A Low, Dishonest Decade

I don't know who first came up with the phrase "The Great Noticing" in the context of UK politics, but the definition appears to be widely understood: ingenuous press commentators noticing things that had been in plain sight for years, even decades. We are now in a meta phase, where journalists themselves notice The Great Noticing, though largely in order to pursue industry beef. Thus centrists appalled at Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour Party leadership in 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket now criticise the rightwing press for its failure to appreciate the damage done by austerity, notably in its contribution to Brexit and the undermining of the constitution at home and international standing abroad during the Johnson years (and Truss weeks). This tendency to reimagine what everyone who really matters knew has now rippled outwards to the point that commentators are genuinely suprised if you didn't realise all along that Tony Blair was faithfully carrying out Margaret Thatcher's great work of economic and social reform, or that the role of the UK in international affairs is simply to hold the US's coat. 

As The Great Noticing has become ever more embedded in the discourse, there has been a rise in cynicism: not simply in the negative sense of people assuming that there will be no penalty for lying and cheating (the removal of Corbyn raised the bar and the installation of Starmer has raised it higher still) but in the positive sense that the lies and cheats are more promptly seen through and more vocally called out. In this context, the Michelle Mone case is interesting less for the evidence of cronyism or backhand donations (it's estimated that some 8 million of the public money spent on PPE contracts found its way back into Conservative Party coffers), important as those are, than for the assumption on her Ladyship's part that lying to the press is a legitimate tactic to protect one's family from intrusion. This claim is presumably on the advice of her media handlers who have spotted the coincidental utility of the recent legal judgement against the Daily Mirror. Mone's argument is not simply that lying is justified to avoid public scrutiny, but that this is what any reasonable person would do. She is asking us to notice that this is how the world works: that virtue is little more than fancy dress.

Phone-hacking is a journalistic cheat-code. Instead of doing the hard yards of investigative reporting, interviewing and cross-referencing statements, you can simply bypass the normal rules of the game. The idea of a cheat-code isn't new, even if the metaphor is. Paying for tips from hotel staff or corrupt police officers has been going on since the popular press emerged in the late nineteenth century, while chequebook journalism is by its very nature the equivalent of a loot-box. We should therefore be cautious in assuming that there is anything particularly novel in such behaviour, but we can more confidently suggest that the response to phone-hacking and other press abuses has been categorically different this century, hence the disappearance of the News of the World, the Leveson Inquiry (however prematurely terminated), and the promising signs that Piers Morgan might end up if not in jail at least in the media wilderness. 

While the Oxford word of the year might be "rizz", I suggest the phrase The Great Noticing would be a better choice, precisely because it seems to have both accelerated and graduated to a higher plane over the last 12 months, indeed over the last 12 weeks. The biggest illustration of this has been the apparently startled realisation of experienced reporters and respected foreign affairs commentators that Israel is actually trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. It would be easy to sneer at the media's inability to spot the accumulating signs since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, but what we should really notice (sic) is that this moment of clarity has inevitably caused a number of other lightbulbs to flicker on: that the two-state solution is long dead, that the US is not an even-handed broker in the Middle East, and that the problem with Israel is not that nasty man Netanyahu with his boorish ways but a society overwhelmingly committed to a system of apartheid. Who knows, maybe some might start to notice that not all charges of antisemitism are made in good faith, though I very much doubt we'll get a Panorama special on the issue.

Another example of this has been the recent moves by the US and EU to encourage Ukraine to reassess its strategy in the war with Russia. Accoding to Politico, "the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war ... [which] would likely mean giving up parts of Ukraine to Russia." The commentators who loudly denounced realists like John Mearsheimer last year for arguing that negotiation and territorial concessions were inevitable are now sagely stroking their chins at the same thought. What most of them appear to have finally noticed is that for all its lack of advanced weaponry and its operational deficiencies, Russia has a lot of manpower that it can call on. Conversely, Ukraine may have the material support of the West, if increasingly grudging, but it simply doesn't have the manpower to force Russia out of its eastern oblasts. While Russia can fight an offensive war against Ukraine, Ukraine cannot fight an offensive war against Russia. The best Zelenskyy can now realistically hope for is joining NATO and the EU as recompense for the loss of Crimea and the East.

At home, the masters of noticing are invariably centrists, not conservatives trying to understand how Britain can have been broken under continuous Tory government. The latter are simply preparing the ground for a Labour administration, both by constructing a Dolchstoßlegende, in which they were thwarted in office by a liberal establishment, and by rehearsing a litany of failures that by their nature a Labour government will struggle to address within a single parliament. Centrists are the great noticers because their essential purpose is to resist the critiques of the left. Not every leftwing analysis will turn out to be correct, and not every prescription emerging from the left effective, but enough will be such that the passage of time will oblige centrists to accommodate and absorb many of those analyses and prescriptions. Noticing is therefore a delaying tactic, so it should come as no surprise that 2023, when Labour took an apparently unassailable lead in the polls over the Tories and Keir Starmer proceeded to junk almost every even vaguely progressive policy, should have seen a flurry of noticing about the last decade.

Likewise the upsurge in noticing in the realm of international affairs isn't about the chickens of the 2000-16 period coming home to roost, or even those of the post-1989 era (the expansion of NATO, the enfeeblement of Russia etc). Rather it reflects the cynicism of the present moment. On Ukraine, there is now an acknowledgment that the country cannot win back its lost lands and that they in turn are a paltry gain for a Russia that has lost standing globally. In the Middle East, there is now a recognition that there isn't even significant minority support for a two-state solution in Israel: the idea remains a figment of global diplomacy. Given the impossibility of a single-state solution - a nuclear-armed theocracy isn't going to dissolve itself into a secular democracy where it will quickly become a confessional minority - this means that the Palestinians must disappear. The calculation of the US and European powers is that they can sit on their hands long enough for this to happen in Gaza, and in subsequent phases in the West Bank, with Israel bearing the lion's share of the blame.

What The Great Noticing presages for British politics in 2024 is not regret over the errors of the last decade, from the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories in 2010 to the media doing its level best to boost Boris Johnson into office in 2019, but a doubling-down on the commitment to restore the authority and gravitas of the state through performative centrism: tough choices, NHS reform, anodyne virtue. The relative decline of the UK over the period - in GDP growth, in productivity growth, in international standing - will be seen not as a wrong-turn to be corrected by significantly different policies but as the new reality to which we must accommodate ourselves by maintaining the same policies, only more competently. In foreign affairs, realism will make a strong comeback, but largely as justification for accepting facts on the ground, whether in Ukraine, the West Bank or Taiwan. While The Great Noticing will see many commentators wake up to the follies of the recent past, few will have the nerve to suggest that we are already 4 years into a low, dishonest decade to stand comparison with the 1930s.

Tory Sovereignty

You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's Napoleon has been criticised for playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many French critics. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, The Duellists, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.

The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in The Taste of Things).

The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.

The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as Blade Runner and Alien, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the core issue of Brexit, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.

Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of liberals - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.

The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like Rafel Behr to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. 

The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.

Kissinger and Empire

The running joke about Henry Kissinger was not simply that so many better people died before him, but that he continued to be fêted by the political establishment despite his judgement having been proved repeatedly wrong by history. Détente is a dead letter, not only with regard to post-Soviet Russia but to China as well, where America's "pivot to the Pacific" is a strategy geared to raising rather easing tensions. The military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina are long gone and whilst the later Latin American "pink tide" was hamstrung by neoliberalism, South America is clearly not the wholly compliant partner that Kissinger envisaged in the hemisphere. His advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons has, thankfully, never been adopted by any power. The final irony is that he died at a time when the limits of the "shuttle diplomacy" that he pioneered in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War have been all too visible in the Middle East where the Biden administration has refused to restrain Israel and very publicly disavowed its role as an honest broker.

Kissinger's role as a diplomatic "superstar" was one of the odder cultural developments of the early-1970s. It owed a lot to his presentation as a cosmopolitan intellectual: his heavy German accent being a performative melding of Old World expertise in the service of the dynamism of the New World. In fact, he had lived in the US since he was 15 (his family fled Germany in 1938) but carefully cultivated his outsider status while being the consummate insider. Kissinger owed his advancement to the utility of his theorising about the balance of power, in particular his idea that it could be personalised (he was a fan of both Metternich and Bismarck), the most famous example of this in action being "Nixon to China". Thus foreign policy was bent by ego and domestic ambition. But for all the focus on "legitimacy" and "order" in international affairs, Kissinger's theorising was ultimately just a smokescreen for the right of the US to act as the global policeman and to exercise its power without restraint: might is right. As Thomas Meaney noted in the New Yorker, "If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority". 

Today, under Biden as much as under Trump, the US doesn't really care about image-management, at least beyond its own borders. And that bipartisan contempt for the wider world reflects the realities of American power, not the personal preferences of individual politicians, let alone State Department employees. Kissinger's elevation to international celebrity owed everything to the watershed marked by the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. This promised a future of greater geopolitical instability, one that appeared promptly in the form of the 1973 oil crisis, and thus stimulated a public desire for the better management of the emerging world system (what would, in time, become the Washington Consensus). Amidst the war crimes in Cambodia and Bangladesh, it's easy to forget, as Joann Wypijewski noted in the NLR Sidecar blog, that "Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither."

Meaney picked up the thread in a more forthright article, also for the NLR Sidecar blog, where he emphasised that the acts attributed to Kissinger were a continuation of American foreign policy rather than a divergence. "Was it so unexpected that the country that had fire-bombed Japanese civilians to get Tokyo to the table also fire-bombed Cambodians in an attempt to get Hanoi to one as well? Was backing the massacre of Timorese an unusual follow-up to backing the mass-killing of Indonesian ‘communists’? Was it so shocking that the political class that had installed the Shah would also ease the way for Pinochet? Was Dr. Kissinger’s record in the Middle East really worse than that of his old nemesis Dr. Brzezinski? For what set the man apart, one may have to look elsewhere." And that elsewhere was image-management, which centred on a personally frutiful contrast of European cynicism and American naivety: "The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism."

As Meaney concluded, "His trademark method was to find ulterior reasons for what the state was doing already." Again, it's worth contrasting this with the present moment where the US has made little attempt to rationalise, let alone justify, its indulgence of Israel. Beyond the usual obeisance towards a two-state solution and mild censure of settler attacks in the West Bank, the Biden administration has offered no substantive criticism of Israel's behaviour, leading to the conclusion that it will be perfectly happy if the Palestinians are wiped off the map once and for all. Its regional goals are clearly Israeli-Arab normalisation and the restraint of Iran, goals that Biden has pursued just as reliably as Trump did, and the underlying purpose of that is to ensure that the US retains a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil supplies, which has been the guiding principle of its policy in the region since the Second World War. But why the lack of pretence now? The reason is simple: while the bipolar Cold War required a war of position, the era since 1989 has required merely a war of manoeuvre, evident in the spread of NATO to Russia's borders and the dependence of China on US Treasuries.

In a timely coincidence, the Guardian published a long read by Tom Stevenson on American empire the day after Kissinger's death. This was a salutary reminder that for all the talk of American decline, or the end of the unipolar world, the US remains the global hegemon with a preponderance of financial and military power "so great that its very extent [has] served to disincentivise other states from challenging it". But this is rarely acknowledged, any more than the foreign policy consistency between Bush, Obama and Trump is. Instead, we are regularly regaled with tales of how a change of administration in Washington might jeopardise America's defence of democracy overseas. As Stevenson asks, "Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution?" One obvious explanation is that countries like the UK and Japan, which slavishly follow US policy in foreign affairs and act as continental-scale aircraft carriers for the US military, are unwilling to admit that they are satellites of empire rather than sovereign states. Kissinger dignified the dealings of heads of state through a diplomatic theatre inspired by the Congress of Vienna. For that he was always welcome in elite circles.

Against Science

Simon Wren-Lewis thinks that the political right has a problem with facts and science. There's an immediate philosophical issue here in that Simon implies that the right's attitude to facts and science is uniform because he assumes that facts and science are synonymous. But this isn't the case. The right has a high respect for facts, albeit narrowly defined, but it has an innate suspicion of the ambition of science. Facts are objective certainties: their truth is indisputable. But while some on the right have a flexible view of what constitutes a fact - the contents of the Bible, or the "reality" of race - the core conservative tradition of pragmatism, exemplified by Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, sees facts as limited by experience. In other words, facts exist in the realm of reality rather than speculation. As Oakeshott famously put it, "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss". This doesn't mean that conservatives are positivists, or that they limit their sympathy only to certifiable truths. For example, that antinomy of "fact to mystery" clearly excludes the mystagogy of the Church of England and the monarchy. 

In contrast, science operates on probability - the likelihood that something is true - because certainty is limited.  The edge of science is a venture into the unknown and the scientific method is more than simple empiricism. Knowledge progresses through the refinement of working hypotheses, which means it is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. The discipline of economics, Simon's specialism, has often been criticised for its pretension to scientific rigour, particularly in its reliance on mathematical models, but this is to imagine that economics deals in facts of a mathematical nature. It doesn't. Economics is a social science, which means that its truth is often contingent, hence the prevalence of stylised facts: general principles that hold in aggregate but for which contrary evidence can always be found at the granular level. That facts and science are not synonymous is not just pedantry. It points towards an important distinction in conservative thought between the familiar and the unknown, which is another way of saying between practice and theory.

Simon describes the right's problem thus: "Why does the political right increasingly seem to be on the wrong side of facts and science, and what should scientists do about it? One answer to the first question comes from asking another. Do some on the left, by which I mean those whose views are to the left of the positions adopted by the current Labour leadership, occasionally have problems with facts and science? My own answer would be that some can, at least in the area I know best which is economics. The example that is freshest in my mind is UK inflation." That "occasionally" is doing a lot of work. His specific argument is that "the inflationary episode we have recently been through in the UK was in part generated by higher energy and food prices, but it was also a result of strong labour markets, where unemployment was low by recent historical standards and vacancies were very high. ... some on the left were much happier talking about imported inflation than labour markets being too strong. Many claimed inflation was profit led. Yet the evidence so far for the UK is pretty clear that profit shares, outside of the energy sector, have remained pretty stable." 

This ignores that the left is not necessarily viewing the "episode" as simply another random event that can be empirically assessed. Rather leftists tend to see it in historical terms as part of a longer trend (a stylised fact, if you prefer), commencing in the late-1970s, that has suppressed working class incomes and boosted returns to capital, leading to today's high levels of inequality. The short-term stability of profit shares in sectors other than energy is not incompatible with this. The tendency to accuse the left of a utopian obsession with the future means that its engagement with history tends to be occluded. For example, critical theory is deeply embedded in historical reasoning as much as social science but is commonly presented as unmoored from both. The qualifiers in Simon's statement - "some", "many" - and his use of "happier" indicates that he recognises that the left has exhibited a range of opinions, both in respect of the latest bout of inflation and the secular trends of the last half-century, but he is obliged to construct a left strawman in order to establish a commonality with the right, namely the power of ideology: "My point is not that left and right are much the same. They are obviously not, and the right has power while the left do not. Instead it is to suggest one source of reality denial is ideology." 

This sails dangerously close to the centrist conceit that everyone bar the centre is driven by ideology, which requires Simon to indulge a form of horseshoe theory in which both left and right are vulnerable to self-delusion: "The ideological source of the left’s focus on profits rather than a strong labour market is obvious. On the right, neoliberalism typically argues against state ‘interference’ with firms and markets. Both climate change and lockdowns are about the state taking measures to avoid extreme externalities. Equally a libertarian ideology would see both policies as restricting personal liberty". Again, that "obvious" is doing a lot of work. In fact, there are plenty on the left who consider an obsession with profit to be merely vulgar, in the Marxian sense, and who would prefer to focus on the clear differentiator between left and right that Simon himself identifies, namely power. The claim that neoliberalism argues against state interefence with firms and markets suggests that Simon really doesn't understand neoliberalism either in theory or practice, though I suppose that "typically" might allow him a degree of leeway. 

Neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of state power. While inspired by Austrian economics (or classical liberalism, if you prefer), it is a pragmatic of how to introduce the market into a social democratic framework. Despite all of the "reforms" since 1979, Western European economies remain fundamentally social democratic, hence we still have state interference, large public sectors and high rates of taxation. Even the US, with its private healthcare and weak labour laws, is recognisably the social democratic polity built between the 1930s and 60s, despite the Reagan revolution. The equivalence of neoliberalism and libertarianism is also naive. While the election of Javier Milei to the Argentinian Presidency may prove a damp squib because he is clearly just a neoliberal with a daft haircut, the vote itself was decided by the specific difference of what was sold as libertarianism. Getting rid of the central bank and dollarising the economy is not neoliberal practice precisely because it curtails state power.

At this point in his argument, Simon executes a sharp turn to highlight the return of the "paranoid style" (a la Richard Hofstadter) to conservative politics, mainly in the US but also in the UK and particularly in the media: "To see how this paranoid style sits far too easily with today’s politics on the right we can look at right wing media, and in the UK with the strong crossover in recent years between those writing in that media and Conservative political leaders and their advisers". The problem with this turn is that ideology does not neatly segue into conspiracism. The one is a collection of beliefs, not necessarily consistent or coherent, while the other is a style of reasoning that posits a singular "key" that explains manifold phenomena. The purpose of Simon's swerve is to establish a line from the media's indulgence of untruth to the Conservative Party's rejection of scientific expertise ("One of our former Prime Ministers made his journalistic reputation doing just this by making things up about the EU"). 

But this isn't convincing. Telling lies, or being "economical with the verité", is not the same as having contempt for science. All politicians lie and mislead - consider the current leader of the opposition - but few of them were trained in the art at newspapers. The Johnson adminstration's disregard for scientific advice, which has been on ample show during the pandemic inquiry, was clearly the product of a more fundamental disregard for the lives of others and a blasé attitude towards public health. That can certainly be attributed to ideology, but the ideology in question is the traditional Tory one, marked by a contempt for the common herd and an aversion to further empowering the state bureaucracy at a time of crisis. Boris Johnson did not mark a departure from Tory values, any more than the pursuit of varying degrees of austerity by successive administrations from 2010 onwards did. The last 15 years have obviously been frustrating for a Keynesian, but to imagine this came about because of a recent rejection of facts and science, rather than a recapitulation of the traditional Treasury view, is - well - paranoid.

Simon's blogpost dribbles away into inconsequentiality and an appeal to liberal virtue: "The most effective way of tilting the scales back towards reality and science is to endeavour to ensure these politicians and this political viewpoint are kept well away from power in the future". Good luck with that, mate. This obviously ignores the structural dimension, and it is here that he could benefit from addressing the analyses of the left, notably Marxists like David Harvey and Robert Brenner, on the long-term causes of the current moment, from the spatio-temporal fixes of capitalist accumulation to the crisis of profitability and secular stagnation. So long as the political system is designed to block any challenge to capitalism, and so long as neo-Keynesian economics seeks to preserve capitalism through a "synthesis", we will see politicians spouting nonsense and denying facts. As Antonio Gramsci put it, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".

Human Resources

The term "human shield" is en vogue at the moment because of the claim by supporters of Israel's military action in Gaza that Hamas are using the civilian population to hide behind. A number of people have pointed out that this makes no sense given that meat-based shields aren't very good at stopping bullets or shells. A human shield, properly speaking, is a hostage whose life is threatened by the person being shielded. But given the way in which the IDF is pounding Gaza regardless of the safety of the civilian population, it clearly does not regard Palestinians as hostages whose lives are to be cherished and it clearly has not prioritised the safety of the Jewish and other hostages seized on the 7th of October either, to judge by its indiscriminate bombing and the slow progress towards a ceasefire and hostage-exchange. The IDF's ostensible target is Hamas who, we have been repeatedly assured, are hidden in underground bunkers. But Israeli forces aren't using "bunker-busting" ordinance but simply flattening the buildings above ground, and so far they have provided little verified evidence of Hamas's network of tunnels or substantiated their claims to have killed "thousands" of Hamas fighters. Israel's goal appears to be to destroy the shield, i.e. the urban fabric of Gaza and its civilian population. 

This appears to be an example of the Dahiya doctrine, developed by the IDF in Lebanon in 2006 and later employed in Gaza during the 2008-09 war, which treated civilians and their homes not simply as collateral damage but as an asset to be denied to their opponents: "We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. [...] Harming the population is the only means of restraining [Hezbollah]". This doctrine is a classic counter-insurgency approach whose roots lie in the repressive policing of the European empires from their heyday in the 1880s through to their dismantling in the 1950s. The genocidal free-for-alls of earlier centuries were replaced by a more systematic policy in which native peoples were seen as a valuable resource. Not necessarily one to be preserved, but as one to be denied to the insurgents, both as a source of supplies and funding and as a protective environment within which they could find shelter. One form in which civilians are treated as a resource is through internment. 

In Northern Ireland, this was justified on the grounds of a plausible suspicion of the internees' involvement in terrorism, but the reality - notably in the case of Operation Demetrius in 1971 - was that many innocent people were caught up in the sweep, which inflamed tensions and led to a rise in violence, while the partiality of the Stormont authorities (no Loyalists were interned in the operation) contributed to the decision to suspend the Northern Ireland Parliament and introduce direct rule from London. Internment in Israel/Palestine takes two forms. There is the classic detention without trial, not only of those suspected of being active in the armed resistance but of ordinary civilians, notably women and children, guilty of no more than throwing stones or haranguing IDF soldiers. It's no secret that Israel seeks to always have a large stock of Palestinians in prison as a contingency for its own troops or Jewish civilians being taken hostage: so that it has sufficient resource to agree a hostage exchange without the need to release actual Hamas or Hizbollah fighters. The second form that internment takes is Gaza itself, and increasingly areas of the West Bank, where barriers and blockades create what are in effect open prisons.

A notable early example of mass-internment was the British action in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The British commander, Lord Kitchener, employed a traditional scorched earth policy to stop the rebels living off the land, burning crops and slaughtering or confiscating cattle, but this was combined with an innovative approach to civilians. Where previously these would be left to fend for themselves, which essentially meant condemning them to a forced march to less hostile territory, or allowing them to die through famine, the British decided to incarcerate them in "concentration camps". In effect, to take the families hostage and deny the rebels their material and emotional support. Though not death camps in the sense we would come to know during the Second World War, these places were characterised by malnutrition and disease due to systematic neglect. Of an interned population of some 100,000 Boers, roughly a quarter died, mostly women and children. 

Since then, wars have typically been fought less between armies than between the military and civilians. Even the First World War, which is emblematically remembered in the trenches of the Western Front, saw more civilian than military deaths. The Second World War was a notable example of this with the  destruction of urban populations through mass bombing (and finally nuclear weapons) being as distinctive as the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish population of Germany and occupied Europe. One war where military deaths did exceed civilian, though not by much, was the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975. This was similar to the Boer War in the use of a scorched earth policy (specifically the use of defoliants like Agent Orange) and of civilian relocation (the Stragetic Hamlet Program). It ultimately failed because of the contradictions between a military counterinsurgency strategy centred on "search and destroy" and a pacification strategy that required territory to be held and services provided to the civilian population to win "hearts and minds". What Vietnam (and indeed Northern Ireland in the 1970s) proved was that counterinsurgency is usually more anti-civilian than anti-insurgent, something that is only too apparent in Gaza right now.

The popular historiography of Israel focuses on the relatively brief military campaigns against the Arab states: the 1948 War, the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This focus is as partial as calling the Israeli military, the most powerful in the region and one that has overseen significant territorial expansion beyond the post-1948 Green Line, a defence force. The other perspective, that of the Palestinians, has focused on the forced expropriation of land and the displacement of the population, starting in 1948, along with the routine harrassment and eviction of the civilian population by both the IDF and settler groups since then. What the current war in Gaza has made plain is that the conflict is at heart between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. It isn't really a military contest at all, despite Hamas's attempts to cast it as such. This has been reinforced by the opportunistic attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, as much as by the Arab states sitting on their hands under the watchful eye of the United States. 

The defence of Israel's actions has included the conflation of all Palestinians with Hamas and the suggestion that civilian Palestinians are no more innocent than "Nazi civilians". Inevitably, criticism of the state of Israel in its aggressive policy has been interpreted as antisemitic, not just by Israeli politicians or Jewish groups in the diaspora, but also by non-Jewish politicians in countries like the US, UK, France and Germany. In some cases, voicing the common line - that Israel has the right to defend itself as it sees fit, that Hamas have brought this on the Palestinians of Gaza, and that calls for a ceasefire are pointless until Hamas is destroyed - is simply a way of indicating fealty to Washington. This, rather than a desire to further stomp on the left, is undoubtedly the main consideration for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party hierarchy, though the opportunity to do a bit of stomping will naturally be taken anyway. Opportunism also underpins the willingness of the National Rally in France and the AfD in Germany to align themselves with the political establishment.

It's worth at this point returning to the history of the Second Boer War. The British government's claim of "military necessity" for its concentration camp policy and its domestic opponents' charge of a "policy of extermination" have obvious echoes today, though it's important to note that no modern politician is willing to use that latter phrase as Lloyd George once did. It isn't hyperbole to talk of Israel pursuing a "policy of extermination", particularly when senior Israeli politicians and military personnel are employing exterminationist language themselves. In fact, the evidence is more compelling this time round. The avoidable civilian deaths of the Second Boer War could be attributed largely to incompetence rather than design, and it was true that improvements made after the public outcry significantly reduced the mortality rate. While Israeli ministers are circumspect enough not to chant "Death to the Arabs" at every opportunity, they are openly advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. That such rhetoric is tolerated by Western states, however uneasily, shows that the problem is not the human shield of Palestinians but the political shield provided by Washington and its allies for genocide.

A VARcical Start to the Season

There is an air of familiarity at the top of the English Premier League, with Manchester City leading Liverpool and Arsenal and the usual suspects close behind, though Tottenham Hotspur appear to have replaced Manchester United as the seasonal anomaly: a team that aren't as good as the pundits claim but who have certainly been lucky. The good fortune that saw Erik ten Hag's team of misfits finish third last season (their goal difference was a paltry 15, which should have consigned them to sixth or seventh) appears to have run out, and luck may be about to do a flit from Ange Postecoglou's refashioned Spurs as well. What Tottenham's recent stumble indicates is that they remain a shallow squad who will probably struggle against teams in the top third of the table on most matchdays, despite the relatively good results achieved against Liverpool at home (that notoriously disallowed Diaz goal) and Arsenal away (a game in which Jesus missed a sitter and Jorginho uncharacteristically gave the ball away). 

The other familiar feature, beyond Chelsea stuck in mid-table, is the interminable chuntering over VAR. For all the obvious errors and angry managerial reactions, this has been a strange debate because it scrupulously avoids the central issue, namely that the obvious incompetence is because the system is controlled by PGMOL. As the Spurs-Liverpool fiasco made clear, the interaction of the match officials lacks process discipline and suffers from over-familiarity ("That's wrong that, Daz"). The obvious flaw is that the official's discussions aren't broadcast. Where that happens, such as in rugby, public exposure encourages both a clear protocol - explicitly state the on-field decision and what is being checked - and militates against ambiguous, blokeish idioms. The whole idea of referees checking their own homework and, as Mike Dean cheerfully admitted, consequently seeking to protect their "mates", was obviously flawed from the start. That said, there was never much likelihood of the technology being introduced without PGMOL being in control of it. 

A long-standing bleat by well-paid pundits is that former players should be encouraged to become referees, which has always struck me as evidence of those pundits' unworldliness. Getting ex-pros to work their way up the ranks as referees isn't going to happen. They don't need the money these days and certainly not the aggro. But there is a good case for them being fast-tracked in as specialist VAR assistants, not simply because of their experience playing the game but in order to maintain some emotional distance between the VAR booth and the officials on the pitch. Of course, this would be akin to putting potential pundits in charge of VAR, and you can imagine the reaction of PGMOL to that, but then if all pundits had to serve an apprenticeship as VAR assistants, would that actually be a bad thing? It might even improve the quality of punditry by encouraging match commentators to be less willing to rush to judgement (though probably not Garry Neville).

The international football break - aka the interlull - has come at the thirdway point of the season, with all teams now having played 12 games. At 27 points and third behind Manchester City on 28 and Liverpool also on 27, Arsenal are slightly worse off than at the same stage last season, when they has 31 points and were 2 ahead of Guardiola's team. The rationalisation among fans is that our dash to the front in 2022 was ultimately undone by conceding too many goals and thus points in the final third of the season, largely due to injuries to key players such as William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu. City paced themselves better, as they usually do, finishing strongly after beating us home and away in February and April. It is widely assumed that Arteta has decided to sacrifice some of the goal-scoring verve that marked the opening third of last season in order to make us more secure at the back. Controlling games better, in the manner of City, and increasing the depth of the squad, should not only make the team more efficient but more durable. Beating City at the Emirates in October might be a taste of that.

However, though our goals scored has dropped from 30 to 26, our goals conceded has only improved from 11 to 10. But an average of a little under a goal a game is probably is as good as it will get: City have now conceded 12 (albeit 4 of those were in today's game at Stamford Bridge). What matters is whether that rate can be sustained through to the end of the season. The last time Arsenal conceded fewer in the opening third, 9 in the 2015-16 season, they finished second behind Leicester City after conceding 13 and 14 in the middle and last thirds (and also losing their shooting boots in that middle third, scoring only 17). With injuries beginning to mount up, Arsenal face a key set of games after the interlull, running through to New Year's Eve, that could go a long way to determining whether Aretea's strategy has a chance of working. The coincidence of games against Liverpool and West Ham United either side of Chrismas, back-to-back fixtures that essentially ended our title tilt last April, offers the chance of psychological redemption.

In terms of the balance of the team, the key issue remains our limited options up front. Though Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz have clearly given Arteta more variety, we just as clearly need another specialist forward who can lead the line as effectively as Jesus but with more reliable end-product. Eddie Nketiah remains a useful backup, as he proved against Sheffield United, but he isn't the sort of dominant striker that Arsenal require. If the team can keep on City's coat-tails until the end of the year, then they may well make a move in the January transfer window. At the other end of the pitch, the demotion of Aaron Ramsdale in favour of David Raya has divided fans, not least because the Spaniard doesn't appear to be that much of an upgrade on the popular English stopper. Time will tell whether this proves an astute tactical move by Arteta, but it is the first test of the much-vaunted "connection" that the club has established with the fanbase over the last couple of years.

In midfield, Thomas Partey's time at the club increasingly looks like it will come to an end this season, his persistent injury problems meaning that he can't be considered a key cog in the team in the way that Declan Rice has quickly become, despite his occasional dominant performances. Rice hasn't been a revelation exactly - he was propping up West Ham for years and always looked comfortable for England - but it's noticeable how much better he looks in a more technical team. If Arteta's endurance strategy is to pay off, it will depend to a large degree on Rice providing drive and defensive security in the middle of the park consistently until May. Jorginho looks like what he is: an experienced pro who can fill-in, but that simply makes him an upgrade on Mohammed Elneny. For all his popularity, the Egyptian is likely to leave by the end of the season while the Italo-Brazilian is unlikely to play more than twenty games. In brief, Arsenal will probably need to bring in another defensive midfielder next summer. 

In terms of the creative roles, niggles for Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli should prove transient, though there remains a concern about the load on the England player. There is also the now perennial hope that Emile Smith-Rowe will finally get a break on the injury front. But it doesn't look like Reiss Nelson or Fabio Vieira are going to make the grade, or secure Arteta's lasting confidence, which amounts to the same thing, so there's every chance the manager and Edu will be in the market for another wide player. Kai Havertz hasn't lived up to his billing, however I have a sneaking suspicion that he could yet be pivotal (I'm obviously just hoping he repeats the trick of scoring the winner in the Champions League final). He's overdue a spectacular goal; or even just an ugly one. His languid style of play has irritated some Arsenal fans, though the player he reminds me of (based on  limited exposure through old videos, it should be said), with his astute positional sense and heading ability, is one George "Stroller" Graham. 

Overall, it's been a fascinating start to the season, with no one team setting the pace in the way that Arsenal did this time last year, and with plenty of unpredictable results and some very good games featuring late drama, such as today's 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Manchester City. As ever, what will matter is consistency in the middle third of the season and then the ability to tighten the screw in the final third, which ultimately reflects the depth of squads as much as tactics. Arsenal look more capable of lasting the distance this time round, though it is going to take some luck - or at least the absence of bad luck - on the injury front, while City are unlikely to repeat their treble triumph of last season and might even prioritise defending the Champions League over another Premier League title. The biggest threat to last season's top two is likely to be Liverpool, who despite looking chaotic at times have crept into second and have the muscle memory of a consistent run to the title to call upon, not to mention the incentive of winning the title in front of their fans rather than a Covid-emptied stadium. It promises to be a vintage season. Let's hope it isn't decided by dodgy VAR.

Time to Move

A dominant theme in the news at the moment is of people on the move, from the anxious queues at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt to the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. From a UK perspective, the issue of migration has been a persistent theme since the media focus on "bogus" asylum-seekers in the 1990s, and obviously played a crucial role in the upswell of euroscepticism between the accession of Eastern European states in 2004 and the EU referendum in 2016. The most recent manifestation, the so-called small boats crisis - itself a relatively minor subset of the number of asylum claims, which is currently around 80,000 a year - obviously pales in comparison to the prospect of 1.7 million Afghanis moved against their will. Beyond the immediate horizon, the continuing flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean littoral, and the growing number of people displaced by environmental degradation arising from climate change, suggests that this century will be defined by the ebb and flow of populations.

Not everyone drawing our attention to the mass displacement of Afghan refugees by Pakistan is arguing for a more humane policy towards refugees generally. For some, it is simply an opportunity to insist that Israel should not be singled out for the crime of ethnic cleansing. But however callous the forced repatriation of refugees might be, it isn't the same as displacing people from their homeland. Of course, the issue becomes blurred over time. Some of those Afghanis were born and brought up in Pakistan, their parents having fled in the 1980s. As the Windrush scandal made clear, states are institutionally oblivious to how quickly people can put down roots, and how even within a single family the understanding of where "home" is can vary (a point well made in Horace Ové's recently reissued film Pressure). But it's also the case that public opinion tends to be sanguine about ethnic cleansing so long as there are no deaths involved, hence the minimal outcry over the Armenians who have fled Nagorno-Karabakh. 

Inasmuch as events in Pakistan have a parallel with those in Israel, it is in the leaked government discussion about the feasibility of expelling the Palestinians of Gaza into Sinai. There's certainly no parallel with the possibility of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt being expelled back into the areas of Israel they left under duress in 1948. There are close to 110 million refugees in the world today, a majority of whom are internally displaced - i.e. they haven't crossed an international border. This figure has risen rapidly over the last decade, largely due to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. If we include migrants - that is people who have moved for a better life but do not yet enjoy the rights of citizenship in their host country - the global population of those living outside their country of origin is 184 million. Add the 62 million internally displaced and you have a global population of almost a quarter of a billion people who have been uprooted: approximately 3% of humankind.

What these figures don't include is the routine deracination that doesn't qualify as forced displacement. This is a combination of economic mobility (moving for work or education), precarious tenancy (a growing problem as homeownership and social renting both decline) and the forced evictions of slum clearances. In his 2006 book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis noted that "Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly ... to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners and middle-class commuters." The result is that "every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people - legal tenants as well as squatters - are forcibly evicted from Third World neighborhoods". The point is that the displacement of people is a constant of capitalism and has been since the initial movement between countryside and town driven by the agrarian and industrial revolutions (the global population became predominantly urban in 2007).

Viewed in this larger context, the struggle for a Jewish homeland during the twentieth century appears like a quixotic act of defiance against capitalism. This was one reason for the emergence of the kibbutz movement's combination of Zionism and socialism, in contrast to the universalist Jewish Bund that prioritised class solidarity across ethnic boundaries. But leftist kibbutzim, despite their presence among the victims of the Hamas attack, are atypical in Israel today, at least in comparsion to the West Bank settlements. While the Palestinian villages they displace are usually agricultural, those villages exist within a geographical hierarchy of small towns and cities housing industry and commercial services (however weak the Palestinian economy may be). In contrast, the Jewish settlements of the West Bank are typically isolated and reliant on communication with towns and cities within the pre-1967 borders. Approximately 60% of the employed population in the settlements works in Israel proper. In other words, the settlements are gated communities made up of commuters and privileged religious groups, the latter of whom are as detached from Israeli society as from Palestinian.

The only way that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank can be functionally incorporated into Israel is if the Palestinians are expelled from Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron so that these and other cities and towns become fully Jewish components of Israel's society and economy. This in turn means that a two-state solution is only viable on the basis of the 1967 borders, which would mean Jews being expelled from all of the settlements constructed in the West Bank since then, just as they were forcibly removed, by the Isreali government, from within the territory of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Liberals who advocate for a two-state solution are usually vague on these practical details, despite the very obvious "facts on the ground", preferring to deride "extremism" on both sides. For example, Jonathan Freedland thinks "the contest that matters most is the battle of hardliners v moderates, or, to be more specific, maximalists v partitionists: those who insist on having the whole land for themselves v those who are ready to share it". 

Freedland's predictably nebulous solution would see "an end to the settlement project in the West Bank and the concession of territory", but an end is not the same as a dismantling. It's clear than many hope the existing settlements can be preserved, even if there is a moratorium on further expansion, and that the major territorial concession will therefore be by the Palestinians, not Israel. But this will leave a dysfunctional West Bank, crippling both a Palestinian state (the current weakness of the Palestinian National Authority isn't solely down to corruption or incompetence) and acting as a fiscal drain on Israel. The territory needs to have integrity. If that cannot be achieved through a single-state solution, then the two states need to be cleanly disentangled. In other words, the best hope is for a bloodless ethnic cleansing. And the only practical way that could be implemented would be for Israel to withdraw all of its citizens from the West Bank (and the Golan Heights) to within its 1967 borders. 

Clearly there isn't much prospect of that happening, and the likes of Freedland would no doubt consider it "extreme", even though it was the original logic of the two-state solution. Likewise, there is little chance of a single-state solution in the foreseeable future, particularly a unitary democracy in which the Palestinian disapora would have the right of return and possible repossession of property, so raising the prospect of Israel neither being a formally Jewish state nor having a Jewish majority population. The outcome that currently appears to have the greatest chance of being realised is the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the West Bank, whose incremental progress has stepped up in recent weeks. When Western politicians talk about it not being the right time to consider a ceasefire in Gaza, insisting that the IDF should have the chance to wipe out Hamas first, we should bear in mind that this is consistent with their refusal to consider BDS as an appropriate response to the encroachment of settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Our politicians and media have been endorsing a slow-motion ethnic cleansing for decades.

Against History

As the violence grinds on in Gaza, attention has inevitably turned to the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Israel's defenders, the desire to place Hamas's attack in its historic setting is an insult to the memory of the victims. This refusal to historicize has ironically been prominent among some historians. You might expect this from those who make a good living writing for the Tory press, but it has been salutary to see such impeccable liberal grandees as Simon Schama, who was famously scathing about the "rhetorical adrenaline" of the French Revolution, riding the wave of hysteria. One reason for the hyperbole is that any broadening of the discourse immediately reveals the asymmetry of the historic relationship. It also reveals the bankruptcy of the official position of the US and other Western states, obliged to back to the hilt an Israeli government that they despise and a two-state "solution" that has been revealed as nothing more than a fig-leaf for the continuing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and now Gaza. This has raised the rhetorical stakes, requiring the "war" to be presented in Manichean terms and the murder of Palestinian civilians to be marginalised by quibbling about whose ordinance did what damage and whether casualty numbers are trustworthy.

It has also resulted in liberals dismissing the history of the conflict with what amounts to "It's complicated", insisting that the struggle between indigenous and colonist cannot be resolved because no people has a better claim to a land than another so we might as well accept the status quo. But the very idea that indigenous and colonist are distinct, like the idea that these categories map neatly onto "racial groups", is nonsense. The complexity of history is in the makeup of peoples. In contrast, states are cleanly delineated because they are legal fictions: a line drawn on a map. The problem arises when states claim to be congruent with an ethnicity, either because this demotes some citizens to a second class status or because it prompts attempts to expand the borders. Ukraine offers a good example of both. The fall of Yanukovych after the pro-Western Euromaidan protests led to an upsurge of Ukrainian nationalism and consequently the disaffection of the pro-Russian east of the country. That in turn provided the pretext for the Russian annexation of Crimea and later the full-scale invasion and annexation of the east.

What genetics shows us is that ethnicity is a cultural identification, not an intrinsic biological reality, and one that reflects the tides of history. Consider, for example, the genetic overlap between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. To talk of Palestinian Muslims as Arabs is actually a little misleading. While the Arab conquest of the 7th century did result in some migration out of the Arabian peninsula to Palestine, it also resulted in the conversion to Islam of many indigenous Jews and Samaritans (and indeed of Christians who had previously converted from Judaism). That is a common pattern. Most conquests in history have involved a political takeover by an elite stratum (e.g. the Norman conquest of England or the later Ottoman conquest of Palestine), with the people (particularly the lower orders) changing little at the time. The reason for this was the mobility of warrior castes relative to sedentary agriculturalists in the pre-capitalist era. Such conquests could lead to new trading relationships that stimulated immigration, while foreign military garrisons could also be absorbed into the population (as was the case in the Roman Empire), but changes in the ethnic makeup of conquered territories tended to be gradual and rarely planned, driven mostly by religious conversion, cultural assimilation and career self-interest. 

In contrast, conquest by genocide and settlement by planned mass immigration, as occured in the United States, is the historical exception, despite its scale and impact being such that it affected two continents - America and Australasia - and made significant inroads into a third - Southern Africa. It's worth noting here that the Spanish and Portuguese of the early-16th century considered the indigneous population of Latin America as a resource to be exploited in the search for precious metals, hence the early concern with laws governing that exploitation and the conversion of the population to Catholicism. By the mid-17th century, English and French colonists in North America saw the land itself, and its flora and fauna, as the resource and the natives as an impediment to access and exploitation. This change reflected the emergence of agrarian capitalism, first in England, and the development of a race-based ideology of land improvement and natural ownership, as theorised by John Locke. There are echoes of Locke's idea that ownership arises from mixing labour with the soil in the conventional history of Israel's land improvement after centuries of supposed waste and mismanagement by the Arabs (see this example of that narrative from 1960).

Outside of the Americas and Australasia, colonial societies in which settlers outnumbered the indigenous were rare and of very limited scope (the plantations of Ulster were in some respects dry-runs for the colonies of North America). This was because of the practical difficulty of carrying out an effective genocide or mass expulsion of the indigenous on a wider scale when that population had not been severely reduced by disease, as occured in the Americas, and where it already practised sedentary agriculture. In this respect Israel is a historical oddity because it is clearly emulating an American model of colonial settlement and (if only at the rheorical extremes) advocating a genocide of the indigenous population in an area marked by centuries of ethnic diversity and cohabitation, not to mention densely-populated cities and neighbouring states that not only have no intention of accommodating.more refugees but earnestly hope for the day when the existing post-1948 diaspora of the Palestinians can return home.

Ireland is a useful lens through which to view Israel as it experienced both colonial models: the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the South (an elite stratum whose imposed agrarian capitalism led to famine in the 1840s) and the Ulster Plantation in the North (an aggressive settler society). The former was dismantled by a national revolution, triggered by a bloody insurrection in 1916, which followed a century of intermittent murders and bombings. That in turn led to a furious war of independence between British and Irish forces that saw war crimes committed by both sides. The creation of the Northern Ireland state was not simply a defensive reflex to protect the Protestant settlers of the six counties, as the deliberate drawing of the border to maximise the territory while ensuring a permanent Unionist majority at Stormont showed. This was a continuation of the rationale of plantation. In the event, demography - the changing makeup of the population and its reflection in elections - has put that domination into question, with the result that the main unionist party is now refusing to allow the Stormont government to function.

The conflict in Northern Ireland after partition was clearly rooted in religion, culture and the deliberate political exclusion of one community by the other, and not in any nonsense such as "race". As such, it has obvious parallels with Israel (that the communities in the North so easily map their sympathies to pro-Israel and pro-Palestine should make this obvious, as should the behaviour of the Irish Catholic diaspora in Glasgow). It is also commonly understood that the final resolution of the conflict must be political: that neither community is going to disappear, either by exile or absorption, so there can be no zero-sum outcome. Power-sharing may currently be in abeyance, but it is clearly the only avenue available after the failure of both the exclusionary Protestant state and the nationalist armed struggle. There is a widespread expectation that this resolution will ultimately entail a unitary state, hence the provision in the Good Friday Agreement for a plebiscite on a united Ireland (the "border poll"). 

What the latest round of killing has made clear is that the Western defenders of Israel do not accept that the same is true for Palestine - i.e. that the only realistic way forward that isn't a zero-sum outcome is a single state solution and that formal power-sharing must be part of that state's constitution. This explains why some are sympathetic to the Israeli claim that the Palestinian people are a modern invention without any historic right to self-determination while paradoxically insisting that the two-state solution, which presumes an equivalent claim to self-determination and thus statehood, remains a viable goal. The wide reporting of Netanyahu's comment that Israel must promote Hamas in order to keep the Palestinians politically divided, so enabling the progressive annexation of land in the West Bank by new settlements, has surely removed the scales from even these people's eyes, so the conclusion has to be that they share the Israeli government's desire for the Palestinian people to simply disappear. 

All Change

The twin by-election defeats in Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth have led to much chin-stroking about the parlous state of the Conservative Party. Can it adapt to the evident shift in public opinion in time for the general election? Does it have a future in the face of a potentially hegemonic New Labour 2.0? How bloody will the internecine struggle unleashed by Rishi Sunak's inevitable resignation as party leader be? A lot of this is just the froth of by-election coverage but there is a more serious aspect to it, and that is the media representation of the Conservative Party and its dynamics. In a nutshell, this boils down to two ideas. The first is that the Tories have a chameleon-like ability to change themselves in order to retain, or regain, power. The second is that the electorate appreciates this responsiveness and will reward it at the polls so long as the change is deemed credible and sincere. Before analysing what these ideas really mean - i.e. what are their ideological underpinnings - it's worth taking a look at the results from last night.

The first observation to make is that it's not easy to find the actual vote numbers in the media. Instead the focus is on the swing between the parties and the size of the Tory majority that has been overturned. Both were very large, and in both Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, but this doesn't tell us all that much. Swings in by-elections are rarely useful pointers unless the swing is small in a tight contest, indicating a decisive shift that may be repeated at a general election, or the turnout is high, in which case a large swing may presage a landslide (not so much because of the size of the swing but because of the way it will be amplified due to the first-past-the-post voting system). Predictably, the turnout in both of the contests was low, which means the large swings will almost certainly be the result of differential turnout between the parties. In other words, this is about who stayed away from the polls and that was predominantly Conservative Party supporters. You can understand the hyperbole about "political earthquakes" and "redrawing the map", but if there is one constant in British political history it is that the significance of by-elections is exaggerated.

Labour managed to secure much the same number of votes in both constituencies that it did in 2019, supposedly it's worst result since the 1930s (in fact, its vote was slightly down in Mid-Bedfordshire). This suggests that it may be at or near to its maximum vote in those constituencies, which doesn't suggest that it will manage to retain either seat come the general election, particularly as it can't rely on the tactical voting that is nowadays a feature of by-elections. The party can expect a further boost in the general election with the prospect of booting out the government, but it can also expect some normally Conservative-voting electors, who wished to "send the government a message" yesterday by voting for the red team, to desert it and return to their usual allegiance. Labour's chief hope for the general election is that the pattern of disheartened Tory voters that has characterised by-elections in this parliament will be replicated on the national stage, as was the case in 1997 when turnout was down by over 6% and the Tory vote declined by 11% of the total.

The Conservative Party's chief hope for the general election is that the government can convince voters that it has changed sufficiently to be worthy of fresh consideration. The problem is that it clearly hasn't changed since Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister and there is no sign that he personally has a strategy for change. He is tied to the legacy of austerity, under-investment and graft, while the attempt to divert politics towards the trivialities of a "culture war" has failed abjectly, despite the best efforts of the Tory press. His elevation was all about putting the "adults back in charge", hence it was welcomed by centrists, but that in turn implied stabilisation and predictablity, not a radical new programme. Ironically, the Conservatives would probably have stood a better chance at the next election by sticking with Liz Truss, for all her faults, because she was credibly offering a departure from the preceding consensus. Her renewed vigour on display at the recent party conference was telling, not least because her argument for stimulatory tax cuts will be central to the inevitable post-mortem after a general election defeat.

The history of the Conservative Party's mutability is one of smoke and mirrors. The willingness to change, and the associated assumption of ruthless pragmatism, is more apparent than real. The Tories haven't significantly altered in their outlook since their embrace of empire under Disraeli, which reflected material changes in the value of land (the onset of the great depression in agriculture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century) and the consequent shift of aristocratic wealth to mature industries and the growing service economy. Even the oscillation between free trade and protectionism, of which Brexit is the latest turn, has been an expression of the persistent internal tensions arising from the material base rather than a "struggle over the party's soul". Margaret Thatcher is often presented as a radical departure, but she herself was always clear that she was simply reverting to traditional Tory values that had been marginalised by Butskellism. The marrying of classical liberal economics with traditional social conservatism had been pioneered a century before she entered Number 10.

The claims of Tory flexibility, which have been a feature of political discourse since the 1920s, invariably come from centrist commentators keen to discipline the Labour Party. The idea of Tory reinvention, along with the idea that their secret weapon is loyalty (obviously risible when you consider the last few years), is meant to paint Labour as politically regressive and fractious. Specifically, that it is wedded to a backward-looking class politics that has been superseded by liberal modernity (hence the influence of the trade unions must be reduced if not eliminated) and that it is impeded in becoming the natural party of government by an irresponsible and potentially traitorous left that elevates heart over head and cares more for foreigners than natives. One consequence of this is that the Tories' historic recklessness tends to be played down or transmuted into a debate about the state of the nation rather than the party's competence. Obvious examples are the return to the gold standard in 1925, the Suez debacle of 1956 and the monetarist experiment of the early-1980s. In contrast, Labour has an undeserved reputation for financial mismanagement that really reflects unlucky timing (1929, 1974, 2008) rather than profligacy.

The second idea, that the electorate appreciates change in response to its concerns is no less a myth. Indeed it only exists as a logical corollary of the first myth: if the Tories regularly change and regain power then this must be what the electorate wants. In fact, the dynamic is the other way round: public opinion changes over time and all the parties, not just the Conservatives, attempt to channel this in ways that support, or at least don't conflict with, their persistent interests. Thus the Tory volte-face on empire, reflected in Macmillan's famous "winds of change speech", came after public opinion had turned decisively against imperial delusions after Suez but also reflected British industry's desire to shift focus to the dynamic market of Europe. Similarly, the party's subsequent relationship with the European Union tracked public opinion, with the growth of euroscepticism from the late-80s onwards driven by newspaper owners rather than by politicians. Boris Johnson's ambivalence on the matter was emblematic of the party as whole, not just his own lack of principle. Likewise, the party's recent tacking on issues such as gender recognition and the green transition reflects the latest demands of the Tory press, not some cunning ploy to outflank Labour.

The prime objective of the party of the people is to restrain the people's enthusiasm, hence Labour's response to public opinion is a mixture of careful curation - for example, using focus groups to steer the media framing of that opinion - and straightforward gaslighting - for example, the insistence that public support for the nationalisation of utilities is naive, or that the NHS cannot be improved by more money alone. The media myth of the Tories is that they are constantly changing to meet the demands of the moment. Paradoxically, that this quintessentially regressive party, whose only persistent concern is the defence of private wealth, is mercurial and volatile. The contrasting paradox of Labour is that it is the party of change (even if only a change in management) but that its progressivism is limited to the retooling of the state and that it can thus be relied upon to minimise or divert the often radical changes demanded by the public. Is the Conservative Party about to change? No. It is simply going to hand the baton of fiscal responsibility and caution to an establishment-endorsed Labour Party. At some point, Labour's authoritarianism will alienate voters and the Tories will reappear offering the prospect of personal freedom. Nothing will change.

The Last Colony

The international reaction to the latest round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has followed predictable lines, with the US giving Israel full backing and the EU calling for de-escalation on both sides. In the UK, the response has been coloured by the prominence given to antisemitism over the last five years, resulting in the sight of senior politicians suggesting that waving the Palestinian flag may be a criminal offence and that cutting off fuel and food supplies to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is a legitimate tactic rather than a war crime. That these statements have been made by qualified lawyers, the Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition, is striking insofar as it highlights the extent to which attitudes to international law generally, and human rights specifically, have changed over the last decade. It would be easy to point the finger at Brexit and blame the Conservative Party, but it's clear that Labour's respect for international law is no better today, with a notional human rights lawyer in charge, than it was in 2003. Indeed, contempt for due process has become a leitmotif of the Starmer regime.

But there is something else in the British response, and to a lesser degree in the response of other Western powers, that goes beyond political opportunism and the habitual asymmetry in their treatment of Israel and the Palestinians, and that something is the recrudescence of the tropes of colonialism. This has been most noticeable in the British case because it remains firmly embedded in the political culture, even if the ideas that give rise to it are rarely articulated in public. Examples of this have been the belief that violence is the only language that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, understand, which is the unstated assumption behind the acceptance of collective and exemplary punishment. There has also been an attempt to devalue the Palestinians, from eugenicist claims about lower IQs due to inter-marriage to the idea that there is a natural "exchange rate" both for hostages (e.g. that one captured Israeli soldier can be exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners) and for lives (that murdering multiples of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is an eye for an eye).

It has also been noticeable how much of this has stirred a muscle memory of the British state and media's handling of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Leaving aside the opportunistic Corporation-bashing, the claim that the BBC was wrong not to refer to Hamas as terrorists was founded on the myth, pushed by John Simpson, that the national broadcaster has always avoided the term because it would be subjective and partisan. In fact, the BBC often referred to the IRA as "terrorists", notably after it revised its editorial guidelines in 1989 under pressure from the Thatcher government. This was the era of the ban on the broadcasting of Sinn Féin voices, which ran from 1988 to 1994, a surreal example of the "There is no suitable interlocutor" trope in which the state resolutely stuck its fingers in its ears. This was ironic because Britain was engaged in secret dialogue with the IRA at the time. That Israel routinely speaks to Hamas is not in doubt, any more than that Netanyahu's governments have deliberately cultivated the Islamist group to split the Palestinians and undermine Fatah in the West Bank.

The most emotive tropes have concerned the vulnerability of Israelis in the areas bordering the Gaza Strip. The settlers whose suffering has been at the forefront of the media coverage are mostly secular kibbutzim, i.e. they look like "us" - white westerners - posing in family snapshots and dancing at a music festival. They are not the religious Jews who have been rampaging in the West Bank of late. This should remind us that the physical expansion of Israel after 1948 was led by the chauvinist left, not by the religious right. It has been standard practice in Western media to focus the coverage of settlers in the West Bank since 1967 on the religious, despite the fact that many are actually secular (indeed, the usual pressures of housing costs since the neoliberal turn have increasingly attracted the non-religious young to the settlements in search of affordable homes). Settlement is then seen as the regrettable over-enthusiasm of a segment of society rather than the systematic policy of the state. Likewise, the ills of Israeli society are increasingly blamed on a drift to the right, a drift seen as the inevitable reponse to Palestinian resistance, despite the state having been birthed by the terrorism of rightwing groups such as Irgun (the political ancestor of Likud) and Lehi.

The most insidious form of this recrudescence of the colonial in the UK media is the use of Israeli liberals to advance arguments that combine humanitarian piety with language that dehumanises the Palestinians. Just as the arch-imperialists of Victorian and Edwardian Britain were liberals rather than conservatives, so it is the voice of centrist reason that today demands unswerving support for the Israeli state while insisting that the promise of a two-state solution can still be maintained against all the evidence of its failure. An example of this was the Guardian article by Yuval Noah Harari that sought to frame the history of the region since 1948 as a series of hopeful experiments by the well-meaning Israelis, all of which had come to grief due to the intractability of the Palestinians. Thus Israel's "generous offer" during the Oslo peace process was met with the Second Intifada. "Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?", Harari disingenuously asks. 

At this point, it's worth recalling Northern Ireland in 1969. The re-emergence of the IRA was driven not simply by an angry response to the Stormont government's violence during the riots of that year, or by the decision of the London government to deploy British troops to keep the peace (but actually to reinforce the Northern Ireland state). Nor was it evidence of some inherent moral failing on the part of the Catholic community: a distaste for dialogue or a propensity for violence. The Northern Irish Civil Rights movement was consciously modelled on the US example of non-violence and ecumenical discussion. It's demise and the consequent turn to violence was the result of a political failure: the realisation that the Catholic community could not expect its concerns to be addressed or its interests defended by a gerrymandered state that systematically denied it effective political representation. 

What eventually brought (relative) peace to Northern Ireland was the collective agreement of the "powers" (the UK, the Republic of Ireland and crucially the US) that a political solution, power-sharing, had to be pursued. For all the claims that today is the moment of greatest peril for Israel, there is absolutely no willingness on the part of the powers (the US again to the fore) to seek a political resolution to the conflict because that would reveal the bankruptcy of the two-state solution as currently envisaged. Instead there is a determination to preserve the status quo, which in turn has meant the acceptance of a system of apartheid. The institutionalisation of this system since 1967 has led not only to the claim that the Palestinians aren't a people as such, and therefore have no claim to a homeland, but to the suggestion that they are interlopers. This was a common refrain during the imperial era when the movement of peoples across imaginary borders, often the result of famines brought about by the conversion of the economy to cash-crops in a global export market (see Mike Davis's 'Late Victorian Holocausts'), was presented as a threat to the recently-established settler economy. 

I think what some people in the UK and elsewhere have found "horrifying" in this week's events is not simply the individual stories of death and destruction but that their acceptance of the asymmetry of the conflict has been disturbed. The Palestinians are expected to suffer, and we're meant to feel sorry for them, while Israel is expected to act with impunity, and we are meant to at best regret the evils this leads to. Hamas didn't keep to the script. The Yom Kippur war, 50 year ago, similarly upset expectations, leading to the slow but steady attempts at accommodation between the Arab states and Israel, but it also relegated the Palestinians to the collateral damage of geopolitics. Since the failure of Oslo, the West and the Arab states have had the opportunity to either impose a solution on Israel - specifically through boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS), hence the focus on delegitimising it by Isarel and its supporters abroad - or to accept the gradual erasure of the Palestinian people. Everything we've seen this week suggests that the latter remains the preference.

Palestine is the archetypal frozen conflict, but we've seen many others since 1989, e.g. Kosovo and Ukraine, and the obvious problem is that they're not frozen enough: the situation changes. Perhaps the most consequential development was the recent Azeri takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, which proved that international opinion will accept ethnic cleansing if there isn't too much media coverage. This is clearly the hope of Israel too, a country whose history is founded on the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and its adoption of a colonial project of progressive land-theft and settlement. And the chief characteristic of that colonial society is not the rightwing nature of its government, nor the influence of the religious on its laws, but the obliviousness of secular, liberal opinion. As Tariq Ali rightly pointed out in the New Left Review, "Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours.  They decided to take matters into their own hands." The impending destruction of Gaza is above all a political failure and the US and UK are complicit in this.