A Very English Conundrum

Apart from nostalgia for a time when the Liberal Party was relevant, which is probably a hankering for the blissful dawn of 2010 rather than 1974, A Very English Scandal, the dramatisation of the downfall of Jeremy Thorpe, has prompted little in the way of political reflection. As a story of tragi-comic entitlement (Norman Scott's lament over his National Insurance card was as emblematic as Thorpe's expectation of the connivance of others), the politics of the era was always going to be marginalised, and that's before you take into account a rich cast of characters that included an inept assassin, a biased judge and a dissolute barrister. With a routinely thuggish police officer and a bustling lady publican called Edna Friendship thrown into the mix, this felt like a Joe Orton farce. As a dramatic form, farce deals with universal moral failings in ridiculous settings, rather than historical specifics, which is why good farces don't lose their relevance. Accidental Death of an Anarchist isn't about Milan in 1969 but a tale of police corruption, which is timeless. Likewise, A Very English Scandal dealt with establishment immorality and complacency, which is for the ages. However, there is some value in thinking about the political context of the Thorpe affair, both to understand the role it played in the lead-up to the pivotal election of 1979 and to assess the current state of the "centre ground" in British politics.

Though he became a Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe was of Tory stock and is best thought of as a maverick who was sincerely postcolonial at a time when the Conservative Party wasn't. He was also heavily influenced by Lloyd George - a family friend - in his political opportunism and reliance on rhetoric. Any similarities in terms of sexual promiscuity are presumably coincidental. In modern terms, Thorpe was a Notting Hill Tory avant la lettre. This highlights one important dynamic: that despite its distinct history and persistent nonconformist culture, the postwar Liberal Party has often featured socially liberal, patrician Tories as leaders, from Jo Grimond to Nick Clegg. I don't apply that term mockingly: rather I note that the Liberals lost their social role with the growth of the Labour Party but were still able to operate as a ginger group that took issue with Conservative Party orthodoxy while agreeing on the fundamentals of property and capitalism. Thus Jo Grimond was able to advocate Scottish independence and nuclear disarmament in the 1950s and 60s without being branded a traitor, while the role of the Orange Book in preparing the coalition of 2010-15 was to encourage the Tories to be even more market-friendly.

Jeremy Thorpe was cautious in his social liberalism. As A Very English Scandal makes clear, he was not interested in advocating the decriminalisation of homosexuality, though I think this reflected a political calculation rather than fear of personal exposure. Being against the death penalty, as he was, wasn't necessarily popular, but it was seen as principled: it didn't alienate those that it didn't attract, which wasn't the case with gay rights in the 60s. His strong suit was his internationalism, notably his stands against Rhodesian UDI and South African apartheid, but this masked a lack of interest in economic policy beyond a distaste for socialism typical of his class and background, which meant an antipathy towards trade unions and an ambivalence towards the welfare state. His opposition to the activism of the Young Liberals in the late-60s was driven more by their demands for a policy of industrial democracy than their disruption of rugby matches involving the Springboks. Ironically, their diversion of this democratic activism into the community politics of the early-70s did much to secure the by-election victories that would propel Thorpe to the peak of political influence in 1974.

While the Liberals were always going to be identified with the political centre by default, Thorpe pursued a strategy of accentuating the party's centrist positioning in order to maximise the votes of disillusioned Labour and Conservative supporters. Rather than a distinct Liberal identity, such as that advocated by the Young Liberals or, in a different register, by the Orange Bookers of the early-00s, the party made "none of the above" the centrepiece of its platform, which meant that it wasn't always clear what it really stood for. Even in the arena of foreign policy, which was inconsequential for the vast majority of voters, Thorpe's leadership was marked by radical rhetoric and cautious policy (for example, while he excoriated British colonialism, he stymied the Young Liberals' opposition to NATO and support for Palestine). His chief legislative contribution was his support in the Commons for Ted Heath in the passage of the European Communities Act in 1972, though it's worth remembering that this was overwhelmingly backed by the establishment (and most of the media at the time) and the inexorable logic of what would become "ever closer union" was understood by relatively few. He wasn't taking a great political risk.

Thorpe's strategy highlights another important dynamic: that centrism is fundamentally opportunistic rather than principled. Again, this is not a slur but an observation of political practice. Centrism needs two clearly defined poles of opposition in order to define itself as a viable alternative. Historically, the electoral success of the Liberal Party under Thorpe (at least in votes if not in seats) owed everything to the secular economic crises of the early and mid-1970s and their political ramifications, in particular the shift of Labour towards greater industrial intervention and the shift of the Conservatives to a more liberal economic policy. Both of these tendencies were partial and multivalent. Labour was divided between traditional advocates of state control and bureaucracy on the one hand and post-68 advocates of workers' control and direct democracy on the other. The Tories were increasingly divided between statist modernisers who placed their faith in Europe and economic liberals who in turn made common cause with small capital reactionaries in their suspicion of the state. The drift of each away from a pragmatic approach towards a more ideological position opened up a space for the Liberal Party, however this depended on the electorate remaining ambivalent about both the main parties, which in turn depended on those parties remaining in flux.

The problem for the Liberals was that this space largely depended on the "don't knows" and in particular Tory voters suspicious of emergent neoliberalism. In other words, this was an electoral bloc that was essentially conservative, rather than socially liberal, and one that found Thorpe's patrician manner and policy caution reassuring. As the political climate became more partisan, and as these conservative voters became more antipathetic towards Labour after the IMF "crisis" and the "winter of discontent", the Liberal Party was increasingly occluded by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party as it exited the state of flux quicker than Labour. While A Very English Scandal suggests that the party's decline in the latter part of the decade, culminating in Thorpe's loss of his seat in 1979, was partly due to the fallout of his acquittal, it was in fact due to a decisive shift in the electorate's attitude towards economic management. Labour actually won slightly more votes in 1979 than it did in October 1974, but the Tories romped to victory by adding 3 million at the ballot box: roughly 1 million from the Liberals and 2 million from increased turnout. While some of that Liberal-to-Tory swing might have been influenced by the Thorpe affair, it is hard to believe that previous non-voters, whether abstainers or the young, were that bothered by it.

This highlights a third dynamic: when the electorate switches in large net numbers between the big two, centrist parties (or regional parties, for that matter) tend to suffer, as would be seen again in 1997. They can also suffer if the centre ground itself becomes contested. Though the Liberal Democrats lost two-thirds of their vote in 2015, after their uninspiring period in coalition, this wasn't because of a major shift between the two main parties but because they lost their pre-eminent role as the "none of the above" vote repository to UKIP. Thinking of UKIP as a centrist party might seem perverse, but that is essentially how many ex-Labour voters who switched to the Kippers rationalised their decision. Even ex-Tory voters who gravitated to UKIP saw themselves as essentially centrist (which for them is synonymous with conservative) in contrast to the socially liberal bloc represented by David Cameron and George Osborne. It's an unpalatable thought for centrists, but the political legatee of Jeremy Thorpe, with his trilby, covert coat and generally raffish air, is (or was) Nigel Farage. But the wipe-out of UKIP in 2017 did not herald a revival in Lib Dem fortunes as the home of the protest vote. Instead we saw a reversion to an electoral duopoly.

Considering the three dynamics outlined above - the tendency of the centre to attract progressive Tory politicians, its tactical opportunism, and the need for a balance of power between the two main parties - the times might appear to be auspicious for a centrist revival. The likes of Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve attract more media coverage than Vince Cable, Brexit provides the mother of all opportunities for a distinctive position, and the 2017 result and subsequent opinion polls suggests that neither Labour nor the Conservatives are about to secure a decisive majority of the electorate. But, there is a big problem here, and we can see it if we remember that the Liberals' fortunes steadily declined after their electoral highpoint in February 1974 as the effects of the mid-70s recession bit. A centrist party that seeks to supplant one of the big two can do reasonably well in terms of votes, certainly sufficient to effect the outcome of a general election, as was the case in 1983 when the Tories lost vote share but increased their seats due to the impact of the SDP-Liberal Alliance on the Labour vote, but a party that seeks to come through the middle and take votes equally from both Labour and the Conservatives requires a relatively benign economic environment and for political debate to accommodate matters aspirational or international.

You might then wonder how the Liberal Democrats managed to do so well in 2010, when they captured 23% of the vote in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The answer is that their success owed much to the Brown administration's stabilisation of the economy in 2009, which led many voters to think that the impact on their personal circumstances might be slight, and their commitment to aspirational policies such as tax cuts, green jobs and (ironically) educational investment, which contrasted well with the Tories' prioritisation of austerity. There was also the banked goodwill arising from their opposition to the Iraq War, which was still a live issue with the setting-up of the Chilcot Inquiry in 2009. If austerity did for the Lib Dems in both 2015 and 2017, it is likely that the weak state of the economy will do likewise come the next general election. Were there to be an earlier election, the most likely trigger would be the government's defeat over its Brexit policy, however the election itself is unlikely to be fought on that topic and is far more likely to centre on economic and social policy, specifically on Labour's plans for investment and repair. In that scenario, a clear difference between Labour and the Conservatives is likely to empty the centre, just as it did in 2017.

Candide in Kensington

As Editor at Large for the London Review of Books, the novelist Andrew O'Hagan was responsible for a couple of notable long-form essays in recent years that caused ripples beyond the literary world. The first was about his aborted stint as a ghost-writer for Julian Assange. This revealed, to no one's great surprise, that its central character was an egomaniac exploiting the conspiratorial netherworld of state secrets and libertarian leakers. The second essay was about Craig Wright, an Australian programmer who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, whose public unveiling was to be recorded by O'Hagan. Wright was a fraud exploiting the conspiratorial netherworld of libertarian technology. You've probably spotted the pattern here. Despite the wealth of background detail offered in these two essays, I was never convinced that O'Hagan was really interested in their ostensible subjects - the ethical grey zones of state secrets and cryptocurrencies - or their unsympathetic central characters. Each might have provided the raw material to craft an interesting fiction, but they didn't really work as essays, despite the attempts to build a sense of tension into unfolding events, essentially because O'Hagan didn't appear to have a point to make in either case

O'Hagan's latest essay is about last year's tragedy at Grenfell Tower and in particular the fractious relationship of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the residents of its northern wards. Despite a much larger cast of characters, this is a more focused project because it has a point: a revisionist interpretation of the council's role. But some features are still familiar, such as the conspiratorial netherworld of the local authority's critics, who in O'Hagan's view are no more able to substantiate their claims than Assange or Wright were. The dynamic of the essay this time is not the tension of a looming decision but the search for a sympathetic character. O'Hagan tells us that he started out with a naïve, even antagonistic attitude - ‘Let’s get the bastards who did this’- but came to realise that the council, and its executive and political leaders in particular, were actually the unsung heroes of the tragedy. But to make the revisionist case he has to show that the common view of the council was near-universal and wrong-headed, which leads him both to construct an exasperating strawman - that its critics believed the council to be "homicidal" and bent on "social cleansing" - and to reduce all those critical of the borough to caricatures. I don't think he is motivated by political bias, or that long exposure to the literary world has made him starry-eyed about the posh, but I think he is approaching the tragedy as a novelist.

In terms of literary influences, there are explicit references to Martin Amis and Charles Dickens, and even a whiff of T S Eliot and Henry James, but the overall tone bends more towards moral philosophy than social critique. What it reminded me of was Voltaire's Candide (a book about disasters and illusions shattered), not least because the essay concludes with the promised cultivation of a modest garden. The chief problem is that most of the nominally central characters, the victims and survivors of the fire, are reduced to simple types or given a schematic purpose, in contrast to the more complex portrayals of Nicholas Paget-Brown, the Leader of the council, and Rock Feilding-Mellen, the Deputy Leader. The local activists are presented as stereotypical trouble-makers, high on their own rhetoric and low on logic, the national authorities (most notably Theresa May and Sajid Javid) are shown as cynical and manipulative, while the "heroes" come across as decent white men put in an impossible situation. It reads at times like a reminiscence of colonial administration in the 1950s. I think O'Hagan seriously misrepresents the critics' case against the council, as well as the history of housing in the borough, and I also think he goes too far in sneering at marginal characters in the story, providing cartoon villains that meet the expectations of the anti-left commentariat (David Aaronovitch and Brendan O'Neill have been predictably prominent in the applauding claque).

The pen portraits of the residents of the tower at the start of the essay emphasise their warm-heartedness and everyday concerns, but they also suggest (by omission) the absence of any political sensibility beyond neighbourliness and a rhetorical commitment to community, even going so far as to approvingly note the quietism of the Muslim bereaved. This approach to the memorialisation of the victims of tragedy has become common since 9/11 and has now been formalised in the opening phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. But O'Hagan also uses the emotional capital of these obituaries to put himself on the side of the victims and against the "committed local agitators", such as the longstanding Grenfell Action Group (GAG), who are uncharitably accused of "throwing accusations into the air like confetti at a whore’s wedding". He describes the Grenfell United support group, set up in the aftermath of the tragedy, as "secretive, slightly exclusive" and suggests that it is unrepresentative: "Several of the residents we spoke to ... were sympathetic to Grenfell United, the ‘bereaved, survivors and community’ group that has the ear of the prime minister, which they filled (both ears) with stories of how much they hate the council. Many of the survivors I spoke to had nothing to do with the group."

O'Hagan takes an evident dislike to Edward Daffarn, the GAG activist who explicitly warned of the danger of a fire well before last June, and also to the then newly-elected Labour MP for Kensington: "Emma Dent Coad introduced Corbyn to a variety of interested parties, among them several local ‘housing campaigners’, but no one from the council. Odd, given that she was a local councillor for so many years. Or is it?" (you'll note another pattern here: that self-ascription is treated to inverted commas). It was at this meeting that Corbyn suggested of the empty properties in the borough owned by the rich that "maybe it’s time to put some of them to good use", which resulted in various defenders of the liberal order in the commentariat clutching their pearls over the sanctity of property rights. O'Hagan admits that the Labour Leader was one of the few visitors to understand the challenge of the aftermath: "he showed some sense of the scale of the problem when he was told how many people would need to be rehoused. ‘But Kensington as a borough wouldn’t have vacant properties for anything like that number’". Given that O'Hagan's chief charge against May and Javid was their insistence on an unrealistic target of three weeks for rehousing those made homeless by the fire, his determination to denigrate Corbyn - "He was admired for his easy ability to hug people" - seems gratuitous and mean-spirited.

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That people tell lies in the wake of a tragedy, whether from anguish or self-importance, is well-known. It's human nature. Likewise, that people will try and leverage such events for wider political ends is hardly a surprise. We all interpret evidence to suit our priors. O'Hagan is sympathetic when it comes to the lies and myths of the apolitical victims - "people tell the stories they need to tell, ones that match their own disbelief, and it doesn’t matter if they’re true" - but he won't extend the same sympathy to those he classes as "agitators" or to those, like Lily Allen and Stormzy, who have cameo roles in the aftermath. The criticism of these two is cheap, claiming that Allen is hypocritical for worrying about gentrification because she is rich and that Stormzy (also "rich") is foolish for demanding money for the survivors when money had already been forthcoming. But why should we expect singers and rappers to be any better-informed than the public at large or less susceptible to rumours and emotion? O'Hagan's attitude, which mixes irritation with patronisation, is not that different to the recent press criticism of Raheem Sterling for his gun tattoo. Ironically, pouncing on minor errors of judgement and questioning motives is the tactic that O'Hagan elsewhere criticises the media for in their coverage of the Grenfell fire. It isn't a defence of the council to emphasise that myths were peddled or hobby-horses ridden, any more than suggesting that some of the fans at Hillsborough were pissed was relevant to that tragedy.

In his generally positive assessment of the council's response, O'Hagan fails to distinguish between will and capacity. The central criticism is not that Kensington and Chelsea was callous or dilatory, as per his strawman, but that it wasn't set up to adequately deal with its residents' needs, both before and after the tragedy, despite being a relatively well-funded and competent organisation. The council did not treat its poorer northern wards in the same way as it treated the richer southern wards, but this is not about an inequality of resource, which O'Hagan is at pains to deny, but an inequality of respect. This comes across indirectly in O'Hagan's narrative, but he is loath to make a direct criticism of the council beyond admitting that their communications were weak. The defence of the council, that they were "there" on the ground helping people immediately after the tragedy, omits to ask why residents felt abandoned. Instead, he prefers to accuse outsiders and the press of jumping on the bandwagon, or to suggest that the victims were simply unbalanced by the tragedy and not capable of the sort of rational thought that he prides himself on. The point is that the council had an institutionalised, arms-length, patronising relationship with its northern residents, and many of them had as a consequence either come to actively despise it or had decided to simply ignore it. This wasn't just about council staff not wearing tabards at the scene of the disaster.

When people said "the council is nowhere to be seen", they weren't just referring to the immediate aftermath but to years of what they interpreted as neglect, but which might be better thought of as an unwillingness to directly engage with people that successive Tory administrations felt an abstract compassion towards but had no interest in establishing any real human relationship with (the film by Anthony Wilks that accompanies O'Hagan's essay online is much better on this point). The key criticism made by the GAG was that the council didn't listen. The defence outlined by O'Hagan is essentially: we read all their emails. While some people will use "listen" as a synonym for "agree with me", it's clear that most of the activists were after engagement - i.e. respect and consideration. On occasion, when trying to blame a third party, O'Hagan admits that the relationship between the community and council was dysfunctional: "It should be said that among the people the prime minister was listening to, with the churches by Grenfell Tower acting as conduit, were people whose disaffection with the council went back years. The wider group had legitimate concerns over a whole spread of issues, not just the tower, and whether she understood it or not, May was being drafted into a political war against the council, in which the fire was a pretext." You'll note how the now-hackneyed phrase "legitimate concerns" is quickly neutralised by "political war" and "pretext".

Nick Paget-Brown was asked by O'Hagan about responsibility: "I said sorry – and indeed I am sorry for what has happened. It happened on my watch, in my borough, and it’s terrible. I’m not apologising for the cladding I was blamed for installing, which has actually been installed all over the country, and which the TMO was told met building regulation standards". This is a standard expression of regret, but it's one that refuses ultimate responsibility. Is that legitimate? Paget-Brown has grounds to suggest that the council could not be effectively responsible, but that would mean criticising a system of market-driven regulation and compliance that was enthusiastically supported by the borough. In defending Feilding-Mellen, O'Hagan notes: "the tower’s vulnerability lay in a network of negligence that was beyond the capacity of any one man". It would be more to the point to say that this "network of negligence" was beyond the capacity of any one council, but that a failure to recognise this on the part of the council was also negligent. When businesses that win council housing contracts are protected from public criticism by "commercial confidentiality", when regulators are captured by industry-backed interests, and when council stock is either sold-off or its management privatised, then councils are often the only visible target for popular ire over the provision and condition of social housing. Paradoxically, the more they are divested of power and responsibility, the more they become a target.

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O'Hagan blames or denigrates pretty much everyone bar the council: the tenant management organisation (TMO) that had operational responsibility for the borough's housing stock, the building industry and its lazy regulators, central government (notably an interfering Number 10), London Gold (the cross-borough emergency response team) and the London Fire Brigade. Labour politicians, such as Corbyn and Dent-Coad, whose lack of executive power meant that they could not be held culpable, are criticised precisely for having nothing to offer but sympathy ("hugs"). They all appear to be motivated by self-interest and opportunism while the council's political leadership and executive officers are, in O'Hagan's telling, motivated by a genuine desire to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. I have no doubt that political calculation played a large part in Theresa May and Sajid Javid's responses last June, but the caricatures that O'Hagan presents are no different to the normal fare of a media that he elsewhere excoriates for over-simplification and an appetite for villains. In his desire to redress the balance of the media's coverage of the council, he becomes partisan. Rather than an even-handed assessment of the tragedy, we get the case for the defence.

The council doesn't get off entirely scot-free. O'Hagan criticises it for its inadequate PR operation and in particular its failure to control the narrative in the immediate aftermath of the fire, but he doesn't draw any conclusions about local government capacity generally, the decline of local newspapers (the traditional conduit for both explanation and criticism), or Kensington and Chelsea's particular history of a tight-lipped approach to communication. If anything, he appears to admire its emotional reticence: "Civic duty doesn’t hug. What it does do, while few notice, is call every head teacher and visit every school, carefully answering the educational and psychological needs of people who may not even register that what is being done for them is being done by their local authority". This panegyric continues with a salute to courage ("grace under pressure") and ends with a  lament: "If you talk to people who work in councils, and I’ve now spoken to hundreds, you quickly see that it is a culture of low appreciation generally, so when something goes badly wrong – off-the-scale wrong – the culture is already in place for total execration. It wasn’t always like this."

O'Hagan expands on that last point by talking of his own upbringing in a council house in Scotland, but his purpose seems to be to marginalise metropolitan trouble-makers in favour of a more traditional, respectable working class: "we didn’t fight a general war with the council. On the contrary, our parents believed the council was on our side". He acknowledges that this changes with right-to-buy: "After Thatcher’s arrival, I noticed that the people left in ‘social housing’ were much quicker to complain". The problem with this interlude, long ago and far away, is that it has nothing to do with the particular circumstances of North Kensington. The area had long been a site for social activism and dissent (again, the Anthony Wilks film is much better on this), and a seed-bed of the counter-culture, from the days of Colin MacInnes through Michael Moorcock to The Clash. There was a general war with the council that long-predated Thatcher, while right-to-buy had relatively little impact because the borough had a modest amount of directly-owned housing stock compared to other London boroughs, having historically preferred to foster housing associations and charitable trusts. O'Hagan gestures at these truths in his review of the area's history, but he doesn't join the dots: a council that is reluctant to be directly responsible for providing homes, the most immediate human need above sustenance, will not have a vital relationship with those citizens for whom housing is primarily a precarious necessity rather than an investment or a route to self-actualisation.

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Any council, any fire brigade, would have struggled to deal with a disaster like Grenfell. In some ways, such as its financial reserves, the borough of Kensington and Chelsea was in a better position than most, but in two crucial respects it was at a disadvantage. The first disadvantage is that it is quite small. This meant that its capacity to handle a city-scale challenge was limited, both in terms of emergency housing and the depth of council services and staff available to support the affected. The consequence was the rapid escalation to the London-wide Gold Command structure, which reinforced the sense that the council was out of its depth. O'Hagan recognises this challenge of size, but he focuses on the unreasonable expectations of Number 10 (particularly that everybody be rehoused within 3 weeks) and the personal ambition of the London Gold team leadership. Were Kensington and Chelsea to be merged with Hammersmith and Fulham, the combined borough would still be smaller, both territorially and in terms of population, than either Ealing or Barnet. This idea is not aired by O'Hagan, even though it is a common speculation among London government experts and has been effectively broached in the creation of shared backoffice services. The continuing existence of the Royal Borough is simply a given.

The second disadvantage is that the borough has long been highly diverse but also highly segregated. Though much was made of the proximity of rich and poor in the press coverage, the reality is that the latter are clustered in a few estates, mainly at the northern end of Kensington and with the northernmost further isolated by the Westway. If you read about (or remember) the Rachmanism of the 50s and the squats of the 70s, you might assume that the creeping gentrification of parts of the north of the borough since the 80s was a consequence of council policy. It was, but not in the sense of deliberate social cleansing. The key point to understand is that Kensington and Chelsea historically built very few council homes. O'Hagan points to the borough's commitment to supporting social housing through charitable trusts, and even suggests the council's policy of supporting them has helped preserve stock that would have been subject to right to buy if council-owned, but he neglects to note that Kensington and Chelsea stocks of both council and social landlord housing are much lower in absolute terms than other inner London boroughs. For example, in 2016, Kensington and Chelsea had 6,840 local authority properties and 13,034 social landlord units, while Islington had 25,850 and 15,617 respectively, and even Westminster (which had done its best to export the poor in the 1980s under Shirley Porter) had 11,840 and 15,312.

The slums and squats of old were a testament to a large market of cheap private rentals, not just in the northern wards but across the borough. As gentrification accelerated from the 80s onwards, that market gradually disappeared as properties previously converted to small flats were bought for conversion back into larger flats or single homes and remaining private rents rose. Kensington and Chelsea didn't sell off lots of council homes because it didn't have that many to begin with, and it didn't decant large numbers of tenants to other boroughs because it didn't have that many tenants. The contemporary "squeezed middle" of Kensington and Chelsea - skilled working class and even professional people who struggle to find genuinely affordable rents - is a consequence of a market that was already heavily privatised before Thatcher came to power. The issue of supply for less well-off residents was the unwillingness of the council to expand its stock over the last 30 years to offset the loss of genuinely affordable rental properties in the private sector. When O'Hagan insists that "In the actual amount of social housing delivered, they did much better than many Labour-run London councils", pointing to a chart that shows the net change in houses for social rent between 1997 and 2017, he ignores that the other boroughs struggled to replace stock lost to the private market over those years because of central government constraints on the use of right-to-buy receipts (again, Wilks makes this point). If you provide 800 new properties through housing associations but lose 1,000 council homes to right-to-buy, your net change will be negative. If you provide 200 new properties but only lose 100 to right-to-buy, your net change will be positive.

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O'Hagan uses the word "estrangement" twice. He first talks about how the separation of the borough into distinct communities was driven in recent decades by the property market: "A genuine sense of estrangement, however, arrived with the super-prime boom in London real estate". Pointing to Russian oligarchs and basement swimming pools ignores that the actual estrangement in the borough was due to the boom in prime - not super-prime - properties, which wiped out the market for private rentals affordable by the working class and lower middle class. He then notes that every tragedy itself estranges: "Every disaster shrine now is a locus of bereavement but also of estrangement". We lose connection with people slowly, and then we lose connection suddenly. However, his remedy is little more than good intentions hedged by a commitment to plurality (this sounds like it was lifted from a speech by Emmanuel Macron): "The space opened up by the tragedy may be one into which no British political party can currently fit: somewhere new and ethically arresting, where the distance between rich and poor is addressed, and where the notion of society is reconsidered, not merely along the old class lines, but with a new tolerance of different truths, as well as true differences". Again, he is loath to admit that the policy of the council might have anything to do with that widening "distance between rich and poor".

There is nothing in his prescription that talks about the social role of local government, which has withered not only because of the retreat from housing but because of the wholesale move to a transactional model of services, something that the Tory administration of the borough has enthusiastically adopted. While the council was not as neglectful of the poorer wards as has been suggested by some high on hyperbole, it never saw its job as being to actively promote wider community integration, something that was evident in its tendency to try and ring-fence the Notting Hill Carnival as a periodic intrusion. Its approach towards the poorer wards was paternalistic: decisions made on the assumption of what would be good for the people without real consultation or involvement (this is the central point of the Wilks film, which is why it succeeds better as an essay than O'Hagan's long read). It is in this context that the residents' disappointment that no community members were to be appointed to the  official inquiry should be understood. Time and again they have been ignored by authority while successful community initiatives, such as the Westway Trust, have either been taken over or marginalised.

O'Hagan sums up: "Despite all the headlines and all the cries of murder directed at the local authority, the only people who could have known that the cladding was a potential fire risk were the people whose financial advantage lay in selling it, and passing it off, up and down the country, as safe. But as headlines go that’s not as sexy or as memorable as accusing two posh men of mass murder." He points to a systemic problem - the conflict of interests within the fire safety regime - but then distracts by insisting that a personal attack on "two posh men" is uncalled for. Just as those two men are a synecdoche for the council, so the council is a synecdoche for that dysfunctional regime. No responsible critic is accusing the council of "homicidal intent", but they are accusing it of being part of a wider system that is neglectful of the housing needs and safety of the less well-off. The term "social murder", which John McDonnell has revived, makes explicit that it is a system of incentives and a lack of restraint that leads to murderous consequences, not the machinations of malign individuals. The Hillsborough Independent Panel did not exonerate Sheffield Council because the proximate cause of that tragedy was the cowardice and callousness of individual policemen.

In the end, O'Hagan fails in this essay, as he did with his long-reads on Assange and Wright, because there is no convincing point to it. It tries to make the case that the council has been unfairly maligned and that tragedy brings out both the best and the worst in people, but the first claim is tendentious, and overly-dependent on a strawman, while the second is banal. The motivated will come away convinced that activists and Labour politicians are manipulative, that pop stars are hypocritical self-promoters, and that some victims are grasping and insufficiently grateful. I'm not sure that O'Hagan set out to make these points, but it is the corner that he inexorably painted himself into once he decided to view the council as a set of well-meaning individuals rather than as a dysfunctional system. What he seems oblivious to is that Paget-Brown and Feilding-Mellen's bafflement and hurt at their treatment is precisely the problem. They were always estranged from the people they sought to administer to, but this is not a failing of them as people: they were simply perpetuating a culture and policy framework that had been established over decades. Grenfell Tower is the story of 72 deaths much longer foretold than the lifetime of Edward Daffarn.

Lessons Learned

The shallow and opportunistic reading of foreign politics by the British media has been particularly obvious this week in the reaction to Ireland's repeal of the 8th amendment to the constitution on the one hand, and to the Italian President's rejection of the M5S/La Lega nominee for the role of Finance Minister on the other. The introduction of legal abortion in Ireland will have no bearing on Brexit, but this hasn't stopped remainers celebrating the vote as proof that referendums can deliver the "right" outcome, while leavers have muttered about "plots" against Northern Ireland. Much has been made by liberals of the calibre of institutional deliberation, the willingness of voters to trust the judgement of those most affected, and the more balanced coverage of the media. All of these played a part, but the projection of Brexit-induced anger over a badly-designed vote, the old ignoring the interests of the young, and a toxic and partisan press means that the underlying dynamic has tended to be obscured - namely that the 8th amendment, which was only passed in 1983, was the last gasp of a political clericalism that was already in decline long before the scandals of the 1990s curtailed the Catholic Church's moral authority.

While the Irish referendum had the advantage of the Citizens' Assembly and detailed legislative drafting ahead of the vote, so expertise had a better hearing and the practical implications were clearer, this has limited applicability for Brexit where no amount of official enquiries could have overturned decades of Eurosceptic media coverage and where the consequences of a multi-dimensional decoupling could not be so easily determined. In legislative terms, abortion is a simple matter. Brexit, on the other hand, is likely to take a decade to fully enact and the social and economic ramifications won't be fully appreciated for much longer. A better lesson is that our current confusion and uncertainty in the UK arises from an unwillingness on the part of politicians to engage with voters in the aftermath of the 2016 vote to determine what sort of Brexit would be acceptable within foreseeable constraints, or at least to determine the true range and balance of opinion in order to understand popular tolerance for the compromises and trade-offs that the negotiations would make inevitable. That this wasn't done, and that a blank-cheque was refused in 2017, means that a no-deal outcome remains possible, essentially as the consequence of ignorance and fear.

In the case of Italy, President Mattarella's rejection of Paolo Savona as Finance Minister is variously interpreted as a necessary black-ball for a dangerous Eurosceptic or a repeat of the Greek tragedy in which the will of the people is countermanded by a callous EU. In fact, Savona is an establishment technocratic whose scepticism about the euro is little different to that of Gordon Brown. His real sin is his prior claim that an exit from the eurozone would have to prepared covertly for technical reasons. As he is so firmly associated with this idea, appointing him would be interpreted as a case of showing your hand, which is why Mattarella cited the likelihood of a destabilising run on Italian bonds were the appointment to go through. The President's view seems to be that as neither M5S nor La Lega included an exit from the euro in their manifestos, there is no mandate to pursue a change that he claimed would have constitutional ramifications in respect of the state's obligation to "protect" citizens' savings (a bit of a stretch), and that for the sake of market stability the coalition's Finance Minister must therefore be at least neutral on the subject. Mattarella is intimating that M5S and La Lega haven't been straight with the electorate, reviving the old tradition of Trasformismo. Ironically, Savona is being black-balled because of his apparent sincerity.

The unwillingness of Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini to compromise on Savona's appointment lends credence to the suggestion that neither really believed the proposed coalition was viable and both are jockeying for position ahead of another general election in early autumn, though it's Salvini who appears to be making most of the running and potentially has the most to gain. The thinking is that La Lega will hoover up votes on the right, from Forza Italia and the Fascist-lineage Fratelli d'Italia (I doubt the bizarre rehabilitation of Silvio Berlusconi as a moderate elder statesman will limit this, but you never know). However, despite its new focus on "national" topics such as migration and the euro, there is little evidence that La Lega can overcome the legacy of its historic antipathy towards the South of Italy, which is where it would have to succeed in order to secure a plurality of the electorate. The party's Euroscepticism is culturally an extension of its opposition to Rome and thus the distaste of the richer North towards a central state that has long subsidised the poorer South. It is hard to see La Lega getting beyond 30% of the vote, and equally hard to imagine Berlusconi sticking with a joint electoral bloc if the Forza Italia vote continues to drift to La Lega.

M5S have once again proved that they are not a party of power but a coalition of often contradictory anti-establishment and technocratic impulses. While many foreign observers imagine that they are on the political left, they have picked up support from the conservative right and from the liberal centre as well, suggesting that their vote, while large in contemporary Italian standards at 33% in the recent general election, might be the most vulnerable to fragmentation. The party with the potential for the biggest surge over the next few months is the Partido Democratico, but that assumes a conscious move towards the left and a manifesto centred on social protection, so outflanking M5S, which is likely to be resisted by the neoliberal cadres even if Matteo Renzi finally departs as party leader. Another problem for the PD is that Mattarella's decision this week means that the coming election may be fought explicitly on the euro. While there doesn't appear to be a popular majority to quit the Eurozone, let alone the EU, Salvini may decide to go for broke with an anti-euro platform simply to maximise his vote on the right. If he does so, M5S might be able to monopolise the "pro-euro but pro-reform" vote, in the manner of Syriza in Greece, which could then send the PD the way of PASOK.

There aren't many valid parallels to draw between either the Irish or Italian political scenes and the UK, though if the next Italian general election looks like it might become a de facto referendum on Europe, you can expect the #FBPE crowd to even more loudly demand that Labour "gets off the fence", despite the unlikelihood of a general election being called here in time to stop Brexit. Some may suggest that the lesson to be taken from Italy is that fundamental and complex decisions should be taken openly by politicians, even at the cost of splitting parties, and not pursued covertly or thrown out to a popular vote simply in order to preserve party unity, but this would be naive both in ignoring the uncertainty inherent to politics (constructive ambiguity is structural) and in imagining that the impeccable process of the Irish referendum was anything other than the usual fudge. The deliberative democracy of the Citizens' Assembly may have contributed to a better discourse, but it was also a way of outsourcing responsibility until such time as the politicians felt sufficiently emboldened to make a commitment to legislation.

The Revival of Liberal Italy

Last Friday, Emily Maitlis suggested on Newsnight that a coalition between Italy's M5S (5-Star) and La Lega (formerly the Lega Nord) would be the equivalent of Momentum and UKIP tying the knot. Assuming Maitlis imagines Momentum to be far-left (though it isn't), this makes no sense. In terms of ideology and policy, M5S would be closer to the Liberal Democrats. Perhaps she just meant they were both good at social media. Likewise, La Lega has more in common ideologically with Tory "modernisers" than it does with the remnants of UKIP. It's programme for tighter immigration controls, which seems to have prompted the parallel, is little more than Theresa May's commitment to a hostile environment and a vigorous programme of deportations. You could dismiss this as simply more evidence of the British (or more precisely English) media's ignorance of foreign politics (consider its current inability to address Ireland except through the prism of Brexit), or even of a post-70s tendency to project domestic anxieties onto a country seen as a close economic comparator, but I think it also points to a more particular failing among centrists (who are well-represented on Newsnight) to acknowledge that both M5S and La Lega are part of the tradition of Italian liberalism.

Consolidating nationally in the wake of unification, Italian liberalism in the late 19th century was anti-democratic and cynical. It was particularly notable for the practice of Trasformismo (transformism), under which liberal politicians like Agostino Depretis and Giovanni Giolitti (popularly characterised as a "chameleon") sought election on progressive manifestos and then adopted conservative polices in office in order to guarantee centrist stability. The result was a politics that valued deals over principle, leading to significant corruption and clientelism. Along with a restricted franchise and the legacy of Piedmontese court politics under Cavour, this worked against the establishment of formal political parties with power instead shifting between relatively fluid factions. While this made liberalism hegemonic in the short-term, it also meant that it was quickly marginalised once universal male suffrage arrived after World War One as voters gravitated left and right to the Socialist Party and the People's Party (the forerunner of the Christian Democrats), both of which had a more institutionalised social base. The liberals, in a last gasp for Trasformismo, allied with the newly-emergent Fascists in the elections of 1921 and 1924, only to be abolished for their pains by Mussolini in 1925.

The historiography of the liberal tradition, and in particular its role in the rise of Fascism, was long dominated by the competing views of Antonio Gramsci and Benedetto Croce. The former saw Risorgimento as an incomplete bourgeois revolution - a failure in that class's historic task - leading to the preservation of feudal forms, a lack of popular legitimacy for the state, and a consequent reliance on coercion and corruption. The latter saw the Italian state in much more positive terms, essentially in contrast to the backward smaller states of the era before unification. Subsequent revisionist histories have tended to either dismiss Gramsci's view as part of a more general turn against the very idea of bourgeois revolution (e.g. the revaluation of 1789 in France), or have supported Croce's view but placed Italy's development within the context of a general advance in the state's capabilities across Western Europe in the 1870-1914 period. In effect, both approaches have normalised Italian political history, dismissing the idea that Italy was either deviant or peculiar (the ideological role of this revisionism, during the high period of ever-closer European union, should be obvious).

Italian liberalism in the years leading up to the Great War combined both authoritarian and progressive elements, but it's unwillingness to define itself positively - preferring to emphasise its opposition to socialism on the left and clericalism on the right - meant that it was chiefly characterised by contemporaries as a self-interested elite. Though the liberals of the late 19th century were intensely patriotic, to the point of imperial folly in Libya, their instrumental approach to government meant that they did not seek to cultivate pride in the state itself but instead emphasised both the macro-ideal of the nation and the micro-ideal of local civic culture (the latter being an important reason for the continuing importance of regionalism). This would be exploited by the Fascists, who amplified the nationalism and additionally offered the novelty of an interventionist state that resolved social conflicts through corporatism and obedience. Scepticism towards the state after World War Two was not just a reaction to the excesses of Fascism, but a revival of that older tradition in which the state is seen to be divorced from society: the "legal" as opposed to the "real" Italy. In other words, the roots of modern Italian populism are to be found in the mainstream liberal tradition, not at the margins of left or right.

Though La Lega has most often entered into alliance with the centre-right at both national and local levels, it has also negotiated with the centre-left nationally and went into alliance with it in some local administrations. It has advanced a number of liberal reforms in the context of its opposition to the centralised state, such as deregulation, while adopting traditional social democratic positions in respects of workers' rights and pensions. While it's policies on immigration and citizenship have gravitated to the right in recent years under the leadership of Matteo Salvini, some of this positioning appears to be opportunistic. In its early years, it's xenophobia was focused on Italian migrants from the South to the North. It's greater focus on immigrants from abroad, like its name change, is clearly about establishing itself as a national party rather than just a regional one. In terms of demographics, La Lega has a much broader base than UKIP, including younger voters and plenty from the professional classes. This means it is actually fishing in much the same pool as M5S, with the distribution of votes in the 2018 general election between the two reflecting regional dominance: La Lega in the North and M5S in the Centre and South.

While La Lega's focus on immigration has squeezed the parties of the right, M5S's proposal for a basic income has squeezed the centre-left Democratic Party, boosting the insurgent party's vote in poorer areas in the South and among the unemployed nationally. These are the sort of policies that political analysts too-readily categorise as "populist", but which would be better understood as popular social protection in the face of an unsympathetic state. What matters in this formulation is the latter as much as the former. That might appear like splitting hairs, but it is important in the context of Italian political history. It is the idea of a state that is self-absorbed and uninterested in the everyday problems of "ordinary people" that has helped make both immigration and basic income salient. With the clientelism of the DC/PSI/PCI era long-consigned to history, with the technocratic condescension of the PD and traditional centrist parties now out of fashion, and with even Berlusconi reduced to adopting M5S and La Lega policies to gain traction with his shrinking base, the Italian political scene is now dominated by fundamental questions about the nature of the state, which is as much a consequence of the evolution of the EU as it is the persistent appetite for regional fiscal autonomy. But this is neither necessarily a threat to democracy nor to liberal values.

Ironically, there are already signs that both of the parties now negotiating a coalition are reverting to liberal type. Luigi Di Maio, the M5S leader, has described his party as "post-ideological" and insists that any governing coalition will be based on a shared approach to issues (i.e. pragmatic horse-trading), while Salvini, who insists that La Lega is "neither of the right nor the left", has already made a volte-face on EU membership and the euro. While centrists in the UK and elsewhere are reluctant to draw the obvious parallels with the UK coalition government of 2010-15, or the success of Emmanuel Macron in France, it looks like Italy is about to witness the emergence of a "radical centre" that has finally reconciled the illiberal tradition of Italian Liberalism with the demands of popular democracy, essentially by projecting the elitism of the state onto both the left and the right. Though M5S is the larger of the two parties, its weak record in local government and the questionable calibre of its MPs suggest that the more established La Lega may end up with the greater electoral benefit from a period in office, though that marginal gain is simply likely to confirm the current four-way split of party politics and thus the new liberal hegemony. Emily Maitlis really doesn't need to worry.

Don't Be Mean to Conservatives

The lasting political legacy of May 1968 is to be found in language: the re-energising of rhetoric and the greater scrutiny of discourse that was embryonic in the slogans of the Situationists. What subsequent attacks on postmodern "mumbo-jumbo" and the strawman of po-faced "political correctness" ignored was the degree of irreverence and mockery that characterised this turn. 1968, at least in Western democracies, wasn't a revolution so much as a wind-up. This jeering spirit was quickly forced underground in the early-70s, not least by those who had appointed themselves the curators of the collective memory of the 60s, though it would periodically emerge on the cultural margins, as in Punk in the late-70s or the more confrontational strands of comedy in the early-80s. Though the "new reality" of the later 1980s and 90s appeared to have consigned this disrespectful tradition to history, or at least replaced it with a jaded cynicism and a vogue for nostalgic commodities such as Situationist t-shirts, the growth of first the Internet and then social media allowed it to seep back into mainstream political culture. The culmination of this is the hilarious sight of the British media debating whether "gammon" is a racial slur.

Though the right have predictably talked up the anti-white connotations and claimed that it is also an insult directed towards the Brexit-voting working class, so establishing a connection with the white van man trope that gave Ed Miliband such trouble, it is the efforts of liberals to arbitrate on what they consider to be the acceptable vocabulary of the left that has ensured the word's media prominence. The liberal case, outlined by Suzanne Moore, is an appeal to both principle ("If kindness is not part of the socialist vocabulary, count me out") and pragmatism (instead of alienating them, try "Persuading former Tories to vote Labour"). The counter-arguments are equally principled and pragmatic. Kindness is an attractive personal characteristic, but what matters in politics is policy. For example, the much-lauded Tessa Jowell was responsible for some very nasty policies in her time in office. That she had a better bedside manner than Theresa "hostile" May is irrelevant. As to winning over the reactionary petit bourgeois, as Matt Zarb-Cousin correctly notes, "despite their over-representation on TV programmes, the gammon block vote is not enough to swing an election, and most of them are found in safe Conservative seats in the home counties anyway".

US liberals have even got on the case: "It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. So much of this sounds like American culture wars transported, horribly and no doubt eternally, to England." Leaving aside the irritating equation of England with the UK (a very gammon move), the sleight of hand in this analysis is the conflation of social identities with political affinities, suggesting that the US culture wars are driven by bigotry rather than political disagreement. This conflation is necessary to make the charge that "gammon" is bigoted stick, even though the fact that you could call your own father a gammon if he showed an unhealthy interest in Trident suggests it is a matter of belief and behaviour rather than skin tone. Likewise, you could call your own son a "centrist dad" if he started quoting A C Grayling at you. Labelling a particular politics with a mocking term is hardly unusual, either in the UK or the US. Consider the term "Tory", which comes from the Irish for outlaw, or the way that the "Know Nothings" nickname of the American Nativist Party was repurposed as an insult.

Though this might appear to be just another example of liberal propriety seeking to delegitimise the left, on this occasion the pragmatic (a concern for the future action of right-wing voters) is more significant than the principle (a commitment to a particular style of discourse). Suggesting that the gammon tendency should and could be won over to Labour is strategically daft, so presumably something else is going on when people like Moore advance the idea. Interestingly, a similar manoeuvre is visible across the pond where centrist liberals have taken to blaming the left, and in particular its rhetoric, for fuelling bigotry on the right. Writing in defence of Bari Weiss's now infamous response to criticism of her New York Times piece on "The Intellectual Dark Web", Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic suggested that the left was hypocritical, accepting Obama's view that the violent extremism of ISIS shouldn't be labelled "Islamic" as this would alienate law-abiding Muslims, while blithely associating the centre-right with the alt-right, thereby alienating moderate conservatives and driving them to the extreme.

But this only makes sense if you see the world in terms of multiple political and cultural continuums, which is foundational to liberalism's self-image as the rational centre. The explicit assumption is that ISIS is way past most Muslims on this particular continuum, while the implicit assumption is that "we" (whoever that non-Muslim grouping might be) are to be found in the opposite direction. Ironically, this is an example of soft bigotry, which assumes that moderate Muslims are more vulnerable to being radicalised because they start from a position closer to the extreme. In fact, there is no continuum. To put this in analogous terms, despite the sociological basis of their support in the Catholic community, the IRA were not extreme Catholics, which is why it made no sense to label them as such. They were extreme republicans, but applying that label did not delegitimise republicanism. The reason why ISIS shouldn't be labelled as Islamic terrorists (though Islamist is legitimate) is that what they seek cannot be considered co-terminus with Islam, any more than the IRA's ambitions and strategy were co-terminus with those of the Pope or the Republic of Ireland.

Friedersdorf reveals the real worry when he quotes Claire Lehmann: "When you collapse the distinction between thoughtful classical liberals & centrists with those who openly advocate for a white ethnostate not only do you insult your readers, but you reward racists with prestige they don't deserve". The concern is not that the moderate right is being traduced but that centrists are under attack from the left. The "don't be mean to conservatives" line is actually self-defence, and an acknowledgement that their resistance to Trump has morphed into an attempt to win over the right by moving right, hence their sensitivity to attacks by the left on articles like Weiss's indulgent profile of the "IDW". Claiming that the left is responsible for the advance of the right is nothing more than a projection of their own guilt for decades of "legitimate concerns" and "bipartisanship". The conclusion must be that US centrists have rejected the idea of building a coalition out towards the left, despite the positive lessons of the primaries and the presidential election, precisely because they would be more comfortable with a government led by Jeb Bush than with one led by Bernie Sanders.

The idea of the political continuum is front and centre in the latest New York Magazine piece by Jonathan Chait, which is more explicit than articles like Friedersdorf's in pointing the finger not at a notional broad left that includes Hillary Clinton but very precisely at the radical left - i.e. those who didn't enthusiastically support Hillary. More than impropriety, Chait accuses the radical left (which he describes as "leftists and socialists") of a contempt for American democracy and its associated norms of behaviour: "they see Trump as the symptom of a deeper crisis of capitalism. The democracy movement is attempting to preserve a system that is being swept away." This is not only an overtly conservative vision, but one that considers norms and propriety to be constitutive of democracy itself, which is in fact deeply anti-democratic. As Jed Purdey, whom Chait misrepresents, notes: "A political science fixated on norms fits easily with a political ethics based on virtue, and the crisis-of-democracy literature really, really wants us to be better, more grateful citizens".

Ironically, the most insightful comment on the current vogue for left-bashing came from Jordan Peterson, though I should point out that this was inadvertent on his part. In a very entertaining profile (he comes across as a complete dick), the tech writer Nellie Bowles notes that "he was radicalized, he says, because the 'radical left' wants to eliminate hierarchies". This manages to capture in a short sentence the entirety of Corey Robin's book on conservative theory, The Reactionary Mind (though I'd still recommend reading the longer work). It's all about the preservation of hierarchies, and that desire is as evident in liberal as in conservative discourse. The "thoughtful classical liberals & centrists" who normalise the Intellectual Dark Web aren't giving space to iconoclasts and rebels, they are simply facilitating propaganda that preserves economic, racial, and gender hierarchies. Likewise, the offence contained in the term "gammon" is the derision directed at men (and women) of a certain (mental) age and social standing who believe that their views should automatically command respect. The centrist commentariat fear that we're actually talking about them.