The Great Reveal

The first couple of books published on Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader have focused on revelations, variously bitchy and exasperated, about the strategic and ethical failings of key individuals. This was inevitable. Books on recent political history, whether autobiographies or eyewitness accounts, need juicy tidbits to garner media coverage just as much as tell-alls about the royals do, or thinly-disguised novels about minor French philosophers. The academic histories that will be written in time may take a more structural approach, but given the habitual bias of British political history towards "character", I wouldn't bet on it. Though Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire's Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn is clearly unsympathetic to the left (the title rather gives it away), while Owen Jones's This Land: The Story of a Movement appears like a classic attempt to salvage the positive from a political episode of hope curtailed, they share a common belief that politics is inseparable from personality.

The press coverage of these two works has tended to delight in the more scathing analysis of Pogrund and Maguire, while Jones has once more been told in no uncertain terms by his journalistic peers that he is unwelcome. My interest here is not in either book (they're unlikely to prove of lasting value), nor in the predictable response of the commentariat. What I'm going to discuss is how revelations about character are treated in political discourse and specifically how this applied to Corbyn. Though journalism presents itself as the first, rough draft of history, it's form and assumptions tend to reflect polished historiographical practice when it comes to political commentary. Pundits aspire to the aphoristic, Olympian judgement of a Michelet or an AJP Taylor (a historian who moonlighted as a journalist) rather than the urgent impressionism of the reporter. There is also a tendency to see politics as drama, reflecting the focus on leading characters, though in the simplistic sense that everything is either a tragedy or a comedy of errors.

Jeremy Corbyn is, it is probably safe to say, fairly set in his ways. Though he may have smartened up his attire on becoming leader of the Labour party in 2015, he didn't transform overnight into a different, steelier character. He was always idealistic, conflict-averse and frankly a bit wet. Despite the attempts to paint him as a tumour in the body politic, he is clearly an inoffensive chap whose main character flaw appears to be peevishness. Few would have expected him to reveal a hitherto-hidden talent for management on his election to the leadership; fewer still a strategic cunning sufficient to the moment of Brexit, a political challenge that brought down two Conservative Prime Ministers in three years and may yet bring down a third within five. And yet the initial dismissal of Corbyn didn't develop into a coherent critique of his shortcomings. While forensic analysis, executive competence and a backstory in managing a large, complex organisation are now considered de rigueur in the leader of the opposition, there was little attempt to criticise Corbyn for the absence of these qualities and qualifications during his early months in office. 

The opposition to him, both within the PLP and among the media, was political. It's interesting to recall that much of the criticism was not about his own beliefs but the company he kept. The accusations of personal antisemitism or Russophilia came later. The essential charge was that he was too leftwing and therefore couldn't unite the party. Of course "party" in this context didn't mean the membership, who returned him with an increased vote after the 2016 leadership challenge, and the unity demanded was simply a euphemism for the continuing dominance of the PLP right. The revival of the antisemitism row after the unexpected 2017 election result, and the emergence of the People's Vote campaign with its emphasis on Corbyn's personal culpability for Brexit, marked the shift from attempts to rule him unacceptable because of his politics to attempts to rule him illegitimate because of his character. But charges of dithering or obliviousness were secondary to the assumption that he was a secret antisemite and Lexiteer. In other words, he was more criminal genius than managerial incompetent.

One thing that has stood out in the recent revelations about Corbyn's time as party leader is how little new material there is, and how little of it rises above office backbiting. For example, that Seumas Milne and Tom Watson were both in their different ways lazy, or that Karie Murphy could be abrasive. Even the claim that Corbyn and McDonnell weren't on speaking terms for a while seems positively innocent, like schoolkids falling out, particularly when you remember the poisonous relations between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The nearest thing to a political revelation in the Pogrund and Maguire book is that Ian Murray bottled joining Change UK at the eleventh hour, which is both unsurprising and ridiculously inconsequential. At the level of salacious gossip, there is nothing to compare with past or recent claims about David Cameron, from the apocryphal pig's head initiation ceremony to the temptation of al fresco adultery. For all that attempts to finally nail Corbyn as an antisemite have come to naught, his critics won't give up trying. Or even seeking to extend the blame to John McDonnell, if only to cement the association of Jew-hatred with the left in the public mind. 

The benchmark for a politician with a disreputable history is, of course, Boris Johnson. A man sacked for lying, not once but twice; who infamously colluded with a friend who wanted to beat up a journalist; and whose extramarital affairs and children have proved difficult to enumerate. But the proper charge against Johnson is not that he is louche or amoral but that he is a lazy chancer who can't cut it in the job. Even conservative commentators and backbenchers are pointing out that his poor performance as Prime Minister was entirely predictable, given his self-indulgent track record as London Mayor and his underwhelming (if brief) stint as Foreign Secretary. They now excuse their prior support with some wibble about him being "a winner", rather than admitting that they were nailed-on to secure a majority in the 2019 general election once Labour fatally committed to a second referendum and the Liberal Democrats and SNP ruled out a Corbyn-led coalition. The Tories could have elected Jacob Rees-Mogg as party leader last year and would probably still have won. 

According to Philip Collins, "The sorry spectacle of Boris Johnson in 10 Downing Street is a repeat of the lesson that Gordon Brown and Theresa May ought to have taught us. Nobody ever changes. Office does not transform character: it reveals it". Is everyone a mystery until they get to Number 10? Brown and May were elected party leader by MPs who had already seen their characters revealed in high office, as a resentful Chancellor and an obtuse Home Secretary respectively. Collins's pompous judgement also ignores context: that both Brown and May were constrained by extraordinary events and their own parties. The clamour for austerity in 2010 and the popular disaffection with New Labour that had been building for a decade undid Brown, while the impossibility of Brexit on terms that would unite the Tories short of outright deception (the chickens now coming home to roost) put paid to May. If these events revealed aspects of character, it was Brown's loyalty to New Labour and May's inability to lie convincingly, neither of which really amount to moral deficiencies.

Corbyn was elected leader by the Labour membership not because they thought he would be managerially competent but because they wanted to change the attitude and policies of the party. Everything that has happened since has sprung from that choice by the membership: the delegitimisation of Corbyn, the marginalisation of the PLP left, and the recapture of the party apparatus by the right. Though the members have now opted for Starmer's competence, they did so (however naively) on the basis that he would stick to the same policy platform. Given his willingness to junk the remain cause, I see little reason to believe that he will hesitate to junk his famous 10 pledges, nor that he and David Evans, the new General Secretary, will be cautious in restraining or expelling the left, whether on the back of the EHRC report on antisemitism or any other grounds. This instrumentalism and mutability will be lauded by the press as evidence of statesmanship rather than opportunism or insincerity.

Had Corbyn been tougher, he could plausibly have achieved more in terms of party democracy and policy, from forcing mandatory reselection to resisting a second referendum, but it would almost certainly have come at a greater cost. The Change UK defections would have been larger in number and the rump PLP would still have been divided between remainers and leavers. History may well show that Corbyn's aversion to conflict actually prevented a split even more damaging than that of the SDP in 1981. A more cynical leader might have spotted the threat of the antisemitism charge earlier and headed it off, but nothing short of a conversion to Zionism would have stilled his critics. A more assertive and intellectually confident leader might have built on the 2017 campaign to normalise the policy initiatives that seemed to come as such a shock to so many in 2019, though the timing and focus of the election would likely still have led to a setback, even had the party stuck to its guns on a soft Brexit. Corbyn's limitations probably made little difference to the course of events, and the "chaos" of the leader's office was a symptom of the wider problems inside and outside the party rather than his personal signature.

Liberal Fear

David Goodhart's career trajectory looks like a classic case of youthful radicalism giving way to mature reaction. From soi-disant "old Etonian Marxist" via the technocratic centrism of Prospect and Demos to the careful rehabilitation of the romantic bigotry of Enoch Powell. I have never read any of his books (and have no intention of starting now, though I have read much of his journalism), not least because his ideas are clearly second-hand and unredeemed by any literary or analytical interest. But he is an interesting case study of the broader phenomenon of the progression from firebrand to fogey, not because he has turned into a conservative but precisely because he remains a liberal. The trigger for this thought is the publication of his latest rumination on the state of the nation, Head Hand Heart, where he laments the decline in esteem for manual labour and the persistent undervaluing of care work, both of which he attributes to the privileging of cognitive work and thus the over-investment in education and valorising of qualifications.

The narrative of time disillusioning youth is obviously ancient, but the political form we are familiar with dates from the early-nineteenth century and specifically the struggle between monarchical reaction and persistent republicanism in restoration France. This tension was reduced to a famous epigram by the French statesman Francois Guizot: "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head". Variations on this, with socialism and communism substituted for republicanism, would later be attributed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Churchill. The irony of Guizot's claim is that it was his own policies as Prime Minister in 1848, specifically refusing to allow any widening of the franchise beyond the propertied elite, that would lead to the collapse of the monarchy of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the Second Republic. A lot of thirty-somethings rediscovered the attractions of republicanism thanks to Guizot.

The relevance of this historical detour is that Guizot was a constitutional monarchist who saw himself as resisting both right and left. Likewise, David Goodhart identifies as a "post-liberal centrist", and in a more emotional register as a refugee from his "liberal, metropolitan tribe". His use of that noun is intended to suggest that the old formations that historically informed politics and culture are now irrelevant, having been superseded by new "value clusters". Though he has gestured vaguely at transitional "inbetweeners", he sees society as fundamentally divided into two opposing camps: "the educated, mobile people who see the world from 'Anywhere' and who value autonomy and fluidity, versus the more rooted, generally less well-educated people who see the world from 'Somewhere' and prioritise group attachments and security". This was the theme of his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In its typology, it is clearly a rehash of the work of Jonathan Haidt on the intrinsic differences between conservative and liberal temperaments, but given a topical gloss by the geographical and cultural divisions of Brexit.

Goodhart started out on his own road to Damascus (or perhaps Doncaster) with a 2004 essay in Prospect in which he suggested that racial and cultural diversity was eroding the solidarity needed to support the welfare state (this was later expanded into his 2013 book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration). I think the timing is significant. Liberalism in practice obviously shifted to the right during the 1990s, but liberal theory also started to lean heavily on communitarianism as a counterweight to the individualism of the neoliberal order. However, lectures about rights and responsibilities remained too abstract for many liberals and the policy consequences, from ASBOS to workfare, too dull and punitive to engender much enthusiasm. What would prove liberating in the wake of 9/11 was the salutary effect of existential fear - the threat to the national community and "our way of life" - hence the many liberal theorists and commentators who talked gushingly about how the attack on the World Trade Center was a clarifying moment.

But that fear was groundless. Al Qaeda proved to be a trivial foe and Saddam Hussein a paper tiger. Later Middle-Eastern iterations, from Muammar al-Gaddafi through ISIS to Bashar al-Assad, have equally failed to live up to their billing. China has little interest in pursuing a new Cold War and the revival of Russia as a threat to the West is risible. Instead, we have gradually turned towards the enemy within, dividing society into hostile and irreconcilable camps, decrying enemies of the people, and inventing phantasms such as elite conspiracies and the woke terror. Though much of this has been presented in the frame of a conservative/liberal dichotomy, it's important to recognise that this anxiety is common to both: QAnon mirrors the belief that Russia engineered both Brexit and Trump; the idea that a metropolitan elite is subverting democracy mirrors the belief that the working class would support a dictatorship. But this equivalence of fear should not mislead us. The kernel of conservativism is not paranoia or mania but the cool and calculating defence of privilege. It is liberal fear that aspires to a universal condition.

The role of race in this landscape is to provide a domestic equivalent for the "clash of civilisations" that we were denied in the early-00s. Goodhart's thesis - that stable societies with generous welfare systems tend to be culturally homogenous and that immigration tends to undermine this and thus citizens' willingness to pay the taxes to support public services - was an example of the importing of a classic conundrum in the sphere of international relations - how can we agree a modus vivendi when our national interests must necessarily differ? - to the field of social policy. There are two obvious problems with this approach. First, in transplanting the "realist" theory that international relations are zero-sum, it assumes that social diversity is destabilising short of full integration (i.e. the subsuming of immigrant identity). Second, it assumes that the native culture was homogenous at the time the welfare state was established and that diversity is a novel challenge that has arisen since. Implicit in this is the belief that the welfare state was largely in place by the 1950s, but this ignores the extension of benefits in the 1960s and the reform and expansion of education in the 1970s. The welfare state continued to grow and develop over time.

We do know that the erosion of tax morale in the UK from the 1970s onwards correlates with increasing immigration, but if this were really causal, you'd expect tax morale to start to erode in the 1950s, after the arrival of the Empire Windrush, and then accelerate during the 1960s. There is no evidence it did. The electoral victories of the Conservatives between 1951 and 1959 were based in large part on a commitment to generous public expenditure, notably preserving the NHS and building more council houses. The 1958 Notting Hill riots, the 1963 Bristol bus boycott and the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts show that race was a salient issue in the 60s, but there was no significant linkage of it to the welfare state. The formal discourse on race concerned civil rights; the informal discourse miscegenation. The increasing reluctance of conservative voters to pay high taxes actually correlates with industrial militancy, squeezed profits (due to international competition as much as wage demands), and the associated inflation of the 1970s. The questioning of the "burden" of welfare then was a class issue. The introduction of a racial dimension is much more recent, dating to the 1990s and the emergence of the "bogus asylum-seeker" in the media.

Having made ethnic diversity the problematic of welfare in The British Dream, Goodhart proceeded to explain Brexit in The Road to Somewhere as an essentially cultural reaction to both the ongoing legacy of that diversity (the desire to defend a rooted identify and ethnic solidarity) and the metropolitan elite's unwillingness to acknowledge the problem. This obviously occludes any material explanation for people voting leave, such as the legacy of deindustrialisation or increasing inequality, unless you imagine that lots of them had read and absorbed the rationale of The British Dream, but it also flattens the motivations of remainers, as if 48% of voters could reasonably be defined as rootless cosmopolitans when even he admits that his definition of "Anywheres" only extends to about 25% of the population. Goodhart isn't crude enough to employ the phrase "race betrayal", but in hitching a dichotomy centred on ethnic solidarity to a referendum, it is pretty clear that this is part of the subtext. If you voted for the EU, you voted against the national community.

One obvious problem with the somewhere/anywhere dichotomy is that most people are a mix of the two. One of Goodhart's favourite stats is that 60% of people have never moved more than 20 miles since they were aged 14, but he fails to note that a large proportion of them are Londoners and other big city-dwellers, including many who would otherwise be viewed in his scheme as anywheres. He also ignores that the inverse - 40% of the population have moved around the country - is not some recent development but reflects a history of significant internal migration since the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century. The British population has always been relatively mobile, with the ironic exception of the city-born who were less likely to move, or at least only move between boroughs. The people we characterise as somewheres are often themselves migrants or their children. Many "small towns" were created by wholesale transplantation, and often quite recently (e.g. Scottish steelworkers in Corby). 

Of course Goodhart isn't presenting somewhere as simply a synonym of indigenous, but once you acknowledge that the majority of the population combine both somewhere and anywhere tendencies, his dichotomy loses much of its explanatory value unless you assume there is an ethnic correlation. As Jonathan Freedland noted, Goodhart sees ethnic and religious minorities "as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with". If the somewhere/anywhere binary is not simply a proxy for native/foreign, is it perhaps just a reductive euphemism for class, with the definition of somewheres serving to unite the otherwise disparate "traditional" working class and comfortable middle-class in a conservative bloc opposed to a "woke" upper middle-class that dominates public life? You'll note that this occludes the actual working class, many of whom happen to be from ethnic minorities, unless of course you believe that a Pakistani-heritage bus driver really is indistinguishable from a BBC producer who went to Harrow.

Goodhart's latest foray, Head Hand Heart, appears to be an attempt to explain why the "Anywheres" were not merely unwilling to acknowledge the problem of diversity but incapable of thinking about it. In effect, he posits a form of false consciousness embedded through the brainwashing of further education. This obviously overlaps with fashionable nonsense about cultural Marxism, but it also means that he provides an excuse for liberal refugees like himself: I was misled by groupthink into supporting liberal shibboleths about the progressive value of multiculturalism. The title suggests a more determined attempt to avoid a crude binary this time round, but his argument is still a simple opposition of graduates and the rest, with the latter subdivided by gendered occupations. This gendering suggests a further step towards conservative orthodoxy, valorising the traditional family and womanly virtues, but Goodhart misunderstands that these ideals were always promoted as being untainted by the market, not a subdivision of it. His is a liberal interpretation of conservativism that strays towards caricature.

That Goodhart doesn't quite get conservatism is evident from some of the reviews. For example, David Willetts, who Goodhart credits with stimulating his original interest in the relationship of diversity and welfare, suggests that universities are far more somewhere than anywhere: "Universities are exceptional among modern institutions in having geographical names. They are somewhere. They stay in the same place for centuries. They are crucial to the local economy and civic life and are the best anchor for a town facing the gales of globalisation. The university is the institution where the tensions Goodhart identifies are most often played out. He worries about students moving out and moving up, but he forgets that the university, with its staff and its services, remains rooted in a town, bringing people in and keeping some of them there. The evidence is clear: universities help towns and cities retain home-grown graduates; cities without a university are least likely to attract back students born there after they have graduated."

Despite his own background, Goodhart appears to have a poor grasp of the sociology of British upper and middle-class life. For all the romance of heritage, landowners have historically been anywheres, owning and moving between multiple properties across often great distances. Speaking a foreign language, wintering abroad and being au fait with international culture were the characteristics of the aristocracy, rather than the middle class, until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The impact of Elizabeth David and Terence Conran on middle class taste was only a little ahead of the exposure of the working class to foreign culture through cheap package holidays to Spain, and most sociologists would agree that there has been greater shared cultural capital between the classes over the last half century. The chasm of sensibility that Goodhart imagines depends on extrapolating the preferences and social capital of a much smaller minority, the actual metropolitan elite, to the larger graduate population, and flattening the heterogeneity and variety of the actual working class (which now includes many graduates).

This highlights the shallowness of Goodhart's thinking and his tendency to ignore actual sociology for the ephemera of opinion polls and journalistic commentary, where anxiety about "white loss of identity" is considered as real as myths about campus assaults on free-speech. That shallowness is also evident in his notion that people (or jobs) can be neatly put into one of three boxes. The vast majority of jobs combine cognitive, manual & social skills, not one to the exclusion of the others. Think of a butcher, a nurse or a car mechanic. The history of industrial relations in the UK is of the refusal of manual workers to be limited by the definition of hand, displaying both head (strikes, go-slows etc) and heart (solidarity) in opposition. The contemporary undervaluing of care work has nothing to do with the dominance of heart in the roles, or the disproportionate employment of women, and everything to do with the exploitative structure of the care sector.

Despite his reactionary gestures, Goodhart hasn't become a conservative and evidence of this is the importance he places on fear. For a true Tory, the strong emotion of fear is very much subordinate to more stable ideas such as hierarchy, duty and caution. Goodhart's pessimistic liberalism is founded on the fear of the other as a threat to enlightenment values and its origins lie in the reaction to 9/11. As Corey Robin put it in Fear: The History of a Political Idea, "At moments of doubt about the ability of positive principles to animate moral perception or inspire public action, fear has seemed an ideal source of political insight and energy". The failure of liberal interventionism in Iraq did not dissipate that fear, it simply redirected it to the domestic sphere in the form of an anxiety about diversity. The failure of neoliberal economics in 2008 did not lead to the triumphant return of material politics, let alone socialism, in part because that simmering fear could be leveraged to divide society along the lines of culture and values. Brexit and Trump are conservative epiphenomena of that debilitating liberal fear.

Though Goodhart presents the welfare state as vulnerable, what he actually fears is not the privatisation of the NHS but the undermining of liberal values. His focus on diversity is not simple bigotry but the belief that multiculturalism entails relativism and that this will ultimately erode those values. In expanding his critique to higher education, he isn't railing against strawmen such as postmodernism or no-platforming but suggesting that the goods of academia can only be preserved if they are rationed and their pursuit limited to those who possess a native sympathy for the enlightenment that underpins them. It is clear that the values Goodhart really wishes to preserve are not those of small town conservatives, just as it is a liberal elite, albeit one that is more sensitive to somewheres, that he still envisages attending Russell Group universities once the former polytechnics are converted back to vocational colleges. In desiring parity of esteem for hand and heart, he is hoping to better preserve the head. Figuratively, he wishes to ensure that the mind of the body politic is focused and self-aware and to that end it must be motivated by a fear of its own dissolution.

Starmerism

The Politics Professor Alan Finlayson thinks it's time to define Starmerism. His reasoning is practical: "Political “isms” give movements a sense of direction and purpose. They redraw the lines of disagreement and provide a compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here". In searching for hints about what Starmerism might be, he alights on The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley, the former Executive Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Labour's recently-appointed Director of Policy, but what he finds is a notable absence: "Ainsley’s trenchant criticism of political and cultural elites’ 'systematic dismantling of working-class institutions' and 'denigration of what it means to be working class' is not matched by an analysis of economic elites. At times, her book treats shifts in labour markets and changes to people’s working lives and incomes as natural occurrences rather than things that are done by some people to others." 

I've not read Ainsley's 2018 book, but the impression I get from the limited reviews is that it is typical of recent politically-oriented, non-academic sociology in that it ignores actual social relations and history in favour of a dubious tale of cultural decay and fragmented identity. This may explain why it appears to have garnered as much interest on the right as the left. According to Mark Bergfeld, Ainsley assumes that the working class was historically homogenous and cohesive, and that the shift from manufacturing to service jobs, with a concommitant loss of pride and identity, has occured only in recent decades. The reality is that the working class has always been multifarious, while the service sector has been the largest by employment for over a century. It is also worth noting that the neat alignment of class and party affiliation that informs the myth of homogeneity was an artefact of postwar social democracy, just as today's alignment of party by age and education is the product of neoliberalism. 

This should be a clue as to how material conditions and social relations inform electoral choice, but Ainsley appears to be less interested in these than vogueish "values". Those she considers central to the new working class - family, fairness, hard work and decency - have a worryingly Blue Labour air about them, reinforcing the suspicion that the overlap between her and David Goodhart may be considerable. The lack of a structural critique may make Ainsley's analysis more palatable to the right, but it also risks treating the working class as the problem, with all that this entails in terms of policy coercion. What she has proposed is both modest and top-down (ironic given her critique of how the working class has been failed by political elites). As Bergfeld puts it in his recent review, "the book falls flat at times as it is by no means as inspirational as the Labour Party’s 2017 or 2019 Manifestos. Moreover, most of these policy proposals have been overtaken by the multiple crises of Covid-19, the environment and the economy". 

Ainsley's unwillingness to see class within an agonistic frame, and her consequent reluctance to point the finger of blame for the condition of the contemporary working class, may turn out to be more indicative of Starmerism than the policy specifics. As Finlayson notes, "Our leaders have harmed the economy by treating common interests as a hindrance to the wealth accumulation of a few, and neglected the institutions, people and professions most needed in a time of crisis. Alongside recognising these truths, Labour needs to offer a compelling explanation for why we got here, what we have to overcome, and who we need to be to create a better future than the overheating dystopia that we feel in our bones is already here". What has been notable about Starmer's public expressions since he became leader is not merely the narrowing of culpability to the political field and the focus on competence, but the absence of any story that explains "how we got here" in the manner of Thatcher (an overgrown state) or Blair (a lack of modernisation). Finlayson attributes this to Starmer's lack of a political career prior to 2015, but I think there are two other reasons for this.

First, a fundamental analysis that focused on economic injustice will inevitably end up sounding like "Corbynism without Corbyn", and it is now abundantly clear that Starmerism will be defined first and foremost as not-Corbynism. But for all its unorthodoxy, the policy platform associated with the former party leader was little more than mild social democracy and an open-mindedness to ideas circulating on the left. The unacceptability of that to the right of the party has limited Starmer's room for manoeuvre, but he has also consciously reduced the boundary of the permissible further by his embrace of conservative stances on emblematic issues such as pulling down statues. This isn't merely virtue-signalling to the readership of the Daily Mail, it is a reflection of his very identity as a lawyer. He is a proceduralist, hence his beef with the toppling of Colston was not that the statue should have remained in place but that it should have been removed legally by the council years ago. The second reason then is that Starmer sees himself as a defender of order. He may have progressive and reformist instincts, but he is, to use the vernacular, a "cop".

This reluctance to formulate an analysis of how modern Britain ended up the way it is extends beyond economic justice. As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted about the necropolitics of the Covid-19 crisis, "The Tories wanted to depoliticise the dead, and they've found a willing partner in the Leader of the Opposition. The strictly limited terms of Keir Starmer's opposition is a stress on Tory incompetence. A wider critique is off the cards: contesting the politics of coronavirus is limited to only nibbling at the edges". An even more obvious example of this arose at Prime Minister's Question time on Wednesday when Starmer decided to not question Johnson on reports that the government intended to legislate to give itself the authority to ignore parts of the EU Withdrawal Agreement. This was greeted as a masterly display of good sense by the same pundits who throughout 2019 condemned Jeremy Corbyn for asking questions on any topic other than Brexit, even after he acceded to their demands that Labour support a second referendum.

The reality is that Starmer avoided the subject not because he is a clever lawyer who adroitly evaded being labelled an obstructive remainer but because he is engaged in airbrushing the last two years from history, in particular the bad faith of the People's Vote campaign and the electoral sabotage of the likes of Alistair Campbell from which he, Starmer, ultimately profited. As Owen Jones (who was himself also culpable) ruefully noted, "as Brexit returns to the headlines and there is consensus in the commentariat that the opposition is cleverly sidestepping Johnson’s trap, let us conclude that that should have been everyone’s approach from the very beginning. We could have accepted the referendum, negotiated a close relationship, and pivoted back to the domestic issues that really matter." The apparent disappearance of Brexit as a live political issue confirms the suspicions of many: that the call for a second referendum would have remained a fringe interest had it not been leveraged by those keen to undermine Labour and remove Corbyn.

Keir Starmer's "clean skin" reputation helped him into Parliament in 2015 and it has now propelled him to the leadership of the Labour party, but he cannot pretend to have been elsewhere when the shadow cabinet argued over Brexit, not least because that was his brief, hence the collective decision of the liberal media to consign the history of "remainia" to the memory hole. It looks as if the electoral strategy is to continue to present him as both more competent than Boris Johnson and also unburdened by any socialist baggage. If British politics is becoming more presidential, Starmer's inspiration appears to be Barack Obama, and I suggest that the parallel would probably continue in government. Alan Finlayson is going to remain disappointed. There will be no "compelling explanation of what is happening and how we got here", both because that would risk unearthing too many skeletons, from the activities of rich donors to Tony Blair's baleful influence, and because it would distract from Starmer's own backstory of meritocratic mobility and competent (and conservative) public service.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

What is rightwing humour? I don't mean conservative comedians telling innocuous jokes, but nor am I referring to explicitly political comedy - i.e. topical satire. Rather I define humour as rightwing when it embodies a conservative temperament and a way of seeing the world that supports rightwing politics, albeit sometimes obliquely. Boiled down to its conservative essentials, this type of humour is either punching down - the comedy of hierarchical contempt that includes misogyny, racism and ableism - or the ridiculing of those who threaten the existing order by imagining a different society - the comedy of derision at "do-gooding" and the slapping down of people who get above their supposed station. In other words, it is defensive rather than offensive (in the sense of challenging), resting on a fundamentally misanthropic and pessimistic view of the world. This doesn't mean rightwing comedians can't tell funny jokes, or even jokes that are empathetic and optimistic, but that what defines them as rightwing is a tendency to punch down, not up. 

As we all know from experience, whether in school playgrounds, pubs or workplaces, there is plenty of that first category of rightwing humour - contempt - in circulation, and little sign of it going out of fashion. The problem for the comedy industry (which includes not only those who make a living as comedians or writers but also the media institutions that host and promote comedy) is that this is invariably offensive (in the sense of giving offence), often stepping over the line into hate-speech. This was (just about) tolerable in the Britain of the 1970s, when TV programmes like The Comedians and The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club were aired on ITV, but the evolution of social mores since, together with the development of technology, means that this kind of humour is now largely restricted to informal channels such as WhatsApp and YouTube. Even Roy Chubby Brown's DVDs now look like the artefacts of a bygone age. 

The BBC wouldn't have touched shows like The Comedians at the time, but that was essentially for reasons of snobbery, not the "wokeness" they are now routinely accused of. If already a parody (the The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club inspired at least a quarter of Vic Reeves' act), the Northern workingmens' club was still a reflection of lived reality in the 1970s. The BBC preferred cosy, pseudo-highbrow panel shows that displayed the nostalgic wit of Frank Muir, or standup so polite that it sat down. The latter ranged from The Two Ronnies, a classic example of a show that would work as well on radio as TV (that's a compliment), to Dave Allen, who succeeded by dressing the anarchic humour of Flann O'Brien in a three-piece suit. Just to prove that the BBC weren't wholly disapproving of the popular mores of the period, The Black and White Minstrel Show ran till 1978.

Since the mid-70s, the political right has been engaged in a détournement of the modes and practices of the left: notably presenting the neoliberal shift under Thatcher and Reagan as revolutionary and progressive. Central to this programme was the invention of a liberal establishment, latterly an "elite", that was accused of patronising ordinary people and restricting their freedom of choice. As neoliberalism triumphed in the economic sphere, the focus of attention increasingly moved to the social and cultural, culminating in the claim that politics is now a matter of values more than material conditions. The Conservatives' erosion of the BBC for both ideological and commerical reasons started in the 1950s, but its current strategy reflects this more recent development, with the focus of "reform" having shifted from consumer choice to the spectre of political correctness. In the field of comedy, this détournement has seen the emergence of rightwing comedians who claim to be "punching up" at the liberal establishment, which is about as convincing as decrying censorship from the pages of national newspapers. 

It's not true that contemporary professional comedians in Britain, and particularly those who get TV gigs with the BBC, are notably "leftwing". Politically, most are clustered around the centre. This is the simple result of affinity in an business based on personality. You'll find it easier to advance your career if you share the same values as the white, middle-class centrists with socially liberal views and a preference for free-market economics who dominate the industry. Like will promote like. This became all too evident in recent years when the issue of a second referendum on Brexit allowed comedians with a nominally progressive persona to criticise the Labour leadership as much as the Conservative government. What was notable was not the fact of the criticism but the language, which was the traditional, conservative vocabulary employed to deride the left: unreliable, unrealistic and with dubious foreign loyalties (the irony of the last of these, centring on Russia and Venezuela, was lost on those simultaneously eulogising the EU).

By its very nature, comedy biases towards raillery and disrespect. The comedy industry prevents this going too far (see its difficulty in accommodating genuinely original comedians like Bill Hicks or Jerry Sadowitz), but there is a reward for "edginess" in the frisson of transgression against traditional shibboleths, hence the popularity of those who dabble in "black comedy", such as Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais. That those shibboleths should still include the Queen and the NHS is indicative of the essentially sentimental and conservative nature of both British society and British comedy. The constraint of dissent is not just a matter of selection by TV producers or festival promoters, it is part of the format of comedy itself. The standup routine is hierarchical and pedagogic - though the model is the Calvinist preacher, not the Stoic philosopher - giving rise to its own sub-genre of ironic deconstruction by the likes of Stewart Lee, while panel-based gameshows are a competition in conformity and the acceptance of one's lot (the magnanimous winners, the rueful losers).

What conservative critics mean by "leftwing" in the context of comedy is simply that low hum of dissent: the hint of raillery and disrespect. A demand for an adjustment in tone is a dead-end because that can only produce either the comedy of hatred - the punching down and derision - or the comedy of mindless optimism, which is temperamentally un-conservative. Both hatred and optimism tend to produce poor comedy because they artificially narrow the range of human emotion: the one rejecting empathy and thereby steadily alienating the audience's sympathy, the other rejecting cynicism and demanding faith from an audience that secretly yearns for the thrill of nihilism (optimistic comedy is not unlike Christian Rock). Conventional comedy acknowledges that full range of emotion, but situates and constrains it in such a way that the social order remains unthreatened, mostly famously in the format of the sitcom: people trapped in antagonistic relations but where resolution is always blocked by humourous circumstance.

Ultimately, rightwing comedy is a rare breed not because the comedians just aren't funny, as some illogically claim, but because centrist comedians already provide plenty of the conservative comedy of derision aimed at those who would seek to change the world, from barbs aimed at vegans to skits about excessively "woke" teenagers. This means that rightwing comedians are obliged by the market to pursue the comedy of outright social contempt if they want to be both true to their temperament and distinctive, but so much of that comedy is socially off-limits that they are reduced to peddling jokes that are either borderline racist, misogynist or ableist (the sort of naughty schoolboy humour that distinguishes the likes of Jeremy Clarkson), or indulging tirades of resentment against a political correctness that actually reflects the centrist dominance of conservative humour. When rightwing comedians punch left, they just sound like liberals.