A Capital Idea

According to the Financial Times, "Chancellor John Healey has rejected calls by senior Labour figures to raise capital gains tax to the same level as income tax, amid warnings that such an increase would hit Britain’s attractiveness to investors." The report is based on four unamed sources, one of whom "called the proposal 'batshit crazy', while another pointed to the argument that people would change their behaviour by leaving the UK or delaying sales, resulting in a drop in income for the Treasury." One of the few people quoted by name, former Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, said "equalisation was always a non-starter. Every chancellor is briefed that the revenue-maximising rate of capital gains tax is 24 per cent after which you start losing money. Officials will never say [economist] Arthur Laffer has a point but that is the gist of it." (Nice to see the FT feels the need to explain to its financially-savvy readership who Arthur "napkin" Laffer was). The only other named source is Jim O'Neill, who claimed that equalisation "would pour more fuel on this idea that every other wealthy person is planning to move to Place X".

It's entirely possible that this is a bit of misdirection by Healey's sherpas, but he doesn't strike me as someone who likes to pull rabbits out of hats. He does strike me as a typical product of the Labour right, being obsessed with an image of probity (recall his self-important resignation as Defence Secretary under Starmer) and fiscal rectitude, the latter less a firmly-held principle than an unwillingness to challenge Treasury mandarins or the Governor of the Bank of England, which places him in a tradition that dates back to Philip Snowden in 1929. Whatever the outcome in two weeks time, it is worth understanding the debate around the equalisation of capital gains tax (CGT) with income tax, both as an indicator of the interests the government feels it must placate and the role of investment in our political economy, or at least its rhetorical role. The contingent argument in favour of equalisation is that CGT was not among the taxes that Labour's 2024 manifesto explicitly ruled out increasing, so it presents an opportunity for the Chancellor in filling his fiscal "hole".

The fundamental argument in favour of equalisation is that capital gains are just another form of income. This is actually made clear by HMRC when you do a tax self-assessment. The different rate is not because CGT is a distinct tax, despite the name, but because income tax is applied at different rates against different categories of income, e.g. pay and pensions, bank interest, share dividends etc. The more moral argument, traditional to socialists, is that a capital gain is unearned income, like rents. If we are to "euthanise the rentier", in John Maynard Keynes's phrase, then we should actually tax unearned (or "passive") income at a higher rate than earned (i.e. wages), not at a lower rate. Historically, starting in the nineteenth century, the UK has tended to do just that. This culminated in the 15% Investment Income Surcharge, applied on top of the income tax rate, in the mid-1970s. Under Margaret Thatcher, the higher rates of income tax were drastically reduced and in 1998 Nigel Lawson abolished the difference between income and capital gains with both now equalised at 40%. This is a fact that Jeremy Hunt either never knew or has conveniently forgotten.

The move towards favouring capital gains relative to earned income came under New Labour when Gordon Brown introduced taper relief in 1998 to encourage more patient investment (the tax rate would go down the longer you held the asset before selling). The flat rate of 18% was introduced by Alistair Darling in 2008, 20 years after Lawson's equalisation, along with a lower 10% Entrepreneur's Relief rate. In 2010, George Osborne reintroduced a tiered system with the higher rate at 28%. There have been lots of other tweaks to the rates, to special reliefs and to the annual exempt amounts (currently £3,000). There are two lessons to take from this potted history. First, that it is Labour that has been the more generous party in government to asset-holders since 1990. This, as much as the "pro-growth" shibboleth, suggests that John Healey is unlikely to break from tradition, despite his own voting record. The second lesson is that UK governments have never settled on a consistent approach to the taxing of capital gains, which is why equalisation remains a live issue. The two together explains why some in the Labour Party, and not just those on the left, think that CGT should be equalised with income tax.

There are three key arguments against equalisation, or more broadly against taxing capital gains at all. The first is the idea that people won't invest in UK assets. The second is that they will be dissuaded from selling their assets when they appreciate, leading to lower economic activity and macro inefficiency. The third, that they will be encouraged to leave the country (as per Jim O'Neill). These arguments are often deployed in combination even though they are not complementary - e.g. if you're not investing in UK assets then you won't have any to sell. The argument that having to pay a little more CGT might tip you into exile ignores that the sort of people who choose to become tax-resident abroad (e.g. Jim Radcliffe in Monaco) are thinking in much larger terms and avoiding many more taxes. The more coherent argument, though it often rests on these three, is that the tax will distort investors' behaviour. This is more credible, if you substitute "change" for the value-laden "distort", simply because tax is often meant to change behaviour (e.g. Pigouvian taxes on alcohol and tobacco). The question is what kind of changes are likely to arise if we tax capital gains? To answer that, you first need to ask who pays the tax.

According to the government, "Broadly, those paying Capital Gains Tax are business owners (for example, holding shares in an unquoted trading company), investors (for example, holding a buy-to let property, a second home or a portfolio of listed shares outside a pension or ISA) and employees (for example, who participate in share schemes)." To translate that into flesh and blood, the first category are people who start private businesses that they later either float on the stock exchange or sell to a competitor. Many of those businesses will already have a diluted share ownership because of options awarded to staff, particularly senior management incentivised to stick around after flotation or a trade sale. It's not just the founders who realise gains at an IPO, and it's not just in Silicon Valley that such options are widespread. The second category mixes rentiers (buy-to-let landlords), the well-off (second home owners) and the wide range of people who hold shares, from those who inherited holdings to day-traders. The last category, employees in share schemes, is thought to number around 1 million people. 

In short, it's mainly the middle classes, not the "entrepreneurs" beloved of financial journalism. Obviously not everyone who pays CGT has the same number or value of assets. At the top end, there will be people who have grown and floated a business, without diluting their ownership, who would face a considerably larger bill, and there will be speculators in UK shares and property who would also have to pay more tax. But neither is an issue as there are always loopholes by which the really wealthy and professional investors can lower their tax bills. There is an entire industry devoted to this. The people who actually pay CGT are predominantly those who already pay UK income tax and who treat their occasional capital gains (and regular dividends) as just another income stream. For the 2017-18 tax year, there were 265,000 taxpayers who paid some CGT (quoted in a government report from 2020), which is broadly 1 in 12 income taxpayers. So how would a higher rate of CGT, let's say 40%, change their behaviour?

The argument that CGT disincentivises investment is based on the idea of risk. Matthew Elliott (the Taxpayers Alliance, Vote Leave and ennobled by Liz Truss) puts it this way: "Start with the principle. A capital gain is not a wage. A salary is paid for showing up doing a job; a capital gain is the reward, if one ever arrives, for putting money and time at risk with no guarantee of return. The farmer who sinks a lifetime’s savings into land and machinery, the entrepreneur who forgoes a salary to build a company, the investor who backs a business before anyone else will: none of them are paid until, and unless, the risk pays off". This obviously ignores the level of risk entailed in zero-hours contracts, the gig economy, and the fact that wage-earners can be fired at will. But it also ignores that much farming does not produce enough savings to reinvest, which is why so many farmers have large debts and others are selling up. It also ignores that an entrepreneur who forgoes a salary must have other income lest she starve, and that investors who back startups operate on the principle that risk can be spread across a portfolio (they rarely back just one business) and hedged through insurance and derivatives.

As ever, the capitalist imaginary bears little relationship to the real world. For the vast majority of asset-holders who may pay CGT there is very little risk, if any, involved. Property prices might be flattening, but they aren't about to crash. The well-known imbalance of supply and demand won't disappear any time soon. And even if you have to hold on to an asset for longer, you may still have an income stream (e.g. dividends or buy-to-let rents). Likewise, while share prices may fluctuate, most shareholdings are through unit trusts or otherwise diversified portfolios. The idea that you need a 16-19% risk premium (the difference between CGT and income tax rates) to allow you to hold property or shares is ridiculous. Elliott quotes a HMRC model from 2025 that estimated the impact of specific rate changes on tax revenue. This assumed an annual loss of as much as £3.5bn by 2029 based on behavioural changes if the higher CGT rate went up by 10%. Given that the total CGT revenue is currently around £20bn, that's some pretty big changes.

The source for this was an Office for Budget Responsibility paper about anticipated taxpayer behaviours in respect of the 2025 budget. This foregrounded changing the date of asset sales in two ways: "forestalling", i.e. selling before the new tax rates come into effect, and "locking in", i.e. hanging on to assets in the hope of a more favourable future tax regime or avoiding CGT altogether through inheritance. The second behavioural change was shifting between asset classes for better tax rates or shifting between gains and wage income. The other changes were tax planning (i.e. avoidance), migration (defined as "either becoming non-UK resident for tax purposes, or diverting some or all activity to jurisdictions where the tax liability is lower"), and non-compliance (i.e. evasion). The paper itself is cautious on these impacts: "[forestalling is] not possible for the increase in main CGT rates as it takes effect on the day of the Budget", while "migration is not a significant factor in the response to the increase in the higher main rate of CGT". 

It's worth emphasising that this model only makes sense in relation to the proposed budget in 2025 and cannot be assumed to hold in all circumstances. Most of the claimed behavioural changes would be irrelevant if CGT rates were increased as part of a wider reform (and simplification) of the tax system, namely a move to treating all sources of income (capital gains, dividends, inheritance, gifts) as income and taxing them at the same (and ideally more progressive) rates. In fact, all that would be left would be non-compliance, i.e. tax evasion. It's also worth noting that an earlier report, by the Office for Tax Simplification in 2010, which contra the OBR said that "More closely aligning Capital Gains Tax rates with Income Tax rates has the potential to raise a substantial amount of tax for the Exchequer", saw the major "distortions" of CGT being due to its use as a means of tax avoidance, e.g. treating income as capital gains or converting cash bonuses into share awards. 

My own guess is that Healey won't do anything dramatic with CGT precisely because he isn't about to propose a sweeping and radical reform of the tax system. Given the institutional resistance at the Treasury, the ideological priors of the media, and the general timidity of the Labour Party in respect of fiscal engineering (New Labour notwithstanding), this is going to be a cautious and unimaginative budget, which means we can expect to see more cheese-paring on welfare. Investors will be happy, but those investors are not the entrepreneurs and market-movers of lore (though no doubt they will also be untroubled), but the petty capitalists who abhor risk and have no intention of becoming tax exiles. Sociologically, they are a step up from the traditional "savers" (nowadays, more likely to be young workers trying to get a deposit together for a flat). They are middle managers with share options, people who inherited unencumbered property (including ex-council houses), and people who started and sold a small business. The overlap with MPs is considerable.

The Representation of the People

The Observer is a pretty rubbish newspaper these days, its strengths in world coverage a mere memory and its commitment to flogging stuff exceeding even that of The Guardian. The one positive is that its football reporting has improved of late after a disastrous start under Tortoise Media. But it has the advantage that its remove from the daily news cycle means that it can take a more analytical, even judicious, view of what is going on in the world. Obviously it doesn't actually do that. What it does do is summarise the consensus of the media. Rachel Sylvester's report, headlined "Greens facing ‘existential threat’ as membership plummets after anti-Zionist motion", rehearses all the various claims made since Thursday's Holborn and St Pancras byelection, coming to the paradoxical conclusion that (in so many words) "The antisemitic left have infested the party so its Jewish leader must step down". It even goes so far as to quote the usual suspects on the subject, Ian Austin and Adam Langleben. Insofar as there is any analysis here, it is the speculation, based on a tiny sample, that Green Party membership may have "plummeted" by up to 2%, which is well within the bounds of seasonal fluctuation.

It is quite possible that many party members have resigned over the anti-Zionist motion, because party members routinely resign over policy turns and this one is undoubtedly substantial in nature and likely to be provocative for many. But it's equally likely that some members will have resigned because they can see the way the wind is blowing - i.e. that the party will now be subjected to a full-on antisemitism scare across the media and that senior members of the party (notably former leaders like Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay) will leverage this for factional ends. If you think the purges are coming, you may well decide to jump before you are pushed, and one factor in deciding this may be the signals you get from the current leadership. Zack Polanski has been accused of a failure of leadership for not having opposed the motion, but he can also be accused of such a failure for not having immediately called out the media's bias and the wrecking of those party grandees. If this all sounds familiar, it is because it was also the strategic error made by Jeremy Corbyn.

It's worth recalling that after rising steeply under Corbyn, the Labour Party's membership fell by 40% between 2019 and 2025. This was only partially down to expulsions, with the bulk of the fall due to resignations in despair or simple hopelessness leading to lapsed subs. But the press saw that as a triumph, not a concern, as it meant the party was returned to its rightful "owners". There isn't a sincere worry that the Greens will lose Jewish members over the adoption of an anti-Zionist policy but a gleeful expectation that they can be harried into expelling left-leaning members, which will incidentally include Jewish ones (like Polanski) and also Muslims, who in UK politics are now coded as left, because of Palestine, regardless of their actual views. This repeat of what we might call the Corbyn manoeuvre won't follow exactly the same trajectory, however. While it is credible to suggest that you must destroy Labour to save it (from the left), because the depth of support in urban seats means it will always return a rump of MPs, you can't suggest the same for the Greens without reducing them to low single figures in vote share and possibly zero MPs.

The right of the Green Party of England and Wales understands this, but some are deluding themselves that agreeing to the media's demands will return them to the status quo ante of 2024, and perhaps even tempt Caroline Lucas out of retirement. What they don't seem to realise is that the aim is not to cleanse them ahead of a relaunch as a once more respectable party but to make them ineffective as an incentive for Burnham to steer left. Polanski's real offence was not his failure to kill the motion but his claim that a vote for the Green Party would keep Burnham honest. Plenty in the media have noted that it was the Greens that effectively toppled Starmer with the by-election win in Gorton and Denton and thus paved the way for Burnham's journey to Number 10. Their celebration of his recapture of voters that had drifted to the Greens is tempered by an insistence that he must not diverge from centrist orthodoxy to indulge them. Those recaptured voters must accept compromise, and they'll only do that if the Greens are no longer a credible threat. The "Burnham bounce" may not survive beyond the next budget, so it is important that the Greens are disabled now. Those on the left hopeful that Burnham will push "left wing solutions" should consider the extent to which the Labour Party's reponse this week has focused on delegitimising the Greens, not on emphasising the attractiveness of those solutions to the voters of Holborn and St Pancras.

The media only concern themselves with marginal parties insofar as they can be used as goads against the major parties. That, after all, is why Nigel Farage is always on the telly. The purpose of Reform isn't to supplant the Conservative Party but to keep it firmly on the right: eurosceptic, pro-US, small state, anti-tax etc. The racism and bigotry are incidental. This is something that Farage understands, which is why he has tried to draw a clear line between Reform and the far-right of Restore Britain and its neo-Fascist satellites for whom the racism trumps the nationalism. It is also something that Kemi Badenoch understands, which is why her conference speech focused on shoring up support among the upper-middle classes with promises on inheritance tax and childcare, rather than "culture war" nonsense. The aim is not merely to bolster support in the Home Counties seats the Tories lost to the Liberal Democrats at the last general election, but to reassure the Daily Telegraph et al that they can pick up the slack as the parties further to  the right of them descend into sleaze, rhetorical confusion (e.g. who can be English) and street thuggery.

When a marginal party approaches critical mass in terms of support and membership, it starts to exhibit the characteristics of a larger party. This includes bothersome ex-leaders, opportunist candidates and the promotion of technocratic managerialists who tend towards the political centre. But the chief change is that it becomes a coalition. The Greens have always been divided crudely into fundamentalists and realists, but over the last decade they have become more clearly divided between conservative ecologists, concerned about the evironment but fundamentally accepting of the social status quo, and eco-socialists who believe the safeguarding of the environment depends on the reform of society. This left-right dichotomy does not map precisely onto the more traditional one of "fundis" and "realos", for whom the dividing line was over the extent of their engagement with the political party system. In fact, both left and right of the party are realists, in that regard. The instinct of the media is to play upon the inevitable tensions of a party's internal coalition and to suggest that particular factions should move across party boundaries, and for that purpose a left-right orientation is necessary.

Though we like to think the British party system is historically stable, it has actually been marked by major reformations and splits, from the merger of the Liberal Unionists with the Conservatives to the launch of the SDP. In recent decades, we've had the farce of Change UK and the fragmentation of the right around Brexit. Much of this has been driven by the media. Today, you will still hear press voices urging the Tories to "unite the right", while others now demand that Labour rule out the possibility of a coalition with the Greens. The point is not the substance of what is being argued, which is entirely contingent and can change with the weather, but the idea that party politics is mutable and should respond to the demands of the media, rather than to the dictates of internal democracy The current concern that the Green Party must ensure it is not vulnerable to takeover by extremists is just the latest iteration of the belief that politics should be left to the professionals, not civilians. 

The plan to disable the Greens goes beyond forcing Polanski out and rests on a particular analysis of the party's current social composition. According to Andrew Rawnsley, "The Greens are an unstable coalition of middle-class planet-loving environmentalists, pro-Palestinian activists and ultra-left militants who have migrated from Labour and elsewhere". The objective is to prise the party apart. The respectable middle-class rump will be patronised (I'm surprised Rawnsley didn't refer to them a "tree-huggers") and generally disregarded as they revert to 2% of the national vote. The pro-Palestine activists and ultra-left militants are largely the same people, but it suits Rawnsley's purpose to suggest a more fragmented landscape of single-issue groups and cranks rather than a coherent left that draws parallels between rent controls in the UK and settler violence in the West Bank. They will once more be expelled into the political wilderness. The champions of proportional representation will again insist that some people should never be represented in our political system.

Going Down

If there is one thing we can be confident about after the Premier League's official announcement of Manchester City's guilt, it is that the club will face a severe, condign punishment. Given precedent, the breadth of the charges and their duration, and considering City's systematic non-cooperation, it would be incredible if they got off with a slapped wrist. The club hierarchy's continued belligerence suggests that they know this: they must get the judgement wholly reversed because otherwise they are going down. Relegation is the most likely outcome for three reasons. First, stripping them of their titles opens a can of worms in respect of teams that missed out on silverware or Europe or who were relegated. This is simply too complicated to correct, given the long period the offences covered, and would leave the Premier League open to years of litigation. It would also lead to reasonable calls for an investigation of City's practices since 2018 so that all disadvantages were corrected. The club's insistence that there was no wrong-doing suggests that whatever they were up to before 2018, they haven't changed their behaviour since. Indeed, if they had, that would be tantamount to an admission of guilt.

Second, it would be embarrassing and ridiculous if a City squad, assembled on the back of a dodgy history, went on and won the league this season. This points to a hefty points deduction that would guarantee relegation (a nice round 100, to match their 2017-18 record-breaking season, would be poetic justice). Third, the duration of the offences suggests that not only should the punishment be hefty but that it should endure for a number of years. We're not going to see City crowned as winners of the Championship in 2028. Additionally, the disruption and consequent resentment that relegation by a single tier would cause means that being forced to regroup much further down the FA pyramid is more likely. Some have suggested that the best way to cleanse the club would be for it to be formally wound up and then re-established, which has happened to other clubs, though usually due to bankruptcy. This would mean entry at no higher than level 7 (the Northern Premier League) and thus at best a 6 year journey to get back to the EPL. Ironically, this extreme case of "Cityitis" is one that not a few City fans themselves might accept, given their tendency towards gallows humour and the club's previous sojourn in the old Division Two (tier 3).

It's important to stress at this point that the fans are innocent. If there is one thing that characterises English football at the top level it is that fans have no say in the operation of the clubs they support. Likewise, the players and coaching staff are innocent. Even if some, like Roberto Mancini, lacked curiosity about the legality or ethics of their employment, you cannot blame workers when the bosses have been fiddling the books, no matter how many bonuses those workers earned as a result. No one seriously thinks that the judgement on Manchester City reflects badly on a generational talent like Kevin De Bruyne, or that Rodri should be summarily stripped of his Ballon d'Or. And if Erling Haaland elicits a common response among football fans beyond Manchester today it is not schadenfreude but pity that he may have wasted his prime years on a tainted project. But is that any worse than a player who signs up for the Saudi Pro League because he would rather have the money than the medals? 

The one person outside of the club's executive tier who has come in for a healthy serving of schadenfreude is Pep Guardiola, on the dubious grounds that "he must have known", as if head coaches were routinely involved in a club's financial management, or on the equally dubious grounds that his support for the UAE's sports-washing makes his support for Catalan independence hypocritical (hypocrisy is failing to practise what you preach, not the holding of inconsistent positions across unrelated matters). You cannot put an asterisk against Guardiola's achievements at Manchester City unless you also put one against his achievements at both Barcelona and Bayern Munich. In all three cases he has enjoyed an unfair advantage, namely the wealth and influence of the clubs he worked for, and the consequent sympathetic treatment by (and occasional outright bias of) politicians, officials and journalists. Guardiola is an elite coach precisely because he only works for elite clubs. He isn't about to parachute in to Coventry to try and rescue them from relegation. 

Football does not actively seek to balance the natural endowments or historic advantages of individual clubs, in the way that the US NFL partially does with its draft system, for example. In every football league there is an elite stratum of clubs that dominate. In Scotland, a team other than Celtic or Rangers hasn't won the league since Aberdeen in 1985, and there were only 14 such interruptions of the Old Firm duopoly over the course of the twentieth century. England is unusual in that its elite is both large and historically mutable: consider the varied fortunes over time not only of City but of clubs like Chelsea, Aston Villa, Everton and Leeds. This meant it was always going to take more resources (and the very best available players and coaches) to crack the EPL. Qatar has made a comparable investment in PSG, but that was always about achieving success in the European Champions League, not dominating the relatively small pond of Ligue 1. For Abu Dhabi the sports-washing rewards of dominating the English Premier League, the most popular in the world, were higher, but so was the risk.

UEFA isn't innocent as it could have properly sanctioned Manchester City years ago and nipped the problem in the bud. The EPL isn't innocent either, even if it has taken an ethically robust and courageous position now. We shouldn't forget that it only introduced its PSR rules at UEFA's prompting and would otherwise have been happy for wealth to continue to have its way with the league, as had been the case since its formation in 1992. The UK government isn't innocent as the nominally arms-length Football Regulator is clearly a waste of space, happy to wave through foreign states taking over English clubs with only the flimsiest of "fronts", as it recently showed with the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United. The government's public appetite for foreign investment, as much as our cultural discretion around footloose capital, has always meant a willingness to turn a blind eye if the money was big enough, something that Andy Burnham has rather clumsily made clear in his concerns that the Abu Dhabi United Group might pull out of Manchester entirely.

Manchester City aren't the only top-flight English club to have broken the rules. Everton, Nottingham Forest and Chelsea have all been found guilty in recent years. But City's case is egregious: an industrial scale operation. That said, it does make the indulgence of Chelsea, who were systematically and persistently dodgy during the Abramovich years, look even more peculiar in retrospect. If we have learnt one thing, it is that sponsorship deals are intrinsically suspicious. It always puzzled me that Arsenal never seemed to generate as much commercial revenue as its peers, despite having a global fanbase (a fact reinforced in the reaction to this year's league title), but it is unlikely to be the only club playing by the rules. After all, the directors were as guilty as others of disguised payments under the old maximum wage regime (Alex James had an undemanding second job as a "sports demonstrator" at Selfridges), and they were no stranger to "bungs" in later years, albeit in George Graham's case the club was effectively defrauded.

Opinion on what should be done is slowly settling on two basic options: a time-limited expulsion of the club from the Premier League (or demotion far enough down the pyramid to have the same effect) versus the permanent expulsion of the owners from the domestic game. As the Prime Minister's intervention has indicated, the latter could have much wider economic ramifications, which is why I think the former is currently more likely, though the balance of probability may shift if the owners continue to be obstreperous beyond their initial appeal. The chance of a state-engineered takeover of the club is zero while we have a government terrified of nationalisation. If there is one thing that neither the English Premier League nor the Football Association want to see it is more supporter involvement in the running of clubs, not because of their contempt for the swinish multitude but simply because they realise the game depends on the willingness of the rich to piss away millions, or even billions, of pounds on vanity projects. Football is a money-pit. 

The pioneers of the EPL were deluded in thinking that it could be made profitable (the cannier simply saw the opportunity to fleece fans through the novelty of sentimental share ownership, and later foreign investors through takeovers). While some owners still shamelessly extract dividends and load their clubs with debt (the other Manchester way), the imperatives of competition and supporter expectation mean that more money typically goes in than goes out. Were the Abu Dhabi United Group to leave the stage, Manchester City would struggle to acquire new owners willing to spend as much money, licitly or illicitly. That would be healthy for the game, but it would throw the club's achivements over the last quarter of a century into starker relief, as it became just another mid-tier fallen giant with hopes of one day "doing a Leicester". My guess is that the Abu Dhabi United Group will retain ownership but take a back seat as a new "clean" board is put in place. City will become just one of many assets in their portfolio. Meanwhile, City fans will have the pleasure of a derby with FC United of Manchester in the Northern Premier League, assuming the latter don't get relegated this season as well.

Reading and Democracy

Most contemporary journalism about social developments starts with a series of assertions. This is a form of argument that can be described as "Imagine if this were true". A recent example is John Harris in The Guardian suggesting that we're all so distracted by TikTok that the death of reading is imminent, and that in turn spells an end to democracy. The mechanism that Harris offers for the first assertion is contextual ignorance: the youth of today - subject to "a distracting and seemingly infinite jumble of random moving images" - cannot see the Fascist overtones of masked men blocking a port. As he puts it (with a smidgen of self-awareness): "But a background in the pre-digital world helps people not just follow national and global events, but clarify and contextualise them. In this case, at the risk of sounding hopelessly pompous, the fear many of us felt as we watched what happened in both ports was surely full of the perspectives gleaned from years of soaking up books and newspapers – and the sense that history often either repeats itself, or rhymes." In support of his claim, Harris cites a new book by the Times columnist James Marriott. I've not read the book (and am not about to), but have read the Substack essay (The dawn of the post-literate society) that was the germ of it and which provides the gist of the argument that we are undergoing an epochal transformation.

According to Marriott, "The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance." Marriott's conservative register - the Burkean "linking" of the generations, the dissolution of the educated elite, the immigrant "tides" - means his prose sounds like something that could have been written in the Edwardian era (and probably was). This tone is front and centre in the expanded and scary title of the book: "The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society". As the more libertarian conservative Henry Oliver puts it in a review, "it feels as if James is part of a cohort that wishes to be in a different part of history".

That use of the discredited term "Dark Ages" should set alarm bells ringing. Historians prefer Late Antiquity, a period that runs from the late 3rd to the early 8th century in Western Europe. There was no "collapse" of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD, no "snapping of the thread", but a gradual evolution of the socioeconomic structure away from slave production and commodity trade towards stationary subsistence and a more attenuated trade in elite goods. The social order this gave rise to was more rural and less urban, but this was not an end to civilisation - i.e. the culture of the city - even in areas where towns were largely abandoned, such as Britain. Rome's educated elite didn't disappear, they simply became Church prelates. It's also worth noting that many of the barbarians had already been employed and even educated by the Romans, a longstanding practice. Perhaps the most famous of these was Arminius (Hermann the German), who was taken as a child to Rome, eventually becoming an equestrian rank military officer before leading a revolt in 9AD in defiance of Rome's plans to extend its territory from the Rhine to the Elbe. 

Taking high-ranking hostages like this was routine policy throughout the history of both the Republic and the Empire, which emphasises both the porous nature of the Roman/barbarian boundary at the personal and social level as well as the fact that many barbarian tribes were formal clients or allies of Rome. A similar policy was adopted by many subsequent empires, most notably the British, particularly in respect of the Indian princely states (think of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh becoming an excellent young gentleman at Greyfriars School). The Dark Ages was a popular trope with conservatives a century ago both because of an anglocentrism that assumed the atypical end of Roman rule in Britain was typical of Western Europe and because of long-held fears, from Gibbon onwards, that the British Empire would end in a similar manner: weakened from within and assaulted from without. Or to put it in terms that remain resonant for conservatives today, betrayed by its elites and over-run by foreign invaders.

The historical reality is that the successor states were as literate at an elite level as the same areas were during the late Empire. In other words, literacy was always confined to a small minority of the population. We can be confident about this because of those states' adoption of Christianity, a religion of the Book that drew a clear distinction between the need for a literate elite stratum and for the restriction of literacy among the wider population. By the time of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, the state was taking a lead in encouraging the spread of literacy, at least among the nobility and the auxiliary classes required to support the state, such as the clergy and merchants. This gradual expansion highlighted a tension in the competing needs of secular society (as commerce and civil law became more prevalent) and the superstructure of the state. This would eventually lead to the Reformation, the explosion of printed matter and popular literacy.

Prior to printing, works of literature frequently "passed out of human memory" due to their fragility and the paucity of copies. Much of Greek literature was lost during the heyday of the Roman Empire, notably with the shift in medium from papyrus scrolls to bound parchment codexes. The latter were more expensive to produce, but longer-lasting, which resulted in many lesser works being dropped. This was exacerbated by a tendency to value Christian texts over pagan at a time when most manuscripts were predominantly produced by the Church (and which explains why many works of Greek philosophy come down to us via Arab copies). Marriott ironically reveals his own ignorance by assuming that these elisions were calculated rather than banally selective: "Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments." This would explain the total absence of any peasants' revolts during said era. John Ball, one of the leaders of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was a priest, which meant he was literate ("When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?")

Harris doesn't back up his second assertion, that a decline in reading will lead to a decline in democracy, but Marriott does. Unfortunately, he simply cites Neil Postman whose rather silly 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death claimed that television was making us passive and incapable of rational argument. For Marriott, "Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy." This is wrong on three counts. The period of expanding print literature (the post-incunabula era) runs for 300 years from 1500 to 1800. The final death blow to feudalism did not happen till 1806 with the formal end of the Holy Roman Empire. Likewise, we have been entranced by screens for over a century now, both in the cinema and the corner of the living room, yet that period saw the apotheosis of liberal democracy during les trentes glorieuses. Cause and effect is hardly proved in either case. 

Lastly, despite the focus on TikTok, most of what we see on phone screens is print. The Internet is a literary medium that incorporates images. It's like a book with illustrations, but dynamic and with added interactivity (so not passive). It's still the case that print > image online. The idea that we're going to lose the ability to read is obviously ridiculous, but there is no shortage of evidence that particular reading skills or habits are changing. But this isn't novel or even necessarily worrying, and the evidence for this evolution has been around for a very long time. For example, the claim that new university students are functionally illiterate is one that academics have been making since the curriculum was exclusively in Latin. This is self-serving both in the sense that it emphasises that students are empty vessels who must first accept their inferiority, and in the sense that it suggests academics have an ever harder job to do and should be paid accordingly. Likewise, the idea that the young (or the lower orders) are acquiring a novel argot that debases manners and promotes vice has prompted moral panics ever since the earliest days of newspapers.

The reality is that reading techniques change over time to suit the medium and the social context. When you owned only one book, you didn't skim read. When you bought a disposable daily newspaper, you did. The contemporary concern about the loss of literacy is about the how and why of reading, as much as the what. Rose Horowitch, in an influential essay in The Atlantic, claimed that "people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis". That "higher-order" is a tell, like the assumption in 1984 that the proles could be kept quiet with pornography. The challenges of comprehension and synthesis are better explained by the superabundance of text (a fact) rather than the degradation of our abilities (an assumption about the weakness of others, rather than our literate selves). We are inundated with the written word - adverts, labels, tags - in a way that a Medieval scholastic would have found terrifying. This is capitalism, not a loss of virtue.

Just as the remnants of feudalism were cleared away by geopolitics rather than The Rights of Man (let alone the spread of the vernacular Bible in the 16th century), so democracy is now under threat from the power of money in politics and a general disillusion among voters as choice has been restricted to the options acceptable to the rich. Blaming our current situation on TikTok is akin to European reactionaries blaming Napoleon on the Freemasons or twentieth century liberals claiming that Hitler came to power solely because of the Volksempfänger (the people's radio receiver). This kind of hyperbolic history and naive technological determinism, repurposed to justify contemporary pessimism, is what you would expect from a conservative writer like Marriott. What remains less clear is why Harris should echo him so willingly. Is this simply The Guardian's hatred of social media finding common cause with Eeyorish reaction? Or does it reflect the nonconformist traditions of the paper and its belief that the lower orders should devote themselves to self-improvement? Answers on a postcard, if you still know how to write.

Fair Game

One of the values of a historical perspective is that much of the noise disappears. This principle operates over years and decades, but it can also operate over days and weeks. Jason Arday died on the 14th of August, less than 4 weeks ago. With politics and football both back, you might have expected the media circus to have moved on, and British journalists have certainly made the effort to tempt us with new outrages, from Harry and Meghan to dodgy donations. But it's also clear that anger at Arday's treatment by the media has not subsided (the fact that Caroline Flack's name has resurfaced in the discourse tells you there is a deep undertow here), hence the ongoing interest in Nathan Cofnas getting his just desserts and the persistence of columnists attempting to justify their (or their colleagues') treatment of Arday. Examples of the latter include Sarah Ditum's piece for the right-leaning Free Press, in which she attributed the prominence of the story to the summer lull ("As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about"); and Helen Lewis's article in the Nation in which she described Arday as a "fabulist". This term has proved popular with journalists, which is ironic coming from people for whom exaggeration and outright invention is less an occupational hazard than standard operating practice.

According to Lewis, "The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate." This is correct in identifying the disproportion of the media coverage, which can't be excused as a product of the "silly season", as Ditum does, but Lewis is guilty of a misdirection here. She concedes that he "was subject to extra scrutiny because of his race", and admits that "the media coverage of Arday was harsh and high-volume." But she also claims that this "volume came from competing outlets breaking fresh news, as more and more of Arday’s extraordinary claims crumbled under scrutiny." In short, it was unfair, but he was asking for it. But what exactly was Arday's offence in the eyes of the media, as opposed to in the eyes of the academic community, who remain largely sympathetic to a colleague, or in the eyes of Nathan Cofnas and other "race realists", who remain unsympathetic as a matter of principle.

The use of the word fabulist offers a clue. The classic examples of this type in literature - Walter Mitty and Billy Liar - are comic characters with whom we sympathise. But clearly the type being identified here is a more serious case: someone who has materially gained through deliberate deceit and the manipulation of others. The literary template is more a mountebank like Augustus Melmotte, in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, or even Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. The emphasis  placed by Lewis on the quote from Arday that "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me", which appeared in Lanre Bakare's Guardian takedown on the 1st of August, is telling. The real charge then is one of imposture. In this narrative, Arday didn't deserve his position, which he secured through a combination of his cheating and exaggeration, Cambridge's lack of due diligence, and a general desire to promote diversity that has had the effect of undermining academic integrity (in a sweet irony, Bakare's piece was amended multiple times due to errors of fact.) This line allows Lewis and other journalists to swerve the accusation of racial prejudice by emphasising that the affair is about academic standards and the corrosive nature of plagiarism.

The problem is that academics themselves have suggested that the general concern with plagiarism is overblown, and that's before you get to the specific examples attributed to Arday. Unsurprisingly, Lewis does not hesitate to attack them for this: "The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal." She criticises Professor Jason Stanley, who wrote a throughtful blog explaining why journalists hadn't even done decent journalism by checking Arday's citations, and Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project, who is a bete noire of the media due to his involvement in legal cases against newspapers. More generally, she dimisses Arday's supporters as "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Lewis is delegitimising them, dismissing them as people with an unhelpful agenda or simply unserious and easily-led. It is, of course, her habitual critique of the left.

Though race was obviously a major factor in the wider media's pursuit of Arday, for the liberal media the issue was class. This much became evident in the aftermath of his death. The Guardian's considered assessment sought to divide the sheep and goats in its headline: "A rightwing witch-hunt focused on Jason Arday – but so did legitimate journalism". In the article, Hugh Muir emphasised the distinction: "The right in its hostile, partisan pursuit nevertheless uncovered doubts about the professor’s academic work – accusations of plagiarism – that could not be satisfactorily dismissed. The professor himself made public claims about his life and achievements that could not be verified. Of course that was a good thing for those who, for racist and political reasons, sought to denigrate him, but wasn’t that also a legitimate concern for those who bore him no ill will – indeed cheered his ascent – but see the importance of integrity in academia and public life?" The use of "legitmate concern" appears to be wholly unironic.

Tabloid readers are not assumed to be interested in academic plagiarism, but they are interested in the idea that someone may be nicking a living, or that someone is in the wrong social position. The ideological core of tabloidism is the preservation of hierarchies, hence the fawning over royalty, the obsession with fashionability, and the beasting of the socially marginal. Racial hierarchies are important, but they are invariably trumped by class. Arday's problem wasn't that he was a black man in a built-up area but that he didn't look the part of a pillar of the establishment. He wore dreadlocks and casual clothing. You wouldn't mistake him for Trevor Phillips or Trevor McDonald. Had he stayed at Liverpool John Moores University, it's unlikely that the affair would ever have blown up. At worst, Cofnas's allegations would have been taken as evidence that outside the Russell Group standards continue to decline due to the folly of getting more working class kids into higher education.

Though the hounding of Arday was initiated by the Daily Telegraph's attack on him as "Cambridge’s diversity poster boy", the story quickly spread among the other broadsheets, with predictable results. In the Observer, Kenan Malik insisted that Arday's supporters were fuelling the right by taking up the cudgels, a variation on his usual theme that however objectionable the right might be the left has done itself no favours. In The Times, Camilla Long symbolically reclaimed the Cambridge office of the "God-level fabulist and nonsense-monger", while blaming Arday's rise on "privileged, self-hating white people". The Guardian's sanctimonious approach - deploring the racist bigotry while elevating inconsequential plagiarism to a capital crime - was typical of the way that the story fed upon itself. As Will Self noted in a suitably acerbic attack on the media en masse, "evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy."

It is significant that while the British press did what they normally do - crowbarring the story into existing frames about indulged minorities, the decline of academic standards and the corrosive nature of "woke" in universities and cultural production - it was the US press, albeit commissioning British writers like Ditum and Lewis, that emphasised that this was really a story about the media itself. The headline on Ditum's article - "The Press Didn’t Kill Jason Arday" - is a classic of the "My T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt" genre. The headline on Lewis's article - "The Jason Arday Truthers" - was an attempt to construct an opposition in unflattering terms that could be sneered at for its gullibility, in contrast to the ceaseless professional questers for truth in the press corps. Just re-read her description of it: "left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok." Is that a coherent community with shared "truths"? Does it even make sense in its combination of organisations and platforms?

The reason for this transatlantic difference is that the class dimension of the Arday affair has less salience in the US where attacks on Black acdemics have usually targeted middle-class high-achievers whose primary offence is being Black and whose secondary offence is promoting Black Studies. Jason Arday studied race in the context of sociology, but his offence was being appointed as a professor at Cambridge, hence the deflection of blame in Ditum's piece to "The institutional failures that elevated him to Cambridge without vetting his work", which makes it sound like his appointment was almost random, which it clearly was not, as Jason Stanley pointed out at length. At the end of the day, Arday was "not one of us", while the journalists and columnists who hounded him were very much part of the gilded circle of British public life, many of whom went to Oxford or Cambridge. The regret over Arday's death is synthetic, just as it was over Caroline Flack and other victims of press bullying.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous lines from The Great Gatsby are relevant here: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Journalists are not necessarily rich, but they serve the interests of the rich and consequently tend to adopt the same attitudes, most notably condescension towards the opinions of others (recall Helen Lewis's contempt towards Jeremy Corbyn for lauding the artistic abilities of ordinary people), and a refusal to accept responsibility for their own actions. Journalists and opinion-writers tend to flit from job to job, but for this reason they have a strong professional culture, which is why working for the Guardian doesn't make you a different animal: you're still writing to order. 

The traditional cry "Nobody tells us what to write" is true only inasmuch as the profession selects for conformity. As a result, it tends to move like a herd ("competing outlets breaking fresh news", as Helen Lewis put it). Jason Arday's tragedy did not arise from his personal failings or the administrative shortcomings of Cambridge university but simply because he got caught in the path of the herd. If he was at fault, it was in his willingness to put himself in the public eye through press interviews about his appointment and back-story, and in his agreement to publish a triumph-over-the-odds memoir, which was never going to be brutally honest any more than any other celebrity memoir is. Once he realised his mistake, it was too late to get out of the way of the herd and its momentum was too great to avoid the inevitable trampling. Jason Arday wasn't fair game; he was road-kill.