AI Will Save Us All

One of the debates loosely collected under the rubric "The Great Stagnation" during the last decade was the question of why the productivity gains of the IT revolution were disappointing. This was an example of a failure of perspective, particularly in its comparison of the last quarter of the 20th century with earlier revolutions and the adoption of general purpose technologies (GPTs) such as steam power and electricity. Productivity is relative, not just temporally (producing more today from the same inputs than we did in the past) but spatially. The slow dissemination of technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries gave the UK a notable "first mover advantage", so much so that this phrase became pervasive in discussions of startups around the millennium. The lesson of history was that gradual dissemination, as much as government policy (e.g. protective tariffs or import-substitution), drove the catch-up of competitors with equal or better natural endownments such as the USA and Germany in the late 19th century. The greater rapidity of dissemination in subsequent technological waves, enabled in part by the cumulative effect of those earlier GPTs, has meant that first mover advantage has shrunk: a narrowing of the window of opportunity for the relative out-performance of peers. 

When all countries get the benefits of a new technology almost simultaneously the impact is diffused globally, but it manifests in different local productivity growth rates depending on the prior technological level. In simple terms, there is scope for a bigger step up in some areas than others. Consider the sub-Saharan African countries that skipped fixed-line telephony and went straight to cell networks and widespread smartphone usage after 2010. While the continent remains bedevilled by many structural impediments, it is now expected to be the second fastest growing region after Asia in coming years. Robert Solow's 1987 quip, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", was what you might expect from an MIT professor focused on the American economy. What he didn't seem to appreciate is that just as neoliberalism shuttered much of American industry and exported capital to peripheral nations, so it also exported productivity gains that might otherwise have been seen in the domestic data.

Perhaps the greatest impact of the IT revolution was that it enabled globalisation. While it was the container revolution and the falling cost of shipbuilding (as it moved to Japan and South Korea) that created the hard infrastructure for a huge increase in global trade, it was IT that enabled global inventory management and offshoring, which is why globalisation accelerated in the 1980s, not the 1960s. In other words, the productivity gains were revealed among developing nations able to leverage both the technology and low labour costs. Western corporations were able to tightly manage this process through technologies such as email, ERPs and CRMs, not forgetting the rapidly expanding and more reliable telecoms and datacoms that we nowadays take for granted. One part of the puzzle of Japanese stagnation, which started in the 1990s when North America and Europe were (relatively) prospering, was the country's reluctance to let go of the technologies that had powered its earlier boom years, such as fax machines and floppy disks. Other countries have read this as a lesson to embrace new technologies as soon as possible, which brings us to the current vogue for government AI strategies.

Much of the promise of AI is based on the assumption that it will drive productivity gains, but this can only be temporal rather than spatial because its dissemination is likely to take place pretty much everywhere at the same time. This is a consequence not only of that narrowing of the window of opportunity due to cumulative GPT waves (the most recent being the now-pervasive Internet), but because the technology itself is dependent on its concentration into global businesses that will necessarily seek maximum profit, and therefore rapid global spread, over national advantage (the tension between the MAGA right and the tech-bros in the US over immigration policy is reflective of this). Countries like the UK that produce national strategies for the development of AI as a productive industry, centred on light-touch regulation, facilitating infrastructure and leveraging "national data libraries", are seeking to combine the prescriptions of neoliberal development economics with the dirigisme of the postwar era, much as Joe Biden's administration in the US attempted more widely in respect of industrial strategy. It's not clear that this can succeed politically. That the electorate won't see the benefits any time soon is obvious, even to those who don't understand the technology. That AI's impact on wages may further erode the social solidarity necessary for a welfare state is perhaps less obvious as we try to peer through the hype.

The problem is that while the UK may well retain its position as a leading AI research centre this won't necessarily translate into a sustainable and significant economic advantage relative to other nations. What government subsidies will do is help defray the costs, both in cash terms and more importantly in terms of environmental externalities, for those global businesses that will dominate the sector, almost all of whom will be American. And you can be confident that they will pay minimal tax on their UK operations. But if the spatial advantage is likely to prove illusory, what of the temporal advantage? Will we at least see an above-trend improvement in domestic productivity? The first point to make is that if British firms have been slow in adopting new technology and working practices up to now, as evidenced by the poor productivity data, then it would seem unlikely that they'll suddenly embrace AI. The rate of the application of technology reflects multiple factors but the decisive one is usually management culture, and it's no secret that outside certain sectors and pockets (typically foreign-owned firms) British industry has poor calibre management.

The second point to make is structural. The UK's under-performance in productivity growth relative to its peers isn't because it lacks high-productivity businesses - there are many - but because of the composition of the national economy. The most obvious factor is the size of the service sector relative to manufacturing. Though the latter has shrunk relative to the former in all developed economies, the shift has been greater in the UK over the last 50 years. Achieving productivity gains in services is more difficult than in manufacturing where newer technology is often decisive. In services, productivity gains are limited by the human factor (the Baumol Effect), the greater difficulty in applying best practice to processes rather than tools, and by the low costs of entry (less need for plant and machinery). The latter encourages smaller, under-capitalised firms, which is a notable feature of the British economy. This is exacerbated by a tax regime that indulges sole traders ("Be your own boss"), small businesses (particularly family firms preserved by generous inheritance rules) and lifestyle companies (i.e. where the priority is a comfortable living rather than productivity).

If there is a strong sense of deja vu about the UK government's rhetoric about AI it is not simply because of its obliviousness to the structural peculiarities of the domestic economy or its proud technological illiteracy but because it sounds remarkably like the paeans once sung to globalisation by Tony Blair: "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India." Thus Keir Starmer's recent article for the Financial Times opens "Artificial intelligence is the defining opportunity of our generation. It’s not a technology that is coming. It is already here, materially changing lives." The conclusion to the piece managed to be both needy and manic: "Put simply, that’s our message to anyone working at the AI frontier: take a look at Britain. Our ambition is to be the best state partner for you anywhere in the world. We can see the future, we are running towards it and we back our builders. Because we know that AI has arrived as the ultimate force for change and national renewal."

The cultish overtones are not just evidence that Blair's crazed eyes glanced approvingly over Starmer's speech. They point to the increasing desperation of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor as they find their economic strategy unravelling before their eyes. The idea that the financial markets would reward the return of "the grown-ups" to office has proven as naive as the idea that the UK could be shielded from the global turbulence now taking another turn as the implications of the second Trump Presidency are assessed. Insofar as Rachel Reeves had a plan, it was to defuse the Tories' fiscal bombs, provide enough extra funding to stop the NHS immediately keeling over, and otherwise sit tight and hope that improved business confidence would drive growth. Again, this studiously ignores the track record of the UK economy: the frothy nature of financial services growth around the millennium, the permanent scarring caused by austerity after 2010, and the sluggish bounceback after the pandemic as zombie SMEs staggered on. The fundamental problem of this government, like the New Labour administrations before it, is not that it doesn't understand technology but that it doesn't understand the UK economy. AI won't save Britain and it won't save this government.

Musk and the Cartel

The era of the political cartel, which broadly coincides with the neoliberal ascendancy, has been marked by both a rigid ideological conformity ("There is no alternative") and by a promiscuity in the exchange of policy positions. Ostensibly social-democratic parties adopting austerity and market discipline may be the most obvious example of this tendency, but we've also seen centrist parties adopt rightwing obsessions around multiculturalism and trans rights while rightwing parties reliant on wealthy donors have claimed to be the true "workers' party". Some of this is simple opportunism, but it also reflects a steady erosion in the transmission mechanisms of voter representation. With party members having less say in policy formation - a fact that coexists quite comfortably with a growing saying in leadership elections - and mass membership giving way to a hardcore of loyalists for whom policy is a second order consideration, party leaders have found it easier to flex their platforms. They have also found it convenient to rely on think-tanks for policy ideas. That these ideas are often contradictory and lack consistency is not an issue: they're in the business of selling products to meet short-term needs.

The result has been a growing disillusion among the wider electorate, reflected in falling turnout and low confidence ratings. The current Labour government's lack of popular support owes less to the traditional cynicism of "They're all the same" and a lot more to the feeling that they don't actually stand for anything. This makes Labour paradoxically predictable (they'll change nothing) and unpredictable (what promise will they renege on next?) It also makes it easier for "policy entrepreneurs" to disrupt the political field by offering the appearance of certainty, so long as they are willing to operate within the boundaries of the cartel (Nigel Farage is a member of the club, Jeremy Corbyn is not). Much of the increasingly common platform to be found on the centre-right, and which they have adopted in competition with the far-right, is made up of bold promises that could not possibly be fulfilled, such as the change to the ethnic composition of the nation. Unless you are prepared to go full Israel, there is no way to satisfy the expectations of racist and bigoted voters, which are about their neighbours (or some mythical London) rather than asylum seekers in small boats. 

A current example of this is the leader of the UK Conservative Party demanding a public inquiry into the "rape gangs scandal", despite there having already been multiple public inquiries that occured while the Tories were in government and whose recommendations they then largely ignored. This amnesia reflects more than political chutzpah. It highlights that policy adoptions are nowadays meaningless in opposition - something many Labour Party supporters are now ruefully realising - and should certainly not be taken as a guide to future action. They serve rather to position particular politicians relative to the perceived preferences of the party membership. A perfect example of this was Robert Jenrick, whom Kemi Badenoch defeated in the last Conservative Party leadership contest and who is now Shadow Justice Secretary, upping the ante by claiming that the "scandal" reflected the failure of integration and that multiculturalism had corrupted the rule of law. It's obviously nonsense, but more importantly it does not offer any kind of realistic solution, just bile. As such, it is very much in the tradition of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of blood" speech. That Jenrick has not been sacked tells you how far we have come since 1968.

In time-honoured fashion, the BBC has decided that the best way to address this unedifying sight is to ask Nigel Farage for his opinion. This is not simply a case of rightwing bias but a consequence of the structural imperatives that arise from the ideological flexibility of the cartel allied to his own talent at giving the media what it wants: unevidenced assertions, radical rhetoric not backed by substantive policy, and carefully calibrated outrage. The "Stop the boats" meme is a good example of the way that ideas first floated by the far-right (recall Katie Hopkins comments about "cockroaches") can spread horizontally across the political spectrum, even as the focus changes ("We are going to treat people smugglers like terrorists", according to Keir Starmer). This happens because there is only a weak countervailing vertical transmission from party members. Farage is attuned to this reality, hence his own party has little internal democracy and is run as a de facto private business. His BBC interlocuters, like Laura Kuennsberg, are also attuned to the need to defend their status within the politico-media class: peer pressure matters more than public opinion.

The recent intervention of Elon Musk into British politics has been fascinating less for the obvious ignorance he has displayed (hardly surprising if you get your understanding of the world from X's algorithms) than for the confusion it has sown among the UK's politico-media caste. At the level of government, this reflects the simple realities of the US-UK power dynamic. Just as Labour politicians like David Lammy, who once derided Trump as a "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath", now seek to kiss his hem as President, so they and others will accord Musk respect so long as he is seen as a favourite of the White House. Indeed, they will actively jostle to become his domestic agent. But Musk's intervention also highlights the weakness of contemporary political parties, notably the inability of the membership to enforce an even vaguely consistent line on the leadership, and the relative power that the media (whether old or new) has in framing public discourse. There are exceptions to this - e.g. the organic protests over Palestine that both the parties and the media have done their best to suppress - but in general public discourse has become coarser and more stupid as the cartel has flourished.

The tussle on the right between the Conservatives and Reform looks like an internal party contest over a declining (and passive) membership, but the importance of members has been over-stated. Shorn of their role in policy formation and with their ties to wider civic society attenuated by the decline of trade unions and volunteer organisations, party members these days are little more than occasional canvassers. And that is a trend that suits all parts of the cartel, as the pushback against Labour under Corbyn, and the subsequent membership decline under Starmer, clearly demonstrates. The fragmentation of the media since the 1980s has allowed politicians to rely more on direct contact with voters rather than indirect contact through members. A lot of the hesitancy over Musk arises from the fact that he is now a more effective conduit than Lord Rothermere, despite the steep decline of UK accounts on X. Where rightwing newspapers used to set the agenda of the BBC and ITV, it is now more likely to be social media, and particularly an outrageous tweet by Musk himself. This reflects the reality of American empire but it also reflects the decline of party democracy.

Liberal Nihilism

In a review of the Serbian historian Miloš Vojinović's The Political Ideas of Young Bosnia, Branko Milanovic draws a parallel between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 and the recent killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York: "When youth is idealistic and when making political change is impossible, individual acts of terror appear as the only venue left." The review is interesting on Vojinović's exploration of the milieu that formed Gavrilo Princip, but the connection between 1914 and 2024 is tenuous, to say the least. The most obvious difference is that Luigi Mangione, the chief suspect of the New York killing, was not (as far as we know) a member of an organised revolutionary society called Young America. The media has long treated political violence schizophrenically: oscillating between its characterisation as the actions of deranged individuals and the product of a malevolent conspiracy that compromises entire social groups. A good example is the recent murders in Magdeburg in Germany, where the press has been torn between the narrative of a lunatic loner and the idea of an Islamist sleeper.

The popular response to Thompson's killing, and in particular the ironic canonisation of Mangione, recalls the "propaganda of the deed" that distinguished revolutionary violence in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This depended on the conflicting role of the emerging mass media as both the agent for the state's official narrative and as the broadcaster of revolutionary demands and slogans, which led during the IRA's campaign in the latter half of the 20th century to various constraints on the media in an attempt to deny them the "oxygen of publicity". In contrast, Mangione's memeification is an organic product of popular anger with the costs of healthcare in the US, not the calculated PR of a revolutionary group. Likewise, the debate around the motives of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the chief suspect at Magdeburg, has largely been conducted through a selective trawl of his social media output. The turgid manifestos of loners (Valerie Solanas, Ted Kaczynski, Anders Breivik) have given way to briefer statements, of which the shell casings incribed "deny", "defend" and "depose" may prove to an apotheosis.

In today's Observer, Kenan Malik extracts two themes from the Magdeburg killings. The first is his usual hobbyhorse of the dangers of identity politics. Malik has carved out a media role as the liberal alternative to Spiked! in decrying the rise of identity politics since the 1970s. It's important to note that neither is sincere is arguing that this has supplanted class analysis to the detriment of progress, in the manner of Ellen Meiksens Wood. Rather they are accentuating identity as a problematic, either in defence of a traditional working class ideal that turns out to be reliably reactionary, or in attacking a misguided indulgence of conservativism that undermines liberal universality. That Abdulmohsen has not presented himself in identitarian terms, and has even insisted on his secularist credentials, does not present Malik with any problems: "We may never know Abdulmohsen’s motives". He simply insists that "understanding western jihadism may help throw light on his actions". For Malik, the key is the degeneration of Islamism to the point where "The line between ideological violence and sociopathic rage has been all but erased". 

In other words, Malik is highlighting a propensity to nihilism, which roots his analysis in the paranoid, anti-democratic narratives of the late-19th century. He then segues to his second theme: anti-politics. Noting the failure of neoliberalism to "end history", and the serial failures post-2008 to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, he imagines that "Anger without change has led to a growing sense that politics itself is the problem." This isn't much use as analysis, if only because politics has always been the problem. The idea that there is a better politics is a liberal delusion (and the raison d'etre of the Observer). Our politics reflects the reality of our society. Malik would be better off asking why we are so poorly served by our political institutions rather than trying to psychoanalyse the population. He ends his piece with this spectacular confection: "Wannabe jihadism, racist populism and individual acts of nihilistic terror can seem disconnected phenomena but all are in very different ways expressions of disaffected rage while trapped within the cage of identity in an age of anti-politics." There is no diagnosis here, let alone a prognosis, merely a hyperbolic pessimism that ironically echoes the nihilism it decries. 

For a little light relief you could turn in the same issue of the Observer to the editorial on the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen. This identifies the famously parochial novelist's continuing popularity, even "modernity", in the way that her characters offer a necessary corrective to contemporary failings: "The hallmark of our age is emotional incontinence. Nothing is held back; our individual wants and needs are paramount. The pathos of Austen’s prose, however, is derived almost entirely from her characters’ adherence to convention, and thus to self-sacrifice. In their reticence and restraint, we find a well of emotion that’s all the deeper for being so quiet and constrained: a profundity that returns us ultimately to what’s important, which is not ourselves, but other people – whether we love them, or not." Austen's popularity only begins during the late-Victorian era and didn't fully flower until the 1940s. She is modern in the sense that she appealed to a postwar nostalgia for the economic and social dominance of the English gentry. In the context of her own times, which were artistically dominated by the emotional incontinence of the Romantics, she was a minor figure whose "two inches of ivory" reflected a conscious turning away from the wider world of agrarian revolt and industrial modernity as much as her own constrained circumstances.

Her reticence and restraint extended beyond matters of the heart to the source of her characters' wealth (e.g. the slave trade) and the class politics of the time (e.g. Luddism). She was, and remains, a true Tory. That the Observer should praise her is no surprise. The paper has always had a soft spot for romantic Tories and the sale to Tortoise Media is likely to accentuate that (yet more profiles of Rory Stewart alongside regular updates on Jess Phillips' state of mind). Nor does it surprise that the editorial should emphasise her emotional continence and bemoan that "self-discovery of a certain kind [has] become horribly central to our culture". I'm only bemused that it didn't rope in the usual attack on social media (maybe Carole Cadwalldr's influence is waning). Just as Kenan Malik's gloomy angst recalls the Edwardian liberal mind, so the paper's indulgence of Austen reflects the steadily-growing liberal backlash against all things "woke", from trans rights to Palestine. Committed to propping up a Labour government that lacks meaningful policies and whose instincts are conservative, the Observer is reduced to a combination of liberal nihilism and anti-modern nostalgia.

The Heavy Thud

Keir Starmer's speech a couple of weeks ago was widely seen as a challenge to Whitehall, which owed everything to the Prime Minister (or his speech-writer's) tendency to sprinkle his deathless prose with clunking metaphors: "Our plan commits Whitehall to mission-led government. An approach to governing that won’t just deliver change but also change the nature of governing itself. ... Make no mistake – this plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down. A demand, given the urgency of our times, for a state that is more dynamic, more decisive, more innovative; less hostile to devolution and letting things go; creative - on the deployment of technology harnessing its power to rethink services rather than replicate the status quo in digital form." To make sure the message got through, he even combined a recent Americanism with a standard postwar lament: "I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here, but I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline."

A few days earlier, the Prime Minister had appointed a "safe pair of hands", Sir Chris Wormald, as his Cabinet Secretary, which suggests that continuity rather than change may prove to be the order of the day, but he again took the opportunity to up the rhetorical ante: "To change this country, we must change the way government serves this country ... From breaking down silos across government to harnessing the incredible potential of technology and innovation, it will require nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform." Leaving aside his penchant for 1980s management speak, this is a continuation of the new public management rhetoric that Tony Blair did so much to advance around the millennium: new ways of working and the smart application of technology can radically transform the state. I emphasise rhetoric because the actual practice was, to borrow a term, tepid. After all, Blair didn't drag the machinery of government into the 21st century. If he had, Starmer wouldn't be trying to sell us on a complete rewiring job now. 

Blair's technophilia was (and remains) notoriously shallow. Another area in which he has been consistent is the claim that political delivery is hampered by the machinery of government, a mantra that Starmer is happy to repeat. In his review of the "gauntlet", Andrew Grice in the Independent rehearsed a now-famous anecdote: "As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff and now Starmer’s national security adviser, put it: 'When you arrive in Number 10 and pull on the levers of power, you discover they are not connected to anything.'" This is misleading in suggesting that power is exercised by some procedural mechanism, rather than by persuasion, lying or bullying. People have to be made to do stuff. Blair didn't lead the UK into the quagmire of Iraq by pulling the Iraq quagmire lever but by twisting arms, dissembling and intimidating any opposition. It's also an example of projection: the conservative reluctance to actually change anything substantial, which underpins the protestations of progressive intent, is attributed to the state's functionaries, thereby exculpating the political class. Grice duly obliges with another anecdote: "Ministers tell me Starmer’s criticism is justified. Some have been shocked by the quality of the civil service they discovered and by how slowly the machine cranks into gear."

I'm confident that many civil servants will also have been shocked by the quality of ministers and their advisors, but the narrative of ineptitude is one that the liberal press only tends to deploy in respect of its foes, for example Trump's appointees in the US or leftwing shadow cabinet ministers when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. The implication is that ministers and top civil servants are from different tribes, mutually surprised by their strange habits and alien mindset, but nothing could be further from the truth in the UK. To start at the top, Keir Starmer is a former civil servant who ran the Crown Prosecution Service, not an arm of the state noted for its dynamism or innovation, while Rachel Reeves is a former Bank of England employee, even if she did fluff up her CV. In terms of their social backgrounds, Labour ministers are quite similar to senior civil servants: Oxbridge, a complacent respect for meritocracy and very limited expertise outside of the traditional sectors of law and finance. They have far more in common with each other than either does with Conservative politicians.

Grice is also revealing about ministers' archaic understanding of organisational dynamics and their naivety about technology: "Wormald will need to make cross-departmental working happen; ministers grumble there is still a “silo mentality” in Whitehall. His other challenge will be to introduce AI into public services; it could deliver huge savings and boost productivity, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels." AI isn't being sold on its potential to boost public service productivity, i.e. deliver more for the same cost, but on its potential to cut service delivery costs in line with the Treasury's across-the-board 5% target. A little vignette from today's news is the report that civil servants are thinking of standardising their document-sharing technology: "No 10, for example, uses Microsoft to share documents, while the Cabinet Office uses Google, leading to frequent delays as people pass information from one department to the other." The issue is not "silos" (email exists) but dumb purchasing. You have to pay Microsoft a licence; Google's tools are free. 

The point is that government's long track record of IT project failures and wasteful procurement is the product of both ministers and senior civil servants and their common groupthink. The institutions of the UK state inevitably reflect the culture and overlapping ideology of the leading political parties. This is a synergistic relationship at the top level, not among the ranks: lowly DWP staff don't influence the parties any more than CLP members influence Whitehall. The revolving door between the senior echelons of the parties and business is the same revolving door that exists between the Civil Service and business. Just as Whitehall colours politicians in power, as humorously portrayed by Yes, Minster, so the politicians, and increasingly their burgeoning special advisors, colour Whitehall. If you want to understand why the state appears overly-legalistic, technologically illiterate and wedded to a bureaucratic and bossy approach, you could do worse than note the CVs of the political class, which bias towards the law, parasitic business and the public/private nexus of the third sector. 

The apparatus of the state, long-used to a duopoly of alternating governments, is obliged by the prime directive of any organisation (to preserve itself and minimise change) to find common ground, which in turn encourages the parties to move towards a mid-point between their positions on the political spectrum. This will occasionally be disrupted by a genuine shift in the political consensus, such as after 1945 and 1983, but opening up a gulf between the parties invariably leads to a countervailing readjustment: pressure to "close the gap". This is not just a political calculation by the opposition to keep adjacent to the governing party by accepting much of its programme as a fait accompli. It also reflects the pressure exerted by Whitehall to maintain continuity once the administration changes (in other words, inertia). What is notable is that these major shifts tend to come roughly 40 years apart (you can include the 1905 Liberal government as well, with its constitutional and social reforms), so we're arguably due a genuinely reforming administration around now. But while Labour under Starmer have been happy to push the rhetoric of progressive reform, their actions have been either underwhelming or positively conservative.

The long periods of Tory rule mean that there is an ideological bias towards them within Whitehall over-and-above any sympathy due to class or culture. This is famously apparent in the Treasury's commitment to "sound money" and its preference for the interests of savers over workers, but it is also evident in other areas of government from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence (both still important components of the social elite) to the various welfare departments where a minatory attitude towards claimants is embedded within their systems and organisational culture. This explains why Labour have historically been more prone to decrying the conservative resistance of the "men from the ministry", but also why the Tories took up a similar complaint against "the blob" after 13 years of Labour government. But while the rhetoric suggests a return to that progressive critique of Whitehall, the lack of any criticism of the Treasury, and the dominant role that it has taken in insisting on cuts to other departments' expenditure, tells you that this will be a conservative government in all but name.

It is highly unlikely that Keir Starmer would lead a revolution in the machinery of government anyway. He climbed the greasy pole by working with the system, not against it. He is not a natural disruptor by temperament and he isn't going to indulge a gadfly like Elon Musk, let alone another Dominic Cummings. Morgan MacSweeney's priority will remain control of the Labour Party, not reform of the state apparatus. Starmer's project is the restoration of the state's authority and dignity after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn, and while that means showing that the state can be trusted to deliver, it also means avoiding chaos. While Tony Blair continues to yearn for national ID cards, Starmer and his lieutenants are focused on the more mundane task of filling in potholes. Possibly using AI. A thoroughly unoriginal and uninspiring man, his eventual memoirs will no doubt repeat that tired old Jonathan Powell anecdote but presumably garnished with a clumsy metaphor about not having the right tools to do the job.

Disasterology

Richard Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism, which I haven't read yet (I'm hoping Santa will oblige) but whose central thesis he explained in an interview with Jacobin: "Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster" while being in denial about real disasters, such as climate change. Seymour sees this as a pyschological coping strategy - the prepper who believes he is in control - while the denial is often channelled into conspiracy theories that provide an identifiable target - Covid-19 as a government plot, for example. He rightly notes that this is not Fascism, because it hasn't yet evolved into a critique of democracy, but he does suggest that it might be a harbinger: "We’re in a stage of accumulation of fascist force. When you go back to the interwar period, that accumulation process had already taken place, there had already been massive pogroms, there had been big far-right movements before fascism." What I'm interested in here is not the psychology of the right but the attitude of the political centre. It was, of course, the liberal and conservative blocs in Italy and Germany that facilitated the rise of Fascism. It was the accumulation of establishment support, or at least tolerance, that mattered, not the pogroms.

Seymour is alive to the ambiguous nature of the political centre. As he puts it, "Increasingly I think that when push comes to shove, liberals do not want liberalism. Obviously, certain distinctions have to be made because there are liberals who are genuinely philosophically and politically committed to liberal values and will fight for them and will go Left if they have to. But there’s also the kind of hard centrists whose politics is organized principally around a phobia of the Left." This is a conventional view on the left, albeit one that conveniently excuses an enervating pessimism about the possibility of progress through the institutions of representative democracy. But it's also a critique that characterises the centre as cynically knowing. They may be deluded in their assessment of how successfully they can control the Fascist right - how far they can turn up the dial on racism and bigotry, for example - but their worldview is not shot through with the same obsession with "hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster". Instead we are assured that optimism remains the defining characteristc of liberalism. 

There's a revealing moment at the start of a separate interview between Seymour and Tad DeLay in which he begins by talking about actual examples of liberal hysteria, notably the hyperbole around the "disaster" of Brexit, and then segues into discussing the manias of the far-right, such as the great replacement theory, as if they were one and the same people. This prompts a question, can we really separate liberals and conservatives categorically in this way, between the hallucinating right and the pragmatic centre? And if we can't separate them, is it helpful to yoke the obsession with disasters to nationalism and thereby quarantine it on the right? My own view is that we cannot, not least because nationalism itself is a product of liberalism rather than an instinctive feature of conservatism. I think there's a lot to be said for Seymour's thesis about the right - the relish for disaster, the stylised death-wish - but I don't accept the idea that liberal politics are fundamentally optimistic and rational in contrast. If anything, they are pessimistic about society, hence the historic disdain for democracy.

Attempts by the political centre to outflank the right, for example Keir Starmer's claim that the last Tory government was running an open borders policy, are often met with derision by the left because they assume the manoeuvre is insincere. But this is to underestimate the attraction that conservative disasters - a nation "swamped" etc -  hold for liberals. The liberal promise that a better future is possible is always tempered by the apparent necessity to defer that future. We cannot have good things today, either because of the errors of the past or because "economic realities" intrude, and improvement is only possible through technocratic managerialism. Hope (socialism or even just participatory democracy) is ridiculed as naive. Conservative thinkers have long sought to link liberalism's progressive teleology back to the Terror of the French Revolution, and then forward to the Stalinist Terror, but the historical reality of liberalism has been anti-utopian since the Thermidorian Reaction and explicitly anti-radical since 1848. We rightly criticise liberals today for adopting conservative rhetoric, but they have been doing this for a very long time.

A persistent criticism of the Labour government by media liberals is that it hasn't offered any hope, the promise of better times. The explanations for this omission have ranged from the wrong backroom staff (it was all Sue Gray's fault but Morgan McSweeney is a man with a plan) to the Prime Minister's lack of political mileage (he's actually been an MP for almost 10 years). A more honest assessment would be that the political centre no longer deals in hope in office, whatever it may campaign on, and hasn't done since 2008. Austerity has enjoyed consensus support across the centre-right and centre-left for the last decade and a half, despite its abject failure in its own ostensible terms, and following the budget reaction it now appears that the government has abandoned hope of stimulating growth to generate the revenues necessary to refurbish the public realm. Instead there will be more crackdowns on benefit claimants, more targeting of migrants, and any minister who tries to push politics further left will have their CV and social media pored over for incriminating evidence to justify their removal. In what sense could any of this be described as liberal optimism?

The Wilson governments of 1964-1970 also struggled with economic policy, and also cleaved to the status quo on foreign policy, but they made significant progress in terms of social policy, both through the legal reforms championed by Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary and in the major investments in education, housing and welfare. The Starmer government has less scope in those tangible areas due to decades of privatisation and marketisation, and it has yet to show much enthusiasm for reform in such traditional areas as the constitution and criminal justice. It is no surprise that elderly liberals like Polly Toynbee, who look back fondly on the liberal reforms of the 1960s (and on Roy Jenkins' subsequent political journey), should have celebrated the initial passing of Kim Leadbeater's private members' bill on assisted dying, but it is not at all certain that the government will do everything in its power to ensure the bill becomes law. That a government whip objected to and therefore blocked progress of another private members' bill to increase palliative care in children's hospitals, immediately after the vote on assisted dying, was telling in its symbolism: the whip was the former Tory MP Christian Wakeford.

In his interview with Jacobin, Seymour notes that the characteristics he discerns among the right can also be found among liberals: the "hallucinatory anti-communism" and the eager embrace of conspiracy theories like Operation Trojan Horse. You could also add the hysterical campaign against Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party to that list. Many leftists consider that to be an example of dishonesty - the party right pretending to be scared or shocked in order to pursue factional advantage - but the tendency to dismiss it all as a scam ignores that many of Corbyn's accusers were clearly thrilled by the opportunity it afforded not only to pose as the righteous but to warn of impending disaster: the destruction of British Jewry. It struck me at the time that the liberal criticism of Corbyn over the EU Referendum campaign was not simply a smear (the claim he didn't campaign for Yes when he clearly did). It seemed to reflect a genuine contempt for his more measured assessment (famously he gave the EU "7 out of 10") and his unwillingness to cast the referendum in their preferred apocalyptic terms. 

We may well be in a period when the right is characterised by disaster nationalism, but that may actually be no bad thing as it appears to be mostly inwardly-directed and its conspiratorial mindset is flighty and incoherent. I'd be far more worried if we were facing expansionary nationalism of the sort that scarred the 20th century, and which looks dreadfully archaic today in Ukraine and Palestine. Of course this doesn't rule out the risks within states, and I think Seymour is right to particularly highlight the anti-Muslim pogroms in India, but my suspicion is that the right's cultivation of fictional disasters as a distraction from the real ones, or its attempts to explain real disasters like climate change as hoaxes or the malevolence of others, will eventually collapse in the way that most cults do. The bigger worry for me is the liberal tendency to adopt the right's style of "hallucinatory scenarios" for its own betes noires, such as the influence of social media, and even to overlap in its obsessions with the right, such as in the recent centrist turn against "wokeness", as this just provides more excuses to ignore liberalism's failures to address the real disasters that confront us: climate breakdown and galloping inequality.