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.

A Touch on the Tiller

Apparently, some people are asking "What is the point of Labour?" Of course, this is a question that has been asked pretty much constantly for the last 100 years. Even during the halcyon days of the postwar Attlee government the party was roiled by existential doubt, triggered by mundane but symbolic issues such as prescription charges. A constant refrain has been that other anxious question "Is this what a Labour government should be doing?", which implies a catechism of correct policy as much as the more nebulous "Labour values" that are regularly invoked nowadays. Martin Kettle is the latest to wonder what is the point of the party, but he undermines his own analysis at the start by describing Rachel Reeves as "a traditionally social democratic, centre-left Labour chancellor". This highlights that the problem in defining the point of a Labour government is that there is no agreement on what constitutes social democracy any longer, let alone the "centre-left". Reeves' own view was expressed in 2015: "We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people."

Kettle's diagnosis is that "Labour is now an alliance of positions, interests and instincts rather than a party with a unifying direction or a leader who clearly articulates an overarching plan for government. As a result, Labour has become several small parties in one." But 'twas ever thus. Labour has always been a coalition of interests and factions, and its leaders have necessarily been skilled at managing the resulting tensions. Even during the New Labour years, when policy went with the grain of wider developments (neoliberalism, neoconservatism, weak communitarianism), there were substantive disagreements on social, economic and foreign policy. Kettle's real point is that the party never fully embraced the secular shift of the electorate: "The essential fact is that Britain is significantly more middle class, better educated, more outward-looking and more liberal. Yet Labour still struggles to adapt to, never mind to lead, this intricate, nuanced and continuing change." In other words, the failure of the SDP to supplant Labour in the 1980s, and the willingness of the party to return to its Labourist comfort zone after 2010, which is what Reeves' words really indicated, has left it facing in too many directions.

The chief problem with this analysis is the assumption that Labour's blue-collar electorate is fundamentally illiberal and backward-looking, which is why they have been attracted to Reform. This suggests that Kettle himself has failed to evolve his thinking since the 1980s. Even a brief glance at the opinion polls indicates that Reform have prospered primarily at the expense of the Conservatives, while Labour is losing support mainly to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, with the latter now acting as a proxy for "the left". The latter drift has been characterised as mainly among under-30s, which is probably accurate, and by what Kettle describes as Labour's "more ideologically driven supporters", code for self-indulgent, middle-class lefties, and which is likely wide of the mark. If it is true that Labour is losing progressive voters while Reform is obviously attracting Tories, this leaves you wondering where the working class has gone to. For Kettle, it simply disappeared with deindustrialiation. The sociological reality is that today's working class is increasingly made up of young, insecure renters in precarious employment. In criticising Labour, Kettle does so through a mental model - the blue to white-collar shift - that has been out of date for decades.

In this, liberal commentators of a certain age find common cause with Blue Labour nostalgists such as Julian Coman who believe that things started to go wrong for Labour when "From the 1980s onwards, the cutting edge of progressive thought became overwhelmingly preoccupied with the rights and freedoms of the individual." This is a gross misrepresentation of the history. The rise of the feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ movements were collective endeavours, not the triumph of the neoliberal monad. Coman's prescription is "a collectivist politics that preserves the ethical insights of universalism, but that also foregrounds the values of social cohesion, collective obligation and communal wellbeing – and is willing to negotiate tensions that might result". Predictably, he espies this turn in both Shabana Mahmood's desire for "order and control" over immigration and in Andy Burnham's wish to overcome "the subjection of democracies to the arrogance of rootless international capital" (Burnham actually spoke of the need to "stop being in hock to the bond markets", which isn't quite the same thing and certainly lacks the whiff of xenophobia.)

A better way of understanding what is the point of Labour is to ignore the vibes-based commentariat and look at the government's fiscal policy, which inevitably tells us whose interests they think they are working for. Chris Dillow makes the important point that what matters in the coming budget is not how much money is raised, or how that is done, but whether it will reallocate the real resources necessary to improve public services and to boost the long-term trends for investment and productivity. Labour's historic reputation, in the sense of justifying its existence rather than just staying in office, has been based on two periods of goverment: 1945 to 1951, and 1997 to 2010. The former was notable for a period of austerity, when consumption was deliberately depressed in order to invest in industrial rebuilding and the securing of foreign markets for exports. This was made harsher than it needed to be by the heavy investment in defence, but it obviously succeeded in improving the fabric of the public realm. The New Labour years saw a significant uptick in public investment, funded by a benign economy, albeit one built on the insecure foundations of financialisation.

In that first period, Labour clearly advanced the interests of the industrial working class through high levels of employment and comprehensive (if not particularly generous) welfare. Social reform took a back-seat until the 1960s and foreign policy preserved too many illusions for too long. In the second period, Labour had a more national and less class-based appeal and focused largely on public services management, leaving economic policy to the markets and an "independent" Bank of England. Its reliance on outsouring and private finance has proved to be a strategic mistake, on a par with its failure to control the finance sector. If in the first period the party clearly represented the interests of labour, in the second period it conceded the government's role in the allocation of real resources to the interests of capital generally and the City in particular. That's a pretty profound change and truly remarkable in the context of the party's history. The pushback after 2008, both the return to a Labourist comfort zone under Ed Miliband and the evocation of a revivalist social democracy under Jeremy Corbyn, attempted to redress this in favour of labour. 

To date, the Starmer government has indicated a marginal preference for capital but has also tried to support labour. So in last year's budget there was a modest increase to the national minimum wage and also a rise in capital gains tax rates (though not to parity with income tax). The true significance of the rise in employer NICs, along with the higher NMW, is that it should act as a stimulus for capital-labour substitution, particularly among low-wage jobs, and thus a rise in productivity. But as with the rest of the budget, it was a half-hearted measure rather than part of a core strategy to shift real resources from consumption to investment. All the signs are that next week's budget will be more of the same: tinkering at the edges with fiscal drag providing the chief means to fund increased public spending. This suggests that the current Labour administration remains trapped in the same worldview that hobbled the Blair and Brown governments: a belief that left to its own devices capital will deliver growth and higher wages, and this in turn will generate higher tax receipts for public spending.

The pointlessness of this Labour government then is not down to Keir Starmer's lack of vision or his inscrutability ("His innermost beliefs are a mystery even to the cabinet", according to Rafael Behr), any more than it is to the inadequacies as Chancellor of the woman dismissed by her patronising critics as "Rachel from Accounts". The lack of point is the point. This is a government that was engineered by the politico-media caste to thwart the left, eject the hapless Tories before they did any more damage, and otherwise just sit tight until something turned up to give the economy a boost. Possibly AI, possibly better trade deals with the US and EU. This is a government that refuses to publicly choose between the interests of capital and labour and believes it can steer a course between the two. But each touch on the tiller simply enrages more people, now on one side, now on the other. The result is a general collapse in support. Perhaps we will all be surprised on Wednesday and the pre-budget leaks and briefings will turn out to have been a cunning diversion, but I suspect that what will see is another timid exercise that will satisfy few.

The End of the BBC

A pivotal figure in the assault on the BBC was Marmaduke Hussey. He was a pillar of the Establishment but also a Tory newspaperman: a former Chief Executive and Managing Director at Times Newspapers. As such, the ultimate call to kill the Corporation - and we shouldn't be in any doubt that what we are withessing is the latest stage in a long drawn out assassination - was made by Margaret Thatcher. She was driven by her belief that the BBC's editorial leadership was not made up of people who could be considered "one of us", like Hussey, and this made them tantamount to traitors in her eyes. Though the then Director General, Alasdair Milne, was also a pillar of the establishment, within months of taking up the role of Chairman Hussey had forced him out. Since then, the Director General has always had a target on his back (there have been no women) and appointments to the role have been deeply politicised. They have also alternated between TV "lifers" and those drawn from the newspaper industry.

As the BBC had always loyally reflected the interests of the state, as mediated by the government of the day, what this antagonism between Hussey and Milne reflected was not some leftwing drift at Broadcasting House but the growing gap between the Conservative Party and Establishment sentiment in the early to mid-1980s (the views of those disparagingly referred to at the time as "wets"). That gap closed over the years, not least because of the "commercial" turn of the Corporation during the regimes of Michael Checkland and John Birt, and because of New Labour's appointment of sympathisers, such as Greg Dyke, who it expected to stay "on side", most notoriously over the David Kelly affair. Since then, the BBC has been beset by repeated "scandals" centring on editorial judgement and the accusation of cover-ups, while the licence fee remains a perennial issue for rightwing newspapers, a fact that has less to do with concerns over the Corporation's funding and more to do with its very existence as a public service broadcaster.

There is an irony in the fact that as the Tory party has fallen apart as a political force since 2015 so its grip on the BBC has tightened, notably with the appointment of Robbie Gibb to the BBC board under Boris Johnson. Farage and his various understrappers have always been happy with the Corporation, though they'd never publicly admit it. They get disproportionate, indulgent coverage and little in the way of probing scrutiny. It's the Tories who remain the BBC's implacable foe, as they have been since the launch of commercial television in the 1950s. You could say that this reflects the reality that the Conservative Party has only ever been a front for the rightwing press and associated commercial interests, but then we have to acknowledge that those powers are waning too under the impact of the Internet, social media and streaming, so why is their grip tightening now? Is this merely the ebbing tide of the politicised appointments of the 2010-24 era?

One plausible answer is that any sign the BBC is becoming popular, particularly with the young, must produce a reaction to force it into becoming more conservative and narrow in its appeal. In other words, this is a defensive manoeuvre in the face of growing calls for the BBC to be genuinely impartial, not just over issues such as Gaza but in its coverage of emerging voices on the left, such as Zack Polanski. The bias that the BBC is encouraged to show, from sneering at trans people to kow-towing to Donald Trump, is less about enforcing a conservative worldview and more about minimising its potential audience. The history of the many calls for impartiality levelled at the Corporation makes it clear that what is really being demanded is silence and thus irrelevance. Just as the BBC should leave sport and entertainment to ITV, so it should recuse itself from any political analysis and leave the exposés of the malignant antisemitism and traitorous indulgence of Islam by the far-left to GB News and others.

According to Polly Toynbee, "Its enemies hate the BBC with the same venom they detest the NHS, as publicly owned and popular social endeavours." But the parallel between the two isn't particularly helpful, and not just because nobody on the right is seriously suggesting the NHS can be converted to an ad-driven model. The Tory ideal is for the BBC to withdraw from popular entertainment and focus on higher culture (albeit of a very conservative stripe, e.g. the Last Night of the Proms) and uncontentious public service broadcasting (essentially middle class programmes like Countryfile and Gardeners' World), leaving the bulk of the linear TV field to commercial broadcasters. In the case of the NHS, the ideal is to reduce it to a basic safety net for the poor. Viewed as positional goods, these are at opposite ends of the wealth/status spectrum: a high culture backwater and the return of pauper wards. Inasmuch as the BBC and the NHS have a similarity, it is in the lack of true democractic accountability, something that doesn't seem to bother Toynbee overly much.

A better way of understadning the animus against the BBC is to consider the role of youth. Political engagement among the young, unless channelled via respectable routes in the traditional parties, is habitually derided as naive or the product of brainwashing. Likewise, and despite her venerable age, Auntie is routinely accused of following fashionable nonsense and of being obsessed with "reaching a younger audience". This isn't without foundation - a steadily ageing audience will inevitably lead to the end of the licence fee model - but it is exaggerated as part of the persistent campaign to undermine the Corporation's claims to represent the entire nation. This is why there is such an emphasis on the idea that the BBC is indulging the radical young over issues such as trans rights and Palestine, and also explains why if any leftwing voices are to be allowed on the channel they must ideally be young and excitable, all the better to be dismissed as young and excitable. Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar probably only have a few more years in the limelight before they are considered worringly "grown-up". 

The elevation of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership presented a major challenge to the BBC precisely because of his age. He couldn't simply be patronised as a young fool. The initial response, beyond dismissing him as a old fool, was to use his supporters as a proxy, focusing on his success in attracting and energising younger voters, hence the prominence given to Momentum. But this ran into the brick wall of the general election in 2017, which proved that Corbyn's attraction went well beyond the young and clearly included many of the older Labour voters that Westminster opinion was convinced had been lost to the anti-EU right. This led to a switch in focus, first to the old standby of traitorous disloyalty (e.g. the attempt by Newsnight to link him to Moscow after the Salisbury poisoning in 2018), and then to the claims of institutional antisemitism (culminating in the infamous John Ware Panorama report in 2019). 

Just as the liberal press routinely occludes 2017, so the BBC will ignore its role in undermining the Labour Party and indulging the Conservative government under Boris Johnson in 2019, and will insist that it is and always has been politically neutral, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary from the 1926 General Strike through the Battle of Orgreave to today. In comparison, its questionable editing  of Donald Trump's 2021 Capitol Hill speech is a triviality. The real significance of the moment is that the UK's national broadcaster is being threatened by the head of a foreign government, and one with a track record of bullying media companies into agreeing sales to his own backers. The fear from the 1980s onwards was that the BBC would be broken up and replaced by components of the Murdoch empire, or at least placed ever more firmly under the thumb of newspapermen, but it's now more likely that it will be arm-twisted into a subservient relationship with the new media conglomerates centring on Silicon Valley. As in so much of her policy, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for the americanisation of British life.