasing clicks by contrarian sneering. Typically, Ronay's final conclusion is that the game itself is rotten, "the real takeaway is how brutally football has chewed this person up", which chimes with Liew's take that football is essentially vicious.

Let us return to the Lewis-Skelly red card decision. One of the regular reasons for dismissing criticism of referees is what Liew describes as "conspiracy hokum": the idea that refs have it in for your favoured club. It's important here to distinguish between bias and corruption (e.g. Coote has faced questions about whether he issued a yellow card as the result of a betting tip to a mate). There is no substantiated evidence of corruption in the English Premier League, but that referees are subject to unconcisous bias is academically well-established. They are influenced by the crowd, they tend to favour home teams and currently successful teams, and there is a degree of regional sympathy. This last point is particularly salient in English football because of its partisanship: every referee is also assumed to be a fan (many are happy to publicise their allegiances). Most PGMOL referees hail from the North West or elsewhere above the Severn-Wash line. London is barely represented (compare and contrast its contribution to players and coaches), which gives rise to a certain paranoia among some fans of teams in the capital.

The issue is not that the PGMOL is a closed shop, though its lack of diversity does make it look like one, but that it is an intrinsically conservative institution with its own cultural norms, which above all means defending your mates against players and coaches and treating fans as ignorant and ignorable. The focus on bias, which the media implicitly stokes as much as it formally derides, is a moralistic distraction from this sociological point, not least because unconcious bias tends to be very marginal and in some cases (e.g. home advantage) will even out. What matters to fans are game-changing incidents, which in football is a reflection of how many such incidents there can be and how their impact varies over the duration of a match. Issuing a red card in the opening minutes or a penalty in the closing minutes matters a lot more than vice versa. And what some fans have begun to suspect is that referees are sensitive to this, hence the chants of "Who's the wanker in the black" and "You don't know what you're doing" have increasingly given way to "It's all about you".

It is this suspicion that referees want to be the centre of attention that drives the current dissatisfaction, not the "sublimation of other grievances" as Liew put it. And, whether you consider it bias or not, a controversial decision involving a big club (or a national team) is more likely to raise the profile of a referee than a similar decision involving a small club. This is why Liew's appeal for referees to be "highly paid and totally anonymous" is naive, even allowing for the weary irony. English referees have been making themselves the centre of attention ever since matches were televised - e.g. Jack Taylor awarding two penalties in the 1974 World Cup Final and Clive Thomas denying Brazil a winning goal against Sweden in the 1978 World Cup. The very existence of the PGMOL is a by-product of television and the money it has injected into the game, while the characteristics the organisation displays - prickliness, pedantry, vanity - are those that could be recognised in Taylor and Thomas all those years ago. What football needs is not more VAR or less VAR but more humble referees, which would require a massive cultural change at the grassroots. But so long as top-division games are comprehensively televised, don't expect it to filter up to the PGMOL.