Relative Failure

How bad are things at Arsenal? To judge by the Premier League table, where we sit 15th, they're pretty bad. To judge by recent form, they're calamitous. Over the last 5 league games, Arsenal have recorded 4 defeats and a solitary draw. This is the same as Sheffield United in 20th and is worse than every other team in between. That said, there are good reasons to believe that this marks the nadir of our season and that results will start to pick up. As is my habit, I'm going to look at points per season-third, a period long enough to remove the noise of short-term fluctuations but short enough to establish intra-season trends. Unai Emery was very consistent in his first season at Arsenal, recording 24, 23 & 23 points. Unfortunately for him, you need to average 25 per third to make top-4. He started his 2nd season with 17, was sacked, and the interim/changeover saw a slump to 14 in the middle third. Mikel Arteta oversaw a recovery in last season's final third to 25 points (finishing 8th), which coincided with a winning run in the FA Cup. The first third of this season (games 1-12) saw a slump to 13 points. One way of reading this is that Arsenal benefited from an Arteta bounce that has now dissipated. But it should also be noted that based on the final third of last season the squad is capable of a top-four finish (though that obviously won't happen in 2021). 

The second third has begun with a home draw against Southampton and an away defeat to Everton. Being charitable, the first saw a fightback and then some determination to hang on after Gabriel, one of the season's better performers, picked up a second yellow card, while the visit to Merseyside might have produced a point but for an own goal. Less charitably, neither game suggested an improvement in the team's ability to dominate games, and the EFL Cup exit to Manchester City this week showed how far we are off the pace of the "elite". But I think we need to give it to game 25 and the end of the second third before drawing any firm conclusions (and before panicking about relegation). Looking on the plus side again, we scored a goal in all three matches, which should not be under-valued given that scoring goals was fingered by many as our chief problem (in the league, we managed 10 over the first 12 games). To add to our woes, we have, not for the first time in the club's history, the problem of self-inflicted wounds in the form of unnecessary red cards for indiscipline. That's clearly an epiphenomenon that reflects anxiety within the squad.

The obvious, fundamental problem is a lack of a creative fulcrum in midfield. Fans who demand the return of Mesut Ozil have a point. He would undoubtedly provide that capability and I did myself advocate his better use during the final days of Emery. But I think this ignores the extent to which he thrived because of other players in a complementary system, notably those who could both break the first line to find him in space, either by intelligent passing (Wilshere) or clever running (Ramsay), and who were capable of then getting on the end of Ozil's through balls to bypass the second line of defence. The current squad simply isn't built for a number 10 of the willowly Ozil type, reflecting a wider disappearance of that role in elite football, and his declining effectiveness since 2018 simply reinforces that. Restoring him now might produce a short-term sugar rush, if only because it would stop Arsenal being so predictable, but it is no long-term solution and even his staunchest supporters would not expect the club to offer him another contract extension. I wouldn't rule out Arteta turning to him in desperation, but I suspect it would be the last throw of the dice.

As the fans have become fractious, what has most been called into question is Arteta's judgment, not just in sidelining Ozil (which may be a decision mandated by others in the club hierarchy anyway) but in persisting with Granit Xhaka, who hasn't discovered another gear and remains a disciplinary liability, and Willian, who is fast shaping up to be the worst premium buy the club has ever made. Of course, you have to ask what are the alternatives. I doubt there was a long-term plan to pair Xhaka with Partey, so you have to assume the acquisition of the latter points to the overdue departure of the former next summer. Despite the Ghanaian's frustrating injury, this still looks likely. The missing piece in the jigsaw cannot be a single player such as the much-heralded (or over-hyped) Houssem Aouar, as the club clearly needs depth, so I wouldn't be surprised to see investment in both the January and summer transfer windows. The Kroenke's would be mad not to pony up funds at this time, despite having their fingers burned over the fee paid for the largely disappointing Nicolas Pepé. Missing out on the Champions' Legaue largesse is one thing, but relegation would be a financial disaster for a club committed to a self-sustaining model and dependent on high ticket prices and matchday corporate entertaining.

Arteta's judgement has not only been questioned in terms of selection but in terms of game management, though I doubt the team's now traditional slow start is something he actively coaches. Decisions on substitutions have come under intense scrutiny: not only whether he waits too long to hook under-performers like Willian but whether he waits to long to replace injured players and risks aggravation. To be fair, this is the sort of chuntering that evaporates when the results are going your way, so I'm not inclined the support the idea that the manager simply doesn't know what he's doing. If there is a substantive criticism to make it is that Arsenal are too one-dimensional, being overly-reliant on attacks down the flanks. The poor return on crosses is not simply the result of technical deficiencies by the wide players or attackers, but that the opposition are usually in place to defend them. We occasionally manage to build quickly enough to prevent this happening, for example in the season opener against Fulham, but too often our build-ups are laboured. This is partly down to Xhaka's slowness and the cautious passing of Ceballos and Elneny, but it's also a result of opponents closing down our wide players in the initial move to force them to turn back or pass square. Some of the relative ineffectiveness of Aubameyang and Pepé is attibutable to this. 

Arsenal were famously criticised for not having a plan B during Wenger's later years, but that simply reflected the fact that the team had become predictable, despite his attempts to vary the approach to goal by mixing the very different styles of improvisational players such as Sanchez, Ramsay and Giroud. Ultimately, this boiled down to the Frenchman's reluctance to play either a counter-attacking game or high press, which were en vogue. Both Emery and Arteta have attempted to add those dimensions to Arsenal's play, but the squad isn't overly-blessed with technically confident defenders who can play out from the back (see Mustafi, Sokratis and Kolasinic) or aggressive forwards who can execute a concerted press (see Aubameyang, Pepé and Lacazette). What has remained common is that Arsenal often end up with high possession stats, but whereas under Wenger that often reflected games in which the opposition defended deep and looked to nick a goal on the break, under Arteta it is because they seek to nick a goal (or two) early through pressing and then sit back confident that they can contain Arsenal's attacks.

As a team, the Gunners have spent too long chasing games since Emery's arrival. The ability to come back and even win from losing positions is admirable, but it's not a viable approach over the long term as it leaves too much to chance. Arteta clearly prioritised not going behind in his early months, and despite the hiccoughs this season, the team have often kept the scores level for long periods of the game before succumbing to a sucker punch, such as against Leceister and Burnley. The greater worry though is that when we go behind early, such as in the away games against Man City in October and Spurs in December, we struggle to come back. Arsenal have drifted towards the bottom of the table because they have been playing like a bottom of the table team: hoping to hang on and lacking the ability (or, perhaps more accurately, the confidence) to force their way back into the game when they go behind. In that respect, the first two games of the second third are a little more encouraging. Up next we have a Boxing Day tie against Chelsea, which on paper looks tough but strikes me as unpredictable. After that, the league games against Brighton, West Brom, Crystal Palace and Newcastle look season-defining.

When Wenger stepped down, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest coaches of his generation and Arsenal were seen as an "elite club" that should expect to challenge for the Premier League and Champions League. What was odd was the decision of the club's owners to then hire Unai Emery, a second-tier manager who had made his name in the Europa League. In this light, hiring Arteta looks like a further display of caution, even a pessimistic lack of ambition, however "promising" he might have appeared as Guardiola's assistant. But it also suggests that Arteta's position is safe and the Kroenkes had always anticipated a few lean years while the squad was replenished. That the Spaniard has been promoted from head coach to manager, and is clearly having greater input on squad acquisitions and sales, reinforces this, even if some of those buys (Mari, Cedric, Willian) lack strategic coherence and the failure to replace Emi Martinez with a proven 'keeper now looks foolish. If Arsenal are in the relegation zone by game 25, that could change, but at the moment it looks like the club have priced-in relative failure. The worry for Arsenal fans is this might prove to be more that just a short-term strategy.

Shifting the Blame

Peter Mandelson's recent admisson that hard Brexit is "the price the rest of us in the pro-EU camp will pay for trying, in the years following 2016, to reverse the referendum decision rather than achieve the least damaging form of Brexit" has prompted much soul-searching among remainers, not to mention eye-rolling among those who insisted that the People's Vote campaign was always as much about undermining the then Labour leadership as reversing the referendum result. Of course, blame for the Brexit outcome cannot be attributed to one individual or group. It is clearly multi-factorial. But while much of the commentariat has been united in its desire to spread the blame widely, this has introduced another form of bias: namely the belief that all are equally to blame, but some are more equal than others. Behind this sits the overarching theory that we've painted ourselves into the corner of the hardest possible Brexit because of extremism, whether Continuity Remain's demand for the revocation of Article 50 or the purity of the Brexit ultras. What this obscures is the serial failures of the political centre since 1975.

In that distant year, the Common Market debate was dominated by material concerns, such as the price of foodstuffs, rather than the more nebulous issue of sovereignty or (in the context of the era) our obligations to the Commonwealth. What was notable about the 2016 referendum was that material considerations were largely marginalised in the discourse through the (often justified) derision of "project fear" and the airy assurances that a continuation of existing trading relations would be simple and straightforward. Though Brexiteers emphasised the commercial opportunities that would accrue once freed from the burden of Brussels, this was little more than an adjunct to the central claim that the EU was an unreasonable constraint on British autonomy, a point made concrete in the current debate over fishing rights in which no one genuinely expects the home fleet to massively expand when we take back control of our territorial waters (we'll just flog more licences to the French). This was a debate about power and authority, however ill-conceived or mistaken in its assumptions.

The operation of that power was always more concerned with the domestic realm than the international. Both major parties long connived in the myth that the government's hands were tied by the EU, leading to the expectation that a post-Brexit UK will be characterised more by state activism than trade deals. Danny Finkelstein in the Times noted the contradiction this produces: "Being outside the single market while still striving to be economically successful requires us to free businesses from excessive rules and costs. We’d have to do it sufficiently to offset the disadvantages of being outside the bloc. In other words, we’d have to offer firms lower taxes, fewer rules and reduced labour costs. This, then, was the economics of Brexit. But the politics of Brexit was quite different. Voting to leave the EU would be, and has been, interpreted as a rebellion by those who felt left out of Britain’s increasing prosperity. Satisfying their demands would lead the country towards higher social spending, a higher minimum wage, more regulations. In other words, in the opposite direction to the economics of Brexit."

However, his implication, that an interventionist, pro-social state would be indistinguishable from the EU model, should be challenged. An AES-inspired Lexit may have been no less a fantasy than a freebooting Brexit, but the idea that a genuinely social democratic dispensation - as distinct from both the EU's ordoliberal model and the UK's neoliberal variant - is beyond the bounds of the possible is simply begging the question. This merely relitigates the referendum by insisting there was only ever, and can only ever be, a binary choice, which in turn plays into the narrative that the country was torn between two extremes. Unsurprisingly, coming from a centre-right perspective, Finkelstein pins the blame on the most vocal Brexiteers: "the people responsible for Brexit are the people who advocated for it. The people responsible for a hard Brexit are those people who led us towards it". But he is strangely coy about naming names, presumably because he is only too well aware that the chief advocates of hard Brexit were not Nigel Farage or the ERG but his own mates in the press.

James Kirkup,writing in the Spectator, also sees this as the product of radicalism, but in his view that label can also be attached to the People's Vote campaign: "But after [Theresa May's] early election disaster, there was genuine scope for her deal to pass the Commons on more than one occasion. ... The centre could have held. That it didn’t was down to the radicals on both sides who sought to destroy any common ground in pursuit of purity. The dance of death between the ERG and PV killed softer Brexit. Who led that dance? It doesn’t matter, because it takes two to tango, and it took two sides to destroy every attempt at compromise." Here we see the emerging myth, shared by both centre-right and centre-left (and even some ostensible leftists), that it was the fault of "radicals on both sides". The People's Vote actually received sympathetic press coverage even by pro-leave newspapers in 2018 and 2019, which reflected the split loyalties of the readership as much as the issue's utility in undermining Labour. That this impeccably centrist campaign, which pushed for a second referendum rather than outright revocation, has now been recast as "radical" is frankly bizarre.

Anand Menon and Jill Rutter provide a more comprehensive list of suspects in their long Prospect article, Who killed soft Brexit? Though this liberally spreads the blame, it does so by focusing on errors of tactical judgement rather than the inevitable culmination of a strategic failing that was decades in the making. So Theresa May is blamed for triggering Article 50 without a clear plan and for boxing herself in with her "red lines"; Jeremy Corbyn is blamed for insisting on opposing the government instead of supporting May's deal, while the PLP is accused of cowardice in not breaking the whip; and the Liberal Democrats and SNP are accused of deluded opportunism in commiting to a revocation of Article 50 and supporting Johnson's call for a general election. The charge-sheet extends to the poor performance of Britain's institutions (parliament, the civil service, the press), and even to the defensiveness of the EU. Some of these charges are justified: May's wounds were clearly self-inflicted and the smaller parties' opportunism gave the lie to their cant about "the national interest". But some is unjustified: the EU27 had every reason to be defensive given their experience of the UK as a negotiating partner, while Labour had good reason to believe after 2017 that it could bring down the government.

Menon and Rutter's conclusion is that a soft Brexit was there for the taking but also that it was a compromise that was simply too unpalatable for too many: "For all the various culprits that conspired to kill it off, it may be that soft Brexit always carried within it the seeds of its own destruction. At least some of those around the top table feared that it was in fact not the obvious compromise, but instead the “worst of all worlds,” where you are locked out of the room but still locked into most of the rules. Soft Brexit was something, in other words, that all sides could agree to disagree with". The reason for this antipathy was not simply the shortcomings of being a rule-taker, but the difficulty of securing a trade-off in a political environment unsuited to such pragmatism: "could a political mindset that prizes adversarialism over collaboration ever buy the inherently unsatisfactory compromise of a soft Brexit?" This theme was expanded on in their summary for the Guardian, which pins the blame on "our wantonly destructive politics" (amusingly, this shorter piece omits any mention of the Liberal Democrats, who were the most wantonly destructive party at Westminster in 2019).

Though they come from different points on the ideological spectrum, these interpretations share the belief that what has led to hard Brexit is the failure of the political centre to cohere and collaborate. But rather than taking this as evidence of the centre's intellectual poverty and incompetence, there is a tendency, particularly with Menon and Rutter, to view it as the tragedy of an antiquated political system that lacks both a consititution (which might have prevented the 2016 referendum being embarked upon so blithely) and the collaborative practices of proportional representation. This means that the hunt for the deeper historical roots of the tactical mis-steps of the last four years is diverted into the conventional territory of constitutional and electoral reform, something that many on the left have been happy to buy into too. Such reform may be necessary, but what the abstraction of Brexit boils down to is power over our own lives: for most leavers, autonomy is a more relevant concept than sovereignty. Providing the political class with more modern tools ignores that the erosion of popular autonomy has been virgorously pursued by that same class for over 40 years and, as the course of the pandemic shows, the question of power over our own lives remains central to popular concern.

I think Menon and Rutter are right that while a soft Brexit was plausible - and even popular, as they concede - it was politically impossible, but the reason for this has little to do with a preference for the adversarial (except in the limited sense of factionalism within Labour) or an inclination towards the wantonly destructive. British politics between 1992 and 2016 was characterised by triangulation and pragmatism, so the charge that collaboration and compromise were too alien really doesn't stick. A more plausible explanation is that the British political class lacked sufficient imagination to see the UK as anything other than either a wholly independent nation or a fully-integrated member of the European Union. The UK has always been a hybrid state, both in its constitutional form (the peculiarities of devolution and the anomalous situation of Northern Ireland) and in its geopolitical role as a bridge between the US and the EU. But it has managed to absorb both of these into a worldview in which Westminster remained dominant and the UK was seen as a first-rank global power. Soft Brexit would have required us to adopt another hybrid self-image, and one that couldn't be so easily finessed to satisfy our collective ego. Becoming Norway, or even Canada, was seen as too much of a step down in the world.

Watch Your Language

Much as Jill Stein of the Greens was blamed for Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 US Presidential election, Black Lives Matter protestors are now being blamed for the Democrats' failure to win the Senate and increase their hold on the House of Representatives. Jonathan Freedland, who has carved out a new niche at the Guardian as the Democrat establishment's British flack, explains this as the tactical folly of using the slogan "Defund the police", which supposedly alienated conservatives who were otherwise minded to vote for the Democrat ticket in November. Naturally he fails to explain the American context, where police funding is actually a salient political issue in a way that it isn't in the UK, and where many politicians run campaigns for elected office on the promise to further increase resources. Nor does he explain that the focus on funding is the other side of the coin to the charge of "militarization" - i.e. the common demand is for the police to be subject to democratic control, an argument that actually garners support among many conservatives concerned by Federal over-reach.

The chief witness for the prosecution of BLM is, inevitably, Barack Obama: "The former president said he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”. The very change activists wanted moved further out of reach." At no point does Freedland stop to ask why Obama didn't progress police reform during his 8 years in the White House. Indeed, far from ridding the criminal justice system of bias, the liberals' favourite President was reluctant to engage with the issue for most of his tenure and his eventual interventions were largely tinkering (on this occasion, the blame is conveniently laid at the door of a hostile Republican Congress, ignoring the President's ability to effect change through executive orders). What marked Obama's presidency was a surfeit of carefully-crafted words that urged change while the executive arm of government largely sat on its hands. This was most stark in the case of gun control, where he provided the nation with emotional release through his empathetic speeches following mass shootings, such as at Sandy Hook, while continuing to tolerate the status quo.

Freedland's wider point is that words matter, but his explanation of why this is so, or why intent and effect can become divorced in political rhetoric is shallow. He explains the problem with the BLM slogan as one of mishearing - "But what too many voters heard was “abolish the police”, by starving them of funds" - rather than misinterpretation or misunderstanding. This allows him to avoid considering the possibility of misrepresentation: the role of the media in insisting that defund was synonymous with abolish. The importance of media opinion underpins Freedland's analysis. When he says that "It’s because change is urgent and necessary that Democrats need to argue for it in a way that wins, rather than loses, support", he isn't advocating patient explanation of policy substance ("When the policy was expressed the way Obama put it, 70% of them backed it" - yeah, right) but insisting on the media's role in supervising political rhetoric. This seems particularly cloth-eared in the aftermath of the BBC's Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, being criticised by economists for using the misleading metaphor of a "maxed-out credit card" to describe government debt.

The chief purpose of Freedland's article is not to further burnish the reputation of Obama, or exonerate the Democrat establishment for a cautious election campaign that came near to failure. Rather it is to punch left in the context of the Labour party. This goes beyond the old Blairite insistence that "equality" should be replaced by "fairness" in the party's messaging to the broader demand that the left should simply shut up: "In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher ran against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the women of Greenham Common, the miners, the universities and often obscure local councillors, as much as she did against Neil Kinnock. Even if he could control his own message, he couldn’t control theirs." In short, he is supporting Starmer and Evans in their strategy of expelling the left and distancing the Labour party from any social movements that might prove challenging. Given that the left isn't going to shut up, and given the ructions over CLPs wishing to debate Jeremy Corbyn's suspension, this suggests that the current tactic of making certain topics impermissible may be extended to a ban on certain words and phrases. It also suggests that the Guardian will be fully supportive of this particular restraint on free speech.

At this point I'm going to leave the embarrassment of the Guardian behind and take a look at the broader history of sloganeering. Freedland gave a few examples of how the political right in the US successfully steered political debate by clever labelling, but he didn't stop to ask why the right has generally been more successful than the centre-left at this. One reason has been a willingness to rhetorically address substance, a winning strategy since the Bolsheviks' "Bread, Peace, Land" in 1917. This doesn't have to be honest or even credible. A relatively recent American example was the use of "death panels" to criticise the administration of proposed healthcare reform. Democrats have not always preferred to go high rather than low (consider Hillary Clintons use of "superpredators"), but they have tended to employ aspirational but empty rhetoric, that floated over the heads of the electorate, more than their Republican opponents. This is not simply a predilection for the high-falutin but a fear of making substantive promises to which they are then held (some of which will conflict with the interests of their donors). In contrast, the GOP believes it can survive failing to deliver to its base so long as it delivers to its backers (cut taxes, fail to build wall, rinse, repeat). In part this is because what the economically-comfortable portion of the conservative base wants is often just rhetoric, a point that should be obvious to Britons after four years of the Brexit farce.

In the UK, substance has tended to do better than the pious when it comes to slogans, particularly in general elections. The Conservatives' "Get Brexit Done" had a clear advantage over Labour's "Time for Real Change" last year. Even if it was largely meaningless, it was more tangible for electors. In contrast, Labour's "For the Many, not the Few" was more effective in 2017 than the Tories' forgettable "Forward, Together". It also arguably disproves Freedland's claim that equality is a repellent concept, as did the "We are the 99%" slogan of the Occupy movement. Perhaps the most compelling recent British example was the 2016 EU referendum where "Let's Take Back Control" remains memorable while "Stronger, Safer and Better Off" doesn't. One notable feature of British election slogans is the willingness of the Tories to directly address Labour, most famously in 1979's "Labour Isn't Working" but also in 1992's "Labour's Tax Bombshell". This doesn't always work (see 1997's "New Labour, New Danger"), but it's a contrast to the Labour party's reluctance to engage in open confrontation. Together with its discomfort at the mention of class, unless evoked in terms of nostalgia, this has meant that the people's party has generally struggled to speak convincingly to the people. 

That aversion to condemning the Tories is part of the liberal legacy of propriety and aspiration that came to dominate Labour after the leadership of Hugh Gaitskell and the intellectual revisionism of Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. Though the old tunes lived on in the rhetoric of politicians such as Michael Foot and Peter Shore, and most vigorously among the more militant trade union leaders, by the time of Neil Kinnock the language of condemnation had been reduced to cliché and was as likely to be deployed in attacks on the left. Tony Blair, with no threat on his left flank, could focus his attacks on a Conservative administration that had already become a byword for incompetence and sleaze, but the Labour leader's moralising was merely a garnish on a glossy sales pitch that emphasised the combination of youth and aspiration as a panacea for structural problems. Jeremy Corbyn represented a return to the tradition of condemnatory rhetoric, albeit often mild in manner, so it was unsuprising that Starmer should seek to emphasise the change of management by lurching in the other direction to a constructive criticism and forensic manner that has quickly bored even his media champions.

An effective political slogan does two things: it crystallises a feeling and its proposes an action. Both can be implicit, rather than explicit - for example, the Tories' 2005 slogan, "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" made a virtue of its implication - but the explicit tends to be more effective. 1979's "Labour Isn't Working" was blunt in its observation, which crystallised a common dissatisfaction, and that allowed the call to action (vote Conservative) to then be implicit. The more granular a campaign, the more explicit the slogan is likely to be and the more emphasis there will be on the call to action. In this regard, "Defund the Police" is exemplary in that it manages to both crystallise the idea of the police as an accountable public service and highlight that different choices can be made, by the people, on how to spend public money in or around the criminal justice system. The alternative proposed by Obama - a series of specific, non-threatening managerial changes carried out by the political establishment under cover of bland language - would almost certainly produce little more than further tinkering. 

Just as with the posthumous reinvention of Martin Luther King Jr. as a euphonious liberal, rather than an angry radical who matured into a democratic socialist, so the criticism of "Defund the Police" originates in a belief that what is amiss is the fundamental premise, not the choice of language. Despite the irrefutable evidence that the funding of American police has been excessive and counter-productive, there is a lack of political will to address the issue. This is partly discretion - the idea that defunding is a vote-loser - but it also reflects the reality that police abuse isn't a pressing issue for the political class nor (a few assaulted journalists and photographers aside) the media. A broader objection to the slogan for many liberals is simply that it isn't a message they are in control of, and it's one that they fear could develop a momentum of its own. It's not quite "All Power to the Soviets", but it has the same risk of mutability. If the police are not beyond democratic control, what other functions of the state could be up for debate? For liberal commentators like Jonathan Freedland, this is twin threat: to the political establishment that they serve and to the media's role in managing the language of politics.

Future Shock

There is a tendency to attribute secular shifts to shocks. Major changes are deemed to be sudden responses to unexpected events, rather than the slow working through of trends that have been decades in the making. A contemporary example is Brexit, which despite the high drama of the last four years has been in the post since the mid-80s and won't fully work itself out till 2040. In popular British history, the daddy of all shocks (though definitely not a surprise) was World War Two, though its social and economic ramifications weren't as great as those of the Great War. The NHS is seen as a response to the popular mobilisation of wartime rather than the logical conclusion of a process of health reform that began in the 1920s, while you could easily be forgiven for imagining that there was no welfare state prior to 1939. The Attlee government is taken to mark the point at which the British Empire began to fragment, essentially because of Indian independence in 1947, despite the administration's actual reluctance to begin decolonisation (motivated not just by racism but by a desire to generate export dollars from colonial ouput in order to pay off US war loans). In fact, the Empire had been creaking at the seams since the Treaty of Versailles acknowledged national self-determination.

This tale of the war as a disjuncture has been challenged by many revisionist historians over the years (and notably by David Edgerton recently), but apart from the attraction of just-so stories or simple cause-and-effect, what the tendency to subscribe to such narratives highlights is the difficulty of thinking outside the framework of historicism and its clean breaks: acknowledging that the twentieth century is still happening somewhere (e.g. the "Red Wall") and that the twenty-first arrived in some respects forty years ago (when kids in those northern small towns were listening to Duran Duran or Cabaret Voltaire). As William Gibson famously put it, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". This has a particular resonance today as we wonder what lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic will have on society, from the imagined desertion of cities to a life lived largely online. I am sceptical about many of the predictions. An early, preventable death from the virus is a shock to the individual, but it doesn't follow that deaths in aggregate will constitute a shock to society (even if the excess is steadily advancing towards the total civilian casualties in WW2 of 67,000).

People have been moving out of cities for some years now, as unaffordable property prices and improvements to transport make commuting easier (it may not feel easier if you're crammed on a train into London, but that the train is packed despite steady increases in capacity is telling). Likewise, working from home has grown since the hyperbole of digital cottagers in the 1990s. The numbers who work remotely full-time are still quite small, but part-time remote working has become normal among middle class professionals. The pandemic lockdowns will have accelerated this trend, but without Covid-19 we would probably have seen an inflexion point in many sectors of the city-based economy around now anyway. For example, the slow death of high-street retail started years ago, reducing car usage is well-established public policy, and new office developments have been trending downwards since the building booms of the 1980s and 90s. It's worth noting that the latter slowing pre-dates the 2008 crash as well as Brexit, though both will no doubt be cited as reasons for the City of London's relative decline over the coming years.

The pandemic is primarily a demand shock - a fall in consumption that has pushed up savings and exerted further pressure to keep interest rates low or even negative - but many commentators think that the consequences will turn out to be "scarring" on the supply side, or hysteresis. This can take a material form in the case of capital goods that are left "stranded" if society fundamantally changes - e.g. empty office blocks - but it can also take the form of abandoned human capital, such as workers having to change not just jobs but sectors, thereby seeing skills built up over many years going to waste and capabilities reset to zero. As FlipChartRick recently put it, surveying a perfect storm of shocks, "The combined effect of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Brexit and the Covid pandemic have left our economy permanently scarred." I think this is a questionable claim when viewed objectively (you could as plausibly argue that the greater scarring occured in the 1980s, when we committed to a service economy locked in to lower trend growth), but it obviously meets an emotional need for the road not taken: the future will be worse than it might otherwise have been. 

Capital waste is endemic to capitalism. That, after all, is the fundamental argument for planning, which even the most neoliberal governments still accept the need for in many areas. You only have to look at the sorry history of Britain's railways, from the over-capacity of the nineteenth century "mania" through the long-delayed rationalisation of Beeching to today's farcical attempts to avoid the formality of nationalisation. In contrast, it is perfectly normal - even healthy - for people to acquire and then lose skills over their lifetime. To see this as "waste", or a poor return on investment, simply highlights the dubious ideological frame of "human capital" and its attempt to promote labour from an equally-dubious commodity to a financial instrument (it also contradicts the obsession with retraining and flexibility). We need to distinguish between physical capital (most obviously buildings) and humanity if we are to think straight. The transposition of the pathology of capitalism - its tendency towards crisis, its social disruption, its ecological destruction - onto humanity itself leads to the seeming paradox that we can neither envisage change yet are always imagining apocalyptic ruptures. 

As Frederic Jameson famously put it in his essay Future City, "Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world." What's rarely noted is that this observation followed a reference to Ursula Le Guin's vision, in The Lathe of Heaven, of buildings "melting". In other words, the world being addressed here is that of urbanity and its poets are less the cynical but optimistic cyberpunks and more the Ballardian pessimists. The disaster film, or the superhero film in which disaster is narrowly averted after much damage, has become as emblematic of our times as the zombie film and its chagrin over humanity's debased state was in the years before 2008. Central to this genre is the destruction of the city, which if you were to judge by Hollywood's ouput is a far more real threat than climate change. Even when the latter takes centre stage, it is the climate's effect on the metropolis that is usually focused upon, and not just because a flooded Manhattan is more cinematically engaging than a flooded prairie.

If we go further back in time, we can see the Romantic obsession with picturesque ruins as a response to the early stages of industrialisation, but perhaps more significant was the vogue for large-scale pictures of apocalyptic destruction in the Victorian era, such as the work of John Martin. These combined not only the violent sweeping away of the world but a clear moral message, most obviously in paintings such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The belief that the pandemic is a judgement on us all has helped to drive the "changed utterly" narrative, while the flowering of conspiracy theories, from the Great Reset to the belief that lockdown is disaster socialism in action, clearly reflects both a popular fear of capitalism and an elite anxiety about that fear. But just as we optimistically imagine a radically changed capitalism of home-baking and Ocado deliveries, or pessimistically dread a broken capitalism giving way to social carnage and xenophobic nationalism amongst the ruins, so we exaggerate both the ease with which a social and economic order can change and the vulnerability of the existing order in the face of shocks. This seems strikingly naive when viewed in the context of history, whether over the last century or the last decade.

The city will survive, but it will also continue to slowly change in composition and size, just as it has done over the last three centuries of expansion and temporary contraction. The global population continues to shift from the rural to the urban, and there seems little likelihood that meagcities will not continue to grow, particularly in Asia and Africa, regardless of how much high-speed fibre is laid. This spread of urbanity beyond the first world will make city-dwelling less attractive to many in developed countries (a phrase that will increasingly be meaningless, of course), but there has always been a constituency that demonised the urban and valorised the imagined bucolic. Without them, our suburbs would look very different. Pret will not disappear, it will simply open more branches on suburban high streets. Workers will still commute into cities, just not necessarily every day (and, who knows, perhaps the four day week will creep in via the back door of home-working). There will still be cars.