How the Left Might Win Inside the Labour Party

This is a follow-up to last week's post, Can the Left Win Inside the Labour Party? That was an essentially negative analysis, focused on the structural weaknesses of the party right in the context of historical decline. That decline encompassed both the wider Labour movement, seen in dwindling trade union numbers and a weakening of union authority within the party (the 2010 leadership election notwithstanding), and the decline in the establishment utility of the both the old Labour right after 1989 and the neoliberals after 2008. Though the 2016 EU referendum and its aftermath provided a springboard for the latter's bid for renewed relevance and ultimately helped secure the election of Keir Starmer as party leader, this came at the cost of highlighting the right's intellectual bankruptcy and manoeuvred them into a corner where 1990s nostalgia had to fill the void. This post is by way of a more positive analysis of the left's strengths and opportunities. But before I move on to that, it's worth recapping two of the key weaknesses of the right as these point to possibilities for the left. 

The most important is the fundamental distance between the mass of the membership and the Parliamentary Labour Party. In terms of political ideology, the contrast is between social democracy and economic liberalism, with social liberalism being the common ground, albeit offset by authoritarian instincts on the right. The PLP's marriage of social liberalism and economic liberalism has proved problematic. Not only has its disciplinary bent alienated many on the left, particularly among the young, but the contradictions between national sovereignty and globalisation have given rise to both an opportunistic and electorally-succesful Toryism and a popular disdain for social liberalism more generally (the so-called culture wars). The party right's attempt to reconcile this, through the emotionalism of Blue Labour or a doubling-down on economic liberalism (e.g. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves's current courting of business), have so far failed to capture the popular imagination. Ultimately the combination is unstable and there are grounds to believe that some on the Labour right intend to resolve this by marginalising the social liberalism, which means antagonising the party membership.

The second major weakness of the right is that the changes in the social composition of the Labour Party, both among the membership and the apparat, have made this ideological distance more difficult to bridge. This is not simply rephrasing the first point but highlights two sociological developments. The party membership has shifted towards greater social liberalism since the 1980s, in combination with a rejuvenated social democracy after 2008. In contrast, since the 1990s the PLP has increasingly drawn its members from a professional political class, nurtured in the upper echelons of the more conservative trade unions and "sensible" local government fiefdoms, that has strong personal relationships with the predominantly rightwing media. This twin movement has fuelled an atmosphere of mistrust and barely-concealed disdain in both directions between the membership and the PLP that clearly goes beyond the forever war against "Trots" or old Labour "behemoths". 

The most obvious evidence of this localised culture war is the current leadership's purge of the left, which has used the proxy of antisemitism, or proximity to those accused of antisemitism, to isolate and expel leftwing members. The point is not simply that the charge of antisemitism is usually false, but that the right feels the need to employ it at all. This is because an ideological attack on the left, in the manner of the struggle against Militant in the 1980s, would fail because the contemporary left are democratic socialists at worse, not Trotskyite entryists committed to the supersession of Labour as a bourgeois party by a genuine working class vanguard. While some of the expelled members are socialists, many are vanilla social democrats or even liberals with anti-imperialist sympathies. Objectively, the people currently being thrown out are well within the bounds of Labour's supposed broad church, including in their support for Palestinian rights.

To give him his due, Tony Blair does recognise that the underlying tension is ideological and is prepared to urge that Starmer expunges socialism from the Labour party altogether. But it is notable that this has led him to insist that Labour should reject "the wokeism of a small though vocal minority", which reflects both his starting position within an establishment still someway further to the right of Labour and even Starmer himself. The justification for this is another motivated polling report by Peter Kellner, for which Blair wrote a typically intemperate and self-regarding foreword. Kellner has followed the conventional wisdom of British political science in assuming a "decline in class-based voting" and its replacement by a politics centred on "the new divisions of age, education and culture". For all the insistence on clarity of purpose and direction, the analysis is incoherent and contradictory. Within four paragraphs of the executive summary Kellner assures us that both that "economics no longer trumps culture" and that "the people’s agenda today is primarily economic and social, not cultural". The Labour right remains in a transitional phase; not yet ready to claim it is the true conservative party: patriotic, trustworthy with the public finances and intolerant of progressive nonsense.

In straightforward electoral terms, the claim is that Labour can only win office by retaking the so-called Red Wall seats, specifically by winning back older, non-graduate voters, who hold socially conservative views. And the corollary to that is that Labour cannot do this if it too loudly proclaims the interests of its actual voting base: the socially liberal, the young and graduates, and of course the urban working class. But this is not simply a counsel of despair - assuming that older conservatives are the only decisive factor in Northern and Midlands seats outside the big cities - it is also perverse in its overt disdain for its most loyal supporters. It is this that provides the left within Labour with its most obvious route back to influence or even outright control: namely becoming the champion of the social progressivism that chimes with the membership. For all Starmer's efforts to simultaneously shrink the party and attract the likeminded, CLPs are not about to be taken over by an influx of Daily Express-reading pensioners, and many CLPs are clearly dismayed by the leadership's alacrity in adopting positions to the right of the Conservatives on topical subjects such as asylum and business-friendliness.

The second opportunity available to the left is the promotion of explicitly social democratic policies. In fetishising the socially conservative voter in Mansfield, the Labour right are careful to downplay that everyman's support for social democratic policies in the economic sphere, such as the nationalisation of utilities, higher taxes on the wealthy and a reversal of the marketisation and stealth privatisation of the NHS. The word "nationalisation" appears only once in the Kellner report, and that in a wholly negative vox pop ("So, I voted Conservative for the first time"). To put this in context, Blair's foreword mentions the "far left" four times. The fundamental problem for the Labour right remains its reluctance to embrace social democracy, old Labour nostalgia notwithstanding. This isn't because the Johnson government has occupied that particular space. None but a fool would imagine the Conservatives have become the party of the welfare state, or even of the developmental state committed to modernisation and public investment. The Labour right remains tied to the mast of neoliberalism (now reframed by Blair as riding the tiger of "the technology revolution"), and no one on the right appears to have a better alternative. 

Kellner, and presumably Blair, isn't  in denial about the public's appetite for social democracy, or even socialism, but he is determined to reinterpret it as anything but support for a left agenda. In a sentence that should go down in history, he claims "To make sense of this issue, we need to relate the widespread pro-socialist inclination among voters to the clear preference for staying close to the political centre". In a section that comes close to parody, he insists that "“Social” is a useful word for Labour to own: there is clearly a public appetite for the ethic of coming together for the common good. Adding “ism” on the end, however, is risky unless socialism can be stripped of its doctrinal associations". This is a logical progression from Blair's own Third Way reframing of what he referred to as "social-ism" in 1994, showing that the project continues in the minds of its leading lights. I doubt they'll take the next logical step and add "National" to the mix in order to appeal to the Red Wall, but it's pretty obvious that the intention is to not only bury "socialism" but to redefine "social" to mean little more than the disciplinary state.

I'm conscious that in outlining what I think are the positive reasons for the left to see hope in the Labour Party I've ended up focusing on Tony Blair. This isn't simply down to the coincidence of his latest intervention. For all his rebarbative qualities and the incoherence and sheer outdatedness of his prognoses, Blair remains an intellectual colussus on the Labour right. In other words, his prominence is entirely due to the lack of novel thinking. The vagueness of Starmerism, beyond status quo conservatism and an anti-leftism that is closer in style to the 1950s than the oft-cited 1980s, reveals the shallowness both of the man - an establishment hack whose managerial talents cannot hide a lack of curiosity and empathy - and the party right more broadly. Blair's haunting of Labour is not simply down to the media's indulgence of him or even genuine affection within the PLP (outside his longstanding coterie there are few who can tolerate his conceit and bitterness). It simply reflects that the party right is populated by intellectual pygmies at present. This is ultimately the left's real opportunity.

Can the Left Win Inside the Labour Party?

The academic Mike Wayne has an interesting essay, entitled Roadmaps After Corbyn, in the current New Left Review. It starts with the fantasy of a new socialist party but only in order to highlight what he terms the left's "collective inertia" and its meekness in the face of Starmer's purge: "Post-Corbyn, the left bows its head and hands back the keys, as acquiescent to the status quo as the Labour Party's tradition of Labourism has been vis-à-vis the institutions of the British state. Clinging to Labour or orbiting around it guarantees political paralysis". Wayne sees the Corbyn interlude as the answer to the question: can the left win inside the Labour Party? His conclusion is that it cannot, and not simply because of the power of the political and media establishment but because it will always have one hand tied behind its back by "the right-wing majority in the upper ranks of its own party". I'm not sure this is correct. The very fact of Corbyn's ascension to the leadership, and the inept response of the right that culminated in his re-election, suggest that "the right's commanding position within the party apparatus", as Wayne puts it, isn't quite as secure or decisive as it once was.

It might appear odd to argue that the balance of forces within Labour has shifted in the left's favour at a time when the right is not only in total command but apparently embarked on a campaign that will see the left extirpated once and for all, but that is what I'm going to attempt to do here and in part I'm going to do it by using Wayne's own analysis of the Labour right. The key distinction he makes is between an essentially social democratic membership (with socialism proper a significant but minority interest) and a PLP that marries economic liberalism and social liberalism. The traditional Labourism of the old-school right is a subordinate strand to the dominant neoliberal master discourse (as he puts it, "Deputy Leader Angela Rayner [is] the new John Prescott to Starmer's Blair"). The tension then is between social democracy and liberalism, and arguably has been since the party's inception, with substantive socialism (e.g. workers' control) and traditional Labourism occupying the flanks and exerting an essentially nostalgic pull. 

This tension was reconciled first by Fabianism and later by the postwar consensus centred on the welfare state. It was then undermined by the Thatcher revolution, with its twin focus on dismantling the welfare state and promoting economic liberalism, which in turn gave rise to a new tension between national sovereignty and globalisation with which the Conservative Party is still grappling. New Labour sought to supersede social democracy by embracing that economic liberalism (and explicitly welcoming globalisation as modernisation) while augmenting it with a social liberalism expressed in such shibboleths as openess and diversity, and in the relaxation of public moralising. Of course moralising didn't disappear altogether. By allying itself with economic liberalism social liberalism underwent a change: "No longer is it about the role of the state as a corrective to capitalism's tendency to increase social stratification. Its role is to guarantee a level playing field of competition, not impose social obligations on capital". This change was most evident in New Labour's attitudes towards the "underclass", a disciplinary regime that would be extended from ASBOs to welfare. 

This narrative is particularly useful in highlighting the continuity of New Labour in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government of 2010-15. Austerity was not merely a financial measure but a moral undertaking that valorised meritocracy and charity. Labour's failure to fully push back against austerity reflected not only its continuing adherence to the dominant combination of economic and social liberalism but also its now habitual substitution of moralism for political analysis. The hegemony that existed in this period across all the Westminster parties had an obvious blindspot: that tension between national sovereignty and globalisation which was increasingly articulated at a popular level as a rejection not only of the EU but of the liberal centre generally. While conservatism's inherent contradictions with capitalism allow it to compensate for the latter's disruptions (so xenophobia can co-exist with free enterprise), social liberalism's greater isomorphism with economic liberalism means it is less able to respond to popular disquiet when those contradictions become acute, as they did in 2016. 

As Wayne sees it, Corbyn's success was to shift the party's focus to the contrast between social democracy and economic liberalism, leading to the electoral advance of 2017, but his failure was attributable to the membership's continuing support for key elements of social liberalism, notably the remain cause, which alienated important parts of Labour's working class base and led to the electoral retreat of 2019. In summary, Wayne sees the problem as the membership's divergence from the electoral base. It's a commonplace of contemporary political science that party members are unrepresentative, and that Labour's in particular are much more middle class and educated than its voters, but Wayne is making a subtly different point: that the Labour membership's meekness (see the failure of most deselection attempts, despite the real fears of the right) arises from a political identification with social liberalism as much as a cultural affinity with middle class norms. 

This points to an important change in the sociology of Labour. Before the 1980s, Labour members were mostly socially conservative, in the style now attributed to Red Wall voters, while the cause of social liberalism was driven largely from within the PLP (see Roy Jenkins' reforms as Home Secretary) in tandem with elite-led civil society groups. The shift towards social liberalism among the membership did not occur as an inevitable corollary of the embrace of economic liberalism in the late-80s and early-90s, but was independently driven by extra-parliamentary social movements, notably focused on race, sexuality and womens' rights. More fundamentally, it reflected the delayed advance of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s and the impact that had on local government during the 1980s. While the Labour right was able to corral and neutralise this tendency, isolating the left within the PLP and embracing new public management in local government, it could do little to reverse its impact on the membership. With the revival of social democracy after 2008, this led to a widening gap between members and the PLP that culminated in the shock election of Corbyn as party leader in 2015.

But while that explains the motive force, we also need to understand why there was no effective resistance, and this is where I take encouragement that the left could advance within Labour again. The ability of the trade unions to act as a brake on the left in Labour has declined. This is not just because of the union movement's diminishing influence within the party, following various reforms around conference procedures, the manifesto and leadership elections. It also reflects a shift in union membership to white collar and increasingly public sector roles which has produced a more liberal base with less instinctive hostility towards the left. Though Corbyn's victory in the 2015 and 2016 leadership contests was variously attributed to the intellectual exhaustion of the PLP and the influx of new members, supposedly a mix of old lefties and youngsters radicalised by post-2008 politics, a no less important factor was the realisation that the Islington North MP's mild social democracy and principled internationalism was much more in line with the interests and sympathies of the unions than the reheated neoliberal nostrums of the other leadership candidates.

While the Labour right remain entrenched in the hierarchy of some unions, and while the unions collectively remain prepared to use their votes at conference to block more radical changes (e.g. to campaign for proportional representation), it's probably fair to describe the current situation as one in which the unions are becoming more detached from Labour: the election of Sharon Graham as General Secretary of Unite on a "workplace first" manifesto being obviously emblematic. The increased recourse of the Labour right to procedural mechanisms to expel the left, notably peremptory expulsions for trivial reasons, is in part a recognition that they can no longer rely on the unions to fulfill their traditional disciplinary role either within constituency parties or at conference. Similarly, the influence of councillors has declined within the party since the New Labour years, ironically because the embrace of technocratic managerialism in local government has drained the right of the sort of political enthusiasm that could motivate members. Topics such as anti-antisemitism and patriotism have taken on a greater importance because they provide a way to mobilise a right that is otherwise lacking a politics beyond a conservative defence of the status quo.

The manner in which the Labour right and centre have pushed back against the left also owes a lot to the encouragement of the media and the campaigns against antisemitism and Brexit during the 2017-19 period. The willingness of members of the PLP to countenance a government of national unity, on the proviso that Jeremy Corbyn would stand down as leader, was remarkable for the lack of self-respect it displayed, allowing the Liberal Democrats and various conservative-leaning commentators to set conditions that would be considered intolerable by any other party. The farce of Change UK was almost entirely down to key members of the PLP being seduced into believing that media support could translate into votes. While the formation of the SDP in 1981 was very much predicated on the calibre of the "Gang of Four", Change UK was a startling example of the delusion that media regard was equivalent to public recognition and as such a substitute for talent. The aborted leadership run of Jess Phillips in 2020 also falls into this category. What this outsourcing to the media highlights (again) is the void that exists on the Labour right. 

My conclusion is that the Labour right is terminally weak. Not only does it lack the intellectual coherence of a program comparable to the New Labour project, but it is forced to rely on the wider political and media establishment to prop it up and help prosecute its battles with the left. The recent BBC series - Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution - simply accentuated how much the right has decayed over the last twenty years. The ridiculous calls for the return of Blair are indicative not simply of an unhealthy nostalgia but of the failure of the right to overcome the contradictions of economic and social liberalism since 2008. The past cannot be properly buried and zombies roam the land. Corbyn offered a solution to that conundrum by proposing a new synthesis of social democracy and social liberalism. That solution remains viable (whatever its own inherent limitations and contradictions, as highlighted in 2019) and, with no alternative on offer beyond authoritarian centrism, likely to remain dominant among the membership. For all the current pessimism, I suspect the left will revive within Labour and I also suspect that the right will collapse once more, as it did in 2015, but next time it probably won't have the lucky break of a divisive issue as powerful as Brexit to help engineer its revival.

Gissa Job

It looks like the Labour leadership have decided to go all in on Tory sleaze, with a particular focus on second jobs where the incidence biases heavily towards the government benches. That relatively few Labour MPs have part-time second jobs or directorships, even accounting for their being in opposition and therefore remote from the levers of power, is less the product of their ethical integrity and more a consequence of their career paths through trade unions, local government and the third sector. It would obviously cause a conniption in the media if a Labour MP were to remain a senior officer in a trade union: we'd never hear the end of claims of divided loyalties and bias despite the party ostensibly being the parliamentary representation of the labour movement. In fact, this scenario is unlikely because the unions have always wanted to maintain a clear space between themselves and the PLP, for fear of the latter colonising and controlling them. Likewise, there is a determination on the part of local government and charities to assert their independence from central government, hence the unease when politicians attempt to combine the roles of MP and elected mayor.

The asymmetry in second jobs between Conservative and Labour MPs reflects the fundamental class interests of the two parties. For all the efforts of the PLP's neoliberals to align more closely with British business and the City, notably New Labour's "prawn cocktail offensive" of the mid-90s, the party remains wedded to organised labour and its embrace by capital strictly contingent. In contrast, there has been no doubt about the Conservative Party's total identification with the interests of capital ever since the collapse of the Liberal Party after World War One, Boris Johnson's "fuck business" notwithstanding. In addition, the two parties tend to occupy contrasting roles relative to the opportunities of the state apparatus: mainly facilitators of rent-seeking through privatisation and government contracts in the case of the Tories and significant beneficiaries of public sector sinecures in the case of Labour. Where the interests of the two parties' elected personnel overlap is in the rentier interests of landlords, which reflects the bourgeois nature of the political class.

The issue of MPs having second jobs is being framed in terms of greed, but this is misleading. Not only do the sums pale in comparison to the wealth accumulated by some MPs before entering Parliament (consider the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak), or what they can earn after leaving Westminster (see former Prime Ministers), it is clear that many MPs are as motivated by the gratification of their egos as by the reinforcement of their bank balances. Owen Paterson's behaviour was egregious precisely because he had reduced it to the purely transactional. As the Committee on Standards put it, "No previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of behaviour in failing to separate private and public interests". In other words, the problem was not second jobs per se but Paterson's divided loyalties: working for a company whose interests might be in conflict with those of his constituents and the wider electorate. His censure is as much about this breach of etiquette as any suspicion of actual corruption (no one is suggesting criminal charges, after all).

Some commentators have pointed out that being a minister is strictly speaking a second job, as if the issue were simply a claim on MPs' time, but this ignores that in an elevated role they are still (notionally) serving their constituents and the wider electorate. But what this point does highlight is that the claim MPs are hardworking is often exaggerated. If being a consituency MP were not merely a full-time job but one that ate up every waking hour, then either no one would be able to take on a ministerial role or such an appointment would inevitably mean the neglect of constituents. As cases such as Geoffrey Cox highlight, MPs don't even need to clock-on at Westminster. It's also worth emphasising that actual second jobs - i.e. formal employment - have to be disclosed, precisely so that such conflicts of interests can be identified and then avoided. Beyond disclosure, this largely relies on the self-policing of MPs. Paterson's offence - his "bad form" - was to blithely ignore these conflicts and thereby highlight the weakness of this self-restraint. 

The argument that MPs holding second jobs and directorships helps attract "talent" to Westminster is obviously self-serving, but it also has an ideological purpose in elevating business management above all other forms of non-political experience. According to David Gauke, "The role of non-executive director (NED), for example, requires similar skills to that of a minister – ensuring that an organisation is thinking strategically; asking searching questions of those with operational responsibility; assessing performance." As anyone who has had direct experience of NEDs will know, their understanding of a business is shallow and their presence is little more than a tribute that must be paid for a public listing. Most of the business scandals since the 1980s have featured negligence on the part of NEDs, perhaps most famously in the case of Northern Rock. Given that they are meant to bring outside expertise to bear on the oversight of a public company, it is chutzpah to suggest that a directorship is akin to work experience in making an MP a more rounded person.

The fundamental problem here is the assumption that being an MP is a job: that there is a first role with which a second could conflict. But MPs are elected representatives, which is quite another matter. In thinking that they can function as an MP while maintaining a non-parliamentary career, Tories are simply reflecting their traditional belief that political authority should be limited to a class defined by its wealth and privilege. In this milieu, being an MP is by definition a part-time role: an extension of that social position. The current debate has highlighted a division within the Parliamentary Conservative Party between long-established senior MPs, mostly sitting in safe seats in the South and West, and the newer intake of MPs who won previously Labour-held seats in the North and Midlands in 2019. The former tend to be wealthy, with extensive extra-parliamentary interests, while the latter tend to come from more modest backgrounds and may never have had a previous job that pays as well. It's not quite Grandees versus Agitators, but it shows that the sociology of the current Conservative Party is more varied than that of the opposition.

In contrast, it is Labour who have normalised the idea that being an MP is a job - indeed a career. This is due to a combination of factors: the practical necessity of paying MPs (from 1911 onwards), so that working-class representatives could be elected; the ideology of workerism and the PLP's identification with the "hard-working" elements of its base (consider the collected speeches of Rachel Reeves); and the gradual expansion of the state, which encouraged the idea that MPs were a species of public servant. The belief that MPs who still practise as doctors (rather than hospital porters) have unique insights into the NHS is trite and sentimental but it also reflects the belief that second roles in the public sector are intrinsically more acceptable and praiseworthy than those in the private sector. Geoffrey Cox would be receving fewer brickbats if his moonlighting was in criminal cases rather than commercial and tax affairs. Of course, this makes no practical sense. If a second job undermines the first, it doesn't matter whether an MP is a doctor or a cabbie. If the argument is purely one of a conflict of interest, then that is an implicit admission that the role of an MP is not full-time.

While "second jobs" are more painful for the Conservatives than Labour, both parties have a shared interest in keeping the focus on formal employment. The elephant in the room is disguised payments outside of this, such as speaker fees or paid newspaper columns, where there is no apparent conflict of interest but rather a shared sympathy. The bottom line is that MPs of all parties find it all too easy to either leverage their role for financial gain or to pay lip-service to their obligations to constituents (and local party members) in order to luxuriate in the regard of the media and the wider para-state of think-tanks, lobbyists and industry organisations. The revolving door between ex-MPs and this para-state is now notorious, to the point where we can talk about a wider system of financialised governance centred on a market in influence. In such an environment democratic accountability is considered little more than an inconvenience. Though the media has quizzed the constituents of Owen Paterson and Geoffrey Cox, this is very much a side-order to Westminster bubble talk about the possibility of a byelection upset and what this might mean for Boris Johnson's prospects. The electorate are called upon to provide a chorus, but they are not considered to be central players in the political drama. They only have the one job and it is decidely occasional.

A Descent Into Madness

I've been going to the cinema quite a lot recently, which is partly a post-lockdown splurge and partly the coincidence of the London Film Festival, so I thought I'd regale you with my observations on two very different films with a common link. No, not Timothée Chalamet in The French Dispatch and Dune, though I'm sure there's a piece to be written about Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve's different approaches to fantasy. The two films are Robert Egger's monochrome The Lighthouse, which came out in 2019 but which I only got round to seeing at the Wimbledon Film Club this week, and Pablo Larrain's colourful Spencer, which premiered at the London Film Festival and is on general release from today. What links them is a descent into madness: the one in an extreme form that evokes Greek tragedy at its most prophetic and bloody, and the other in a more symbolic manner, centred on the slipperiness of personal identity, whose literary touchstone is Shakespeare rather than Sophocles (despite the ready-made parallel of Antigone, a princess condemned to a living tomb).

The Lighthouse is a two-hander that has obvious echoes of the dramatic form, from Beckett and Pinter to Steptoe & Son. Willem Dafoe plays the veteran lighthouse keeper (or "wickie") Thomas Wake, while Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, the tyro with an obscure past (he turns out to be another man altogether, Thomas Howard, who has assumed the identity of a dead colleague). Brought together for the first time, they must spend a month on a remote island lighthouse, somewhere off the coast of New England in the late nineteenth century. On the day before their relief, after a grumpy co-existence marked by very different views on the apprentice keeper's character and work-rate, they are trapped by a fierce storm, which the superstitious old-timer thinks was brought about by the younger man's killing of an annoying one-eyed gull. With their supplies exhausted or spoiled and only strong drink for solace, they slowly, and then quickly, descend into madness. 

In terms of cinema, it's The Birds meets a low-budget Apocalypse Now, though you can also find visual references to everything from L'Atalante to Oh! Mister Porter and any number of classic Westerns. It's a supremely referential work, though this perhaps leads to excess in the screenplay, written by Eggers and his brother Max. The film could have been shorter than its 110 minutes. The largely voiceless scenes featuring other actors, notably the mermaid and the recollection of the actual Ephraim Winslow, whose identity Thomas Howard has taken after the former's accidental (but preventable) death, felt like off-stage references expanded in the translation to a more expansive medium. The debate over whether the film could best be described as a horror or a psychological thriller really relates to its length. If cut down to nearer an hour, and with less show (and blood) to augment the tell, it would have been closer to the tradition of the BBC's A Ghost Story at Christmas. Expanded, its padding tends towards the Hitchcockian, even in its conscious nods to George Cukor's Gaslight.

The literary references are extensive: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Greek legend are perhaps the most obvious. Indirectly, the evocation of Coppola's masterpiece, which famously featured a shot of Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The Golden Bough on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table, points to a mysticism that marries Christianity and pagan ritual. There is confession ("spilling the beans"), thrice-times denial and blood sacrifice. The central motif is the theft of fire, in the form of the lantern, which Thomas Wake jealously guards. Winslow spies the old fella disrobing before it at night in an ecstatic, sexualised communion that reminded me of Danny Boyle's 2007 film Sunshine. The final scene sees the Promethean Winslow on a rock having his liver plucked out by a bird. Wake is both Triton and Proteus (the sons of Poseidon), the former explicit in one of his thundering speeches, the latter implicit in Winslow's suspicion of the older man's honesty and clichéd mannerisms. 

But Howard/Winslow is also protean and one of the features of the film is how Robert Pattinson seems to look at different times like a callow youth and at others like a hard-bitten veteran. This is less the actor's mercurial skill than the director's determination to unmoor the characters and make them seem more plastic and unreliable. In this vein Willem Dafoe revisits some of the madness of his Vincent Van Gogh (2018's At Eternity's Gate), while at other times he looks, and acts, like a miniature version of Charlton Heston's Moses from The Ten Commandments. Weaker actors would have buckled under the strain of a story that is often silly - the ripe language, the petty squabbles, the wanking and farting - but expected to carry a huge symbolic freight. The gap could have led to unintentional bathos but it's a mark of the film-maker's skill and that of the actors that it largely maintains the tension between the two, even indulging in some moments of outright comedy, such as the argument over the quality of Wake's cooking, which justifies the comparison to Steptoe & Son. 

Cuisine is also central to Spencer, an imagined tale of Christmas at Sandringham in 1991 with all the trimmings. The date places the events shortly before the publication of Andrew Morton's book on the Princess of Wales, which revealed the sham of her marriage, her and Charles's affairs and her suicidal thoughts. Diana, convincingly played by Kristen Stewart, teeters on the edge of a breakdown in the face of the Windsors' coldness and dedication to suffocating habit in food, clothing and blood sports. In the first scene at table she hallucinates eating her own pearls (if you're going to have an eating disorder, make it classy). She is deferentially menaced by a fictional embodiment of the royal establishment, played by Timothy Spall, who bangs on about service while regaling her with a bloody tale of a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the one intrusion of reality that feels tonally uncertain in a film that is otherwise a clever ghost story in which Diana Spencer haunts the royals ahead of her own death. The subject of the film is identity. The princess is cast in the role of the Prince of Denmark, with a hint that "not to be" is her fate. Given that she's also the ghost, there's an obscure (and perhaps accidental) parallel here to Stephen Dedalus's theory about Hamlet in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In contrast, her husband, who is more usually associated with the tortured prince by our fawning media, is best summarised in the words of Nigel Molesworth as "utterly wet and a weed". In a difficult role, Jack Farthing manages to communicate both the man's fussy irritation and abiding immaturity through an economy of mannerisms and speech. The rest of the Royal Family are eminently forgettable, which is probably the most realistic feature of the film. To provide dramatic foils worthy of this heightened Diana, the screenplay invents not only Spall's menacing factotum but a sympathetic chef and a dresser, played by Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, who personify elements of the fictional Diana's character (self-care and self-love) and are also representative of the people's otherwise mute chorus (the one scene that involves actual civilians, absent the press, sees them open-mouthed at her appearance in a roadside café as she seeks directions). 

The key scene between Diana and Charles, in which he lectures her about the need to divide oneself into public and private personas, features a snooker table and some passive-aggressive ball rolling. This is one of many clichéd tropes in a film that is perfectly happy to indulge them in spades: long corridors, candlelit dinners (both of which echo Stanley Kubrick), rocking horses and a midnight raid on a room-sized fridge. What holds all this together is a magnetic performance by Stewart and a Diana who is much more unpredictable than she was in real life - summed up by arguably one of the finest masturbation jokes ever commited to the big screen. Though the real-life princess was a fashion icon, the film goes beyond mere dressing-up to employ clothes as a motif of both the uncertainty of identity and the constraints of formality (every outfit has been planned in advance, there is no spontaneity). Early in the film she takes a scarecrow's battered and torn jacket, convinced it belonged to her father when they lived nearby, as a souvenir of her life as a Spencer.

What the two films share, beyond cooking and wanking, is the suspicion that an invented or adopted persona is a first step towards madness, which is obviously an in-joke for people who work with actors. Thomas Howard, pretending to be Ephraim Winslow, never makes it off the rock but Diana Spencer, trapped in the public character of the Princess of Wales, manages to escape temporarily, with her sons singing along in her open-top car, to an afternoon of obscurity and fast-food in London. Of course we all know that this is a temporary reprieve and that tragedy awaits. The other link between the films is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart became screen superstars together in the adaptations of the Twilight vampire novels. They have moved on to more substantial fare since, but both remain attracted to the roles of troubled characters with uncertain identities. If there is a moral to these two tales, apart from avoid lighthouses and Prince Charles, it is that you must make your own character or have it made for you.

Proud Vulgarity

The official reason for Facebook's decision to rename itself Meta Platforms Inc is its commitment to the metaverse: a virtual reality environment that represents the next stage in the evolution of its walled garden approach to social interaction. The unofficial reason, offered by the corporation's critics, is Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to deflect attention from Facebook's predatory and antisocial behaviour. Some have even classed it, along with the space programmes of Elon Muck and Jeff Bezos, as a billionaire's self-indulgent desire to slip the surly bonds of Earth. I think this is wrong, confusing a high-risk commercial strategy with expensive toys. The risk to Meta is that Zuckerberg's imperial ambition could further encourage anti-trust moves by the US government, and might even lead to the call for such a virtual environment to be classed as a public utility before it can become a private monopoly. Wiser heads calling for a focus on products rather than architecture are reflecting a political as much as a technological anxiety.

By concentrating on the assumed motive of distraction there is a danger that Zuckerberg's critics are under-estimating both his vision and the ability of Meta to realise it. It is easy enough to point out the underwhelming history of virtual reality and online spaces such as Second Life, but there's little doubt that immersive environments are the future. What we've learnt about information technology since the 1980s is that it inevitably tends towards integration and interoperability. And what we've learnt about social media since the 2000s is that the network effect - where people gravitate to the most popular platform so making it even more useful - is extremely powerful. The renaming of Facebook the corporation goes beyond the defensive. The use of the word "meta", meaning beyond or across in Greek, suggests an escalation in Zuckerberg's long-held ambition to mediate the Internet for the majority of the world's population.

So why are his critics seeing this primarily as a rebranding or even an expression of shame? Kenan Malik in the Observer provides a clue by yoking it together with the news that University College London is considering changing the name of its Huxley building on the grounds that Thomas Huxley, the Victorian naturalist, subscribed to a racial hierarchy, as did many at the time. For Malik, this posthumous criticism of a "a leading liberal of his age" is excessive and a distraction: "It is difficult to know what the renaming of Huxley Hall would add to our understanding of the man, of his age or of racism. It is equally difficult to know how it would take away anything of the actual racism that black people face today. What we end up with is a Zuckerberg version of history in which symbolic gestures come to replace material change and in which rebranding becomes an all-purpose tool to avoid serious discussion". 

It's obviously galling that an Observer columnist should be decrying symbolic gestures after that paper's role during the 2019 general election campaign, particularly its promotion of tactical voting, which helped the Conservatives win a number of marginal seats, and its advocacy of a second referendum, which meant that the serious discussion of material change was marginalised. Its dismissal of Labour's manifesto as unrealistic has been shown up by subsequent events but this hasn't stopped it lecturing the nation on what must be done, most recently on the climate, let alone decrying political inaction over material change. To add insult to injury, Malik sees an obsession with form over content as a symptom of a wider malaise on the left. As a long-time critic of multiculturalism and identity politics (you can take the boy out of the RCP, but ...) he fears that "struggles for equality and social justice have become even more centred around the cultural and the symbolic, whether tussles over identities or controversies over statues, rather than on wages, housing or material deprivation."

This is hardly a novel claim, but then the house-style of the Observer has been the tedious repetition of the same arguments for decades, from Will Hutton's europhilia to Nick Cohen's leftphobia. With socialists marginalised in Labour and the party increasingly adopting conservative rhetoric on economic and social matters, it is once more safe for the paper's liberals to thunder about inequality and exploitation. According to Malik, "both politicians and activists often worry more about cultural domination – think of the constant spew of controversies over 'cultural appropriation' or offensive speech – than exploitation; the struggles for the material changes necessary to improve our lives have too often become subsumed by demands for symbolic gestures." Of course, the group that actually worries most about cultural domination is neither politicians nor activists but journalists and commentators. They also have a tendency to find arguments against thorough-going material change when it suits them.

Implicit in Malik's analysis is the idea that those who fret about cultural domination are not merely misguided but are consciously turning away from the harder issues that society faces, which is why the parallel with Facebook is so useful. But to make this equivalence work, you are obliged to see the name change as nothing more than a cosmetic exercise, rather than a statement of intent about the future of the Internet, which is at odds with the Observer's longstanding belief that Facebook is a malign actor that threatens not only traditional media but democracy itself. Did Carole Cadwalladr lose her marbles for nothing? Ultimately the forced parallel between Meta and identity politics doesn't work, but Malik's insistence on making it flushes out his belief that the "culture wars" are essentially the fault of the intolerant left who have rejected Enlightenment values. The reason he didn't mention journalists in respect of "cultural domination" is because they are overwhelmingly rightwing and their ideal of "free speech" is the liberty to patronise and offend minorities and the powerless.

A more thoughtful analysis of the relationship of the left and the amorphous culture wars was provided by the Czech political scientist, Ondřej Slačálek, in Eurozine (in translation): "For the left, the age of culture wars becomes a trap. It’s not that traditional socioeconomic issues are disappearing; it is rather that amid the battle between liberals and conservatives, they tend to pop up somewhat blurry, or in an unexpected form: such as when poor people vote for the conservatives, ‘against their class interest’, just to retaliate against the liberals for their moral complacency." This restores liberals to the dramatis personae (you can be confident the UCL report that bothered Malik was mainly written by liberals) and also notes that it is the left's agenda that is squeezed: "The left is under fire from two different directions: should it stand up for human rights together with liberals, or for social cohesion and solidarity together with conservatives? Either way, the left quickly loses persuasiveness. If it used to be characterized by its proximity to the working class, and therefore also a certain proud vulgarity and anti-establishment appeal, it now seems to be losing both of these attributes to the far-right."

Where I think Slačálek is mistaken is in thinking that the left has lost that "proud vulgarity" and anti-establishment instinct. That's certainly true of the parliamentary left: consider the sorry tale of Angela Rayner's apology for calling the Tories "scum". But outside of the mainstream politico-media space, there is no shortage of derision and disrespect towards both conservative and liberal elites, notably on social media. That those elites are apparently hell-bent on criminalising it, under cover of the ludicrously misnamed Online Safety Bill, is evidence both of its prevalence and its effectiveness. The reason why the press have largely greeted the Meta launch as something between an admission of sociopathic guilt and a joke about Silicon Valley awkwardness is that the fears stoked by the UK's referendum on Brexit and the election of Trump have now abated. In their place is a more visceral hatred of public criticism and a growing sense of impunity. The Zuckerbergian metaverse will, like any mediating abstraction, have structural biases and de facto censorship. That's something the press understand and are very comfortable with.