What Is the Labour Government For?

Though noticeably obtuse when it comes to actual history, the Guardian's political coverage has a marked tendency to recycle the past, seeking parallels and portents to explain contemporary developments. The shadows of Thatcher and Blair loom large. This can give the impression that British politics is stuck in an endless holding pattern, which isn't entirely wrong. The latest example sees the political editor Pippa Crerar mining a more recent seam, the 2015 general election: "Before the 2015 UK election, the Australian political expert Lynton Crosby devised a strategy for the Tories that became known as “scraping the barnacles off the boat” – shedding unpopular policies that hindered the party’s electoral appeal. Instead, the party focused on core issues it believed would help win over floating voters: the economy, welfare, the strength of David Cameron (and weakness of Ed Miliband) and immigration. Everything else was deprioritised and the Conservatives stuck to their messages rigidly. It worked."

The Tory focus on essentials in 2015 had the advantage that most voters considered it plausible. The Tories can usually be relied on to promote the interests of business, and enough people are convinced by the media that this is the same as promoting a healthy economy. Likewise, there were solid grounds in 2015 for believing that the Tories would be hard on welfare (excepting pensions), not least their track record as part of the outgoing coalition government that had embedded austerity. And it wasn't implausible that they would lower immigration relative to the "influx" of Eastern Europeans seen under New Labour. Of course, the last of these is now a busted flush, following the "Boriswave" that was the predictable consequence of getting Brexit done, which goes some way to explain why the party is down in the polls and Reform is up. Indeed, you could argue that it largely explains why Reform exists and now has 6 MPs (Robert Jenrick having defected from the Conservatives this week).

In contrast, the problem for Labour is that a dwindling number of voters are convinced of the party's core values, or even believe that they have any. As a result, a strategy of "scraping the barnacles off the boat" in order to focus on core issues like the cost of living doesn't convince, both because the commitment seems insincere and because the government seems incapable of dragging its attention away from the barnacles. The recent partial U-turns on ID cards, inheritance tax and business rates all suggest a government that doesn't really know what it is doing, or why it is doing it, given that all were battles it chose to fight and could easily have avoided. The emblematic ID card scheme, like the watering down of the Hillsborough bill and the proposed abolition of jury trials, suggests a government incapable of passing up an opportunity to indulge it authoritarian instincts, while its attempt to exempt the security state from the duty of candour is an example of its unerring ability to misunderstand public opinion. None of this is ever going to be popular with voters.

The bulk of the PLP also seems unwilling to let go of the issues that it believes helped it into power, hence antisemitism is once more in the news, with MPs apparently terrorised by teachers and the West Midlands Police accused of a secret agenda in banning the notorious ultras of Tel Aviv Maccabi. This is because the essential issue for many on the party right is the defeat of the left, the one issue that reliably unites the Old Right, the Blairites and Blue Labour. This has mechanically led to the promotion and protection of Israeli interests, which has in turn gradually morphed into a soft Islamophobia. This has presented the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, with a dilemma. She can't dismiss the WMP's poor handling of the affair as a trivial operational matter without being accused of pandering to the Muslim vote, and she can't dismiss the force's critics as hyperventilating opportunists without calling into question the seriousness of the charge of antisemitism. The result is that she has felt obliged to demand the Chief Constable's resignation. 

What these two cases highlight is that the right of the party are having to cast their net ever wider to find opponents now that the left has been expelled from Labour. In Bristol, it isn't the pro-Palestine protestors who face sanction but the school that sought to avoid conflict outside its gates, while in Birmingham Labour find themselves attacking the police because they too sought to avoid conflict on the streets around Villa Park. The Labour right - many of whom had little interest in antisemitism before 2015 - now find that they can no longer control the monster they created over the last decade, but also find that they cannot kick the drug, if I can mix my metaphors. They are now at the mercy of small, unrepresentative activist groups, like Labour Against Antisemitism, but they have also internalised the cause so completely that they are willing to credulously espy antisemitism almost anywhere within the institutions of the British state and the wider establishment, from the BBC to school governors and the police.This has the febrile atmosphere of a "terror", even if people aren't being routinely shot on the flimsiest of pretexts.

You can understand why the likes of John Mann wish to keep antisemitism prominent, over and above a defensive posture in the face of protests over Gaza. Without it, he has no political utility for the British media and thus no public profile. But you would imagine that there are plenty of MPs outside Labour Friends of Israel who can see how self-defeating this has become for the party and how irrelevant it is for most voters. The demand that the government do more about the cost of living crisis is thus a veiled criticism not only of its lack of focus but of its chronic tendency to be distracted by the "barnacles". You could (generously) interpret the recent chunterings by Paul Ovenden about the "stakeholder state" as having a similar rationale. But what all the mutterings about a lack of focus and the ineffective "levers of power" avoid is the admission that the reason this government is failing is because it is run by people whose ambition (and whose expectation until quite late in the day) was limited to recapturing the Labour Party from the hated left.

Now in office, purely as a result of the Tory collapse, and augmented in the Commons by a generation of rightwing novice MPs who have only ever known factional struggle in draughty church halls and social club committee rooms, the Labour Party cannot shake its belief that the UK faces a greater threat from a fragmented and disorganised left than it does from a nativist right led by a genuine antisemite. The revelations about Nigel Farage's schooldays can be read as an attempt by liberals to shift the government's focus from the left to the right, and will succeed up to a point - Starmer will happily decry antisemitism on both flanks - but the effort will ultimately fail so long as the likes of John Mann and Steve Reed have a platform. They will always prefer to attack the left. This is reinforced by their not-so-secret belief that the political right will remain divided as the bitter and acrimonious defection of Tories to Reform continues. The focus of the Labour right's ire will increasingly shift to the Greens, particularly if Your Party continues to spiral towards irrelevance.

The problem is that this still doesn't answer the question: what is this Labour government for? All it does is recapitulate the same arguments made by its media outriders in 2024: that here is a group of sober professionals who can be trusted to manage the country after Tory chaos, and who have proved their ethical credentials by their robust expulsion of the left. It fails to recognise that they won the last general election by default, that their authoritarian managerialism was never popular, and that their track record in office has underwhelmed even the pessimists. A change of leader later this year is unlikely to alter the trajectory, but that in turn will only cause the party to redouble its efforts to remind the electorate that the real threat is the left and only this iteration of Labour can counter it. More enemies will have to be found who can be tarred with the brush of objective antisemitism. The herbivorous teachers and nonplussed police officers are only the start.

Leverage

In the latest issue of The Economist, Matt Holehouse has an article that purports to reflect the consensus of the political class: essentially, that the levers of government are ineffective. He opens with an anecdote about the denizens of Number 10 Downing Street fiddling with redundant thermostats that fail to alter the temperature. This is, pretty obviously, an invention, though it does serve more purposes as a metaphor than the author perhaps intends. Rather than focusing on the systemic disconnect between dial and boiler, perhaps we should note the British state's unwillingness to rip out old fixtures and fittings (the House of Lords inevitably springs to mind), or even to wonder whether people who persist with a futile action (the very definition of madness) should really be in a position of power. Holehouse then quotes Keir Starmer: "Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be". Is this credible coming from a former DPP, who was supposedly so well-versed in the machinery of the state that he was seen as a natural for Prime Minister?

This bathetic introduction provides an opportunity for Holehouse to cite the recent complaints by Paul Ovenden, Starmer's former director of strategy, who quit the chilly building when vicious messages denigrating Diane Abbott came to light, about the supposed "stakeholder state: a sticky nexus of campaigners, regulators and lawyers who gum up government business with fringe causes." Ovenden's diatribe barely qualifies as analysis, but the language employed by Holehouse to summarise him is revealing, both the emphasis on a "nexus", which implies a common interest, and on the "fringe causes", which is a condescending way of describing attempts to hold the government to account. Whenever a politician talks about the ineffectivess of the levers of power, they are simply demanding fewer constraints on their ability to exercise that power. Holehouse makes this clear when he claims that "Focus groups increasingly see Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, as a “just do it” politician." That bowdlerised phrase originates in the world of business - The Economist 's natural audience - and is usually abbreviated to JFDI: just fucking do it. In other words, execute my will without demur. If you want an example of what that means in practice, consider an unarmed civilian shot in the head by a masked agent of the state on a street in Minneapolis.

But Holehouse is not interested in impunity so much as unanimity: "This appetite for a stronger, faster, politically charged centre of government amounts to a curious consensus between Sir Keir, the Tories and Mr Farage. ... Like Mr Johnson during covid-19, Sir Keir has talked of “mission control” nerve centres in Whitehall, with large screens displaying data feeds. Reform UK shares the same vision. The party promises a cull of civil servants and quangos, and a shock-and-awe legislative campaign, to “ensure that the state apparatus obeys the will of the people”." The current experience of Reform in running local authorities - i.e. their realisation that far from cutting council tax they must increase it simply to keep the lights on - should have prompted some scepticism on Holehouse's part. And the ridiculous image of large screens, like something out of a James Bond film, should have stirred the memory of New Labour's obsession with fatuous and misleading metrics. But these are ultimately distractions. What matters is the claim of consensus, which might seem paradoxical if you were expecting the next general election to provide a clear choice between Labour and Reform.

Holehouse then pivots to present a more subtle argument. As he correctly notes "For governments that know what they want, arm’s-lengths bodies are not obstacles to their agenda, but instruments for executing it. Margaret Thatcher created “executive agencies” to run services like passports and patents, reckoning that a new cadre of business-minded managers would be more efficient than the Whitehall old guard." What he doesn't explore is the patchy record of the agency approach. He also accepts at face value the claims of decentralisation: "Such centralisation is a big intellectual break from the past 40 years. New Labour saw decentralisation as synonymous with modernisation. David Cameron came to power in 2010 with ideas of localism, volunteerism and personalised choice in public services." As any fule kno', the UK state has undergone massive centralisation since Thatcher opened her multiple fronts against local government, industrial coordination and the welfare state, and that direction of travel has continued up to today. The problem is that the antipathy towards the men from the ministry - the Civil Service - has seen that centralisation made deeper but narrower through the agency state: the parcellisation of power across "independent" regulators and commercial outsourcers.

As befits The Economist's ideological position, what Holehouse is really arguing for here is a continuation of the neoliberal state. The whining about ineffective levers is seen as an unflattering reflection on the political inadequacies of the government: "Sir Keir promises a “fundamental reform of the British state”, but his remarks reflect frustration with government more than a plan to remake it ... Sir Keir has, his colleagues say, no real theory of the state ... by lamenting that Labour feels powerless, Sir Keir only makes the case for his populist rivals." The worry then is that if capitalism's B team is admitting its inability to govern, at the same time as the A team have spiralled off into irrelevance and culture war posturing, then the way may be opened to a party of rightwing chancers whose approach to the neoliberal state will be a mixture of vandalism, cupidity and gross incompetence, in the manner of the latest Trump administration in the US. The Economist was against Brexit and remains in favour of closer economic ties with the European Union. It is disappointed in the timidity of the current government in achieving that. This is a vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer.

Coincidentally, Larry Elliott published a more centre-left variant of this critique in The Guardian on the same day. This was again heavy on the ineffective levers trope but did at least acknowledge the role played by "obeisance to market forces", the "dominance of the Treasury" and the "British cult of the amateur". Where Holehouse is happy with the neoliberal state but dismissive of the quality of the politicians tasked with presenting it to the public, Elliott wishes for a return to the indicative planning of the 1960s and the marginalistion of the Treasury, which (briefly) empowered politicians. This is hardly likely, not least because the political courage and imagination required to make it happen is lacking in a Labour Party now deeply imbricated in the agency state (Ovenden's bitter screed noticeably ignores the revolving door). As a high-profile Lexiteer, Elliott ignores rapprochement with the EU, but it should be clear that his desire for a more dirigiste economic policy would be in tension with any move towards greater integration, not least in attempting to "pick winners" in a single market hostile to preferential state subsidies.

The flurry of press articles about the ineffective levers of power is best read as a withering judgement on the calibre of the cabinet in general and the Prime Minister in particular, rather than a systemic critique. Indeed, the very emphasis on levers, buttons and dials tells you that these are not synecdoches of the machinery of government but metonyms of the politicians - the hands - meant to operate it. Significantly, these articles don't propose substantive policies ("picking winners" is an aspiration) or forward-looking structural reforms (recreating the NEDC is just nostalgia). This is because the authors have no confidence that Starmer, or anyone else among the senior ranks of the Labour Party, is capable of putting the machinery of government to radical use. As Elliott notes, "Only rarely, and then usually as a result of extreme circumstances, has the British state been geared up for transformative change." The chance was missed with the 2008 financial crisis and again with the Covid pandemic. Should another opportunity, offering similar leverage, arise over the next four years, it will be studiously ignored.

Hate and (Class) War

Politicians are usually assessed by the public in two ways: what they have done and what they stand for. The two are not necessarily in harmony. Many people objected to Margaret Thatcher's monetarist policies and disregard for industry in the early 1980s, leading to very poor opinion poll ratings at the time, but voted for her and the Conservatives in 1983 because of what they believed she (very personally) stood for following the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands. More recently, the public came to despise Tony Blair because of what they felt he stood for - duplicity, arrogance, contempt towards the weak - despite agreeing with many (though not all) of his policies on the NHS, education and criminal justice. In some cases, a politician's image - i.e. their symbolism - can outweigh their record, hence Kenneth Clarke's reputation for conviviality, even when reduced to the props of a Havana cigar, a pair of suede Hush Puppies and an evening at Ronnie Scott's, always counted for more than his track record as Health Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It's worth bearing this in mind when we turn to the issue that has baffled the best brains in British political commentary over the course of the year: why do so many people hate Keir Starmer? Some think that it is down to what he has done, or failed to do, specifically the bad policy decisions made by the government, such as the removal of the winter fuel allowance. But many of the policies that he has been criticised for from the left, such as the disability benefit reforms and the initial continuation of the two-child benefit cap, are still popular with the wider population. The regular criticism from the commentariat that no one knows what this government's true purpose is suggests a lack of major policy goals. This isn't wholly fair - the government has done a fair bit, if only due to the momentum given by plans laid well before this parliament - but it does suggest that the public's response would more likely be one of boredom rather than visceral dislike. Even the well-publicised u-turns and waterings-down, from environmental policy to Europe, are more likely to stimulate disappointment rather than outright hatred.

The latest attempt to explain this, by the Financial Times Political Editor, George Parker, is fascinating because of the insights it provides not into Starmer and the government but into the commentariat itself. For example, an unnamed polling director says "For a rather dull and inoffensive politician, Starmer does generate remarkable levels of hate", which displays a condescending assumption about the bovine nature of the electorate. The FT piece includes a chart showing Starmer's popularity ratings steadily falling since the general election. What the chart barely shows is that he was unpopular before then: the anomaly is having hit a net approval rating near zero at election time, which clearly reflected the spillover of popular optimism that we might finally be rid of the incompetent Tories. The reality is that the wider population never liked him and a greater exposure has not changed their minds. Luke Tryl, of the uber-centrist More in Common outfit, admits that Starmer was never popular but thinks that this means he, and the rest of the cabinet, haven't been given the benefit of the doubt in office: "People didn’t just think that they were rubbish, they thought they were bad faith actors."

Inevitably, some see the fault not in our political stars but in ourselves, or at least the swinish multitude, thus Tom Baldwin talks of "ungovernability" and fears that "Something is going on with the electorate". Gideon Skinner of Ipsos thinks Starmer & co have simply inherited a wider problem: "There has been entrenched pessimism over the way that government works going on for many years". The key to my mind in all this is Parker's assessment: "Starmer and Reeves have made plenty of mistakes, as even their allies admit, and the change they promised has been slow in coming. But for technocratic, low-key politicians, the level of opprobrium they attract from voters is striking." This reflects a worldview that simply cannot comprehend why anyone would object to dull technocrats. The commentariat spent so long promoting Starmer as the adult in the room, the competent manager, the liberal authoritarian of their dreams, that they failed to see how unpopular this style of centrist managerialism had become. With Reform and the Greens now being characterised as "twin populisms", it is clear that the lesson hasn't been learned.

One obvious reason for this reluctance to face reality, and thus for the continuing air of bewilderment among people paid to understand politics, is the complicity of the commentariat in pushing bullshit and excusing fraud from 2010's austerity onwards through Brexit down to today's partisan battles over Palestine, trans rights and asylum-seekers. It's also worth emphasising that while the bulk of the population have only a superficial understanding of the antisemitism shenanigans that roiled the Labour Party, and limited sympathy for its victims, there is a popular appreciation that the "winners" are unprincipled and untrustworthy, which is certainly one reason why Starmer is regularly accused of being a liar. But the Prime Minister isn't merely the face of an uninspiring and regularly disappointing government. He is also seen as a creature of the media, in much the same way that Boris Johnson was, and therefore symbolic of the entire politico-media class. Or the caste, if you prefer. And we should  really prefer that term in order to distinguish it from class in its proper sense.

What this disingenuous performance of bafflement reflects is a gap in the mental furniture of the caste, and that gap is class. Since the 1980s, if not before, political journalists and opinion columnists have excised the very idea of collective action, and thus of collective responsibility and the motivating power of shared interests, from their worldview. This has been replaced with an emphasis on the individual, the neoliberal monad, hence the greater focus on personal ambition. Even factional struggle has been reduced to personalities, famously in the case of Blair vs Brown. Today, ideology is seen in wholly instrumental terms, thus Wes Streeting can be commended for insincerely changing his tune to win over the "soft left". There has also been a steady normalisation of cupidity among politicians. The theme of the various investigations into expenses scandals over the years, usually led by rightwing newspapers like the Telegraph, has been "they're all at it". The purpose isn't to encourage the public to elect virtuous MPs who will clean the Augean stables but to accept that this is the way of the world.

But while class may rarely feature in newspaper commentary or in political programmes on TV it remains natural for the mass of people to think in class terms, however inchoate. When we look at Parliament, the common interests are those of the classic bourgeois recognisable since the days of Balzac and Thackeray: landlordism, the bribery of public officials, the preferment of friends and relations. But there is also a much more modern aspect to this, and that is the moralising, hectoring language of business leaders that has become the political lingua franca since Thatcher and has given us the stunted vocabulary of "hard choices", "modernisation" and "value for money". And a further layer is added by the contemporary appetite among politicians for the performance of an impossible discipline to appease an imaginary reactionary: impermeable borders, every malefactor punished, every sign of dissent cracked down on. 

This is, above all else, an ugly political culture that reflects an ugly class reality: the dominance of wealth in public policy and the media, the toleration of public squalor, and the hypocrisy of our foreign relations. Starmer is simply the clueless lightening-rod for the entire politico-media caste. The commentariat's bafflement at his unpopularity is an attempt to create some distance between themselves and a doomed individual, to deny all knowledge of his origins and elevation ("success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan"). But this is futile. It is precisely because most people have made the connection that Starmer is hated, and it is because the commentariat cannot acknowledge this that they remain in public denial. Until he is put out of his misery, we will have to suffer more columns wondering why he isn't as good as the writer hoped and more puff-pieces arguing that a more telegenic version, cut from the same managerial cloth, will surely turn round the government's fortunes. 

Doing Violence to Language

In their trite language, shallow reasoning and obsession with status the "News Agents" podcast team of Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall quickly established themselves as the voice of liberal Middle England: patronising, entitled and fundamentally anti-intellectual. But the Bondi Beach murders and the immediate unanimity of the press in claiming that this is what "globalise the intifada" means has now prompted them to grapple with the linguistic turn in philosophy, albeit half a century late. Obviously they weren't about to start quoting Foucault, let alone Wittegenstein, but they were happy to dabble in speech-act theory as Maitlis asked "If language becomes entrenched, does it become the beginning of violence? Is language itself violent?" Sopel's response was to note that two propositions can be simultaneously true: that words in support of Palestinians can be legitimate and also intimidating to Jews, which makes it a "knotty problem" for the police. As an aside, the police appear to have cut the knot by agreeing to arrest people if there is enough media clamour over certain phrases and then let the courts sort it out.

This was a fatuous exchange that simply highlighted once more the pernicious role of asymmetric balance in broadcast media. Thus the right of pro-Palestinian protestors to articulate a political demand is balanced by the right of certain British Jews to not feel uncomfortable. The historian Simon Schama chipped in on Twitter to cite John Stuart Mill's harm principle, which can be summarised as: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." This is more popularly interpreted by the phrase (often misattributed to Mill) "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". But the problem with this is that the point at which another's action becomes a harm to you may not be as obvious as the end of your nose. UK law is quite clear that words can only be considered illegal if they constitute hate speech, incitement or defamation. The problem arises in determining what words amount to hate, incitement or defamation.

In the 1970s, the linguistic turn led to a recognition that vocabularies and grammar reflect structures of power. At the practical level, the result was a lot more attention being paid to the effect of language. There were positive aspects to this, such as the growing social unacceptability of racist, homophobic and misogynistic remarks, but also negative aspects, such as moralising and tone-policing. As these developments were seen as progressive, the inevitable reactionary response was an initial focus on "free speech absolutism", which largely boiled down to the right of powerful white men to verbally abuse minorities. But this has now given way on the political right to an explicit embrace of censorship, often by the same people who still insist on their right to free speech. This apparent paradox is easily resolved when you realise that it is founded on a hierarchy of regard: certain people's feelings matter and should be protected by the state, while other people's feelings don't matter so you are free to insult them. It is an example of Wilhoit's Law in action.

The right has always recuperated progressive ideas and rhetoric for reactionary ends. Thus the concept of liberty, which began as a demand for the freedom of religious conscience, eventually came to mean little more than the rights of property-holders. The "language is violence" trope is just the latest example of this process. A phrase once associated with feminists critiquing consumer culture is now deployed to justify banning protests. Perhaps the most startling example of recuperation in recent years has been the transformation of "radical" feminism from an emancipatory and generous project into a reactionary and paranoid one whose apparent goal is to excise the very possibility of gender non-conformance. This obviously doesn't describe all feminists or all feminist practice, but you'd struggle to appreciate that if you relied on the media, which simply emphasises the point that language en masse - the volume of words used to describe the world through the channels of public discourse - inevitably reflects the power structures of the day.

The current debate about what can and cannot be said is the inevitable consequence of the government's foolish decision to go beyond proscribing Palestine Action to banning expressions of support for the organisation. This has opened the door for demands to ban various phrases purely on the grounds of subjective interpretation. Thus "from the river to the sea" is interpreted as a call to wipe Israel off the map, rather than a demand for equal rights, while "globalise the intifada" is interpreted as a call for the genocide of all Jews, rather than solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle. That these interpretations are contested should be evidence enough that they cannot reasonably be banned, but the political speech-act that is the call for their banning is not intended to outlaw specific phrases but to cultivate a climate in which support for the Palestinian cause is always illegitimate. This demand will not be satisfied until the very word "Palestine" is outlawed as harmful to the sensitivities of British Jews. 

What we are witnessing can legitimately be described using that much-abused term Orwellian, whereby a political issue becomes ever more difficult to address as the language is circumscribed. But the world of 1984 is not one in which public discourse is uniformly limited so much as it is stratified by class. The tightly-controlled Newspeak is the argot of the managerial class and the intelligentisa. Prolespeak, the organic language of the mass of workers, is beyond the party's control, hence why Winston Smith believes that it is only among the proles that hope lies, and hence why the party relies on pornography and sentimentality to keep the workers quiet. In Britain today, the common culture is ever more reliant on a media diet of pornography (property porn, food porn etc) and sentimentality, while the intelligentsia is marginalised as irrelevant, and the managerial class employs a vocabulary that emphasises the individual over the collective through the jargon of entrepreneurialism and psychotherapy ("solidarity" is as infra dig as socialism).

In this environment, political discourse is infantilised. Commentators are obsessed with the pettiness of "who's in, who's out" and the playground taunting of the House of Commons. Inquiry is limited to asking politicians to comment on the words of other politicians, rather than to explain policy. And worst of all, the public are assumed to have an intellectual capacity that doesn't extend beyond moronic metaphors about maxed-out credit cards. But if the public is taken to be stupid, it is also taken to be dangerous. An ill-mannered mob that is prey to demagogues (our commentators have all read their Plato), but also an organic mass that is capable of directed action against their betters when activated by agitators. The common thread is the belief that language is both a potential danger (inflammatory) and a potential salve (placatory). 

Orwell was wrong to imagine that sculpting the language of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia was the basis of totalitarianism, not least because both of those fractions of society are only too keen to self-police for reasons of career advancement and social status. The authority of the state has always depended on preventing ideas in free circulation among the upper strata from reaching the lower. The tragedy of the French Revolution for conservatives, and subsequently for many liberals like Simon Schama, was that ideas of liberty and enlightenment were perverted when deployed among the lower orders, leading to an orgy of violence. Likewise, Emily Maitlis is not suggesting that language is a tool of structural violence, an insight that might lead her to question her own role, but that in the wrong hands it can be destabilising. What the British politico-media caste is arguing for is straighforward censorship.

National Insecurity

The US National Security Strategy (hereafter the NSS) is perhaps oddly named in that it pays scant attention to the security of the country itself, whether from foreign attack, natural disasters or the growing impact of climate change. The comments about defence against potential aggressor states are cursory when not fantastical ("a Golden Dome for the American homeland"). This blitheness is a persistent feature of American political culture, rooted in the assumption that two oceans protect it from sudden attack (a point the NSS makes explicit) and that the threats from the North and South are non-existent, at least since the annexation of Texas in 1845. The "infamy" of Pearl Harbour obscured that this was an assault on an imperial outpost that would not become a US state until 1959. In threatening Canada and Mexico over tariffs, and in suggesting that Denmark should do the decent thing and sell Greenland to the US, Donald Trump isn't stepping beyond this base assumption. He is merely articulating, loudly and at length, a stance that all parties have felt it prudent hitherto to keep sotto voce.

These assumptions have long been shared across the political spectrum in the US. In his Lyceum Address of 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln famously emphasised not only this sense of external security but also the fear that what threatened the union was internal: "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

The NSS takes a similar approach: an obligatory nod to the idea of an external threat that immediately gives way to a focus on internal disarray and then homes in on migration as not only a threat to the US but to the world order: "We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation. We want full control over our borders, over our immigration system, and over transportation networks through which people come into our country—legally and illegally. We want a world in which migration is not merely “orderly” but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit."

In his preface to the NSS, Trump (or at least his ghostwriter) claims that "Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest ... They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” ... And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty." The dichotomy of internationalism and isolationism is important, but it can lead us to fail to see the common elements in the thinking of American elites (which includes Trump). First and foremost is the fear that the country could be undermined by unconstrained immigration. Today the focus is on Central America and "shithole" countries in Africa. But as the familiar rhetoric of vicious drug-pushers and greedy moochers makes clear, this is a continuation of older fears of Jewish communists, Italian gangsters and Irish hoodlums, not to mention uppity blacks. 

US elites don't fear invasion, but they do fear the dissolution of the racial and religious hierarchies that underpin their political and economic power, which makes the strategy paper's focus on European "civilizational erasure" all the more obviously a case of projection. The writers of the NSS do not understand Europe either politically or culturally, but then they don't feel that they need to. European civilisation is for them simply a proxy for a white, Christian, conservative ideal of homogenous "nations" that has no historical basis. Western European populations were already being dramatically remade through migration two centuries ago. That, after all, was one of the drivers in the emergence of the "imagined communities" of nationalism. In advocating for conservative nationalism today, the US is not promoting national sovereignty, let alone more racism, as some liberal commentators lazily assume, so much as arguing for the continued fragmentation of possible economic competitors. What it dislikes about the EU is the regulatory impediments to US businesses exploiting European markets. It's fear is not that the typical European will be a brown-skinned Muslim in 50 years but that she will be buying European goods in preference to American ones.

The global reaction to the NSS has largely reflected parochial concerns. South of the Rio Grande, it has focused on the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which can be read as a clear warning that regime change is coming to Venezuela, a point that Maria Corina Machado has been happy to amplify. In the Middle East, there has been a largely positive response to the shift in emphasis from "nation building" (always an implicit threat to the Gulf monarchies) to pacification, investment and trade. The claim that the region "is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was" will ring hollow in Gaza, the West Bank and Southern Lebanon where Israel will remain unrestrained. In Europe there has been much pearl-clutching by liberals appalled at the antipathy towards the European Union and the stated intent for the US to act as a referee between Europe and Russia rather than a staunch ally of the former. According to Simon Schama, "Historian in me knows the Trump national security strategy document will go down as one of the great betrayals of the free world and all those responsible for it remembered in shameful ignominy."

It is ironic that a British historian noted for his comfort with the broad sweep and his emphasis on the importance of rhetoric (cf his Citizens) should fail to see that the NSS doesn't break any new ground other than in its choice of language. Other historians would point out that it simply makes clear what has always been understood to be the US's real interests and incidentally its abiding contempt for European politicians. The words may be salty but Trump has not diverged in any meaningful sense from either standard US theory or practice. As Tom Stevenson noted, "In its open aggression and territoriality, Trump’s second National Security Strategy is less duplicitous about US actions around the world than past official documents." If anything, Trump has been relatively restrained, reflecting his political base's tendency towards isolationism and his own laziness. Insofar as you can bandy around words like "betrayal", this would better fit the generation of European politicians who refused to address the new world of the 1990s and instead promoted NATO, and thus dependence on the US, as the sine qua non of collective security.

The question now is whether they have the nerve to move towards a genuine European security alliance, backed by French nuclear weapons, in which NATO would simply be an outer envelope incorporating the US and UK (London will never reject Atlanticism and its nukes are controlled by Washington). The truth is that this will not happen, partly because of political cowardice but mainly because Washington has no intention of allowing it. For all the demands that Europe step up to the plate, the strategy remains the same: to keep Europe under America's thumb. The increased spending on defence will go towards US-manufactured weapons and clear constraints will be placed on their use. Ukraine will be chopped up but Russia will not go to war with the EU. If the conflict has shown anything, it is that Russia is militarily weak and has no more popular enthusiasm for conflict than Western Europe does. The usual suspects among the UK political class will chunter about national security and the independent nuclear deterrent, but none will go so far as to identify the US as a threat. The global order will remain intact and at the very heart of it will remain a paranoid society of gun-owners who fear being murdered in their beds.