Wolf Hall Gift Shop

Anne Boleyn has left the building. In pieces. Wolf Hall has been a moderately engaging TV series, but the effusiveness of the reviews and the cultural reception has been way over the top. I shall try to provide a corrective. Some of this Mantel-mania is probably nostalgia for the half-remembered BBC costume dramas of the 1970s (a sexed-up Poldark is also in the offing), some is just National Trust lust (everything was suspiciously clean), and some may be the assumption that we are in the presence of Acting (sic).

I've not read Hilary Mantel's books, but I did see the two stage adaptations last summer, which made for an interesting contrast. Portraits of Thomas Cromwell show a bruiser in the mould of Ed Balls. Though leaner, Ben Miles was closer to this, with a loose-limbed gait and accent that suggested both the commoner and the soldier. In contrast, Mark Rylance was too feline, though the screenplay made the most of this in scenes where he quietly watches events, sometimes concealed or paused on the threshold, acting furiously with just his eyes. The moments when he threatened violence were unconvincing. Similarly Nathaniel Parker was a more robust and humorous Henry (like a psycho Sid James, though without the cackle), but Damian Lewis was better at conveying the frustration and capriciousness of the king through tightened lips and flared nostrils.

Though Mantel's tale is built on the manoeuvrings of men, the key theme is the constraints placed on women. Some of this is presented in the form of traditional tropes, such as the treatment of women as pawns in male power plays. In one scene, Anne is physically coerced on a chessboard-like dancefloor by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. At her coronation, she is manipulated like a mannequin. When arrested, she is at a loss how to proceed until instructed by Cromwell. This lack of physical agency is sharpened by contrast with the trope of girls learning to read (the daughters of Cromwell and Thomas More), which represents female empowerment and self-worth. It also suggests the latent power of the next generation of women, which will see first Mary and then Elizabeth, Anne's flame-haired daughter, on the throne.

A second traditional trope is the idea of women's sexuality as destabilising and malevolent: Anne as a witch, Henry "undone" by her wiles, the final accusation of incest etc. Mantel introduces a third, more modern, trope: the sexually autonomous woman. Examples are Johane's initiative to take Thomas to her bed, Mary Boleyn's flirtation with him, and the frisson between Thomas and Anne. Cromwell is shown as attractive and congenial in the company of women, though there is no historical evidence for this. The irony is that the real-life Cromwell's lack of sensitivity to sexual attraction, specifically Henry's dissatisfaction with Anne of Cleves ("She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported"), led to his downfall.

Female sexuality, and particularly its association with blood, is centre-stage: the weak joke that Prince Arthur "had spent the whole night in Spain" brings to mind Catherine of Aragon's vagina; her daughter Mary cannot stand due to her period and is offered a chair by Cromwell (historically improbable - as a royal princess she would have sat anyway); Anne clothed only in a shift on her bed displays her first pregnancy to Cromwell (again, improbable), and her second pregnancy ends with the blood of miscarriage on the floor. On the scaffold, the hands of Anne's female attendants are smeared with her blood as they put her dismembered corpse in the coffin.

As heritage TV, it was inevitable that the series would be used to draw political parallels with the present day, thus continuing a postwar tradition. Geoffrey Elton's 1953 history, The Tudor Revolution in Government, cast Cromwell as a bureaucratic reformer and loyal monarchist, which suited the Butskelite consensus of the 1950s. The reign of ER2 has been marked by a fascination with the Tudors, largely because they are seen as the progenitors of the British Empire (the conquest of Ireland, the Navy Royal, the American colonies), and thus the other book-end. In the 1960s, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons portrayed Cromwell as a scheming and unprincipled parvenu, in contrast to the conscientious and anti-authoritarian Thomas More, which reflected both liberal shibboleths and the unspoken fear of social mobility among the upper middle-class. Bolt's More was cast in the mould of Dietrich Boehoeffer and Martin Niemoller: establishment anti-Nazis.

Today, Martin Kettle see's Mantel's Cromwell as a Machiavellian "fixer", a proto-Blairite navigating a middle road between the "pedestrians" and the "madmen" (it's worth recalling that the original third way, the via media, was the English solution to the conflict of Catholicism and Protestantism - i.e. the Anglican Church). The idea of Thomas More as a man of conscience also lives on, despite Mantel's less sympathetic depiction of him as a prig and a torturer. Trendy vicar Giles Fraser bizarrely claims "when More was declared a saint in 1935, it was partially a powerful and deliberate witness to German Christians to do the same" (i.e. defy power). It was not. More was canonised en masse with 53 other Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation. As the process of canonisation takes decades, the idea that this was a gesture of solidarity in the face of Hitler's ascent to power in 1933 is ridiculous.

Even more bizarre was Larry Elliott's attempt to explain the Eurozone crisis by quoting the economic historian David Landes: "The Protestant Reformation changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure". As Elliott sees it, "Northern and southern Europe started to go their own ways in the 16th century. They had different beliefs, different ways of doing things, different cultures. Half a millennium later this gulf has yet to be bridged: witness the strong sense of protestantism that informs Germany’s attitude towards Greece." Not only does this simplification ignore the common beliefs and methods of contemporaries like Kepler and Galileo, but it also ignores the lasting predominance of Catholics in Bavaria and the Rhineland, the economically most advanced areas of Germany.

In fact, there is ample evidence that the structural differences between Northern and Southern Europe were already entrenched long before the Reformation.  As Comin, Easterly and Gong conclude: "Technology in 1500 AD is associated with the wealth of nations today". As Fernand Braudel pointed out, the major determinant in European history has been the differences between the geography of the North European plain (which includes the bulk of England and Southern Scandinavia) and the North Mediterranean littoral. One could argue that the value-system we call Protestantism grew out of and reflected the economic advantages this geography bestowed - i.e. it was ideological - but to suggest that the wealth of London, Amsterdam and Hamburg arose from their rejection of transubstantiation, rather than their access to sea-lanes, would be nonsense.

Elliott continues: "But these were not the only changes happening. The voyages of discovery by Columbus and Magellan meant the known world was expanding. It was an era of globalisation, with new products available for import and fresh markets opening up". You may have spotted that these voyages were funded by closed and censorious Catholic Spain. The two hundred years between 1400 and 1600 saw the centre of the global economy shift from the Eastern Mediterranean to North Western Europe. The latter was not only best placed for Atlantic trade, but provided access to the Baltic and to Northern European coasts and rivers. This benefited England and The Netherlands most, not just because of their ideal position but because they did not divert significant resources to the now less-rewarding Mediterranean, unlike Spain and France.

Elliott, echoing Landes, believes the mechanism for this bifurcation in economic performance was literacy, as a result of the spread of bible-reading, rather than any intrinsic Protestant work ethic. This is a variation on the human capital theory of economic progress and so reflects modern assumptions. In fact, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that mass-literacy became a factor in economic growth, hence the introduction of universal elementary education in the UK in 1870. From the 16th to the 19th century, few jobs required reading skills and those that did were adequately supplied by the "middling sort" (e.g. Grammar school boys like William Shakespeare). If you were a land-labourer or a mill-worker, being able to read conferred little economic advantage.

Now into his stride, Elliott cannot stop seeing parallels: "Rather like the privatisation programme of the 1980s, the main reason for the assault on the monasteries was financial: Henry was short of money and wanted the funds to fight his expensive wars". Despite his fondness for the joust, Henry was not particularly martial, with wars restricted to short periods at the start and end of his reign. Though these stressed the treasury, this was because of the already high level of expenditure by the spendthrift king on his bloated court and palaces. The dissolution of the monasteries dates to the mid-1530s and was triggered by the Act of Supremacy and Henry's subsequent excommunication by the Pope. There was no pressing military need for cash at the time, though later dissolutions would help fund his 1542-4 campaign in France. The pressure for "privatisation" came from the aristocracy, who wanted to acquire monastic land, and from wealthier merchants seeking social status through the purchase of manorial estates.

The goal of privatisation during the first two Thatcher administrations was not to raise cash - supposedly to pay for unemployment and the Falklands War - but to give the private sector a free-hand in rationalising industries such as steel, shipbuilding and car manufacture (unemployment was paid for by higher tax, chiefly VAT). This changed after the 1987 election as financialisation started to influence policy. During the 1990s there was a clearer parallel with the dissolution of the monasteries as utilities, such as water, energy and the railways, were privatised. This is because the utilities provided guaranteed economic rents, in the same way that land did in the 16th century. The earlier 1980s programme was more akin to asset-stripping, hence the sensitivity of the "selling off the family silver" jibe by Harold Macmillan.

As a tale of sexual and power politics, Wolf Hall (on stage and small-screen) is little more than a superior version of The Tudors. The sense of profound historical change, such as the social ramifications of the dissolution of the monasteries or the economic and geopolitical pivot from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, is entirely absent from the confined world of the court. History is reduced to the conservative notion of inter-generational debt: Cromwell's filial-like loyalty to Wolsey and his paternal concern for Gregory are contrasted favourably with the dynastic instrumentalism of the aristocracy. The hint of a Hobbesian cynicism - man is a wolf to man - is reduced to a tale of justified revenge (against Wolsey's persecutors) and the king's increasingly dangerous delusions. The attempt to draw parallels with modern government and economics, to find significance in the drama of jealousy and ambition, is just a way of excusing a secret pleasure. It's the costumes and the candlelight and the tapestries that we'll remember. And the blood. It's the bling and the terror of power.

Wants and Needs

The question on many people's lips is "What does Vladimir Putin want?", but an equally pertinent question is "What does Roman Abramovich want?" Following the incident on the Paris Metro, when a group of Chelsea fans physically and verbally bullied a black commuter, Jose Mourinho said: "I felt ashamed when I found out but these supporters do not represent the club". Chelsea famously backed club captain John Terry, a player found guilty of racial abuse by the FA, who is nothing if not representative. The club clearly did not regard his behaviour as unacceptable, otherwise they would have sacked him, which has led to some fans now claiming that the Metro chant was in support of the player (the song was originally a response to the fans of opposing teams singing "John Terry, you know what you are" when he was cleared of criminal charges, but it has taken on a life of its own since then). Does the club bear some responsibility for that warped logic?

The words used - "We're racist, we're racist; and that's the way we like it, we like it" - are a claim of authenticity: this is our true nature and we are real Chelsea fans. But "real" here does not mean "representative", in the sense that Mourinho uses that word - i.e. typical, rather it suggests that the true essence of the club is racist (among other things) and that this should be defiantly professed in the face of a hostile world, which includes other, less hardcore Chelsea fans. Stamford Bridge was not a noticeably racist crowd until it was targeted by neo-Nazis in the late 70s and early 80s, and I doubt the crowd are different to the general population now. The problem is that while the sieg-heils and ultra-violence have disappeared, the vocal intimidation and general arseholery have been recuperated by private school-educated dicks pretending they're Cockney geezers. What the reported association with UKIP points to is gentrification as much as bigotry. It's toytown racism.

Let us turn from little blue men in Paris to little green men in Eastern Ukraine. A common view is that "Putin wants to be the man that tears up the post-Cold War settlement a victorious NATO imposed on a pitifully weak Russia". This is an interpretation found across the political spectrum. Many on the left buy in to the idea of "national humiliation" and the psychodrama of the leader striving to restore a people's dignity. This trope (which has already infected commentary on Alex Tsipras and Greece) can be traced back via Castro, Chavez and others to Bolivarism, which in turn has its roots in Bonapartism. Not a good precedent, really. The view from the political centre is that the Russian economy is weak and that Putin's strategy of opportunistic adventurism is intended to shore up domestic support. On the right, conservative "realists" see the half-hearted expansion of NATO as a strategic error by the West: the US should either back off and respect Russia's spheres of interest in its "near abroad" or robustly intervene, not fall between two stools.

Underpinning much of this analysis is the assumption of Russia's innate expansionism. The nineteenth century was marked by the fear of the Bear seizing Istanbul and the Bosphorus, becoming the dominant power in the Balkans, and threatening Britain's position in the Middle East and India (they were expansionist, we were just protecting our interests). The twentieth century was marked by Soviet advances in Eastern and Central Europe, the fear of communist insurgencies worldwide, and the ill-advised gamble in Afghanistan. The subsequent "frozen conflicts" of Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are modest in comparison. The question is whether the Eastern Donbass will go the same way, semi-absorbed into Russia's rust-belt, or whether Putin sees it as a lever for greater control: "The evidence so far is that what Russia actually wants is indirect influence over the whole of Ukraine, and for the West to pay for it". A less cynical view is that "If it holds, the Minsk agreement offers Russia a dignified way of accepting Ukraine's post-Soviet emergence as an independent state."

What most of these views share is a close identification of Putin the person with Russia the state actor. The emphasis on "dignity" is also revealing. In geopolitics, the term is routinely applied in relation to countries whose sense of self-esteem is deemed to exceed economic or military capability. The hegemon tends not to worry about dignity, having the reassurance of power, so setbacks (no matter how disastrous) are marginalised as "embarrassments". The extreme form of this conceit is to find dignity in our defeats (John Rambo was just a latterday Mrs Miniver, but with more troubled hair, while American Sniper is Taxi Driver wrapped in the flag and drained of irony). The belief that others are prey to insecurity leads to the idea that Putin is acting like a truculent teenager who isn't sure what he wants, but knows he needs something to boost his ego. The extreme form of this remote psychoanalysis is the suggestion that Putin might have Asperger's syndrome or be a paedophile, which is from the same stable as Hitler's monorchism. This is calculated disrespect, much like Wolfgang Schauble's patronisation of Syriza.

As the corruption of the Putin regime and its failure to reform the post-90s economy has become ever more apparent domestically, it has been increasingly important to control the media. Short of a North Korean strategy of isolation and paranoia, this requires a narrative to explain foreign bias and hostility. The obvious one is national exceptionalism: Russia is unique and blessed by God, the West is jealous and wants to control Russia's resources, our immediate neighbours are unreliable and ungrateful for everything we've done for them in the past, and domestic critics are working for "them". While the Western media tropes frame this as a reversion to Soviet or Tsarist times, the template is actually modern US exceptionalism. The only real difference is the American delusion that "freedom" is a domestic natural resource more abundant than oil. The important point is that this "nationalism" is focused on influence, not territorial expansion. Today, Russia is no more likely to invade Lithuania than the US is to invade Cuba.

Painting Putin as malevolent and manipulative, together with the claim that Russia is using "hybrid" tactics (i.e. "subversion by a number of means, both military and non-military"), is convenient in discrediting domestic critics in the West, recycling the traditional smears of "Moscow gold" and "useful idiots", a charge broad enough to encompass the Front National, Syriza, various NGOs, and campaigners against fracking and TTIP. This continues the binary basis of Western attitudes to Russia, whereby we simultaneously deride them for their backwardness while attributing great powers of state-sanctioned mischief. The Kremlin's soft power is characterised as a "slick operation", much as the Comintern and KGB were in days of yore, while we assume their economy is so fragile and dependent on primary industries that the oil price fall must cause immense damage, unlike the resilient economies of the US and UK (though a minor chord here is the assumption that Scotland is notionally bankrupt).

Though Russia would obviously prefer NATO to stay the other side of Belarus and Ukraine, and to not expand to Georgia, there is no existential fear. Few think that US or German tanks are going to move East any time soon. Similarly, Russia's intentions  in its "near abroad" look modest. Its policy in the Baltic is focused on neutralising any threat to the Kaliningrad enclave and the Baltic Fleet HQ. In the South West, the fraught relations between Russia and Ukraine originate in the division of the Soviet Black Sea fleet in 1997 and the extension of the Sevastopol base lease. The annexation of Crimea can be framed as righting a historic wrong or simple opportunism, however it is better seen as Russia trying to prevent the erosion of its military position rather than revanchism or expanding its sphere of control. The balance of power in the Black Sea has not fundamentally changed since Turkey joined NATO in 1952, and despite its naval base at Tartus in Syria, Russia is in no position to challenge NATO in the Mediterranean. However the conflict in Ukraine pans out, Russia will be no stronger regionally than it was twenty five years ago.

The period since 1989 has been marked by a series of conflicts that arose due to local or regional instability, some occasioned by the dismantling of Communism (e.g. the Balkans), some by the de-escalation of superpower rivalry (e.g. the civil wars in Somalia and Afghanistan in the 90s), and some by superpower proxies stepping out of line (e.g. Iraq). Arguably, the geostrategic retreat of Russia also played a part in enabling the Arab Spring. The US chose not to support clients such as Mubarak to the hilt (ditto France and Ben Ali in Tunisia), and was repaid by a noticeable lack of anti-Americanism among Egypt's revolutionaries, while Gaddafi's isolation clearly emboldened his enemies before NATO's pivotal intervention. From a Russian perspective, its retreat from the world stage has been destabilising (this can be seen in the tone of exasperation in its statements on Syria and US policy). It therefore seems illogical to assume that Russia is motivated by an opposite goal, i.e. to foster instability in Ukraine.

Despite this wider context of retreat, leavened by noisy but relatively low-risk interventions in the "near abroad", Russia has been described by too many in the West in terms that inevitably (and irrelevantly) call to mind Hitler and appeasement: "Today it is an authoritarian state, with expansionist ambitions, that does not consider itself bound by international treaties and norms. To secure his power at home, Putin has decided to test its limits abroad. Whether it is in Ukraine, or elsewhere, one day we will have to stop him." This is absurd. Russia does not intend to ethnically-cleanse Eastern Europe; it does not plan to annex the Baltic states and so trigger a war with NATO that it knows it would lose; it has no intention of jeopardising the capital assets of its oligarchs in the West; and I'm pretty sure Vladimir Putin has two testicles. Russia may want respect on the international stage, and continued influence in Ukraine, but the last thing it needs is another Cold War and persistent impediments to economic growth, let alone a hotter conflict.

I have no evidence that Roman Abramovich is a racist, but nor have I seen any sign that he is actively anti-racist or that he gives a toss about the issue. Chelsea will go through the necessary motions of condemning racism and banning the Paris Metro supporters and others guilty of racist behaviour, and many Chelsea employees will no doubt be sincere in upholding anti-racist practices, but this is ultimately just "protecting the brand". In this, I'm not suggesting that Arsenal or any other club would have finer motives or a cleaner record, merely noting that there is a clear difference for club owners between wants (win trophies, patronise competitors, preen for your peers) and needs (avoid reputational damage, avoid sanctions by the authorities, expand global commercial operations).

The decision to support John Terry was a pragmatic calculation that his value as a playing asset exceeded the brand damage caused by his retention as club captain. In contrast, the little blue men, like the little green men, are expendable. Chelsea will do all the right things for the return-leg with PSG, the fuss will die down, and Terry will get his testimonial in due course. The fighting in Ukraine will rumble on until either the US ships arms to Kiev or Russia winds back its support for the rebels. A political compromise will either redraw the border and accelerate Ukraine into NATO (probably Kiev's preference) or leave it a confederated and bickering buffer (probably Moscow's preference). Putin will be able to turn either outcome to his account. Abramovich will have no comment.

Institutionalisation

The breakdown of the state in Libya and the BBC documentary Inside the Commons remind us of the central role of institutions in politics. There is a lesson here for the Greek "crisis". In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi sought to entrench his position by abolishing the already weak institutions of the post-colonial state and replacing them with tribal theatrics and empty slogans about direct democracy (the colonel was a strange cross between a Mafia don and Prince Charles). Oil revenues allowed Gaddafi to maintain control by buying-off or undermining opposition and by substituting engineering projects for visible government. The Libyan state collapsed after Gaddafi's death because of the institutional vacuum he created. Still smarting from the mess they made trying to airlift democractic institutions into Iraq, and not forgetting Somalia, the NATO powers now seem happy to keep their distance from a failed state and rely on Egypt to stamp out ISIS.

Michael Cockerell's documentary reveals Parliament to be an ornate stage for bumptious egotists, a workplace in which office politics is work, and an anti-democratic farce that fills MPs' time with absurdly arcane and wasteful procedure. Though he wheels out the usual cliché about the finest club in London, the more obvious template is a leading public school, like the one in Lindsay Anderson's If ... but without the Bren gun. To suggest that this milieu is simply reproduced by the disproportionately public school-educated MPs themselves is to ignore the way that the institution enforces it through physical discipline (rushing, queueing, the narrow corridors), class division (pecking orders, uniforms, insignia), and the competition for privilege (a seat, a better office, an early draw in a ballot). This also reminds us that the prime directive of all institutions is self-preservation.

Much of the form and ritual of the Commons records the historic struggle between Crown and Parliament, thus dignifying MPs, but it also serves to distract attention from the modern exercise of state power, which largely happens elsewhere, and to belittle the subsequent advance of democracy. Calling Jacob Rees-Mogg "the member for the eighteenth century" is more than just a joke. The growth of select committees since 1979 is often presented as a reassertion of backbench power against the executive, but it can also be seen as a triumph of neoliberal managerialism (akin to non-executive directors) in its emphasis on episodic and post-hoc inspection and the extension of its remit to the interrogation of society at large. Confronting industry bigwigs and civil servants after a cock-up or institutional scandal makes good TV, but there is little evidence it leads to better laws.

After an initial flurry of excitement over Yanis Varoufakis's costume, the Greek drama has taken on the familiar shape of a contest between national stereotypes. This is misleading. Though European power struggles are still mediated through councils of national ministers, an institutional form that dates back to the Congress of Vienna, this obscures the real actors. As Michael Pettis notes, "European nationalists have successfully convinced us, against all logic, that the European crisis is a conflict among nations, and not among economic sectors ... The financial crisis in Europe, like all financial crises, is ultimately a struggle about how the costs of the adjustment will be allocated, either to workers and middle class savers or to bankers, owners of real and financial assets, and the business elite". The institutions of the EU clearly privilege the latter, which necessitates a narrative of national immorality to justify austerity to the former.

The flattening of borrowing rates occasioned by monetary union led to large flows of capital to the periphery. The scale of this was due to the high rate of corporate and household savings in the core (the product of low wage growth inflating profits and low consumption by savers) and high demand for property investment at the edges. The institutional weakness has often been characterised as a lack of fiscal union to match monetary union, but it would be more accurate to say that what was missing was adequate capital controls, the common feature of all financial crises since the 1980s. To blame this on an individual nation is meaningless. As Pettis notes, "As long as a country has a large number of individuals, households, and business entities, it does not require uniform irresponsibility, or even majority irresponsibility, for the economy to misuse unlimited credit at excessively low interest rates".

Sovereign states that faced a debt crisis after 2009 did so because the public sector bailed out the private sector, i.e. the government nationalised regional and national bank losses, following local property market busts and write-offs due to the global banking crisis of 2008. This applied across the EU (notably the UK) and not just within the Eurozone. Greece was atypical because it had an excessive level of public debt before monetary union, as a result of historic institutional corruption, and because that same institutional failure prevented the scale of the debt being revealed until 2009. Just as the institutional failure of the banks was transformed into an issue of public debt and the need for austerity at the national level, so the institutional failure of Greece became a justification for enforced "structural reforms" across the Eurozone.

Paradoxically, the EU's chief ally for thoroughgoing structural reform in Greece is Syriza. The Greek government are not about to implement a socialist command economy, and have further emphasised their pragmatism by nominating a former New Democracy minister as president. The dispute (and thus the basis of a deal) is over the type and sequence of structural reform. While both sides will be keen to improve tax-collection and root out corruption, the Troika also want to push ahead with measures to open up the Greek economy to international big capital. Syriza's push back against this reform may actually make a lot of sense if the institutional capability isn't in place to support privatisation and deregulation without widespread abuse. This is precisely the lesson learnt from Russia in the 1990s. In other words, the Troika's policy may be contradictory if it seeks to simultaneously reduce the power of oligarchs and advance the transfer of assets from the public to the private sector.

Though the Greek state is notorious for feather-bedding and backhanders, it would be wrong to imagine that it has not improved over the last three decades through exposure to EU norms. Like Spain and Portugal, Greece has been engaged in a gradual evolution of the state since the end of military rule in 1974, an endeavour that advances one coffin at a time (it is worth remembering that it took 40 years to extirpate the institutional remnants of Nazism in Germany). The European goal in respect of Greece should not be the paying-down of its debt (which nobody believes can happen in full, at least not this century), nor the deregulation of its economy (which would happen gradually anyway), but the normalisation of its institutions. In effect, Greece's "institutionalisation" within the EU.

As Thomas Piketty notes, "Institutions do not arise out of harmonious societies populated by representative agents; they arise out of unequal societies and out of conflict." This suggests that now is the ideal time to achieve genuine institutional reform in Greece, not just because of the obvious need but because Syriza is probably best placed to effect reforms given its lack of institutional baggage and its appetite for conflict with Greek elites. The Troika's insistence on premature structural reforms that favour big capital and financial interests, such as privatisation and market deregulation, is probably the biggest threat to achieving that reform.

I don't subscribe to the view that the EU wants to impose a Carthaginian peace on Greece, pour encourager les autres, so I remain optimistic about a deal that would both ease austerity and advance institutional reform, but I also recognise that there will be no admission that austerity was a false prospectus so we can expect the rhetoric about national responsibility to continue. The irony of the years since 2009 is that the institutional bias of the EU towards the interests of bankers, big capital and the asset-rich has, through the instrumentality of fiscal austerity, boosted national identity. This in turn has created political space for the far right and Europhobes more generally, and thereby put the cause of "ever closer union" back a generation. Austerity at least makes the EU's priorities clear.

Raging Bull

In terms of the Overton Window, the idea of a basic income has moved from unthinkable to radical in recent years. Though Natalie "Turbine" Bennett fumbled the chance to push it towards acceptable in her notorious bout with Andrew "Slugger" Neil, it would be wrong to see this as a setback. The basic income was always going to be treated as a risible undercard before the big election fight, and the socio-economic forces driving it aren't going away. Where the Greens went wrong was in proposing a revenue-neutral scheme that matched the current cost of selective benefits (in this they were influenced by the Citizens Income Trust's 2013 proposal for a £71 weekly income). This means starting the debate from the wrong place, both because existing benefits may not be adequate or well-targeted (or even fully taken up) and because a benefit-substitute case ignores the wider role of the basic income in society and the economy.

The Greens' proposed weekly basic income of £72 is equivalent to the current adult income support and JSA rates. Since 1980, unemployment benefit has been up-rated in line with prices, excluding housing costs, rather than earnings. While median wage growth has been stagnant, this obscures two countervailing trends: the increase in real housing costs and the fall in real commodity prices. The end result is that the ratio of benefits to wages has roughly halved from 20% in 1970 to 10% now. The Greens' proposed basic income is little more than the minimum deemed necessary to avoid destitution, rather than the basis for a flourishing life, and thus the principle of less eligibility in modern guise. A scheme that merely substitutes for inadequate benefits is not worthy of the name. A universal basic income must be driven by human dignity, not administrative efficiency or parsimony.

The decline of unemployment benefit since 1980 also emphasises the importance of the uprating mechanism chosen for the basic income, a topic on which the Greens have been notably quiet. The level of income must be sufficient not only to avoid poverty but to enable a minimum of self-respect (e.g. buying new clothes occasionally and yes, a flat-screen TV and some booze), which means closer to £150. If the basic income were to be tied to prices (excluding housing), then its value relative to wages would progressively decline. Linking it to median wages would be better, however continuing job polarisation means that median wages will grow more slowly than average wages (because of higher growth at the top of the wage scale), so a basic income will not reduce inequality beyond the initial recalibration.

Unlike organised labour or universal suffrage, a basic income cannot address the social relations of capital and labour, in the sense that it provides no mechanism for the democratic control of capital. In particular it provides no mechanism to control the "social dividend" of economic growth - i.e. how productivity gains are divided between capital (profit), labour (wages) and society at large (the basic income plus pro-social taxation). If the basic income is to escape the straitjacket of "welfare", it needs to directly address the issue of uprating and thus the question of how we divide the fruits of growth. Given their growth-averse principles, you can see why the Greens might be shy on this point.

Instead of following the sterile lead of the mainstream media and quibbling about whether a particular scheme would be "affordable", it is worth looking at the wider arguments in favour of a basic income in light of these three key aspects: personal dignity, the distribution of the fruits of growth, and the social relations of capital and labour. Here are ten arguments that I think are worth thinking through. A basic income would ...

1. Allow us to "rethink how and why we work" and "reward unpaid contributions" --- This is essentially an argument focused on self-actualisation and esteem, which assumes that basic needs (food, shelter, safety etc) are taken care of. It tends to be people of independent means who can afford to rethink how and why they work. On £72 a week, you probably can't afford the travel costs and incidentals to do much volunteering, let alone buy a converted windmill in Suffolk and set yourself up as an artisan baker. That said, this is not a bad argument, but it might be better reformulated as: a basic income would reduce anxiety and depression and help raise levels of life satisfaction. This might have a greater positive impact on the NHS than any mangerial reform.

2. Make workers more choosy --- There's an ethical argument for giving everyone sufficient power to choose their circumstances, but we should recognise that for most people this is a matter of being able to desert a shitty employer rather than give up work altogether (there is much truth in the maxim that people don't leave jobs, people leave people). Just as most of us don't want to be entrepreneurs, so few of us want to be lonely potters or unappreciated watercolourists. A basic income would encourage employers to either improve conditions or invest in automation, both of which would boost productivity. Ironically, the greater resilience of workers between periods of employment might also allow for more labour market flexibility - i.e. we might see easier hiring and firing as well as greater labour bargaining power. It may not sound like much, but allowing workers to be "more choosy" might have a profoundly energising impact on the economy.

3. Enable lifelong learning --- This presumes that sufficient course places are available and can be provided for free (or near-free). It is unlikely that enough teachers would volunteer to run such courses for no pay, and there would still be the cost of facilities to cover, so this seems like wishful-thinking. In practice, this would bias heavily towards MOOCs (massively open online courses), which means a lot of this learning would be on a par with watching Countdown. I'm not being dismissive in saying this, merely noting that we can't all sign up for tutorials with Mary Beard. I suspect the reality would be a combination of self-study and volunteer-led symposia (so pretty much like a book club). Again, the biggest benefit might be seen in health and happiness.

4. Encourage education and training --- The "human capital" argument assumes that a more educated society will lead to a higher-skilled economy and thus higher wages and tax revenues, however the evidence of recent years is that the returns to education (outside of elite institutions) are declining. What a basic income might do is enable more workers to go part-time in order to pursue skills training. With more eighteen years olds prepared to opt for a gap-decade, start a business, or acquire a degree in parallel with work, a basic income might help redress the traditional imbalance between vocational and academic education. The outcome might be a lot more disruptive of the higher education sector than MOOCs.

5. Reduce bureaucracy and benefit fraud --- Given the number of means-tested benefits that would remain, such as for children, housing and disability, it isn't obvious that a basic income would reduce either substantially. Income support, JSA and pension credit (which would be replaced by a basic income) together account for 37% of all benefit fraud. The big-ticket item is housing benefit (27%), which is only going to be reduced through building a lot more homes (to push down rents) and/or by providing rent-free social housing. As a rule, arguments for a basic income should focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency.

6. Redistribute the fruits of technological progress --- The argument for this is a variation on the "standing on the shoulders of giants" meme, but with the added recognition that every innovator depends not only on his or her intellectual predecessors but on the contribution made by contemporary society as a whole to innovation (e.g. taxes invested in education and infrastructure). This is also an argument that addresses the classic problem of luck - i.e. the idea that financial rewards may only be partially attributable to the recipient's talent or hard work and that a portion is down to "right place, right time". By redistributing some of the rewards through the social dividend of a basic income, everybody gets to share in that luck, which is another way of saying that we ameliorate bad luck or disadvantage.

7. Encourage entrepreneurialism and innovation --- A basic income de-risks the choice of the individual to start a business or develop an innovation. It should be stressed that this is less about providing "seed corn" (£150 a week won't go far) than instilling confidence. Conversely, a basic income might help prolong the life of inefficient micro-businesses that would otherwise go to the wall. On balance, the trivial sums make this a trivial issue. The greater benefit is likely to be the support provided to innovation. With the cost of research and development in many areas falling due to the impact of software and the advance of "maker" technologies, the basic income could lead to a significant expansion of the "garage" sector of the economy. Though only a small fraction of these innovations will be successful, the aggregate impact could be large.

8. Encourage social cohesion and strengthen democracy --- Social cohesion is an argument for a universal, unconditional flat-rate basic income scheme, as opposed to either a narrow substitute for benefits (i.e. a dole) or a negative income tax that tapers the basic income to zero for higher incomes (and thereby divides society into classes). The negative income tax approach is favoured by the right and is bound up with lower tax and greater self-reliance, i.e. severely curtailed public services. There is a danger that the basic income could weaken democracy, specifically if an increase in taxation on higher-paid workers leads to support for the right-wing claim that those who pay tax should have greater rights over fiscal policy than those who depend solely on the basic income ("no representation without taxation").

9. Provide a fiscal stimulus --- The higher marginal propensity to spend of those on lower incomes means that a basic income would probably increase aggregate demand, but only if it distributes from rich to poor. An income neutral scheme, such as the Green Party's proposal, wouldn't. A persistent increase in aggregate demand means lower income inequality, and the basic income is just one way of achieving this. The problem with the stimulus argument is that there are (arguably easier) alternatives means to the same end, such as increasing the value of benefits, which would keep us stuck in the paradigm of welfare.

10. Reduce inequality --- Beyond any initial redistribution through the introduction of a basic income and the reform of the tax code, a basic income could be redistributive via two uprating mechanisms. First, if the combined growth dividend for the basic income and for wages exceeds the dividend for profits, this will gradually shift the balance from capital to labour (in this definition, "labour" includes the basic income and workers gain the combined benefit). Second, the growth dividend for wages could be split between cash (to cover price inflation) and reduced working time. Combined with a maximum working week that was gradually reduced (thus encouraging further productivity growth), this would progressively narrow the spread in income between the bottom and top deciles of the income scale.

A basic income worth fighting for would be one that increases personal dignity, progressively distributes the fruits of growth across society, and redresses the current imbalance in power between capital and labour. Insofar as the details have been worked through, the Green Party proposal does none of these things. Advocating a revenue-neutral scheme without any progressive uprating mechanism entrenches poverty, undermines the social benefits of a basic income, and leaves the proposal vulnerable to potentially pernicious alternatives such as a negative income tax. If nothing else, this should make the conservative roots of Green policy even more obvious. Just as a basic income scheme cannot be designed in isolation from the wider tax system, so it is naive to imagine it is unrelated to working hours and housing affordability. A basic income must be transformative, not apologetic. Seconds out; round two.

The Monetary Policy Committee

The Chancellor's announcement of the extension of pensioner bonds should remind us that the UK's Monetary Policy Committee is now a triumvirate of George Osborne, David Cameron and Lynton Crosby. The meetings chaired by Mark Carney at Threadneedle Street are a masquerade.

One of the key neoliberal reforms of New Labour was granting the Bank of England operational independence in 1997, which meant the ability to set interest rates. But this hasn't removed the pressure on politicians to ensure adequate returns for savers. Instead, it has led to a displacement whereby government seeks to pull other policy levers to produce the same effect. Given that many of these levers target specific electoral blocs, rather than the economy as a whole, there is an obvious risk of bad policy due to preferential treatment. In this sense, Osborne's commitment on pensioner bonds is consistent with his reform of pension and annuity rules and the continuing constraint on housebuilding.

Unconventional monetary policies - such as QE and negative deposit rates - give the impression that central bankers have been actively managing the economy, but the macroeconomic impact has been slight because these measures don't address the shortfall in aggregate demand. Dramatic monetary interventions announced by central bankers serve as a distraction from the continuation of fiscal policies that favour the rich and penalise public investment. Though most people recognise that what the global economy needs is higher wages in the West, lower profits (to stimulate productivity growth), and increased infrastructure investment (outside China), governments remain committed to austerity and the preservation of existing wealth. QE is better than sitting on your hands, but not much.

Ageing populations mean that more and more people expect to live off the income of savings, in the form of pensions, equities or property assets. But long-term interest rates have been trending down from 6% in the early 80s to near-zero now. This, together with the growing surplus of capital over the same period, has inflated bubbles in property and commodities as savers have sought alternatives to declining deposit rates. The problem is that the property and commodity markets are now either flat or out of the reach of modest savers, while deposit rates look likely to remain near zero for the foreseeable future. The extension of pensioner bonds is not merely a pre-election giveaway, it's an admission that adequate returns for savers can only be achieved by selective government intervention. It is this intervention, rather than concerns over increased public debt or vote-buying, that really bothers the free-market right.

The central fallacy of public debate in the UK is that the national economy is equivalent to a self-reliant household. This is obviously absurd on many levels - if we all followed the maxim "neither a borrower nor a lender be", the economy would collapse - but the persistence of the metaphor in government speeches is not due to a lack of imagination but rather its ideological value in emphasising the ideal of wealth preservation. The salience of inheritance and the "mansion tax" serve the same purpose. But the paradox is that the majority of people to whom this moral fable appeals do not own any real wealth, let alone a mansion. What most of them are concerned about are low returns on modest savings and pensions, hence the attraction of pensioner bonds. Logically, modest savers should be in favour of high public debt - i.e. a low-risk buyer of their loanable funds, such as a government that can print its own money - which again does much to explain the testiness of the right on this issue.

The fact that public debt is high but interest rates are low suggests that the former is not having a negative impact on the economy, so we should not make debt reduction a priority, regardless of the "fix the roof when the sun is shining" nonsense. If low interest rates are fundamentally due to the combined effects of a worldwide savings glut and a lack of demand for capital, then it isn't going to rain any time soon.  The wealthy are not bothered by low rates for savers or low aggregate investment as they are focused on arbitrage between different asset classes - i.e. getting an above-average return due to market privilege, which can be further amplified through tax avoidance. What they don't want is confiscatory taxation, hence the antipathy to public spending and the insistence on austerity. Though it may upset the purists at the IEA, the pensioner bond is a small price to pay if it buys enough votes to maintain the stranglehold of the wealthy on the monetary policy committee.

A Place of Greater Safety

One of the sub-plots of the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall is the story of the English Reformation, with freedom of conscience and expression represented by the Tyndale Bible that James Bainham dares to read out loud in church. Another sub-plot concerns Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent", whose prophecies and media profile made her the Myleene Klass of her day; that is until her objection to Henry's divorce, delivered on the threshold of Canterbury Cathedral, set in train a process that would bring her to the scaffold. Following her prophecy that Henry will die within a year if he marries Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell questions her in passing and determines that she is, as he cynically suspected, merely a front for scheming Catholic monks. What these two (historically inaccurate) scenes highlight is the relationship between speech and place.

It might seem odd in the age of social media that the politics of free speech should still be tied to physical spaces, but that seems to be the case to judge by the number of media articles in recent years bemoaning the revival of political correctness on campuses and the boycotting of localised cultural events, such as art exhibitions and even film releases (The Interview and Fifty Shades of Grey have this much in common). Some of this is just the banging of an old drum, such as Nick Cohen accusing the academic left of being anti-liberal and indulging religious fanaticism, thereby departing from the teachings of the True Church as laid down by The Blessed George Orwell. But a more interesting angle has been the criticism of the idea of "safe spaces" - i.e. the designation of particular places, such as colleges, as free from prejudice and hate-speech.

The concept of "safe spaces" developed in the womens' movement of the 1960s, US educational desegregation in the same decade, and the post-Stonewall gay movement of the 1970s. The idea was to create refuges from offensive behaviour. This was a particular priority in institutions where different groups came together (and potentially into conflict) and where access was considered a right or even a privilege, such as schools and colleges. The conventional view is that "Safe spaces is a direct corollary of the rise of identity politics. As the essentially economic argument between right and left died down, it was replaced by a culture war in which gender, sexuality and race were at the heart of the discussion". In practice, identity politics are commoditised (you realise your identity through consumption), and the financialisation of education has made students more demanding customers, so the claim that the "culture war" is not an economic issue is dubious.

Some critics have characterised safe spaces as a corruption of the idea of "no platform", claiming that a student union policy originally focused on denying legitimacy to speakers deemed racist or fascist has been extended to a blanket ban on anyone holding views objectionable to any minority on campus. The picture this criticism paints is of independent thinkers being silenced by a powerful, hyper-sensitive thought-police. It is not clear how they have acquired this power. The media coverage makes it look like a much bigger problem than it is, largely because the independent thinkers turn out to be journalists or their media mates who have been called out for sloppy thinking or professional trolling. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen speaks at the Cambridge Union: you can never find a thought-policeman when you want one.

Defenders of safe spaces have tended to characterise the concept as a matter of personal security rather than public speech, focusing on the "microaggressions" than can "trigger" emotional trauma. It is very easy for this language to slip into the realm of the ridiculous, and there is no shortage of "political correctness gone mad" tales to suit every prejudice, but perhaps the telling point is the characterisation of students as "vulnerable young people" who must be sheltered from the world. This has obvious echoes of the academy prior to the 1960s, much as the safe space policies of colleges are reminiscent of the old rules on propriety that were defied in that decade (and which remind us that colleges originated in religious orders). Though the intentions may be benign, safe spaces are inescapably discriminatory: separating the sheep from the goats, the in from the out. The sanctuary becomes an exclusive club, which tells us that what is ultimately being valued here is property, not sensitivity.

It is always worth asking, whenever the topic of "political correctness" comes up, what real power is being exercised. Colleges do not implement safe space policies because the administrators are intimidated by a handful of transsexuals, but because such policies allow them to neutralise dissent and numb students. As one academic put it: "When first-years come in, they’re still quite feisty. But by the time they get to third year they've absorbed the culture". That culture will extend seamlessly to the corporate world in the form of diversity policies, so colleges are clearly continuing to fulfil their role in socialising middle and working-class students. In contrast, upper-class students continue their tradition of rugby and dining club outrages, appropriated "laddism", and the provocative booking of speakers such as Le Pen. The lesson is that the rules don't apply to the ruling class.

Safe spaces have come to the fore as an object of media attack not because they are particularly threatening or growing in influence but because they provide a vector for the liberal assault on political correctness. Though PC was largely an invention of the reactionary right in America, it has become a convenient target for neoliberals as "reform" and financialisation has moved into academia. This is similar to the way that PC has become a bogey in respect of local government. For example, Louise Casey's report on Rotherham Council's handling of child sex abuse has been greeted as an attack on "misplaced political correctness", despite the ample evidence that the failure occurred because of a lack of sensitivity by the council and police, not because of an excess of it (as one senior officer quoted in the report said of the councillors, "They couldn’t be further from politically correct. They were bullies, they were sexist"). The issue in Rotherham centres on taxi-drivers and a lack of empathy by the authorities. The solution is a Whitehall takeover. Go figure.

The liberal assault on political correctness in academia is more advanced in the US than the UK, so it's worth looking over the pond to see what we can expect here. According to Jonathan Chait (a sort of American Nick Cohen), "political correctness is not a rigorous commitment to social equality so much as a system of left-wing ideological repression. Not only is it not a form of liberalism; it is antithetical to liberalism. Indeed, its most frequent victims turn out to be liberals themselves". Chait is only too well aware that PC was developed by conservatives who wanted a deniable means of abusing blacks after the 1960s, so he executes a textbook dual-house-plague manoeuvre: "Actual communists hid their noxious beliefs under the guise of anti-McCarthyism in exactly the same way that actual racists hide their beliefs in the guise of anti-political-correctness". This is a hegemonic argument that insists that extremists are blinded by "beliefs" (liberals are empiricists) and that social equality and repression are barely distinguishable. Liberalism is all, and what that means in practice is conservatism (i.e. conserving our time-honoured liberties).

While the neoliberal order values diversity and tolerance, because they are economically efficient, it has no interest in challenging privilege that is not egregiously inefficient. The American liberal defence of free speech has been a defence of existing privilege ever since the Pilgrim Fathers. Chait's critique of PC builds a strawman in which academia and social media are dominated by Marxisant theory and feminists, which Henry Farrell accurately dismisses as absurd trolling: "University administrations are largely indifferent to the siren call of post modernism and (except where serious scandal is threatened) feminist issues on campus. In contrast, they are exquisitely sensitive to the interests of funders (whether it be the state, large donors, or both) and members of their boards of trustees, very few of whom are concerned with combating racial and sexual injustice ... The turn of the cultural left to Twitter is a reflection of its weakness on university campuses, not its strength".

What I think the attack on safe spaces reflects is the growing commercialisation of universities and colleges of further education. The right not to be "triggered" has become a privilege that you are paying £9k a year for. In this sense, a safe space is starting to look like a Pall Mall club. The neoliberal impatience with safe spaces reflects the desire for university vice-chancellors to start acting like the CEOs they are: dictating policy (after consultation, of course) and cutting through the crap, whether that is antiquated vested interests or "misguided political correctness". The phrase "A Place of Greater Safety", which was used by Hilary Mantel as the title of her historical novel about the French Revolution, refers to the grave. A grave is an exclusive property. Though your freshly-minted degree may not get you a job that pays enough to afford a mortgage, you can at least save up for that one small plot of earth.

Segregation Tomorrow

Transport for London has confirmed that work will shortly begin on segregated "cycle superhighways" in Central London, due for completion in 2016, augmenting the fragmented blotches of blue paint that currently claim to do the job on some of the capital's roads. There will be an East-West route from Tower Hill to Acton, and a North-South route from King's Cross to Elephant & Castle, the two interconnecting at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge. No doubt the new MP for Uxbridge will be the first to try them out, probably on the longer Acton to Tower Hill route, which will allow for a photo opportunity at Parliament Square followed by lunch in The City. We can only hope the name "Boris lanes" does not catch on.

Coincidentally, the free marketeers at the IEA have issued a proposal to convert various urban rail lines into busways, i.e. dedicated, single-lane roads for high-capacity buses. Leaving aside their ideological antipathy to railways as natural monopolies that the state cannot avoid managing, their case is perfectly rational viewed in terms of minimising cost and maximising carrying capacity, but it will disappear without much trace. The same cost-benefit rationale would indicate that segregated cycle lanes are the worst possible use of a scarce resource, but the odds are that the current plans will lead to more routes in future. So why is it that the political establishment in London is (broadly) keen on cycleways but not on busways?

Carrying capacity (the number of passengers who can pass a specific point in a given period) is essentially a factor of the speed and size of vehicles. Generally speaking, the faster a mode of transport, the lower the capacity because of increased stopping distances (the stopping distance increases by the square of the increase in speed). You can potentially offset this reduction if you increase vehicle size, subject to aerodynamic drag. It is difficult to do this for trains due to the constraints of existing infrastructure (low bridges and limits on platform extension in urban areas), so high-speed railways inevitably end up being premium services enjoyed by the few. Conversely, the high capacity of the Tube is largely down to the relatively slow speeds dictated by short runs between stations and Victorian engineering.

Buses are potentially higher capacity than trains because of better braking (rubber on tarmac is superior to steel on steel) and upper decks (assuming you avoid low bridges and trees). The problem is that they are in competition for road space with cars and lorries, though this is elsewhere an advantage in that they can flexibly serve low-use routes - e.g. minibuses in rural areas. Railways have the advantage of dedicated corridors in urban areas by which they can carry relatively large numbers quickly into and out of city centres. Without this, nobody would ever build a railway (of course, without railways, you can't easily build large cities). Aeroplanes are far cheaper over longer distances (you don't have to build sky), but their capacity is constrained by speed, distance from urban centres and limited runways, as well as externalities such as noise and air pollution.

A dedicated busway makes sense in terms of capacity, but it is also attractive (to a certain mindset) because it creates two classes of road: mass transit for the majority in parallel with mixed-use roads for a minority who can afford tolls (e.g. the congestion charge). As with most libertarian fantasies, this boils down to segregation. The problem with converting existing railways to busways is that the tracks used by commuter trains are also often used in part by inter-city trains. Where routes aren't mixed use, they've usually been incorporated into light-rail systems already (e.g. the Overground in London). Where busways have been implemented, they are usually new-builds in expanding cities where land values are relatively cheap (e.g. South America).

Arguably, a better approach for London would be to convert existing roads to dedicated busways (the logical extension of bus-lanes), but that would be inconvenient for car and van-drivers, which is why the IEA doesn't argue for it. This reluctance to offend drivers is matched by the popularity of trains with the middle-classes, which together limits the potential for the re-purposing of either roads or railways. This in turn explains why schemes that carve out road capacity for cycling can only succeed where they clearly benefit the influential upper middle classes, which is why a cycleway between The City and Acton (crossing Hyde Park and skirting Notting Hill) is being referred to admiringly by both the cycle lobby and the Evening Standard as "Crossrail for bikes". The shorter North-South route will cement the gentrification of Elephant & Castle.

Cycleways are low capacity. High-capacity platoon cycling, i.e. where everybody chugs along in a group at a common speed, was the norm before mass car-ownership but is now a distant memory, even in China. In an environment with vehicles travelling at different speeds, the fastest effectively dictates the carrying capacity because of the natural desire to maintain safe distances (the proposed TfL routes are two-way, i.e. you have to avoid on-coming traffic). Once you get racing bikes, mountain bikes and fixed-gear bikes on the roads - the result of wealth plus concerns over fitness and the environment - you reduce carrying capacity due to competition. This is not just testosterone, but the result of the plurality of bike capabilities, personal objectives (working up a sweat versus transport) and attitudes towards risk (exemplified in jumping lights, which will still be a problem with segregated routes that intersect with roads and pedestrian crossings).

Because of modern cycling manners, the per capita capacity demanded by cyclists will always be in excess of other modes of transport. This is a triumph of the individual over the collective, and thus an inefficient use of road space and transport spending. Cycling has become popular with politicians not just because it is seen an environmentally-friendly, with the added cultural bonus of an image that mixes the common touch, the fashionable and the slightly lairy, but because it is emblematic of constant striving and individual achievement. Like marathon running, it is an exemplary neoliberal mode of transport - i.e. elitist and antisocial (this is sidestepped by cyclists who habitually cast themselves as victims). Whereas segregation once meant denying access to others, now it means opting out. Arguably, it has done ever since the 1960s.

Cycle superhighways are part of the emerging urban transport environment in which segregation between different modes in city centres is not just a practical necessity but a means of status identification - i.e. a privilege. The further expansion of the segregated cycle network in London will depend on the reduction of existing road traffic, which may be achieved through a combination of autonomous vehicles (Uber increasingly looks like a stepping-stone) and more expensive tolls. Once, the chief difference between urban and suburban transport was underground. In the future, it will be overground. The city gates of old will be reintroduced, just further out.

Looking on the Bright Side

My last post on Arsenal, in early December, suggested that we were likely to improve significantly over the coming months as the squad settled down and injuries abated. This didn't require a crystal ball. A bumpy start to the season was always likely, given the after-effects of the World Cup and the time required to integrate new first-choice players - a process made more difficult by the international breaks in October and November as well as the many injuries. It is no coincidence that this improvement has happened after the Champions League and Euro qualifiers went into hibernation, and may also owe something to our early exit from the League Cup. The team looks to be benefiting from more time on the training ground, with reports of Alexis Sanchez's appetite for work being emblematic of more than just the Chilean's personality.

Though we've had to accommodate new absences since the start of December (Wilshere, Arteta and Debuchy), they've been in areas where we have been able to backfill competently, while the returns (Giroud, Ozil and Walcott) have significantly improved our attacking options. The progress of Hector Bellerin has vindicated Arsene Wenger's decision to let Carl Jenkinson go on loan, while the recall of Francis Coquelin has shown that a loan spell isn't a one-way ticket, a point worth remembering in respect of Joel Campbell as well as the Gooner full-back (on the other hand, Lukas Podolski already feels a distant memory, despite his popularity among the fans). The young Catalan has quickly become a fan favourite, though this, like the improvement in Monreal's reputation, owes much to a more solid midfield providing cover and freeing up the full-backs to attack.

As shown against Man City and Villa, the side now has a balance that allows it to sit back more and safely cede possession. This is being hailed as "flexibility" by the pundits, the "plan B" having apparently gone out of fashion, though we shouldn't forget that Wenger has been routinely criticised for being inflexible in the past. The solidity of the midfield owes much to Cazorla's workrate in a central role, effectively dividing the job previously done by Arteta between himself and Ramsey. With Coquelin happy to sit deep, Arsenal look less likely to be caught by balls behind the full-backs. This suggests that Sanchez will come back into the side at the expense of either Ozil or Walcott, rather than revert the midfield from a threesome to a pair. Add in Oxlade-Chamberlain and you've got four quality players to perm for two positions. Giroud and Wellbeck (plus the eager Chuba Akpom) offers rotation up front. Altogether we're looking healthy at the sharp end, which explains the Campbell and Podolski loans and the sale of Benik Afobe.

Rosicky, Wilshere and Flamini provide alternatives for the central midfield three (with Arteta to come), and we now appear to have (touch wood) enough cover at the back with the addition of Gabriel. Though the simultaneous loss of Mertesacker and Koscielny remains a risk, we're no longer skating on such thin ice, not least because Monreal (and briefly Debuchy) have shown that gaps can be plugged. Calum Chambers, who has looked a bit of a square peg at times, is likely to benefit more from time on the training pitch now than from games. Though not a straight positional swap, Krystian Bielik looks like he may be the long-term replacement for Abou Diaby in the squad, though preferably on the pitch rather than the treatment table (you have to suspect the Frenchman's Arsenal career may end in the summer when his contract is up).

The one blemish over the last 8 weeks was the defeat at Southampton (the point away at Anfield was tolerable in the circumstances), which owed a lot to Szczesny's poor decision-making. The promotion of David Ospina appears to have had a calming effect on the defence, while prompting a bizarrely orgasmic chant from the crowd (which is already getting a bit wearing). The media focus on the crafty fag in the shower (which sounds idiotic on so many levels) is perhaps Wenger's way of making a deliberate point about the Pole's immaturity. Ospina's four straight clean-sheets ought to be even more salutary (Szczesny conceded in each of his last 7 games before being dropped). Wenger's willingness to put the Pole's nose out of joint is also a clear message to the rest of the squad that no one can coast. The undemonstrative Colombian, as much as the hyperactive Chilean, may be indicative of the new Arsenal.

There will no doubt be further cock-ups, but over the course of the next 18 weeks you'd expect our overall performance to be closer to the last 8 weeks than the preceding 16 weeks from August through November. The draw of Monaco in the Champions League gives us our best chance to progress beyond the last 16 since 2010, while progress in the FA Cup against Middlesborough looks achievable. I doubt both Chelsea and Man City will implode, and the gap of 11 points looks too much to make up over 15 games, so third is still a reasonable target, probably around 76 points. Manure have gathered points without playing well, but I can't see them playing worse, so it will be tight at the end. Neither Southampton nor Spurs look like they've got the legs to finish in the top four.

Overall, we're starting to see the promise visible last season bear fruit, while the squad reinforcements have provided greater flexibility and depth. We probably still need another couple of players next summer, bearing in mind that Mertesacker doesn't look like the sort of defender capable of continuing into his mid-30s at the top level (he'll be 31 in September), and I suspect that one or both of Arteta and Flamini are likely to be released within the next 18 months. Now that the money tap has been de-iced, buying proven quality looks well within budget. Expect rumours about Mats Hummels and Lars Bender to start circulating once the transfer window closes.

We may not win anything this season, and may finish with fewer league points than last - which could lead to more anti-Wenger ranting over the summer - however I think we're heading in the right direction and should be capable of mounting a serious title challenge before the manager's current contract expires. On the other hand, and indulging my inner optimist, this could be the season when we finally overcome the memory of Paris 2006. A final in Berlin against Bayern Munich would be fun, particularly if Ozil can spare us the need for penalties.