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.

Heroes and Villains

In his recent short essay, What was Corbynism?, Will Davies noted that the moral cause that swept the backbench MP to the leadership of the Labour party was a reaction to the instrumental moralising of David Cameron and George Osborne: "The aftermath of the financial crisis witnessed a resurgent politics of guilt, in which authority derived from its capacity to mete out punishment to those who had allegedly had it too good. ... Devastating cuts to the welfare budget and to local government (which is responsible for so much of what holds society together, via social care and children’s services) were notionally justified on a nonsensical macroeconomic pretext that they would generate growth and balanced budgets, but morally and psychologically justified on the basis that someone needed to suffer." The war on welfare was not just an article of faith for the Tories, it was a cynical diversion at a time when QE was cushioning the wealth of asset-holders. As Davies continues, "The point is that, several years before an unlikely figure from the Stop The War coalition became Leader of the Opposition, austerity had already been waged as a moralistic program based around a logic of innocence, guilt and punishment, overlayed on to a financialised economy divided ... according to a logic of assets and debt."

Had Labour's interim leader, Harriet Harman, taken a moral stand over benefit cuts in 2015, then it is likely that the leadership election would have seen a "soft left" candidate, such as the second-placed Andy Burnham, win handsomely. Though the membership clearly wanted the party to be more leftwing in general, and Corbyn enjoyed a sympathetic regard because of his historic radicalism, it was ethics rather than politics that fuelled his victory in the contest. Labour lost sight of its historic purpose as the voice of the dispossesed and the disadvantaged - and this was as much due to the Parliamentary Party's longstanding pusillanimity as the ideological dérapage of the New Labour years - with the result that one of the few sincere international socialists in its ranks became its conscience. One way of understanding how a largely unchanged membership could vote first for Corbyn and then for Starmer is to recognise that in 2015 they had little choice if they didn't want to compromise their core beliefs about what Labour stood for. Unlike the PLP, the opportunistic perpetuation of the party was not enough.

This moral dimension is salient at the moment because of Rishi Sunak's recent Spending Review. In the midst of the pandemic, the Conservative government finds itself unable to target its usual cast of the disreputable. The unemployed, who are forecast to number 2.6 million by the middle of next year, cannot be beasted as workshy or inadequate when jobs are disappearing through no fault of their own. Similarly, "skivers" will remain a redundant insult as long as the furlough scheme continues. That the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit is due to end at the same time, next April, is obviously not a coincidence, while the ending of the grace period on benefit capping is already underway. This explains why the groups singled out by the Chancellor in his statement for punitive treatment are those who are deemed to at least have jobs and therefore less cause for complaint, hence public sector workers (with doctors, nurses and those on the lowest pay exempted) are expected to bear a real-terms pay reduction despite their efforts on the "frontline". Likewise, foreign aid can be slashed because the recipients have made no sacrifices for the nation and are popularly seen as queue-jumpers for limited charity. 

This last move is particularly vicious and has presumably been chosen (thereby breaking a manifesto pledge) in order to provide rightwing newspapers and the reactionary base with some red meat at a time when domestic villains are in short supply. As foreign aid is set as a share of GDP, maintaining it at 0.7% would represent a real-terms cut anyway because the economy has contracted by an estimated 11.3%. The additional "saving", estimated at £5 billion over the coming year, is negligible in terms of both the current deficit and accumulated debt. Public sector net borrowing for 2020-21 is forecast to be £394 billion while total debt will be north of £2 trillion. The popularity of this move is not a reflection of a lack of charity among Britons, who have mostly elevated Marcus Rashford to hero status for his campaigning for extended school meals, though the excuse that "We should spend it on our own people" often comes from those most insistent that domestic welfare should be trimmed as well. Rather it reflects a desire to export the punishment Davies talks of and not have to witness the consequences. It is an act of moral cowardice in which a majority of the population are implicated.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed severe shortcomings in the state's resilience and capacity, and has particularly highlighted the damaging effect of austerity on local authorities over the last decade. Though more money has been provided for the extraordinary measures demanded by the pandemic, there is little sign that the government either intends to redress the last ten years of counterproductive underfunding or to alter its preference for outsourcing and private sector profit-making over public sector provision, despite the clearly greater competence of the latter in areas such as track and trace and the almost comical levels of incompetence and corruption revealed in the awarding of contracts for PPE and other pandemic-related products and services. The idea that there won't be a return to austerity, or indeed that austerity ever actually ended, is not supported by current policy. We are currently in a phoney war where the government cannot launch its austerity campaign for want of suitably contemptible opponents. Efforts were made to fill the temporary absence with the press focus on "Covidiots" earlier in the year, and more recently in ministerial statements that sought to pin the blame for the second wave on the public, but these have been undermined by confused regulations and perceived unfairness over local lockdowns.

The political right has always needed enemies within, but the intensity of the hatred of selected scapegoats is a relatively new development, and one that increasingly extends to the liberal centre. In a 2016 New Left Review essay, Davies describes the history of applied Neoliberalism in three phases. The initial period of 1979-89 was defined by its "combative opposition to socialism, whose destruction, both internationally and domestically, provided its animating telos". Despite failing in its public objectives to reduce unemployment ("Labour isn't working") and increase productivity ("Let managers manage"), it clearly succeeded in its core objective of marginalising socialism. The normative neoliberalism of the second phase, which spanned 1989-2008, was engaged in the "remaking of subjectivity around the ideal of enterprise", with competition (both real and artificial) employed as a means to discover best practice and ensure fairness. To this end, centre-left parties found themselves more in tune with the times because of both their greater willingness to pursue managerial and technocratic approaches to governance and their tolerance for increased public expenditure. Inequality was legitimised on the grounds of both efficiency and fairness. When neoliberal governance was shown to be hollow by the banking crisis, inequality once more became salient in political discourse.

The third phase, which Davies styles punitive neoliberalism, is still ongoing and is characterised by the focus on debt, which is held up both as a failure of government in the preceding phases and as a personal shortcoming, hence the utility of daft analogies between government spending and households or credit cards. "Under punitive neoliberalism, economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt, producing a melancholic condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations". Again, this is not simply an irrational spasm but an emergent process whose purpose is to divert society from the need to acknowledge the failure of neoliberalism to save capitalism by making it either fairer or more efficient. As Davies puts it, "One way of interpreting the apparently senseless violence of punitive neoliberalism is as a strategy for the circumvention of crisis and, at the same time, an avoidance of critique". 

In this context, the recent examples of cronyism and waste, and the disregard for public opinion over the subsequent revelations, are as telling as the Prime Minister's decision that far from being sacked for bullying, the Home Secretary should be held up as an example to us all, a heroine battling the Civil Service's ingrained misogyny and racism. In the eyes of liberal opinion, this is more evidence of Johnson's lack of virtue and the Conservatives' unwillingness to be bound by the norms that they insist should be observed by others. But this critique ignores that the Tories' defence of their actions actually rests on the arguments of combative and normative neoliberalism: that the free market must be prioritised over the state, even if that means tolerating abuse at the margin; and that coercive management is acceptable if it produces positive outcomes. As we (hopefully) come out of the pandemic next year, we can expect Tory rhetoric to return to the identification of society's villains in advance of a new round of rebranded austerity. Until then, if you want your punitive neoliberalism fix, you'll have to make do with the Labour party's war on its own membership.

Bloc Party

The report that the Republicans gained votes among ethnic minorities during the recent US Presidential election should remind us that the right are not oblivious to, or in denial about, demographic change. And, that whatever their reactionary instincts, they will attempt to shore up their support by accommodating that change. The most famous historic example of this is the way in which the political right appealed to women after female suffrage was finally achieved, fearing that the "gentler sex" would be attracted to socialism and less supportive of the military, by an emphasis on stability and security in the context of "family values". One reason why the Republicans shifted in recent decades to the "angry white dude" vote, with emblematic issues such as gun rights and the "culture war", is that religion and abortion have started to lose their valence as vote motivators for both men and women. Another reason is that the Republicans have been losing support among male voters and have been thrashing about for a response. In many ways, Donald Trump was an experiment, the results of which actually point to the potential to build on a growing conservative base among ethnic minorities.

In the case of Britain, the political prioritisation of antisemitism over other forms of discrimination and bigotry should be seen not simply as factional instrumentalism by the Labour right, but as evidence that the Jewish community has become more politically Conservative since the 1970s, with the inflexion point occuring a decade ago. This secular shift has meant that Jewish political and cultural concerns have steadily gained credibility with a centre-right media that still exhibits instinctive antisemitism on occasions, and there has been relatively little pushback against the more extreme manifestations of it, such as Melanie Phillips' hatred of Palestinians. Just as the Mail and the Telegraph have managed to set the political agenda for the BBC in recent years, so too the Jewish Chronicle now has a subsidiary role as a catalyst for the broadcast media's treatment of antisemitism and the acceptability of the Labour Party. The news that the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement are now making explicit demands of Keir Starmer is less an indication of the community's relative strength, or of the Labour leader's sympathies, than evidence that they are only too well aware of the media leverage they now enjoy. 

One way of looking at the importance that the Labour right attaches to antisemitism is not just its utility as a stick with which to beat the left but as an apeing of rightwing attitudes. The history of the Labour right has essentially been the promotion of conservative policies, from austerity and wage restraint to immigration controls and higher defence spending, coupled with the limited amelioration of the consequent social ills. Antisemitism has become salient for the Labour right precisely because they believe Jews have moved politically towards the Tories. The obvious problem with "chasing conservative voters" in this fashion is that it doesn't work, which is why we've normally had Conservative governments over the last 100 years. For those in denial about the party's conflicted Brexit stance, the loss of the "red wall" of Northern and Midlands seats last year has been attributed to a combination of Jeremy Corbyn's personal unpopularity, a failure to pander to "legitimate concerns" over immigration, and an "extreme" manifesto, but the decline in Labour's vote long predated the previous leader and the turn left, while attempts to outbid the Tories on immigration, national security and punitive welfare have consistently failed over the years. 

As Jews have cleaved more strongly to the Conservative party, the Labour right have increasingly viewed them as swing voters, despite their negligible significance in all but a handful of constituencies, or even as a communal bloc vote that needs to be "won back", which is both patronising and inherently racist in its assumption that Jews vote as a unified community. Of course, the same patronisation is evident in talk of the "white working class" as a homogenous bloc. To a degree, this is part of the Labourist tradition, which long relied on votes aligning with sectarian and ethnic boundaries, but what is relatively new, dating from the New Labour years, is the almost complete disregard for those other dimensions of society - represented by groups such as the poor, the young and the old - that the party felt it had both an obligation to represent and a need to explictly target. This arises from an increasing focus on voters as bearers of "cultures" and "values", which is not just an anti-materialist (and inherently reactionary) perspective, but appears to reflect an acute sensitivity to contemporary sectarian and ethnic boundaries, however illusory they may be in reality.

Though antisemitism is more prevalent among Conservative party members, it is no longer definitional in the way that it was up until the 1960s. The historic role of the Jew - as the embodiment of the alien and the suspect - has now been inherited by the Muslim, while the asylum-seeker has absorbed much of the bigotry once aimed at the Irish and West Indians. The result is that Islamophobia and an intolerance towards refugees has become more respectable among both Conservative and Labour MPs, but it is only the former who can claim to be in harmony with their membership. Of course, being out of step with the members is a badge of honour for most of the PLP. This friction within the Labour party, which also manifests itself over trans and traveller rights, is not simply the latest cycle of the struggle between a predominantly leftwing membership and a predominantly rightwing apparatus. There is more going on here than a dispute over socialism versus revisionism. As a political vehicle built on the trade unions and affiliate societies, Labour is the ultimate bloc party. At heart this is a dispute over whether the party's future will be based on ethnic and cultural blocs, with the more conservative (notably the "native English") enjoying a privileged position in determining priorities, or whether it will remain a class-based party seeking common cause in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. Is it a coalition of verticals or a horizontal?

In the US, the same secular evolution is paradoxically more antagonistic at a societal level, because of the country's history of slavery and genocide and its institutional bias against non-whites, but less antagonistic at the party political level, because party affiliation is looser and the constitution encourages broad (if deradicalised) coalitions. There's no membership to expel and consequently the media spends little time trying to badger party managers into disciplinary action. Instead the focus is on policy development, which in practice is bought or blocked by mega-donors. Radical challenges to this order are either marginalised through media blackouts or neutered by black propaganda with an emphasis on lurid conspiracy and character assassination. One of the more notable developments since 2015 has been the way that this traditional American style of anti-radicalism has seeped into British politics, with examples of conspiracism (chiefly, but not only, around Brexit) and blackballing (Corbyn, obviously). To call this McCarthyite isn't hyperbole. 

The Labour party leadership's current preference for values in place of policies and its ambition to build an Obama-like coalition of the undemanding is likely to prove fruitless, both because the electoral blocs it wishes to court are nowhere near as coherent and institutionally robust as they are in the US and because the few blocs that have disproportionate media clout, due to their alignment with the right on key issues, will push the party so far to the right as to be indistinguishable from the Tories. Making a martyr of Jeremy Corbyn doesn't just risk alienating the left, it risks alienating those groups that Corbyn and the left have traditionally championed, hence the increasing concerns expressed by Black and Asian party members at the perceived hierarchy of racism and bigotry displayed under the "new management". That Donald Trump managed to grow his vote among ethnic minorities and women was seen as a paradox by many, even an irony, but it simply proves that he was a pragmatist who was happy to take support from any quarter. In contrast, Keir Starmer seems set on a course that will inevitably narrow Labour's electoral coalition further. Following the vote-share high of 2017 and the setback of 2019 (for which Starmer's Brexit policy must shoulder a lot of blame), this looks self-defeating.

American Polarisation

Donald Trump's election in 2016 didn't reflect well on the Constitution (not least the electoral college), the vulnerability of the Republican Party establishment to a leveraged buyout, or the weakness of the Democratic Party in the face of an unabashed plutocrat. His relatively narrow defeat in 2020 (currently 78 to 73 million votes with 97% counted) is not a victory for the Democrat establishment, let alone "normality". Liberals are now ruefully conceding that "Trumpism" is here to stay, but they remain resistant to conceding that Trump is essentially a symptom of a deeper structural malaise, to do with the operation of American capitalism and the anti-democratic design of the constitution, rather than simply a freak occurence. Instead there will be a renewed scolding of the left, for its carping and lack of enthusiasm, combined with an ever more contemptuous distaste for "vulgar populism" and "demagogic nationalism". The meta-narrative of the political scientists will simply be the old tune of polarisation, again ignoring that the appearance of a deep divide centred on irreconcilable "values" is a product of the constitution and of the power of money, rather than something intrinsic to the American character.

One reason why Trump has managed to not only retain voters but grow his support is that he has been an exemplary Republican President. His has not been an activist administration, despite the promises. He didn't build the wall, he didn't bring the coal & steel jobs back, he didn't pull out of NATO. For many GOP voters this isn't a problem, not simply because he can blame inactivity on an unhelpful Democrat-controlled House or bogeys like antifa, but because the failures affect few voters directly (his Florida win appears to have been down to retirees and wealthier Latinos, for example). He has also avoided alienating his supporters. His remarks over the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the Proud Boys were seen by liberals as evidence of his moral debasement, but far from suggesting that he is a secret collector of Nazi memorabilia they merely indicate that he is a pragmatist keen to preserve all parts of his base. His tax cuts are seen as aspirational by many (the product of decades of ideological spade-work across the aisle) and his handling of the pandemic has been sufficiently obscured by supportive media to allow many voters to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Did the Covid-19 pandemic influence the result? If you argue that it did, and furthermore that Trump lost voters due to his mismanagement and performative ignorance, then the counterfactual is one in which no pandemic occurs and Trump retains those voters and possibly wins. If you argue that it didn't, then you have to conclude that the Democrats failed to make it a sufficiently decisive issue. The key takeaway for me is that Trump has recorded not only the highest ever Republican candidate vote (beating his own 2016 record) but more than Obama won in 2008 when pollsters were predicting a lasting demographic shift to a coalition of the young, liberal and minority centred on big cities. Trump's relative success can't be attributed simply to population growth, though that is obviously a factor. It suggests that the Republicans are now suceeding in generating fresh "angry white guys" and are even cultivating new reactionary groups among ethnic minorities that have hitherto cleaved to the Democrats. One of the keys to Trump's persistent popularity is that he is still seen as "not a politician", and that anti-establishment vibe clearly appeals way beyond the traditional conservative core.

It looks like the GOP will keep the Senate (the two Georgia run-offs are likely to split at best) and therefore a chokehold on Congress. I suspect the Republican party establishment won't seriously challenge the result (even if Trump and his administration does - though the manner in which he is doing it looks more like a grift to raise funds than a coup) as they'll calculate that Biden will be timid and they can block any legislation they don't like. This suggests it's going to be four years of posturing and little substantive change. This will be celebrated by centrists as a return to normality, and in many senses they'll be right. It will be like the Obama years - insufficient reform, the indulgence of Wall Street, more drones - but without the slick presentation and with even less appetite to fight the far-right. Centrist ideologues will no doubt interpret the close result as evidence that the Democrats must reject left-leaning policies in order to "heal the nation" and "unify" a polarised public. The subtext will be an attempt to allay the fears of  independent and "moderate" Republican voters that socialism might enter through the back door.

Political polarisation in the US is real, but it needs to be emphasised that this is a product of the political system rather than a Jekyll and Hyde divide in the American psyche. Commentators and political scientists routinely blame the people without observing that they are channelled by the media into one of two camps whose cultural opposition masks significant consensus on economic, social and foreign policy. This is far more of a "managed democracy" than the UK, where less gerrymandering means the two-party system is prone to insurgent third parties, usually aimed at preventing Labour moving too far to the left or occasionally acting as ginger groups to push the Conservatives rightwards. US democracy was an elite stich-up at birth that inherited the factional approach of the British system. While the UK's democracy evolved through the struggle for suffrage and working class representation, exemplified in the replacement of the Liberal party by Labour, the US system largely maintained its 18th century form even as the party names changed (it even survived the Civil War). Interests would coalesce around individuals and these pseudo-monarchs would vie for the Presidency. The original convention that the loser in the election would be appointed Vice-President indicated how cosy the relationship was. 

Maintaining the current system is key to maintaining the dominance of the Republicans and Democrats. While the UK has always had minor party representation, the current US House of Representatives has only one member not affiliated to the big two, and that's a Libertarian party representative who was elected as a Republican in 2018. One of the ironies of British commentators insisting that Labour should be more like the Democrats is that the US system forces broad coalitions and encourages semi-independence (e.g. Bernie Sanders, as one of only two independent Senators, running for the Democrat Presidential nomination, which would be the equivalent of Caroline Lucas standing for the Labour leadership). Party membership is not the site of contest it is in Britain. What matters are registered supporters (Labour's move towards giving them a say in the leadership contest was ironically held up as destabilising). Purges are rare in the US, but paradoxically this is because the party establishments are so dominant and money matters so much in winning elections at every level. 

Democrat disgruntlement has grown as the biases inherent in the system have increasingly favoured the Republicans, but it is doubtful they would radically reform the system under any conceivable circumstances as that would potentially open the door to genuine multi-party politics. While the British left ponders once again whether it should work within Labour or challenge it, running independently of the Democrats is simply not seen as a credible option in the US where the left has consistently propped up the party. The GOP has only won the popular vote for the Presidency once in the last 30 years, when George W Bush was re-elected in 2004 (a vote that largely reflected patriotic support post-9/11 and which occurred before the debacle of Iraq became undeniable). Barack Obama had the capital to initiate reform in 2008, but even without the intrusion of the financial crisis I doubt he would have been inclined to do anything, preferring to believe that the demographic wind was behind the Democrats' sails and that they could make the existing system work to their advantage. Given Biden's bipartisan instincts and the GOP's dominance of the Senate and Supreme Court, the chances of substantive reform over the next four years are nil. And that means that a Trump revival in 2024 can't be ruled out.

Corbyn and After

The Labour Party's disciplinary processes have always been factional. While the party is not, as the EHRC report confirmed, institutionally antisemitic, it is institutionally anti-left. The purpose of the party is to restrain the socialist impulse, channelling it into parliamentarianism. This means it must balance between keeping socialists inside the tent, to prevent the emergence of an electoral challenger (or significant spoiler) on the left, and expelling leftwing members when they become too dominant or troublesome. It doesn't face the same issue on its right flank, where dissidents will be tolerated by the party hierarchy (and lionised by the media) all the way up to the point where they shamelessly turn their coats or even set up new parties with the express intention of burying Labour for good. This asymmetry means that the disciplinary system invariably tends to favour the right, and consequently its focus shifts over time to reflect those issues deemed (whether reasonably or not) to be dividing lines with the "far-left", hence the current focus on antisemitism and the lesser importance accorded to Islamophobia. 

Will an independent complaints procedure change this? No. It will allow the leadership to claim that it is incapable of interfering, but the idea that factionalism will disappear is naive. This will be present not only in the interface between the party and the independent body, i.e. how complaints are initiated and the role of the NEC in judgements and sanctions, but structurally in the likely sympathies of the membership of a panel appointed by the party hierarchy itself. They will almost certainly be middle-class, professional and committed to liberal orthodoxy, which means they will inevitably bias towards the political centre and be wary of left "extremism". In other words, this will simply further institutionalise factionalism, providing a defensive shield against claims of bias and injustice. That Keir Starmer and Dave Evans have immediately interfered to suspend Jeremy Corbyn is recognition that they know they can get away with this pseudo-independence. They now have power without responsibility.

Much of the political spite displayed towards Corbyn this week has repeated the highly personalised judgements that have been made against him since he first became leader, notably that he is thick and narcissistic: qualities he supposedly shares with Donald Trump. But the most telling charge is that he was simply unfit for office, an opinion that even those who oppose his suspension are happy to subscribe to, as this carefuly curated selection of letters to the Guardian shows. This emphasis on Corbyn's inadequate leadership is an indication that the real target of the liberal media's ire is the party membership, who had the temerity to not only elect him in 2015 but to re-elect him in 2016 despite the charge that he had single-handedly murdered the remain campaign in the EU referendum. It is the party members (and to an extent the wider electorate who delivered the "wrong" result in 2017) who are really being told off.

Corbynism was initially an attempt to build a wider social movement in support of parliamentary socialism. Its beleaguerment after 2017 was not simply the result of a decapitation strategy by its factional enemies but a wider campaign by the political centre, notably embodied in the astroturfed People's Vote and the Change UK farce, which aimed to force it to focus on Westminster and media opinion to the exclusion of movement-building. As such, this was a perfect example of parliamentarianism, the idea that all politics outside the Westminster framework is illegitimate, that Labour's first priority is to allay the fears of the establishment and prove its "fitness to govern", and that militancy of any sort is a guaranteed vote-loser. Though Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism only traced this tradition up to the 1960s, there has been nothing since to suggest it doesn't continue to reflect the thinking of the PLP. If Kinnock's tenure focused on beating down militancy and New Labour majored on fitness to govern, the early signs are that Starmer's focus will be on the illegitimacy of extra-parliamentary action (the comments on the Black Lives Matter protests and criticism of the National Education Union are illustrative).

There is an argument to be made that Corbyn's crime in the eyes of the establishment was not merely being too far left (objectively he was only offering lukewarm social democracy that was well within the bounds of Labour's history), or even of being obsessed with the rights of the marginalised and the interests of foreigners, but of being too disrespectful of the parliamentary system (the lobby as much as the Commons chamber). This was not so much down to his own attitudes (he is arguably one of the staunchest contemporary champions of Parliament as a democratic body, in the mould of Tony Benn), but to his encouragement of organising and pressure beyond Westminster (for the media, an area suitable only for anthropology or ventriloquism, not autonomous politics). The sneering about his historic support for marginal causes, his ready attendance at demonstrations and his insistence that everyone was capable of independent thought and appreciation, bizarrely demonstrated in the hysterical reaction to his admission that Ulysses was a favourite novel, all point to a contempt for someone who doesn't know his place.

Corbyn's elevation to the leadership was an aberration in Labour's history, even if the ethical tradition he represents has been part of Labour since its inception. The question that has to be asked is how he managed to come to power. It wasn't because of his own cunning or resourcefulness, or the strength of the organised left. It can't be attributed to luck or the stupidity of his opponents either, despite those who would later loudly regret enabling his candidacy in 2015 and the ineptness of the 2016 coup attempt. A more plausible answer is that the party right was so bereft of ideas, so intellectually exhausted after the disappointments of New Labour, that some felt the need to support Corbyn's candidacy simply to lend the respectability of ideological contest and variety to what would otherwise have been a depressing executive search process. But even that isn't wholly convincing. 

The answer, surely, is that the party membership wanted a more leftwing leader and programme, something that should have been understood with the election of Ed Miliband but which was dismissed at the time as being due to the malign influence of the unions (a dismissal that seems to have encouraged Miliband's own caution). The introduction of democracy into the election of the Labour leader has been destabilising because it no longer allows the party and union establishments to control the process. The result, in the short-term, has been Starmer's strategy to campaign left and lead right, but this isn't likely to be viable in the long run simply because the membership will quickly tire of such dishonesty. As one-member-one-vote cannot be repealed, the most likely fix will be to raise the threshold for candidate nominations, so preventing a leftwing MP from bypassing the bulk of the PLP to appeal directly to the membership. In the circumstances, further moves to democratise MP selection can be assumed to be off the agenda in the interests of "unity".

Corbyn's failure to radically reform Labour guaranteed that he would never get the chance to radically reform the country. And that failure was as much down to him and John McDonnell being thoroughly institutionalised as it was to any lack of managerial nous. Building alliances and solidarity is the very nature of leftwing politics, but it faces a particular problem when it comes to dealing with the PLP, which is that the latter ultimately has the power of the state at its back and it is also adept at isolating dissent (though the Socialist Campaign Group has 34 members, only 18 have signed a letter calling for Corbyn's reinstatement). This can only be negotiated with from a position of strength, and that strength can only be built outside of Parliament, whether as a movement working through Labour's membership (a la Momentum) or as a ginger group disciplining the party through electoral threat (a la UKIP). As the sneers about Glastonbury and the dismissal of his willingness to ask questions on behalf of ordinary citizens revealed, the establishment's fear was never that Corbyn would dominate the Commons but that he would make it look irrelevant.

Local Government for Local People

Like the person with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail, John Harris can be relied upon to insist that the chief cure for Britain's democratic shortcomings is localism. This has meant both advocating a radical devolution of powers to the neighbourhood level ("flatpack democracy") and championing metropolitan mayors against Whitehall. As he tends to take a blinkered approach to each (in the manner of his Anywhere but Westminster safaris), he never has to address the contradictions between the two, nor has he produced a theory of subsidiarity that would distinguish between good (regional) and bad (national) centralisation. While he is fulsome in his praise of technocratic Blairites, like Nick Forbes in Newcastle, he also exhibits a suspicion of politicians who are too political, hence his admiration for middle-class independents and his distrust of "top-down" Corbynism. His is a pessimistic anti-politics, hence the apocalyptic tone of his latest bulletin where he insists "that power and responsibility have to be radically relocated, before our age of failure and rupture finally breaks the system for good".

Harris provides a dubious history for this narrative of impending doom: "The very British malaise this story highlights (which is most clearly manifested in England, although all four countries of the UK now have over-powerful administrative centres, and weak local government) goes back more than a century, to a diminishing of civic leadership by national government that began in the early 1900s, and reached a peak in the Thatcher era, with a sustained assault on city and local government, and the idiotic abolition of England’s metropolitan county councils." He provides no explanation for why this process should have started in the Edwardian era, though the online version of his article links to a History Today essay bemoaning the 1902 Education Act for removing "direct democratic control" over schools. There is an argument to be made that the slightly wider franchise for local as opposed to parliamentary elections (e.g. some women had the vote) made councils more democratic at the time, but after 1900 the trend was towards universal adult suffrage at both local and national levels. The era of civic leadership whose passing Harris regrets was marked by the limited democracy of property ownership.

The Balfour Act, as the 1902 legislation was known, wasn't a power-grab by Whitehall. Its main provision was to guarantee funds from local rates for denominational schools that could operate independently of council control. This was undoubtedly regressive, as it entrenched religious schools and selective grammars, but if anything it meant devolving power, not centralising it. The act also replaced the directly-elected school boards with council-appointed local education authorities (LEAs). This "deradicalised" education, as many of the school boards had attracted trade unionist and suffragette candidates, but again the move hardly amounted to centralisation, while the later 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) would extend local authority control over denominational schools. The major move towards centralisation in education came with the 1988 Education Reform Act (the Baker Act), which introduced the national curriculum, standarised testing and grant-maintained schools.

Harris's wider claim of "a diminishing of civic leadership by national government" over the course of the last century isn't supported by the actual history. The power of local authorities steadily expanded after 1900, not only in traditional areas such as public health and housing but increasingly in newer areas such as transport, further education and arts and culture. This culminated in the 1972 Local Government Act, which established the metropolitan county councils in recognition of the need for unitary control in the major conurbations. The tide turned with the Thatcher government, which not only abolished the metropolitan counties and reduced local authority influence over education but also commenced the privatisation of many local services. But this was very much a handbrake-turn, not the peak of an 80-year long centralisation drive. It must also be remembered that Thatcher's justification for many of these policies was to return power to local communities, not only in abolishing the metropolitan counties to the advantage of the boroughs but in curtailing "irresponsible" spending on black lesbians and other lefty causes for the benefit of respectable ratepayers. In this she was evoking the same Edwardian nostalgia that enamours the Guardian's small town expert.

In further support of his argument, Harris attributes the lower Covid-19 death rate in Germany to its tradition of devolution. This isn't without substance - it's clear that the UK government's decision to largely bypass local health experts has been a disaster - but a blithe comparison with German federalism ignores the long history of fragmentation under the Holy Roman Empire and the compromises required to effect unification in the nineteenth century, not to mention the reaction against centralisation after 1945. In contrast, England has been a unitary and highly-centralised state since 1066. Its devolution of power (or outright ceding of sovereignty) over the last century was limited to those parts of the British Isles that had been unwillingly absorbed in the past. England itself remains a relatively homogenous country with little appetite for the sort of regionalism found in Germany, Italy and Spain, and one where a strong civic identity in the major cities (as distinct from small towns) has traditionally been contentious and viewed with suspicion across much of the political spectrum (hence the Labour establishment's ambivalence over the GLC and its current uncertainty over devolution).

The weak power of the contemporary metro mayors, such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, is consistent with British history, and the 1972-86 period of powerful metropolitan councils is very much the exception. It is county councils and city boroughs that have traditionally been the centres of local power, and they have been reluctant to devolve authority further as much as they have been reluctant to support regional tiers, not least because they have seen their remits eroded by Whitehall since the 1980s. It is possible that the metro mayors could evolve into a more substantial layer of government, but that could only come about if central government chooses to both loosen its own grip and dragoon the counties and boroughs into line. This seems unlikely in the current climate. The liberal ideal of a plurality of powers keeping each other in check, like the idea that local independents are inherently virtuous, is essentially anti-political. The reality at the micro-level is a monopolisation of scarce resources by the sharp-elbowed middle classes, NIMBYism and a conceptual segregation of local from national (and international) politics.

The metropolitan counties were created in response to the new demands of the 1960s and 70s, particularly the need for better coordination of housing and transport, as well as the first stages of deindustrialisation. Their abolition necessitated the creation of various coordinating bodies that have gradually led to the revival of unitary authorites since the millennium. This has been amplified by the increasing importance in the neoliberal era of agglomeration, requiring strategic coordination of transport, the environment and planning. The radicalisation that the older authorities were prone to has been neutered by directly-elected mayors beholden to media approval and with tight constraints on their remit (Ken Livingstone being the only notable maverick). The current friction between the Labour metro mayors and Tory government is likely to make the latter more reluctant to cede further authority, while the former are unlikely to agitate in any serious way as that would run counter to the strategy of the national party at Westminster and risk creating alternative centres of authority to Keir Starmer.

We are likely to remain stuck with a highly-centralised national government, a patchwork of county and borough councils that are either blinkered or beleaguered, and an inadequate intermediate layer at the metropolitan and regional level whose powers are inferior to popular expectations (not a day goes by without the Mayor of London being condemned for not acting over some issue that the office has absolutely no power over). It is important to recognise the competing dynamics: that national parties will always want a strong state in order to enact national policies and won't welcome dissenting intra-party power bases; that metropolitan authorities span varied constituencies with different interests, which means a politics of struggle rather than cooperation is inevitable; and that effective regional authorities capable of "levelling-up" must necessarily trample over the interests of some small towns and districts for the wider good. Until he acknowledges these dynamics, Harris's insistence that localism is a pancea for effective local government will remain just the idle daydream of the Shire-folk.