Arrested Development

The setting of Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin is obviously meant to represent a larger canvas. Inisherin literally translates as Island of Ireland. But this may be just one of many misdirections by the writer and director who gleefully toys with the tropes of Irish history. Far from being about Ireland more generally, or the bitter falling-out of the Civil War during which the story is set (an offstage rumble, though with an oblique reference to the execution of 6 anti-Treaty men in Tuam in 1923), this is a more universal tale of a small community committed to superficial stability and social convention but sitting on a seething mass of resentment and spite. The central characters are Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic Súilleabhaín (Colin Farrell), long-time friends whose conventions centre on trivial chat at Jonjo Devine's pub. Aware that he is getting older and believing that he has a duty to develop his talents as a musician, Colm decides to end a friendship he has come to consider an unneccesary distraction. But on a small island, you can't easily avoid other people. 

Colm's solution is to tell Pádraic that he doesn't like him anymore, that he always found him dull, and that he wants no further intercourse. In plain terms, he won't speak to or acknowledge him. Pádraic, who slowly comes to appreciate that he may be the dimmest bulb on the island - the local soft lad, Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan) confuses him by using French words - can neither comprehend nor accept this rejection. His sister, Siobahán (Kerry Condon), urges him to move on, but he cannot. The setting for a Greek tragedy in the style of J M Synge is complete. Colm is solipisitic enough to believe that he can publicly admit this devastating truth and imagine that everything else will remain the same, but what he doesn't appreciate is that this act ripples outwards as it erodes the social glue of politeness and rubbing along, prompting first Siobahán to admit the truth (that her brother is dull if nice, that all the men are "feckin' boring") and then leave for the mainland, and then Dominic to commit suicide as he can see no future beyond the violent beatings of his policeman father and his own emotional and sexual frustration. 

There are anachronisms aplenty and many parodies of Irish culture, particularly as seen through the eyes of nineteenth century English writers: the animals in the cabin, the brother and sister in their 40s sharing a bedroom, the brutal policeman - more RIC than Garda - who doesn't have to fear popular justice or the IRA. One oddity is the idea that a small island would have a permanent police presence but that the priest would only visit on Sundays. The reality would have been the other way around. What I think McDonagh is doing here is emphasising that toxic men, represented by the policeman, Peadar Kearney (Gary Lydon), are the problem. Not only is he a domestic abuser, routinely beating his son Dominic, but he displays a callous indifference to others, whether they be condemned IRA men or Pádraic and his sister. The repressive social conservatism of the Catholic Church, though promoted by men, was associated in Ireland with the feminine: Mariolatry, the Magdalene laundries etc. It is consequently held mostly off-stage in McDonagh's script or played for laughs in the postmistress's snooping. 

When Peadar assaults him, Pádraic doesn't fight back, in effect adopting the feminine role, much as Dominic routinely does. Colm, witnessing the scene, wordlessly helps Pádraic to his feet and helps drive the horse and trap back to the Súilleabhaín home. The silence is as much about their shared shame as the newly-established rules of their small society. Colm will later punch Peadar, but this is literally knockabout comedy rather than intrinsic to the plot. Likewise, the scene in which Pádraic and Dominic filch a bottle of poteen from the Kearney house while the father sits drunkenly comatose and nude is an opportunity for the son to comment on Peader's "small brown cock", which is less a critique of toxic masculinity than an example of how it is internalised by boys as a style of rebellion against authority. The one character that rejects these male rules and assertively stands up for herself is Siobahán. She is a symbol of modernity, with her modern clothes and collection of books, though her manner and spiky language are anachronistic. 

Siobahán is balanced by the ominous Mrs McCormick, who is clearly the Shan Van Vocht (the poor old woman personifying Ireland) that inspired Yeat's Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Joyce's parody of the milk-woman in the opening scene of Ulysses. Pádraic's habit of hiding from her on the open road, and Siobahán's indulgence of the old crone's house-calls, exhibit the ambiguity of the younger generation's relationship with Ireland in the early twentieth century, but they also emphasise how pointless their self-delusions are as the old woman repeatedly catches them out and makes her contempt for their insincerity clear. Mrs McCormick is perhaps the most clear-sighted, as well as clairvoyant, character in that she has no illusions about the hatred under the surface and positively revels in saying the unsayable. As such she is a destabilising figure closer to a modern Irish iconclast like John Lydon or Sinead O'Connor than the saintly Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

But this toying with Irish literary culture shouldn't distract from a central narrative device that comes from the traditions of the big screen. Whereas the relationship of Gleeson and Farrell in McDonagh's earlier In Bruges was the classic odd couple familiar from buddy movies - of the older, wiser head and the impetuous youth - in The Banshees of Inisherin it is more obviously the comedy double act that provides the inspiration. The template might appear to be that of Laurel and Hardy: the fat fella with the delusions of grandeur and the thin fella as dim and innocent as the day is long (the pair famously inspired Samuel Beckett and in turn Harold Pinter, whose influence in McDonagh's plays is clear). But I think another, more recent inspiration might be Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke's creations, Kevin and Perry. The defining characteristic of Colm is not his overweening ambition (he is clearly a talented fiddle-player and composer) but his stroppy, teenager-like reaction to not getting his way. And the defining trait of all great comedy double-acts is frustration.

Frustration is the leitmotif that colours all of the main characters. Pádraic is frustrated by Colm's rejection and his own inability to mend the breach. Colm is frustrated in his attempts to devote himself to his music. Dominic is frustrated in his attempts to establish any sort of a meaningful relationship with a woman. Siobahán's seething anger is a study in frustration and petty indignities, from Pádraic's animals invading her home to the postmistress steaming open her letters. Where she differs from the men is that her attempts to have a richer, more meaningful life will ultimately be realised by leaving the island. Colm's parallel attempt to mature is thwarted by his inability to follow the logic of his own analysis, both in the realisation that he is being held back by his community and his cynical appreciation of the Church's role in maintaining it. His "despair" articulates this frustration, while his self-harm shows how it curdles into mindless violence: a obvious metaphor of the Civil War but more profoundly a comment on his own cowardice. He cannot take the route followed by Siobahán. He is trapped in a damaging relationship, but it is with Inisherin, not with Pádraic.

The two main characters are emotionally still children, hence Pádraic's innocent sleeping arrangements and his love of his donkey, Jenny, and Colm's self-indulgence and emotional blackmail. When Pádraic reports Colm's decision to Dominic the younger man tartly responds, "What is he, twelve?" And that's the truth of it. Colm is barely adolescent and Pádraic is a man whose moral and emotional development - his desire to be "nice" - appears to have stopped at the age of eight. This might be a case of McDonagh pointing up the immaturity of the Free State, but I'm inclined to believe that the larger canvas he is working on is that of masculinity and in particular the more extreme, self-pitying anti-feminism exhibited by the likes of Jordan Peterson and the Men Going Their Own Way movement. Colm's self-harm shows the absurdity of separatism; Pádraic shows himself to be easily-led by Dominic's foolish advice and willing to escalate from resentment to arson; while Dominic's death condemns both his father's violence and his own inability to mature and break away. That we can feel sympathy for all three characters is a testament both to the acting and the writing. A fine, sly film about men behaving badly.

We Own This Town

The changing political weather means that every Prime Minister can expect good days and bad days in the press, but the extreme oscillations seen in recent years, and the short to almost vanishing periods between the peaks and troughs, is unusual. Since 2016, every head of government has been undermined by one section or another of the media from their first appearance in front of the lectern outside Number 10. In the case of Theresa May, this focused initially on the debate over what Brexit meant and then the deal she negotiated with the EU, but that emphasis on policy shouldn't mislead us. While the liberal press chafed at what it saw as a historic mistake, the conservative press were only willing to give her unqualified support when she veered to the right and supported their prejudices, e.g. in the attack on the higher judiciary as "enemies of the people". Their attitude to the Brexit negotiations can best be described as querulous. Boris Johnson enjoyed a short interlude during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when his optimism briefly chimed with the resoluteness of public opinion, but this simply highlighted the attacks on his consititutional impropriety beforehand and his personal corruption thereafter. 

While these attacks were mostly made by the liberal press, it's worth remembering that the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph's contribution to "Partygate" wasn't to undermine or dismiss the charges but to claim that Keir Starmer was guilty of similar breaches. Beyond the internecine warfare of the political cartel, what we saw was a media united in the belief that it could stampede politicians into policy changes or even resignation by leveraging their eating a piece of cake or drinking a bottle of beer. It is this corporate belief in their power and authority that we should be attuned to, and not be distracted by their partisanship. Liz Truss obviously made a disastrous start and compounded that at every turn up to her resignation this week, but much of her folly sprang from her misreading of the media, particularly the Tory press. She appeared to take their sometimes lavish praise of her during the summer leadership election contest seriously, failing to understand that she was only ever promoted to stop Sunak. The latter was stymied because he brought down Johnson, and Johnson, in the eyes of the Tory press, was one of their own.

This consistent undermining over the last half-decade isn't the norm in British political history. All governments suffer periods of public criticism, and no Prime Minister is ever free from gravely-expressed doubts about their abilities, but the relentless campaign of destabilisation is novel. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown could all claim to have been undermined by the press, like Heath, Wilson and Callaghan before them, but the negative coverage reflected substantive political differences and often came after extended periods of acclaim. Enoch Powell, a man who could ruefully reflect on his own progress from senior office to the margins, once claimed that all political careers end in failure. But that trajectory no longer holds unless you imagine that securing the highest office itself is the proximate moment of failure. Truss and Kwarteng's mini-budget was a massive error, but its consequentiality was as much a result of negative media as bad macroeconomics or the skittishness of the financial markets. There was no honeymoon period but it seems unlikely that any future Prime Minister will enjoy much of one either.

The pivotal figure in this development was David Cameron, not because his decision to hold the EU referendum introduced so much toxic bile into political discourse but because he quit office immediately on the day that the press decisively turned against him. This emboldened them to think they could directly control who would occupy Number 10. For the rightwing press in particular, this was a sweet moment of revenge because of Cameron's indolent sponsorhip of the Leveson Inquiry, which had washed a lot of dirty linen in public and would, if it had proceeded to phase 2, have explored the relationship of the press and politicians directly. That Cameron was only bounced into launching the phase 1 inquiry by the liberal press, following the phone-hacking scandal, was another irritation for the right. While the financial crash of 2008 and the following austerity of the coalition years cast a shadow over the economy and society, the biggest political event was actually the expenses scandal of 2009, which reinforced the press in its belief that it had the whip-hand over politicians. 

For liberal commentators like Rafael Behr, the sequence of weak office-holders since Cameron quit Number 10 for his writing shed is explained by an apparently congenital, even biblical, lack of virtue, thus "Johnson begat Truss. Before that, Theresa May begat Johnson." Behr does acknowledge the influence of the press, but only as a supportive environment rather than as the chief begetter of this uninspiring lineage: "Her plans grew from seeds of US Republican-style anti-government conservatism that isn’t native to Britain’s political soil, in a micro-climate controlled by the Tory press." Anti-government conservatism is obviously neither alien nor historically recent: it is one of the dominant strands of British political history and much of the American tradition can be traced to theorists on this side of the Atlantic. Naturally, Behr will not be commenting on the liberal media's role in promoting Johnson as a flawed but still more suitable incumbent of Number 10 in 2019 than the then leader of the opposition. He will however take pleasure in the role he personally played in that outcome while decrying the role of the Tory press in influencing politics.

This belief in the press's kingmaker powers has contributed to a counter-movement, by both liberal and conservative opinion, away from party democracy. Party members are now routinely denigrated as unrepresentative fools, despite being sociologically closer to the general population than MPs and often motivated by public-spiritedness and engagement with political theory. The implication is that they have been misled by the press as much as by mythical entryists, evil antisemites, or Nigel Farage. Once more we are told that the election of a party leader, and potentially a Prime Minister, should be reserved to MPs. The people telling us this are often the same ones applauding the appointment of Jeremy Hunt to Number 11 as "a safe pair of hands". That's the same Jeremy Hunt who received 18 votes from his fellow MPs in the first round of this summer's Conservative Party leadership election. It's important to understand that this counter-movement is not about bending to the will of the press but resisting it, and the consequences of that can be seen in both of the leading parties.

The purging of the left in Labour might appear to be just the latest round of factional bullying familiar since the party's inception, but its often comically intemperate nature (disqualifying people for liking the social media posts of a Green MP, for example) suggests that there is something else at work here, and that something is about protecting the PLP not only from CLP members with a mind of their own but from the media. The tight message-management and Westminster discipline over relatively trivial matters (e.g. appearing in solidarity on a picket line) aren't just about the leadership's paranoid determination to appeal to rightwing voters but a desire to not provide any opportunity for the press to divide the party or build up challengers to the leadership beyond anointed loyalists. Should Labour form the next government, it will differ from the New Labour years in one important respect. It will not attempt to bully the press, as Alastair Campbell notoriously did, but nor will it seek to cultivate a chummy relationship with it. Rather Starmer will seek to draw a tight boundary around the PLP to minimise the party's attack surface. You can expect accusastions of a "bunker mentality" if Labour take office.

The symbolic end of the Truss administration came with the failure of lobby discipline on Wednesday night (the pearl-clutching reports by Labour MPs like Chris Bryant were also telling). The accelerated leadership election, and the humming and hawing over what role (if any) the Conservative Party membership will have in it, clearly reflects a rueful regret over the course of the summer contest, with its embarrassing media-controlled hustings and the uncritical way in which Truss was promoted by  rightwing newspapers to the party membership. This is an attempt to restore what we might generously refer to as parliamentary democracy, but which more cynically is best described as the cartel. What we're witnessing is a power struggle within the politico-media caste that has been going on since the phone-hacking scandal came to prominence in 2005. Much of what happened since, from the response to the financial crash through to Brexit, has been coloured by this struggle, and there is every reason to believe that it will continue for some years yet. Starmer's defensive strategy does not suggest that press reform is coming any time soon.

Real Resources

There was a useful Twitter exchange between Chris Bertram and Chris Dillow today that captured a fundamental truth about the UK economy: namely that with low unemployment the government lacks the human resources necessary to significantly invest in public services, and that there is little enthusiasm for the constraints on private consumption that could free those resources up. The last few weeks have been characterised as a struggle between monetary and fiscal methods - the now-departed Chancellor's plan for unfunded tax cuts at the upper end of the income scale versus the intervention of the Bank of England to prop up pensions funds as the cost of borrowing rose steeply. What this has occluded is the role of real resources, both capital and labour. The former is alluded to only in the context of fears that property prices may fall if higher borrowing costs crater the housing market, while the latter received only an indirect reference in the latest exhumation of the Britannia Unchained quote about British workers being among the world's great idlers.

I take a less pessimistic view of this quandry because it seems obvious to me that much of our capital and labour is currently misallocated - the evidence is there in the weak productivity data - and that can be changed. Unproductive capital can be taxed, which effectively means a portion of it can be reallocated to addressing the pitiful state of the public fabric, while the cost of labour can be increased to incentivise better allocation within the private sector. The latter would best be done through a combination of increased payroll taxes (i.e. employer NICs) and an increase in the minimum wage. Some businesses at the margin of profitability would go under, but that is precisely what we need given the long tail of low productivity firms. It would be nice to believe that businesses can raise their productivity endogenously, and some undoubtedly can and will, but the hard truth is that significant aggregate improvements come about through business churn and people moving jobs.

If the travails of the current administration have confirmed anything it is that conventional policy has run out road, even if that orthodoxy remains tenacious. If the cuts to public services a decade ago didn't alter the UK economy's long-term trajectory, another round of austerity now is hardly going to do the trick. And let's not forget that the delay to the Bank of England's unwinding of its quantitative easing programme isn't simply down to the bad timing of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget. The Bank has been unable to wean the financial markets off QE for the past 13 years. The return of Jeremy Hunt has been greeted by centrists as an "adults in the room" moment, but their determination to restore a status quo ante marked by low growth, widening inequality and a steady deterioration in the balance of payments is frankly perverse. So too is the suggestion that all will be well if we simply reverse Brexit: the mother of all u-turns that the liberal media are now urging on Keir Starmer as the Prime Minister-presumptive.

It's a commonplace to observe that Margaret Thatcher's desire to create a shareholding democracy through the privatisation of public assets failed. Those assets are now in the hands of foreign governments or international conglomerates while the number of indvidual private investors in British companies has steadily declined. But what this narrative misses is that she succeded in cultivating a new breed of petty capitalists and rentiers in the form of sole trader companies (there are now over 4 million of these) and buy-to-let landlords. Much of the hidden under-employment in the UK economy can be found among these micro-businesses, and many sole traders are only reluctantly self-employed: they'd prefer a better paid, more stable job with a bigger firm, not a "bonfire of red tape". The recovery of the rentier after the near-liquidation of the mid-twentieth century reflects not only widening inequality and greater financialisation but also the massive injection of capital into property, which in turn was the result of the state's deliberate withdrawal from the provision of public housing.

Given these characteristics, there is little reason to believe that the UK economy is about to turn the corner. Productivity growth will continue to be weak; house prices may stumble but without a massive public housing programme they will recover; and the balance of payments will continue to widen as the pound slowly drops and global inflation steadily rises. While the government's mini-budget was badly-timed and tone-deaf, the strong reaction of the financial markets clearly reflected a more profound correction in expectations about the country's prospects. This pessimism goes beyond disappointment with the choice of Conservative Party members, or worries about the future trading relationship with the EU. Centrists who insist that all our problems are of recent vintage, going back no further than 2010 or even 2016, are deluded. We are still suffering from the deindustrialisation of the early-1980s and the hubris that led to Black Wednesday in 1992. The New Labour years were simply a missed opportunity.

A rational policy would turn the state's punitive gaze away from welfare recipients towards the self-employed and small businesses. It would also shift the burden of taxation from income to accumulated wealth - property above all. Neither is likely to happen during the fag-end of the present government. Not only would such measures be anathema to Truss, or indeed any other Tory leader, but the time required to effect the changes and to see the benefits is too long to be considered at any point other than the start of a parliament. Assuming Labour next takes office, the centrist clamour for a "return to normality" suggests that the "hard choices" of a Starmer-led government would once more centre on hoary old debates about means-testing and the need to keep business sweet. Blairite outriders like Philip Collins are already preparing the ground: "Good social democratic virtues can be served without committing a single extra penny. “We will work with what we have” is a good and comprehensible approach that still leaves plenty of room for action."

We are trapped because the real resources of the economy, i.e. capital and labour, are not being put to efficient use, and there is no political will to take the steps necessary to rectify this. That lack of will isn't simply the result of calculations over the reaction of electorally-important groups such as homeowners. The truth is that the politico-media caste are perfectly happy with this state of affairs. While they have derided Liz Truss as an idiot, she wasn't wrong to talk of "managed decline" in this context. Obviously her insistence that only her plan to arrest this would work has proved a hostage to fortune, and her maladroitness has been spectacular, but her initiative went well beyond the usual "something must be done" new-broomism of previous Prime Ministers that invariably left the fundamentals untouched. What this debacle has proved is not just that the international financial markets retain the disciplinary power that Hayek celebrated but that the machinery of informal government, from Threadneedle Street to Fleet Street, remains dedicated to preserving the gains of Thatcherism.

Of Time and Tide

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian assures us that the Tories are heading for oblivion. That's obviously hyperbole. Even if you think they've already blown the next election through their recent fiscal mismanagement, there's no reason to believe they won't recover, much as the ignominious defeat in 1974 ("Who governs Britain?") led to the victory of 1979. Indeed, the media-wide grooming of possible successors to Liz Truss, notably Michael Gove in both the Murdoch press and the Guardian, suggests they may have an outside chance of turning things around before we next go to the polls. Personally, I doubt it, if only because Gove simply offers a rehash of the past (stupid policies and back-stabbing included). The Conservative Party's problem is that they have no diagnosis of the current situation that is likely to attract new voters - 2019 was the limit of their expansion - hence the rhetorical return to the heady days of Thatcher. But it's also the case that the Labour Party is in no better position analytically, suggesting that its current poll lead is not built on solid foundations. Both are trying to resuscitate an electoral bloc from the past: the one from the 1980s, the other from the 1990s.

This has led media supporters of Labour to suggest we are witnessing a natural turn in political fortunes, which in turn allows them to skim over the void of the party's policy offer. For example, Toynbee quotes Jim Callaghan: "There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of." Just to make sure we understand the point, she then quotes Shakespeare: "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." And then she hammers the point home by reaching for the Bible: "For everything there is a season." Finally, in her own words, in case you really didn't get her drift, she turns the dial up to eleven: "Metaphors of tectonic plates, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes blow through political commentary, because this is that moment. It’s all over for the hegemony of a wild Conservative party flown so far right it has taken leave of its senses and abandoned most supporters." 

This is obviously a misuse of the term "hegemony", which becomes all too apparent when she claims "Tory donors shifting to Labour are just a straw in the wind". That is actually evidence for the continuing hegemony of the conservative dispensation established after 1983 in which our political parties seek the approval of high finance and major corporations. Polly's reading of the polls suggests a wider moral shift within the polity. Thus "Covid brought out a communitarian impulse in people to protect one another", while "a majority now think immigration is good for the country". This leads to the inevitable, clunking encomium: "That is a changing Britain, kinder and fairer, of which the Truss, Kwarteng, Rees-Mogg, Braverman wing of the Tory party are wholly oblivious. As a result they are all destined for a long oblivion." Her upbeat prognosis cannot hide that the opposition is offering the same old recipe of fiscal responsibility and a social justice that looks remarkably like social conservatism, but all delivered with a kinder face. Not the least of the reasons for doubting the efficacy of this offer is the association of "kinder and fairer" with the likes of Starmer and Reeves.

Toynbee, like much of the rest of the press - both conservative and liberal - is engaged in constructing a strawman Toryism made up of equal parts "libertarianism" (with its subtle overtones of not-invented-here) and a rightwing "extremism" (with its subtle overtones of foreignness), all marked by cruelty and stupidity, as if these were characteristics historically alien to the Conservative Party. The narrative of the sea-change depends in large part on the idea of a sudden shift in sentiment, so inevitably the focus is shortened. Thus Toynbee notes that "69% think ordinary working people don’t get their fair share of national wealth (which is up 10 percentage points since 2019)", as if the aftermath of the last election was the moment when the switch was flicked, ignoring that the turn against inequality was well underway by 2015 and was indicated both by Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader in that year and the strong performance in the 2017 general election when, absent the Brexit effect, Labour might well have ended up as the largest party.

"The real value of benefits has now been cut in seven of the last 10 years – but voters no longer back such callousness." But why did they once back it and now don't? What exactly has changed, Polly? As ever, the role of polling companies and the media in manufacturing consent is obscured. Instead we are asked to believe that the electorate, unlike the Tory party, has suddenly "come to its senses", first in rejecting Corbynism and then in deciding that actually its supports the Corbyn platform of public investment and higher taxes on wealth. Naturally, Toynbee isn't going to explore the substance of this for fear of highlighting the differences between that emergent public opinion and the present Labour leadership, notably over public ownership and support for striking workers. Nor is she going to ask why the liberal press put so much effort into blackballing Corbyn if the virtues of mild social democracy were always apparent. Better to attribute the ideological gyrations of an increasingly tired Conservative Party to mental debility and present Labour's offer as akin to a glorious revolution.

In a similar vein, Andrew Rawnsley talked at the weekend of Tory "maniacs" and a Labour Party of "sensible people", but he rather gave the game away when he claimed "The appearance of the conference told its own story. The number of delegates sporting badges, lanyards and T-shirts bearing shouty slogans was sharply down. The number wearing suits and neat haircuts was significantly up. They sang the national anthem. The backdrop to the platform was a huge union flag. The sums allocated to new policies were relatively and cautiously modest." He also pointed to the post-2024 reality: "If anything haunted Labour in Liverpool, it was the thought of the awful financial mess and eviscerated public realm that they may inherit. “Really frightening,” said one member of the shadow cabinet." In other words, there will be the usual hard choices to be made to get the public finances back into order, and you can be pretty sure the burden of that will disproportionately fall on places like Liverpool.

The more calculating advocates of Brexit always knew there would be short-term pain, and that such a major reconfiguration of the UK's trading relationships and domestic economic regime meant that "short" would have to be measured in years. While the Tories could hope to benefit from a "Very well - alone" spirit, they must have considered that plan B would be a period out of office while another government struggled with the consequences before a triumphant return based on a critique of the failure to take advantage. You could already hear this in the rhetoric of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, notably the attacks on the "anti-growth coalition", as much as in the "haunting" of Labour shadow cabinet members in Liverpool. Despite the media's insistence that the next general election will be a Manichean choice, the cartel shares a remarkably similar analysis of the challenges facing the UK (low growth) and doesn't fundamentally differ on the policy response this requires (belt-tightening, pump-priming, cosying-up to business).

While the anti-growth coalition has quickly expanded to encompass everyone from the CBI to David Attenborough, a point made with relish by both conservatives and liberals, we shouldn't assume that this doesn't resonate with voters, particularly the "red wallers" that both main parties remain obsessed with. As Matthew Lynn put it in the Telegraph, "it is possible that the average person grasps that a country where it has become too difficult to do anything is slowly dying". Of course the sense of frustration and termination is more likely to be a reflection of that electoral bloc's age and sense of their own mortality, but that ressentiment is still a powerful motive. What stands out in all this metaphorical blather is the absence of the young, either in rhetoric (except as an implicit component of the anti-growth coalition) or on the conference stage. If there really is a lasting political shift underway, it is the gradual alienation of voters under 40 from the Tories that first became apparent in 2017. In 1979 the Conservatives won the youth vote, and they won it for a reason. Callaghan's belief in a sea-change was just the bewilderment and resignation of an old man.