In Praise of the Ratio

I'm not particularly interested in the specifics of the grime artist Wiley's antisemitic remarks, though I would note that it appears to have arisen out of a beef with his Jewish manager, so the best background reading might be James Baldwin's 1967 essay, 'Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White', which explains the material factors at work, rather than anything printed of late in The Voice or The Jewish Chronicle. What stood out was the way that a viral online campaign, #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate, saw people who have whined about "cancel culture" in the past clamouring for Wiley's cancellation by Twitter. As the hashtag indicates, this is not simply about "Jew hate" but more significantly the refusal of a "safe space". That was evident by the number of career cyberbullies, mostly emanating from the political right and centre, who loudly participated in a 48-hour boycott of the platform. While many of their erstwhile targets (i.e. the left) celebrated the sudden arrival of peace and tranquility in their timelines (it didn't make that much difference, if we're honest), some felt obliged to join the boycott.

The point here is not the routine hypocrisy or the willingness of some on the left to fall in line with the civility police to demand better gatekeeping, but the obsession with Twitter. The microblogging site is not big in social media terms, with around 330 million users compared to Facebook's 2.5 billion and Instagram's 1 billion, but it enjoys a disproportionately high profile in public discourse. This is both because it is popular with people who work in both old and new media and, not unrelatedly, because its ability to generate controversial content makes it a prime source for recycling by that old media. Facebook may be regarded as more sinister in its manipulative ambitions to know everything about you, but Twitter is a more reliable target for scorn because it is seen to encourage incivility through anonymity. The latter is offensive to media gatekeepers not so much because of their over-developed respect for bylines but because they fear that ordinary users are "getting away with it" - i.e. not facing the consequences in terms of public opprobrium and shame by which those gatekeepers normally manage the discourse.

Twitter's USP is the Speakers' Corner principle: that any idiot can stand on a box and harangue the crowd but also that any number of idiots can answer back. It doesn't have the gated communities of Facebook or the competitive rating of Reddit, though those facilities do exist. Its attraction is precisely that it most closely matches the public square: a free-for-all in which originality and wit are rewarded by dissemination but where most of the activity is criticism. That might seem over-generous for what is often just tutting, abuse or incoherent ranting, but this is to misunderstand the value of raillery and loud dissent. What I'm thinking of here is not the formal public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) of Jurgen Habermas, though I do think his analysis of its history, and specifically the way that it has been eroded by commercial mass media and representative democracy is relevant, but the more informal public sphere: the pub and the football terrace more than the coffeehouse and the debating society.

We are all familiar with the ways that access to public speech is controlled, with the consequence that we all have a strong sense of "their" discourse and its instrumental rationality, as distinct from the practical rationality of everyday discourse, or the "lifeworld" as Habermas would put it. Central to this control is the expectations of class and social capital, but we also know how fluid these are in reality: how one can impersonate (or be mistaken for) another "type" through language and cultural reference. This isn't misrepresentation but evidence of the inadequacy of the narrow definitions and stereotypes manipulated by the dominant discourse: the reactionary Muslim, the resentful ex-miner, the woke millenial etc. The nature of Twitter, and in particular its anonymity, is ideally suited to this chameleon-ism. Blue-ticks rigorously staying on-brand is a marginal pursuit. The great bulk of activity on the platform is ordinary people being both ordinary and extraordinary, as the whim takes them.

But if this were merely people showing off, or curating fictitious characters, they wouldn't be on Twitter. They'd be on Instagram or LinkedIn (and to be fair, many of them are, but that just means they're compartmentalising). What they are doing on Twitter isn't broadcasting or even narrowcasting (again, the Direct Message facility is marginal), but acting as that Speakers' Corner crowd: laughing at the pretensions of the high-and-mighty, calling-out hypocrisy (as they see it), showing support for the favoured, ridiculing the disfavoured. Where Twitter was once praised as the medium of democratic revolution, the "voice of the square" in authoritarian regimes like Egypt, it is now more likely to be associated with the word "mob". This shift has been given some academic respectability by concerns over the mechanics of social media, though a lot of this later critique is of the pop-sociology type promoted by the liberal media that conveniently dovetails with its meta-narrative about populism.

For example, Will Davies has written in the London Review of Books on the Schmittian roots of the 'like' button: "In place of elections, representatives and parliaments, all talk and gutless indecision, Schmitt appealed to the one kind of expression that people can make for themselves: acclamation. The public should not be expected to deliberate or exercise power in the manner that liberals hoped. But they can nevertheless be consulted, as long as the options are limited to ‘yea’ or ‘nay’". Davies is a more subtle thinker than this might imply, and his ultimate argument is against binary simplicity rather than social media per se, but there is a danger in promulgating this view that we lose sight of the sheer amount of critique that swamps the momentary acclamations of social media. What winds up the persistent critics of Twitter isn't the likes but the ratio: the hostile replies to nonsense and pretension. Speaking back isn't really what Carl Schmitt had in mind. 

Social media has refined and intensified the idea that we should pass binary judgements, but this isn't a novelty, as the history of plebiscites and the desire for a pure expression of popular will shows. Schmitt was criticising liberal democracy, both in its favouring deliberation over peremptory action and in its claim that the people can be effectively represented through debate and the search for consensus. The attraction of the plebiscite was not merely that it did away with all the "talk", but that it allowed a direct connection between the people and whoever can exercise power: the monarch, the dictator etc. As such, it is anti-democratic, rather than just anti-talk or anti-representation, as it presumes a political centre that is unconstrained by anything except the negative acclamation of the people, which is the historical reality of the pre-democratic era in which the people had only the one recourse in the face of an unreasonable government: revolt.

If the "mob" is one caricature of Twitter, the "wisdom of the crowd" is another, though in practice this dubious dynamic is limited to the crude signal of trending topics (and, as usual, the algorithms are obscure enough that we don't know how truly representative it is). Henry Farrell has a more positive view of social media in general and argumentation in particular that could be said to provide a rational basis for that wisdom: "We have a strong tendency to believe our own bullshit. The upside is that if we are far better at detecting bullshit in others than in ourselves, and if we have some minimal good faith commitment to making good criticisms, and entertaining good criticisms when we get them, we can harness our individual cognitive biases through appropriate group processes to produce socially beneficial ends. Our ability to see the motes in others’ eyes while ignoring the beams in our own can be put to good work, when we criticize others and force them to improve their arguments. There are strong benefits to collective institutions that underpin a cognitive division of labor".

In other words, you are making a useful contribution in the social media salt-mine simply by telling others that they have failed to consider different perspectives, even if that's not true or your own perspective is demonstrably wrong: "Your most truthful contributions to collective reasoning are unlikely to be your own individual arguments, but your useful criticisms of others’ rationales. Even more pungently, you are on average best able to contribute to collective understanding through your criticisms of those whose perspectives are most different to your own, and hence very likely those you most strongly disagree with. The very best thing that you may do in your life is create a speck of intense irritation for someone whose views you vigorously dispute, around which a pearl of new intelligence may then accrete." What this highlights is the importance of cognitive diversity, i.e. the breadth of the public sphere: "diversity of perspective is typically correlated with diversity of goals – someone who disagrees with how you see the world is also likely to want different things from it". This is a useful perspective for considering the certainty of various blue-ticks, for whom diverse opinion appears to be nothing short of an existential threat.

The critics of "cancel culture", like those of "safe spaces" a few years ago (often the same people, natch), claim that it threatens cognitive diversity, but it is clear that they are operating with a very narrow definition of "diverse" and similarly regard free speech as the right for those who have speech-power to be free of consequences, rather than as a moral imperative to equalise that speech-power and give voice to the marginalised. In practice, the war on the woke is a strawman that serves to further the marginalisation of the left. This endeavour has adopted the terminology and principles that the left have historically employed, from free speech to anti-racism, not simply as an adroit tactic but as a necessity. As Aaron Bastani fairly notes, "the compulsive vendetta being pursued against the left serv[es] a secondary purpose of not having to confront the fact that – for the first time in a century – the political forces of the status quo have no solutions to society’s intensifying crises". The danger is that Twitter, arguably the one social media platform that has played a positive role in expanding dialogic democracy and therefore helping address those crises, will become collateral damage of the establishment's intolerance of dissent.

Coming to America

Globalisation has been a problematic in political discourse for two decades now, largely centred on its attendant inequality and environmental damage, but the coincidence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the fracturing of US-China relations have together now brought the dimension of geopolitics and security to the fore as well. We can see this not only in talk of a revived "Cold War" but in the idea that a government's first duty is the protection of the people, even if many politicians chafe at the idea and would rather prioritise the economy. This has even prompted astonishment in some quarters. Anthony Barnett expressed this well in his latest openDemocracy blockbuster, 'Out of the Belly of Hell': "The real surprise is not that there is a financial crash ... It is that governments themselves brought it about by deliberate acts of policy. A previously inconceivable collapse of commerce was caused by politically ordered lockdowns. ... Why did it happen? ... All of us believed that market values ruled and democracy had been hollowed out, or captured by authoritarians. We were all wrong".

Of course, we have not seen a "collapse of commerce". There is a great deal of ruin in a nation and technological progress means there is probably more scope for it with every year that passes. What we have seen is evidence of the economy's resilience and (what is effectively the same thing) its inefficiency - i.e. the redundancy of many office-based roles, the predominance of distributive over productive activities, and the inequity of economic returns (this time focused on the poor pay and conditions of "key workers"). To believe that the system puts profits before people does not require you to also believe that politicians are blind to public opinion when they depend on democratic election. There is no contradiction between the two. Even if you imagine the political response to have been a cynical attempt to preserve labour for the future benefit of capital, it is surely more likely that the government would adopt a "humanist" response to the pandemic. The point about the evils of capitalism is that they are systemic. They do not arise from evil men doing evil things but rather from the butcher and the baker feeling obliged to pursue their self-interest.

Barnett's incredulity allows him to suggest that what we thought we understood about globalisation is wrong, or at least seriously incomplete. He isn't suggesting any significant change to the economic or social analysis of globalisation, or the ideology of neoliberalism, but he is suggesting that the last half-century saw a simultaneous counter-movement: "Accompanying and related to the inhuman progress of the market, with all its insecurities, booms, busts, precariousness and refusal of responsibility, there has been a parallel process of humanisation". The mechanisms for this remain sketchy: "Today the human consequences of globalisation are part of our experience as well as knowledge. People everywhere feel we share the same planet earth at the same time as each other. ... This is an economic, social and political revolution. An immense improvement in the standard of life has created a generalised capacity to become citizens everywhere ... sweeping educational, sanitary and technological transformations have laid the basis for people to become fully human and this has blown away neoliberalism".

This is a liberal humanism that imagines a global public, forged by mobile phones and the exigencies of lockdown, and now entrusted with the historic mission of superseding the neoliberal order. Barnett historicises this by excavating the roots of our shared experience: "Globalisation in this sense and as we know it today began in 1968. The impact of the Vietnamese Tet offensive in January, the French barricades of May, and the Prague Spring that brought the Soviet Tanks into what was then Czechoslovakia, were high points in a whole series of challenges that altered the nature of what was possible. They were unexpected, unpredictable, popular uprisings against the established orders and expressed a far-reaching social transformation, one that had developed through a decade which had already seen the liberation of most African countries from colonisation. It would prove to be revolutionary, although not in the way that the rhetoric of the time foresaw. It was the start of our contemporary globalisation, as it became clear that processes had been unleashed that had escaped the control of those supposedly in charge as well as the confinement to any single continent".

1968 did not mark a "time of liberation" but the triumph of individualism and the restoration of order. These two were not in conflict. Indeed the combination was the ideological launchpad for neoliberalism. That is why a "left-wing moment", as Barnett puts it (if you ignore the often cool response of actual workers at the time), could lead to "five decades of right-wing domination". The Tet offensive led to US disenchantment but public opinion was already swinging against the war in Vietnam; les evenements in France led to the electoral success of the Gaullists later in the year; and the Prague Spring was crushed, marking the start of the era of stagnation in Eastern Europe. Barnett remains optimistic: "For sure, the pandemic is already generating an eruption of reaction designed to strengthen corporate capitalism. At the same time I believe it is going to initiate a long, progressive, democratic and ecological transformation. We are witnessing the force that will achieve this in the upwelling of solidarity that has been released in cities, towns, communities and networks, in response to the lockdowns and in support of frontline workers around the world". You can't fault his positivity.

My scepticism isn't about the idea that neoliberalism and globalisation have generated their own resistance. Whether you describe it as a counter movement in the language of Polanyi or a dialectic in the language of Marx it is clear that there has been a consistent social reaction that runs like a thread from the Upper Clyde work-in to the Occupy movement. But that reaction has rarely been politically successful and, as we're seeing with the UK Labour party right now, has tended to provoke an even fiercer and unforgiving reaction by the establishment. Barnett's belief that this time is different, that the lockdown and sympathy for frontline workers will lead to a transformation, strikes me as naive to the point of delusional. I also can't help thinking there is an element of displacement at work here, that the disappointments of Brexit and Trump can somehow be overcome through global solidarity, even though both are themselves credible examples of a reaction against globalisation, specifically the impact that trade with China (among others) has had on traditionally well-paid manufacturing jobs in electorally pivotal areas such as the American "rust-belt" and England's "red wall".

A more insightful take on the history and prospects of globalisation is provided in the LRB by Adam Tooze, in a review of a number of new works that look in particular at US-China relations. The first point he makes is that "Economic growth powered by globalisation was geopolitically innocent", though it's important to note that this "innocence" depended on US hegemony and in the event only lasted for a period of less than twenty years: "One of the effects of America’s unipolar dominance in the wake of the Cold War was that it permitted a clean line to be drawn between economic and security policy. ... In the best case, as liberals hoped, economic development would produce political and legal convergence. ... And if it didn’t, it couldn’t cause any real harm because America’s military and economic predominance were so overwhelming". By 2008, this was clearly not going to plan. China was not liberalising politically, its supression of wages and encouragement of saving was creating a huge trade imbalance with the US, and it wasn't content to limit its industry to low-value outsourcing but sought to compete at the highest levels (e.g. Huawei).

Tooze's second point is that "The mistake in thinking that we are in a ‘new Cold War’ is in thinking of it as new". This isn't the least of his heresies: "For Americans, part of the appeal of allusions to Cold War 2.0 is that they think they know how the first one ended. Yet our certainty on that point is precisely what the rise of China ought to put in question. The simple fact is that the US did not prevail in the Cold War in Asia. Korea was divided by a stalemate. Vietnam was a humiliating failure. It was to find a way out of that debacle that Nixon and Kissinger turned to Beijing and inaugurated a new era of Sino-American relations. America’s ability to tilt the balance against the Soviet Union was linked to its success in playing the Chinese off against the Soviets". History alone should give the US pause for thought in prosecuting a Cold War in Asia, but so should the inter-penetration of the American and Chinese economies. As Tooze puts it, "we have learned, or relearned, that economic growth and trade determine the balance of power and generate tensions that ultimately require international political resolution. The new détente must, therefore, directly address issues of geopolitics and security".

To put this another way, the Cold War ended in Europe shortly after 1968. It was replaced with the era of détente, whose key dynamic was not arms limitation but the growing inter-connection of the economies of the USSR and its satellites with the West. The fall of Soviet communism in 1989 was the result not of popular dissatisfaction (that was merely a symptom), or of a crisis of confidence among the leadership (ditto), but of trade imbalances, fluctuating oil and gas prices, and the financial ramifications of the ending of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. Meanwhile in Asia, China's embrace of the capitalist road in 1979 showed not only that the market did not inevitably spread democracy and "liberty", but that neoliberalism was no threat to authoritarian regimes (something that had already been made clear in Chile). We are now in a new era of détente where Cold War theatre has been revived to provide a nationalist safety-valve for popular anxieties that originate in the neoliberal order. Against this, Barnett's belief in an emerging global consciousness and solidarity will struggle in vain. The tune of public safety is likely to be played in a martial rather than a pacific register.

How might this détente evolve? Under Trump, the (still) global hegemon has rejected multilaterism for unilateralism, strong-arming its allies and pursuing the chimera of bilateral deals from Palestine to North Korea. The tone may change with a Biden presidency, but the dynamic probably won't. European states will be expected to fall in line, and the UK in particular will be expected to show willing, lacking as it now does the excuse of EU consensus. The current call for a more robust British response to Russia is little more than cosplay between two marginal powers that have both seen better days, but the decision to freeze-out Huawei marks a significant step towards the UK's trading relations being dictated by Washington. The issue here is not a coercive agreement that inundates us with dodgy chickens but the likelihood that the US will want to incorporate the UK more fully into its own economy in order to butress its position relative to China. The irony is that we may end up with tighter economic integration in twenty years with the US than we ever had with the EU.

Who Are Newspapers For?

The question has two meanings: what are the "market segments" for which a particular title is designed; and who in society does the paper support and advocate for? This week's announcement that the Guardian Media Group is going to lay off staff and reduce its output due to plummeting revenue has produced some predictable schadenfreude on the left, where anger remains over the group's role in the undermining of Jeremy Corbyn since 2015 and the defeat of Labour last December. It has also produced some notable justifications in response from the better-known staff on the Guardian and Observer. I'm not going to spend any more time than is necessary on the likes of Nick Cohen and Hadley Freeman scolding the left and insisting that good quality journalism must be paid for as the only alternative is "fake news". Both are columnists whose role is to stimulate rage-clicks in the era of social media through confected offence and trite opinions. Of more interest is the defence mounted by George Monbiot, who whatever his flaws (pomposity, piousness, a lack of wit) is probably sincere.

Monbiot's position is that the Guardian offers plurality, which he interprets as "greater reach and impact, and a discussion, not a sermon" (coming from his eminence, that last bit is nothing if not ironic). He ties this quality to the paper's ownership model: "The ownership issue is crucial. Most newspapers are owned by billionaires or multimillionaires. They are, as a class, not neutral. They want a world that's good for people like them. Less tax, less regulation, fewer workers rights and trade unions. They use their papers to get it". This is a genuinely odd claim in defence of the Guardian. The paper was founded by anti-radical rich businessmen, controlled by the Taylor & Scott families for most of its history, and the Scott Trust was established in the 1930s to avoid death duties. It isn't that different in its origins and history to the rest of the British press, even if avoiding being bought up by a multimillionaire in the last forty years has left it looking unusual. Monbiot's suggestion that the paper has a different class perspective leaves hanging the question of what that perspective is. If it doesn't reflect the interests of billionaires today, whose interests does it reflect?

The Guardian's history is no secret. What stands out is its consistent reluctance to embrace progressive causes until the last possible moment. It criticised the Peterloo reformers as dangerous agitators, it was sympathetic to the South in the US Civil War (largely because of its commitment to free trade), it opposed militant suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and it opposed the creation of the NHS. This last was partly because of its antipathy towards the left, in the form of Aneurin Bevan (it even went so far as to advocate a vote for the Conservatives in 1951), but also because it saw itself representing the interests of doctors and other professionals who benefited from the existing healthcare system. It has rarely been sympathetic to organised labour (it responded to the 1926 general strike by setting up a no-strike in-house pet union) and its support for social reforms has, contrary to the myths, been cautious & peevish (its current approach towards the transexual rights movement and its gender-critical opponents is typical: conflicting sermons rather than discussion).

Its commitment to plurality and balance has tended to bias in a pro-capital, pro-Atlanticist direction. It argued for the abolition of slavery, but also argued for the full compensation of slave-owners. It has wrung its hands over Palestine but was consistently Zionist up till the Second World War and pro-Israel after 1948. It opposed the Suez adventure but has backed (albeit sometimes reluctantly) most wars of choice since 1989. When pressured by the state over leaks and sources, it has usually caved-in. Its political endorsement during general elections has tended to oscillate between Labour and the Liberals (except when it sits on the fence and advocates anti-Tory tactical voting), but enthusiasm for the former has tended to correlate with how centrist the leadership is. It was a prime backer of the SDP and New Labour and is currently giving its all to Keir Starmer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Guardian's stance has remained consistent - bourgeois, managerialist, metropolitan - while the political landscape has shifted around it. It is therefore relatively easy to say who the paper supports and advocates for in society. It is the professionals and managers of liberal capitalism and the associated institutions of the para-state, from the BBC to the National Theatre.

The paper's problem is the other question: who is the paper trying to serve? Monbiot talks of "greater reach and impact" as if it were a public good but it is really just a commercial strategy. In recent years the paper has commited to a free-to-view digital model augmented by various subscriber add-ons and subsidiary earners, from lectures by staff (a comical example of its pedagogic pretensions) to a dating site for the like-minded (already shutdown this year). This has created a number of tensions. The need for eyeballs to drive advertising revenue has led the paper to invest heavily in star writers, but this has also encouraged performative controversy (columnists like Suzanne Moore and Nick Cohen applauding their own bravery while insulting much of the readership) and a tendency to the lazy and meretricious (John Crace, Barney Ronay and Marina Hyde). It has also tried to expand into the United States and Australia, but this has simply increased costs across the board. More and more of its reporting now relies on agencies and freelancers, which limits its ability to develop complex stories over longer time periods and relationships with primary sources.

Its Anglosphere ambitions have not required any change in its political stance, but it has irritated British readers (and not just the parochial ones) through excessive Americanophilia (Hadley Freeman) and the promotion of a blander, internationalist liberalism that sets the limits of the possible some way short of UK practice (e.g. healthcare). In some ways this echoes the paper's previous deracination when it relocated from Manchester to the metropolis. Its attempts to tend to its Northern roots through John Harris's prole safaris or the vox-pops of Helen Pidd have become more ridiculous with the passing years, but this isn't simply a case of forgetting it's origins. Detailed reports on Egypt or India found an eager readership in Manchester in 1890 because cotton was still king. The paper now has little to say to the "Red Wall" and regards its denizens as mere spear-carriers in a factional play about the struggle for the soul of the Labour party. Its target audience in the North is the educated classes of Hebden Bridge, who are assumed to share the same cultural capital and material interests as their equivalents in Weybridge. Its bafflement and contempt for leave voters during the Brexit saga reflected a wider impatience with the country. It's sympathy for working class British culture, outside of the commoditised form of new music and film, is largely limited now to the cartoons of Steve Bell and David Squires.

It may be increasingly antique in an era of media bricolage, but many people still imagine they have a relationship with a particular newspaper and that it reflects well on themselves because of the assumed affinity with ideals such as fairness and tolerance. The Guardian's naked antipathy towards Jeremy Corbyn led to disappointment and a sense of betrayal among many readers (and not just Corbyn supporters) because it undermined that affinity. This isn't simple narcissism on the part of those readers but an asymmetric emotional investment. Indeed, the charge of narcissism is perhaps better levelled at the paper itself. The structural trend away from reporting to opinion means that the "voice" of the press is increasingly self-absorbed and intemperate in general, but what the last four years have shown is how little regard the Guardian in particular has for a large part of its own readership, a disregard that is now being repaid in kind. This is not just a case of the paper revealing its "true face" once more, but a consequence of its attempt to become the international standard-bearer of liberal capitalism.

Many media folk have made the point that the people who will lose their jobs at the Guardian aren't the annoying columnists but reporters and the non-bylined, but very few of them have noted that the result will be an even more elite, privileged workforce. That in turn means that further revolts by GMG staff against the more egregious columnist rants (such as the letter criticising Suzanne Moore's stance on trans rights) will be less likely. The trajectory of the Guardian now seems clear. Shorn of it auxiliary cultural products, the paper's embeddedness in the metropolitan liberal milieu will now become weaker, matching its cultural retreat from the rest of the UK since the 1980s. Simultaneously, its commitment to becoming an international platform that offers a funkier vibe slightly to the left of the New York Times means that its reporting will become more fragmented and shallow while its opinion will become more shrill and solipsistic. It's not a pretty picture and blaming the left for its current travails is just a taste of what is to come.

Fungible Voters

Helen Pidd's now-notorious vox-pop in Wednesday's Guardian, in which she sought to assess the response of Leigh - "a 'red wall' constituency in Wigan, Greater Manchester, which had just gone Conservative for the first time in more than 100 years" - to the stimulus package announced by the Chancellor this week, has provided a couple of days of fun. Critics have deconstructed the piece itself, noting both how unrepresentative it was of the electorate (there are still plenty of Labour voters there) and how inaccurate and bigoted some of the individual opinions were. In an attempt to justify her work, Pidd added fuel to the fire by claiming, in so many words, that a pizza restaurant owner is working class and that Labour needs to listen to racists. I would dismiss this out of hand as simply lazy, pseudo-reporting, presumably commissioned to provide grist for some commentator's mill about "what Labour must do now" (my money's on John Harris), but there is a serious point buried underneath the dross.

In responding to criticism on Twitter, Pidd said: "Reporting involves... reporting what people say. If you want to understand why Labour lost places like Leigh, listening to what their ex voters say is important, whether or not you (or indeed I) agree with their views". The trouble with this take is that the piece was clearly not a sociological enquiry but another attempt to push a favoured narrative, as was made all too clear by the headline: "Imagine the state we’d be in if Corbyn had been in charge': the view from the 'red wall'". This reinforces the claim that the reason Labour lost the last general election was the offensiveness of its then leader, yet all the subsequent polls and analyses (carried out with a lot more rigour than Pidd's vox-pop) have shown that Brexit was the predominant issue and that antipathy to Corbyn on the doorstep often required prompting while for many his caricature as the terrorist's friend was merely a post-hoc justification for changing lifelong voting habits. Pidd may claim that she doesn't write the headlines, but as the Guardian's Northern Editor I doubt she is kept in the dark about them until publication either.

What caught my attention is the idea that political parties must privilege their ex-voters when "listening" after defeat. This is dubious advice. An election loss is just as likely to have been due to a failure to attract new voters as a failure to hold onto old ones. One thing that has come across in the various post-mortems of Labour's 2019 campaign is that the party pursued an ambitious strategy, focusing resources on Tory marginals that it thought it could win. This was criticised after the fact because the party leadership didn't realise how vulnerable its existing seats were, particularly in the Midlands and North of England. However, many of those critics were the same people who built a career taking those very same seats for granted after 1997, despite the clear warning sign of waning affection (a point the Labour Together report was honest enough to admit). That Labour lost heavily does not mean that it was wrong to campaign to win more seats, or that its manifesto was "unrealistic" in being hopeful and visionary. After all, a more cautious approach (the notorious "35% strategy") and a comically timid manifesto tanked in 2015, while optimism put wind in the sails in 2017.

Last December, the Tories were the party who best captured the optimism (however misplaced) of the electorate, with the promise that Brexit would cut the Gordian knot of decades of dissatisfaction over regional imbalances and fraying public services. The electorate is steadily changing, both in composition and in attitudes, so the job of parties is, in large part, to project where they think the electorate wants to go, not simply where they've been. The pivotal elections of recent British history, such as 1945, 1964, 1979 and 1997, were all about envisioning a future that a new electoral coalition could coalesce around. This point is well understood by liberals when it serves their interests, hence the FBPE trope that as leavers die off the country will inexorably shift towards remain. But that morbid calculation ignores that if attitudes correlate with age, remainers are steadily converting to leavers at some inflexion point on the gradient. This thought is suppressed because it offends the linked ideas that liberal values are the product of reason and that they are historically posterior to conservatives values.

Despite the media impression of loyal blocs and a pivotal floating vote in the middle of the spectrum, the truth is that voters are much more dynamic and promiscuous. One example of this is the many voters who claim to have always voted for party X who turn out to have voted for other parties or to have abstained in the past. This isn't poor memory or "shyness". It's just coherence in action: the self-delusion that we have always been consistent in our attitudes. A good example of this is the recent claim by some that they couldn't vote for Labour while Corbyn was in charge - i.e. they were prevented from being consistent by forces beyond their control - when in reality many just wanted to "get Brexit done" and were prepared to vote Tory to do so. A more narrow example is the many Jews who claimed they couldn't vote Labour in 2019 because of antisemitism under Corbyn's leadership, which ignored that the Jewish vote switched decisively to the Conservatives during the 2010-15 period when Ed Miliband was leader. If you're voting Tory for the third time in a row, you are no longer an ex-Labour voter in any meaningful sense.

Voters are fungible. A vote gained counts as much as a vote lost. This tends to be obscured in the analysis of net vote shifts in elections, though pollsters and psephologists are now paying more attention to the currents beneath the surface. What was clear in December last year is that Labour lost voters equally in all directions: to the Tories, to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, and to the SNP and Plaid Cymru. The injunction that the party should listen to voters who deserted it loses some of its force when you consider that they aren't about to speak with one voice. The Guardian's focus on the 'Red Wall' is a selective interpretation of Labour's challenge, and one that pretty obviously seeks to privilege an anti-left vocabulary in order to coax the party back to the centre. To this end, a small business owner and a racist retiree can be presented as "authentic" Labour voices. It doesn't matter that their claims are untrue ("The government has basically invested in us", "Whole sections of Leigh that are colonised with new entrants") so long as they are willing to support the narrative that Labour must change.

A bias towards retaining existing voters is by definition conservative, but it is also pessimistic in that it believes opinions are fixed and the possibility of persuasion is limited (this is partly liberal condescension: I am capable of reason and can change my mind; you are set in your ways and cleave to your tribe). This advice is ironic coming from the Guardian, given that newspaper's steady insistence from the late-70s onwards that Labour needed to stop listening to its "traditional" voters, particularly trade unionists in the North of England, and try to attract the "younger", emergent classes of professionals and aspirational skilled workers in the South and the Midlands. This first produced an attempt to supersede Labour in the form of the SDP, and then the successful attempt to colonise the party and overthrow its old "class war" politics and proletarian culture in the form of New Labour. At every stage there was an emphasis on radical departure and optimism ("Things can only get better").

Pidd's contribution won't even merit a footnote in the future histories of the Labour party, but the question of whether it should seek to win back its lost voters or try and build a future coalition will be central to any understanding of the early years of this decade. So far, the signs are that the Starmer leadership is leaning more towards the former than the latter, though this may be based on a strategy of consolidation ahead of the bold economic platform that we have been promised. A more pessimistic take is that the current manoeuvres to attract conservative voters will inevitably slide back into the groove of the cautious fiscal management and punitive social sanctions of late-period New Labour. In its desire to marginalise the left and encourage Starmer's retreat to the centre, the Guardian risks squeezing out progressive voices in favour of reactionary tropes and a waspish intolerance of the "woke". But perhaps this isn't seen as a problem. The irony is that the paper long ago stopped worrying about retaining old readers as it surveyed the opportunity of a more internationalised, online audience.

Labour's Loyalty Test

The Labour frontbencher Steve Reed, Shadow Secretary for Communities and Local Government, has deleted a tweet containing an antisemtic trope, specifically referring to Richard Desmond, who is of Jewish heritage, as a "puppet master" of the Tory party following the revelations of his property business dealings with Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. This would appear to be a textbook case of thoughtless antisemitism. Reed deleted the tweet shortly afterwards and issued an apology today: "I want to apologise unreservedly for the language in the tweet I posted on Saturday. It was inappropriate and as soon as I realised my error I deleted it". While he has come in for criticism from the Conservatives, his behaviour has been lauded by the Labour right and various centrists with many comparing his contrition favourably to Rebecca Long Bailey, who was sacked as Shadow Education Secretary in June.

Of course, this praise for Reed's prompt action ignores that he was bang-to-rights. Even if the former press baron were not Jewish, the "puppet master" image would remain a well-worn antisemitic trope. In contrast, Long Bailey was guilty of referring to Maxine Peake as "an absolute diamond", without apparently having spotted an inaccurate claim by the actor in the Independent interview that she retweeted ("The tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services"). That she didn't promptly apologise, any more than the editor of the Independent did, but instead tweeted that she didn't endorse the claims made by Peake but felt the interview was worthy of attention because of the actor's emphasis on the importance of staying in the Labour party, appears to have been the final straw for Keir Starmer who insisted that zero tolerance means zero tolerance.

However, it's worth recalling that some defenders of Starmer last week, notably Paul Mason in his new occasional berth at the Spectator, insisted that Long Bailey's real offence wasn't circulating a claim that could be interpreted as antisemitic but her refusal to obey orders: she insisted on issuing a clarification rather than simply deleting her original tweet and thought that she could negotiate a compromise with the Leader's office. As Mason put it, "A story emerges of press-imposed deadlines vs unanswered phone calls. Starmer’s people sound flabbergasted that Long-Bailey refused to delete her offensive tweet — and that’s the substance: you can’t have a shadow cabinet member refusing a direct order". Whether he really has an inside line or not, Mason's interpretation does get to the heart of the issue. The charge of antisemitism is not merely an instrumental weapon for delegitimising the left, the response to it is now a loyalty test. If you argue, you're out.

It's possible that Reed might still be sacked, if the charge of hypocrisy becomes too difficult to deflect or if the Tory press decide to run with it (so far, the Guardian is doing its best to ignore the whole affair), but my expectation is that he will be saved precisely because he has loyally followed the procedure: an unreserved apology with no cavilling or attempts at mitigation. This proceduralism was also in evidence this morning in Starmer's latest weekly appearance on LBC. Challenged on his dismissive language towards the Black Lives Matter movement last week, suggesting it was a momentary phenomenon, the Leader of the Opposition revealed that he is to undertake "unconcious bias training" as part of a new programme being deployed party-wide. That apparently will be enough. You might reasonably have expected a former human rights lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions to have an above-average understanding of unconcious bias already, but he is determined to lead by example.

The problem for Labour arising out of these recent incidents is twofold. First, it reinforces the media impression that Labour is a hotbed of various forms of bigotry and bias. This will probably remain the case until after the Equalities and Human Rights Commission inquiry into antisemitism within the party reports. Starmer is clearly hoping that the pre-emptive adoption of a zero tolerance approach will mean he can welcome the findings with open arms, regardless of how critical they may be, and then move the political agenda onto more favourable ground. He can be reasonably confident that the EHRC won't focus on named individuals but will focus on processes and training instead, so the role of the right in sabotaging case-handling can be occluded and the media interpretation biased towards the ideological damnation of the left. In the meantime, incidents like Steve Reed's tweet can be managed so long as the correct procedure is followed. Whether figures on the party left will be allowed to follow that procedure is another matter.

The second problem is that the commitment to proceduralism reinforces the developing media impression that Labour is now a party of elite lawyers. Of course, barristers and solicitors have been disproportionately influential throughout the party's history, and the pettifogging and bureaucracy of organised labour and local government is central to its organisational culture. But since the mid-90s, as trade unions and councils have been weakened and as the "malevolent forces" of modernity have been associated more and more with global businesses and supranational courts, the party has been increasingly identified with an increasingly dysfunctional legal system. Paradoxically, it is criticised as both the architect of punitive law, from ASBOS to asylum detention centres, and the champion of "politically correct" interference in the operation of that law, from the 1998 Human Rights Act to the EHRC itself. At present, it is the latter aspect that is dominant, largely because of Brexit and in particular Starmer's own role in arguing for a second referendum.

It doesn't take a political genius to work out that the Tory attack line in 2024 will focus heavily on the caricature of Starmer as the "remain lawyer". While the remain part will still motivate some, Labour can hope that the passage of time will make it less salient and that a more robust left-leaning economic offer will change minds in Northern seats. The problem for the party is the lawyer part. Taking a socially conservative line on the police and armed forces, or inadvertantly belittling BLM and transsexuals because that's what you unconsciously think many voters want, may shield you from accusations of excessive "wokeness", but it isn't going to neutralise the charge that your sympathies are instinctively cosmopolitan and elitist. "Forensic" may play well with the London media, but it "don't mean shit" in Bishop Auckland. The problem is that too many voters felt Labour had failed the loyalty test in 2019, and that was to do with Brexit, not support for Palestine.