The Landlords Party

In this week's episode of What Have Labour Gone Back On Now?, Lisa Nandy has reaffirmed the party's support for Right-to-Buy and its aversion to rent controls. She linked the latter to "untargeted mortgage relief" (as advocated by various Tory MPs of late), which at first sight might appear a little odd. As Labour List's Tom Belger helpfully explained, "There are understood to be concerns [that] rent controls while mortgageholders’ costs are soaring risk exacerbating a shortage of rental properties if more landlords sell up." In other words, this is about protecting the Buy-to-Let constituency, which is well-represented in the House of Commons, and as such is an example of targeted mortgage relief. You'll also notice the claim, which has become canon among this constituency, that if landlords are obliged to sell their properties this will lead to a shortage of rentals. In fact, those properties will either be bought by other landlords with larger portfolios who aren't so exposed to interest rate changes or they'll be bought by people who want to buy houses for their own use, many of whom are currently renting. They don't get mothballed. As ever in discussions of housing in the UK, actual interests are obscured by myths.

Nandy's thoughts on Right-to-Buy are similarly questionable, insisting first that it was originally a Labour policy and that where it went wrong was "the decision of the Thatcher Government to fail to replace the council housing stock that was sold, pitting the rights of the individual against the rights of the community." This fails to explain why Labour's idea never got off the drawing board and why the Thatcher government precluded adequate replacement. There wasn't a formal moratorium on council house builds after 1979, there was simply a lack of money which became more pronounced over time, and that lack was a result both of Thatcher's war against the larger urban authorities and the generous discounts on sales. As the article linked to above goes on to note, "Inside Housing deputy editor and author Peter Apps argued it was not possible to back Right to Buy but oppose depleting social housing stocks. While Labour promise to replace homes sold, “it’s just not that easy to get new council housing built, but it’s very easy to sell it at a massive discount”." 

In imagining that you can both offer Right-to-Buy and avoid running down council stock, Lisa Nandy forgets that Labour's original plans, from Hugh Gaitskell's manifesto promise in 1959 to Jim Callaghan's more considered review in 1977, foundered because full replacement would require selling at close to market prices, which most tenants couldn't afford. In the 1950s it was still plausible to imagine Aneurin Bevan's ideal of mixed social housing, where "the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street", but by the 1970s council housing, in particular "sink estates", had become associated in the popular mind with the lumpen elements of society. The reality was much more of a patchwork with tenants in skilled manual work now often much better off than twenty years previously and much of the newest council housing stock being low-rise and often indistinguishable from private estates. But this in turn meant that any programme of sales would initially deplete the stock of better properties, as proved the case in the 1980s. 

The Tories cut the Gordian knot by both offering massive discounts (averaging 44% and rising to as much as 70%) to buyers and gradually strangling the number of new starts by councils. This made it a one-way bet. You could buy cheap and then sell dear once the price went up, allowing you to buy somewhere bigger and perhaps cheaper beyond the city. Alternatively, you could wait to inherit your dear old mum's flat and either sell at a massive profit or realise your ambition to become a landlord. This was a completely rigged market, not to mention an exercise in social engineering - two things the Conservative Party claimed to oppose. It's worth emphasising that these two measures went hand-in-hand. It was only by artifically driving up house prices generally, through limiting council starts and easing mortgage financing, that the Tories could buy off their existing homeowning constituency who would otherwise have looked askance at subsidies for the less well-off. Rising house prices allowed remortgaging for conservatories, extensions and (in time) equity release for new cars and expensive holidays.

Because limited council housing in recent decades has been (rightly) prioritised for vulnerable families, the vast majority of tenants still don't have enough income to buy at anywhere close to market prices, so a revival of Right-to-Buy would require a repeat of the scale of discounts seen in the 1980s. This in turn means that one-for-one replacements could not be funded through receipts, even assuming councils were allowed to keep all the money and earmark it for new builds. You would need massive central government funding to make up the shortfall. This clearly isn't going to happen, not simply because Labour's masochistic embrace of "fiscal responsibility" will rule out borrowing but because the alternative would mean funding new council houses through the taxation of existing homeowners and renters, and neither of those groups would consider that a fair deal. The latter might be assuaged by the promise of access to secure council tenancies at reasonable rents, but that presumes a massive expansion of social housing over the term of a parliament (which would incidentally hammer the private rental sector), and nothing Labour has suggested explains how this could come about. The trick the Tories pulled off in the 1980s, of creating more winners than losers in the short-term, cannot be repeated.

The fundamental problem with Right-to-Buy, which has been there since the 1970s, is that there is a mismatch between the prospective buyers (council tenants) and their means. The people who could potentially buy council houses at market prices are currently paying rent to landlords in the private sector. We know they could afford a mortgage because their rent often covers the actual mortgage repayments for the property (i.e. it's a Buy-to-Let rental). Even where the landlord does not have mortgage debt they are likely to pitch the rent at the market level, which is clearly determined by the landlords who do have mortgages on their properties. In addition, the rent covers the landlord's profit. This means there is another mismatch: between those who can afford mortgages (renters) and those who have access to mortgage capital. The latter is now commonly described in terms of "saving for a deposit" and the "bank of mum and dad" but this obscures that for many landlords the first link in the chain that allowed them to raise deposit capital was the profit made on selling an ex-council property. 

So how do we solve this problem? The solution is to take private landlords out of the equation and replace them with local authorities. This could be done through compulsory purchase, rather than expropriation, the funds being created by selling the mortgages to the Bank of England. In other words, this would be a form of quantitative easing but one in which the assets acquired by the bank would be mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) rather than its own gilts. This is, famously, the model of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that provided secondary mortgage financing in the US (buying mortgages from lenders with cash that is then used to issue more mortgages). It should be emphasised that the sub-prime crisis that peaked in 2008 was not due to this model itself being problematic but due to the deregulation that led commercial banks to expand into "private-label securitization". Insofar as this approach would be problematic, it is that it would be counter-cyclical, i.e. boosting demand at a time when the Bank wants to dampen it. The solution to that would be to pay the landlords with bonds, rather than cash, recognising that most would want to invest/save rather than consume.

This approach would allow rents to be brought into line with the council norm (usually much lower) and tenants given secure agreements with more reliable maintenance and repairs. The rents paid would continue to service the mortgages but the repayments could be reduced, so the lower rent receipts matched them, by extending the mortgage terms. If a tenant then wished to exercise Right-to-Buy, this would simply return the repayments to their previous level and term (but without the need for a deposit). As multiple mortgages will have been bundled-up, the repayment period effectively becomes open-ended, much as the national debt has been for centuries. In fact, this is just national debt. But unlike operational debt that depends on tax receipts to be paid down, and which is therefore subject to bond market sentiment, this has the advantage of the guarantee of future tenancy income and the proven calibre of the stock. Again, to emphasise the point about the 2008 crash: the problem wasn't simply handing out mortgages to people who could never realistically keep up with the payments but an over-supply of speculative property (notably in Florida) that required mortgages being issued promiscuously in order to keep the construction industry growing. That isn't a problem the UK is likely to face any time soon.

This might sound radical, even a bit "out there", but it is simply a scaling up of what the Labour Party proposed in 2019 (see page 9 of its Housing Manifesto): "To get our council housing programme off to a flying start, we will introduce a council buy-back scheme, with additional loan funding for councils to purchase properties from the private rented sector, with a focus on those properties sold through the right to buy, but now in the hands of private landlords. We will provide funding for the purchase of at least 5,000 properties a year throughout the next Parliament." In retrospect, that seems both sensible and pitifully unambitious, but in the current context of the Labour Party it might as well have been a call for the liquidation of the kulaks. In contrast, Nandy's rallying cry appears to be that "private patient capital" can be relied upon to fund council housebuilding, which sounds like PFI but also suggests that building will be at a pace that suits the construction industry. The difference between 2019 and 2024 will be that Labour's policy will be embedded in the market, rather than bypassing it, and high finance will get to wet its beak. Most importantly, landlords will be reassured.

Labour and Ordoliberalism

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer has been characterised by a tendency to prime the press that he or another senior member of the shadow cabinet is about to make an era-defining speech that will simultaneously tell us what the party now stands for and set the agenda for the coming general election. They invariably disappoint, which makes you wonder why they keep doing it. In part it's simply because this is the way centrist politics is done: substance subsumed to media management and set-piece speeches reduced to the hunt for a TV-friendly soundbite. The problem is that none of Labour's front bench are skilled rhetoricians who can riff on the bland material, while the failure to define the era through a telling phrase or slogan ("For the many, not the few", "Get Brexit done") clearly isn't because they're keeping the good stuff back for the election campaign. Insofar as a speech these days tells us anything, it is more likely to be which promises the leadership have now decided to row back on. It's hardly inspiring stuff.

The belief that this pattern would be broken by Rachel Reeves in her speech in Washington DC earlier this month was strong, despite her robotic style and penchant for cringe-inducing neologisms such as "securonomics". Together with the paper that fleshes out the ideas, A New Business Model for Britain, the speech was clearly intended to define the lineaments of Labour's economic strategy. Given the performative echo of Treasury practice seen since then, whereby Reeves and Pat McFadden have slapped down expenditure promises across other areas, it is clear that whatever can be gleaned from the Shadow Chancellor's statements probably marks the limit of the party's ambition. But while the recent focus has been on how Labour's "fiscal rules" will always trump investment (the Green New Deal is now intended to reach the target of £28 billion of annual investment at some vague mid-point in the next parliament), less attention has been given to understanding the ideological shifts underway.

The wider context here is the retreat from "high globalisation" and the turn towards national economic planning, most obviously evidenced in Joe Biden's "Build Back Better Plan" for the USA. The political consequence is a stronger role for the state, ensuring strategic investment for future key technologies and incentivising business to reshore production and encourage well-paying union jobs. This has been presented as both continuity and reform, which is captured in Janet Yellen's description of the productivist turn as "modern supply side economics", a phrase Reeves approvingly quotes. However, perhaps the biggest continuity is the recognition that the US state has always taken a strategic approach, from Alexander Hamilton and the protection of fledgling industry in the nineteenth century through the institution building of the Progressive era and FDR's New Deal to the central role in industrial and technological planning played by the Department of Defense since 1945. Outside the 1940-80 period, the UK has not been as strategically committed to planning or direct industrial intervention.

One interpretation is that Reeves' speech marks Labour's move away from neoliberalism. As Simon Wren-Lewis put it: "The stress of higher public investment, an active industrial policy and much else shows that we are not seeing a repeat of the Blair/Brown programme. To New Labour neoliberalism looked like a success story in boosting the UK’s relative economic performance, so much of what Thatcher did was preserved. Today the opposite appears true." But if Labour is moving away from 90s-style neoliberalism, what is it moving towards? Almost ten years ago, Wren-Lewis sought to explain his own understanding of the differences between neoliberalism and ordoliberalism. While this was clearly part of his longstanding campaign to rescue mainstream economics from its association with neoliberal ideology, he did usefully distinguish ordoliberalism in two respects. First, "Ordoliberalism sees a vital role for the state, in ensuring that markets stay close to some notion of an ideal market". And second, it's practical application is through a "focus on rules and independent institutions". Both of these dimensions are clear in the Shadow Chancellor's words.

If we view Joe Biden's strategy in the long context of a highly-interventionist American state, what is the credible historical context of the UK state? The ordoliberal patina of Reeves words shouldn't lead us to imagine that the next Labour government will take Germany as its model, citing Ludwig Erhard as an inspiration and promising a British Wirtschaftswunder. Even if rejoining the EU were back on the agenda, national pride would make such a deliberate comparison politically unpalatable. While the Tories are never shy of promoting international models, from Silicon Valley to Singapore, the Labour Party has always been rigidly nativist and backward-looking in seeking inspiration. The underlying assumption is closer to the postwar era's mix of national capitalism, founded on a strong manufacturing base, and the warfare state of high defence spending and technological research, as outlined by David Edgerton. But this is clearly just nostalgia. The manufacturing base of the 1950s and 60s isn't coming back and defence spending isn't going to increase enough to stimulate the wider economy. It's also clear that reviving the Industrial Strategy Council and other institutional gestures will mean little while Labour remains reluctant to pursue nationalisation.

If you rule out both the neoliberalism of the 1979-2008 period, and the type of economic planning and government intervention in markets seen in the postwar years, then pretty much all you have left as a guide to government is the 1920s and 30s, which isn't going to win hearts and minds. Labour's problem is that there is a gulf between its modest proposals and the heroic visions of the past, such as the 1940s and 1960s, from which it can legitimately take inspiration. We return then to the perennial problem of the Labour Party: if it isn't for socialism, then what is it for? The simplest answer is that it is for the state. This means both that it seeks to advance the apparatus - that is the institutionalised political class and its auxiliaries in the media, public administration and think-tanks - and that it contingently seeks to restore the dignity and gravitas of the state after its recent embarrassments, something that clearly motivates Sir Keir Starmer KC. In this context, ordoliberalism has the attraction that it retains the basic neoliberalism, notably in the aversion to public ownership, while elevating the importance of the state.

But perhaps Labour isn't moving as far from neoliberalism as left-of-centre observers like Wren-Lewis imagine. As Will Davies put it recently, "When politicians argue that we onshore supply chains, they contradict the key tenets of globalization, so it strikes observers as post-neoliberal. That’s how it appears from the perspective of the liberal center." This highlights the way that centrists have tended to associate neoliberalism, if they accept the term at all, with globalisation and the removal of trade barriers: essentially the economic dimension of liberal internationalism. They have been far less willing to identify domestic policy as neoliberal, particularly in its promotion of market mechanisms and the cultivation of assets, often seeing these, along with anti-labour laws, simply as common sense. But if you recognise that the disciplinary, biopolitical state is at the heart of neoliberalism, then the current incarnation of the Labour Party, with its obsessive internal purging and promises of crackdowns on antisocial behavour, is most definitely neoliberal.

If Labour is really an unreformed neoliberal party adopting the convenient rhetoric of the ordoliberal state it remains unclear which vintage of neoliberalism we're looking at. The "global race" rhetoric of the 1990s is still to the fore, but so too is the "fiscal responsibility" of the 2010s. There is plenty of talk about Tory failure over the last 13 years, but less clarity on what Labour would have done differently in power. Insofar as Reeves ventures a critique of the New Labour years it is to dismiss the belief "that a nation can rely on growth in just one corner of the country or a handful of industries". There is also an implicit recognition that Blair and Brown never turned around the UK's history of underinvestment. But for all the incidental references to her Leeds West constituency, her prescriptions are vague on how areas like Yorkshire could be expected to post GDP growth ahead of North Rhine Westphalia or Lombardy. Those advocating a swift return to the EU Single Market are equally vague on how this one neat trick will reverse the decades of relative underperformance experienced after the establishment of that market.

Consider this thumbnail sketch from the Reeves paper: "It is not all that long ago that South Korea’s comparative advantage was in agriculture. Today, with far-sighted government action in partnership with a vibrant market, it is an advanced economy with cutting edge industries". This obviously occludes the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee that oversaw the transformation from the shattered, low-output economy of 1953 to the hallyu of the millennium, not to mention the financial privations experienced by South Koreans during the years when they were out-competing shipyards, car plants and factories in the UK. That combination of repression and sacrifice is simply inconceivable here. The truth is that the British state has never been very good at strategic planning and the limited exceptions in the period between the mid-30s and mid-70s were either associated with the warfare state or nationalisation, that peculiarly British form of socialism. With the S-word effectively banned and our military illusions surely punctured for good after Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an appetite for planning but no sight of an actual plan. The ordoliberal gloss reflects this.

Who Wants to Regulate AI?

The short answer is the large companies that want to protect their initial advantage. In understanding this paradox, it is worth considering the wider history of regulation, given that for all its revolutionary promises and the talk of it as a general purpose technology (GPT), like iron smelting or electric motors, AI is simply a novel application of existing, poorly-regulated technologies whose "product" is a variety of software commodities. The narrative of industrial regulation, from the UK Factories Act of 1847 onwards, is conventionally presented as the state, on behalf of society, constraining the anti-social practices of business. Karl Marx even hailed that legislation, limiting the working day to ten hours, as a victory for the working classes: "it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed ignominiously, ludicrously, before the political economy of the working class". 

But while the regulation of labour and the working environment would develop in a pro-social direction, not least through the efforts of trade unions, it remained marginal to the bulk of state regulation which was focused (ostensibly) on the protection of consumers rather than producers. Under neoliberalism, there has been a steady eroding of worker's rights and protections through deregulation, but there hasn't been a noticeable reversal of consumer rights, despite much propaganda about the freedom of choice. If anything, regulation has increased in scope. The bonfire of red tape that Brexit promised to deliver has proved to be a damp squib, not simply because it isn't in the interest of British companies to diverge from international standards and thereby jeopardise trading relations, but because a regulatory free-for-all lowers the barriers to entry and thus risks promoting disruptive competition in domestic markets. 

This gets to the nub of the matter, which is that regulation is invariably biased in favour of incumbency: the aim is not to disrupt an industry by forcing non-compliant firms out of business but to cement their position by moulding the regulations to suit their preferred practice. This doesn't mean those regulations are toothless or irrelevant, any more than the 1847 Act was a con that left workers worse off, but it does mean that regulation necessarily accommodates those who already dominate an industry. In the case of AI, the companies that currently dominate the space are the established major technology firms, such as Microsoft and Google. This is barely questioned even though there is no reason to believe that artificial intelligence should be limited to the paradigm of software, or that large companies whose expertise (and profit) is in providing business services and advertising should be the natural progenitors.

AI is more than Excel with knobs on, or a weirdly intrusive version of AdWords, but it's also better thought of as different in degree rather than kind. The term "AI" is obviously misleading: there's no actual intelligence and therefore nothing artificial about it. Under the covers, AI is simply a set of machine learning (ML) algorithms trained on massive datasets. Though the algorithms are the intellectual property, the asset is the data, and that asset has been built by you and I: it's simply the Internet. As that has grown, and as advances in computing power have allowed for more complex algorithms, so AI has emerged like a butterfly from the ML chrysalis. The algorithms themselves are not revolutionary either, being essentially geared to pattern recognition and statistical prediction. As such, they are pretty obviously an outgrowth from financial "quants" and even DSGE models, hence the more cynical dismissal of a product like ChatGPT as a "stochastic parrot". AI is fintech.

The political reaction to the emergence of AI, and in particular the "Stop me before I kill again" warnings of various AI "pioneers" and "concerned industry insiders", has been both a predictable demand for state regulation and a jockeying for position as the regulator for what will inescapably be a global industry. The Conservatives have insisted that the UK is not Ruritania, while Labour has decided AI developers need licences, proving that they understand regulatory arbitrage no more than they understand technology. At the edges we have seen the UK security services make their usual pitch, claiming that terrorists might use AI to groom the neurodivergent, and Tony Blair wade in with another business buzzword-heavy report from his institute. I don't know what's more delusional, his belief that AI can provide a "new national purpose" or the suggestion that "Requiring generative-AI companies to label the synthetic media they produce as deepfakes and social-media platforms to remove unlabelled deepfakes" could possibly work.

Where Blair gives the game away is in his proposal that the state must take the lead in "Building AI-era infrastructure, including compute capacity and remodelling data, as a public asset with the creation of highly valuable, public-good data sets". Stripped of the turgid language, this sounds pretty much like a plan to harvest existing public datasets, such as the clinical information held by the NHS or the educational data built up since the introduction of the national curriculum. Insofar as the UK has a possible edge in the emerging market of AI regulation, it is in its ability to offer access to such rich and coherent datasets as a quid pro quo, something no equivalent regulatory entity could offer in the US. And if there is one thing that distingushes it from other European countries with equally rich public datasets it is the willingness to sacrifice the digital rights of its citizens in pursuit of public-private partnerships.

There has been plenty of pushback to both the apocalyptic hyperbole of the tech companies and the cynicism of politicians, but this has also been problematic because of the tendency to focus on horses that have long since bolted, such as the biases built into training data, or on the disruptive impact on jobs, which is going to happen come what may because it always does. To note the damage companies like Microsoft and Google have already done is all well and good, though this can easily slip into a more general techno-pessimism or simply fuel the existing campaign of media incumbents to denigrate social media and more democratic forms of critique, but the fact that these industry giants have been only minimally constrained over the last three decades (the EU's various competition and data protection rulings have never seriously dented share prices) does not suggest that states are about to get tougher with them. If anything, what is being proposed is closer cooperation. 

In this respect there is obviously a shared interest in hyping both the potential and therefore the risks of AI. For politicians, it offers a Get Out of Jail Free card, whether real or imagined, like North Sea oil or the sunny uplands of Brexit, while for the tech companies it bolsters their claims to be at the forefront of world history at a time when their profits are softening and market valuations depend on assuring investors they have a de facto monopoly on the next big thing. As Corey Doctorow put it, "For those sky-high valuations to remain intact until the investors can cash out, we need to think about AI as a powerful, transformative technology, not as a better autocomplete." What we certainly don't need is to look behind the curtain, hence the lesser media attention paid to the armies of low-paid workers who toil away in the AI data-mines trying to label the training data to improve the quality of answers, or at those unwitting Internet users whose "free labour" choices augment that data. We haven't moved that far on from the ten-hour working day.

Between Two Realms

The claim that "the next UK election could be the first at which the Murdoch papers do not back the winning party" is a useful jumping-off point to consider how the relationship of the press and politicial parties has changed since Tony Blair flew half way around the world to pay homage to the Dirty Digger in 1995. According to William Turvill in the New Statesman, "Earlier this week, the Sun’s editorial section shrieked that Starmer’s party was “fully in bed with the eco doom cults” ... Barring some significant changes by Starmer, or a dramatic U-turn by the Sun, it seems unlikely that the red top will call for a Labour government next year." Given that Labour has this week started to row back on its £28 billion anual green commitment, and given Starmer's rejection of activism, I wouldn't be surprised if the distance between the two dramatically narrowed over the next few months, but the underlying question remains. Can Labour win without Murdoch's backing?

The short answer is yes. The track record of Murdoch's papers in picking the winner is largely down to them simply picking the party most likely to win, hence the flip from the Conservatives to Labour in 1997. The crowing of 1992, "It's the Sun wot won it", was relief for having backed the right horse in what looked like a narrow contest, not evidence of the paper's magical powers of persuasion. The role of newspapers in political narrative is largely about salience: determining what is important and what needs to be discussed in the frame of political action ("Something must be done"). In this they act as the agenda-setter for other media, most obviously TV. The technicalities of the media should logically reverse that relationship, with the immediacy of live TV news setting the agenda for the press, as it largely does in the US and other countries. The UK anomaly reflects the continuing dominance of the BBC in television and radio news and its preference for treating newspaper journalists as a shortcut to the appearance of balance, an approach willingly echoed by ITV and Channel 4. 

Attempts to break up this cartel with even more opinionated journalists, such as GB News, have failed because they're offering more of the same rather than something different. Fox News succeeded in the US because it offered a radically different product to NBC and CBS. In the UK, where the main TV channels already privilege journalists and columnists, a new entrant must offer something wildly different, hence GB News has been drawn towards conspiracy theories. The inclusion by the BBC and ITV of voices from new media on the left, such as Ash Sarkar, does not detract from this cosy relationship and if anything helps give the misleading impression that marginal interests are being represented, albeit in their appropriate marginal place. In fact, these new media outlets are increasingly being aborbed into the "club" and are adopting the same modes as traditional media, such as the prominence of "name" columnists and the trenchancy of opinion. I suspect that many are more than happy with this development, viewing a job with one of the established players as the career goal.

The longstanding relationship between the press and political parties was based on the premise that both sides would respect certain limits: that there was a mutual interest in preserving their symbiosis. An individual politician could not expect to be shielded if there was a juicy scandal to report, and the political class as whole understood that it would take periodic kickings as part of the pantomime of faux-populism, but there was a belief that the press would turn a blind eye to the "old Spanish practices" of Westminster. This was upset by the expenses scandal in 2009. The timing of that and the financial crash of 2007-8 was not coincidental. With the shared worldview of neoliberalism suddenly in question, there was an instinctive turn to find scapegoats. Bankers, such as Fred Goodwin, bore the odium initially, but once it became clear that the political system would bail out the banks then attention turned to the politicians. The problem was that the political parties were united in consensus, so the only avenues available to the press were either a populist anti-politics, such as the Tea Party in the US, or the questioning of the virtue of politicians en bloc, as in the UK.

Britain would obviously go on to have its own populist moment in 2016, but the relationship of the press and the political caste was already damaged by the time of the 2010 general election. David Cameron's decision to launch the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 was not simply a response to the phone-hacking scandal but an attempt by politicians as a whole to reassert authority over the fourth estate. The subsequent revival of the expenses scandal around Maria Miller, the then Culture Secretary with responsibility for enacting Leveson's recommendations on press regulation, made the link explicit. Since then we have seen politicians retreat across the board. Leveson II, which would have turned the spotlight on the press-politics relationship, was unceremoniously buried, while tighter regulation of the press has proved illusory. In the years since the post-Leveson truce politicians and media have become so indistinguishable that we ended up with an amoral journalist in Number 10, and the press then proved its continuing power by bringing him down over nothing more substantial than cake.

This has all happened against the background of an economic decline in newspapers since the millennium as advertising has moved online. Paradoxically, this hasn't reduced the role of the press in setting the political weather, rather it has led it to increasingly colonise TV and social media. The borders have become more porous between the press and other media, but they have also become more porous between the media and politics, with the former increasingly commissioning serving politicians to act as opinion-formers rather than simply people whose opinions should be interrogated. There has always been crossover between the two realms, but that tended to be unidirectional: a politician would retire and present cosy documentaries on trains or a journalist might become an MP and never look back. Nowadays, it is not unusual for someone to move repeatedly back and forth between the two. The idea of an independent press that holds politicians to account is being eroded before our eyes. 

The BBC in particular has actively cultivated this through an expansion in its news coverage. While it has conceded that this increase in quantity hasn't resulted in greater quality, at least in the specific area of its coverage of economics, there seems little desire to substitute more domain experts for shallow blowhards, and that in turn has meant promoting the sort of people who see their interests as lying at the intersection between the two realms, from Matthew Goodwin to Alastair Campbell. After the defenestration of Richard Sharp, it might be thought that the BBC is in a weakened state, but this is to ignore its continuing centrality to the politics-media nexus, which was after all the reason why Sharp's apointment as Chairman was both predictable and controversial. Far from being further evidence of the moral delinquency of Boris Johnson, his elevation to the role reflected that ever-growing merging of interests that has occured since 2012.

To return to the jumping off point. Does it matter any longer who Rupert Murdoch (or his editors) supports in the next general election? The answer is still yes. While the Sun's circulation may have fallen from 3.5 million at the millennium to less than a million today, its influence remains significant. But Turvill is looking in the wrong place: "Editors and proprietors might argue that their influence is greater than ever because, owing to the internet, total audiences have grown. But realistically, when the next election falls, it is difficult to imagine millions of readers scrolling through newspaper websites to read editorial endorsements." Even at its commerical height, most people never bothered to read the editorials in the paper either. The vector by which the press influences public opinion has always been through salience: the topics it deems worthy of coverage and the shouty opinions this gives rise to. And the salience of the press itself has grown due to the expansion of TV's political coverage and its appetite for adversarial balance. The problem of the British press is increasingly the problem of the BBC.

Onwards and Upwards

Arsenal's season ended not so much with a whimper as a demonstration of the team's unpredictability. Like a marching band suddenly losing step and dropping half of its instruments, points were carelessly thrown away against Liverpool, West Ham and Southampton in April before the crunch match at the Etihad Stadium proved that they were definitely second-best to Manchester City. This was followed by title-worthy wins against Chelsea and Newcastle United before the team appeared to give up hope at home to Brighton and away at Nottingham Forest. The closing day's thumping victory over an obliging Wolves side reminded us of the potential, but meant little outside of the positive vibes that had been present all season. However, that "connection", as Mikel Arteta described it, is perhaps the most valuable outcome of the season. Qualification for the Champions League is important in both sporting and financial terms, but ultimately Arteta's project will depend on the fans' patience and so far they have concurred in his belief that the squad is another season or two away from lifting a major trophy.

I said at the two-thirds point of the season that Arsenal could win the league if they finished on 90 points and City dropped a few. In the event, they won the title on 89 points versus the Gunner's 84, and didn't drop any points until after the title was secured. In other words, Arsenal's relative failure was due to those 6 dropped points in April and I can't have been the only fan who thought that the jig was up before we travelled to play City. The popular narrative is that the squad was found wanting when injuries hit, notably when the loss of both William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu left a hole in the defence. There's some truth in that - the squad clearly needs more quality in depth, though it should be noted that adding Jorginho and Leandro Trossard was a clear step to address that deficiency - but it's also true that those 6 dropped points were due to the team losing control of games needlessly, rather than a tired team being battered on the ropes by its opponents. 

Divided into thirds, Arsenal gained 31 points over the first 12 games, 29 over the next 13 and 24 over the final 13. That looks like a decline, but that final third saw the highest goals scored - the sequence was 30, 26 and 32 - the problem was that it also saw the most conceded - the sequence being 11, 12 and 20. Of that increase in goals conceded, 7 came in that run of three draws in April. The disruption to the defence clearly played a part in that, but perhaps the bigger issue was the way that the team failed to keep a chokehold on the two away games, at Anfield and the London Stadium, which ultimately was a reflection on the midfield and its recurrent tendency to give the ball away cheaply rather than the defence. With Granit Xhaka almost certain to move on, Thomas Partey looking inconsistent and Oleksandr Zinchenko being injury prone you can understand the targeting of Declan Rice. Personally, I think the squad needs two fresh central midfielders as Jorginho isn't going to play 45+ games.

For all the plaudits earned by Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes, perhaps the greatest success in defence this season has been Aaron Ramsdale, who not only silenced his critics but has been central to that sense of connection between players and fans. The conundrum in defence is less about how many centre-backs we need to stockpile, though clearly Rob Holding's deficiencies in playing out from the back mean he's no longer the future so another incoming is likely, but what sort of full-backs we need. The inverted role of Zinchenko, which Arteta also tried to emulate using Partey at the tail-end of the season, has provided another dimension to the team, but that in turn has left Kieran Tierney looking out of place. Do we keep him for variety or look for a like-for-like backup to the Ukrainian? Whatever happens, it's doubtful that the agent of chaos known as Nuno Tavares will reappear in Arsenal colours again. Likewise, is the plan to revert to using Ben White as a full-back, in which role he excelled both defensively and offensively, or will Tomiyasu be preferred as a defender happy to move into the middle of the backline when the left-back moves into midfield? 

In attack, Arsenal managed to score 88 goals, which was only 6 fewer than Manchester City. This was done by spreading the load, rather than relying on a machine in the mould of Erling Haaland, who got 36 in 35 games, with Gabriel Martinelli, Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard each scoring 14 or 15. Jesus managed 11 in a curtailed campaign and Trossard looks like he can get into double figures too. Perhaps the biggest surprise was Granit Xhaka, who got 7 in the league and 9 in all competitions. As the obvious deputy for Jesus, Eddie Nketiah scored 4 in the league and 9 overall, despite severely limited playing time. The problem is that while title-winning teams usually have strong goal contributions from midfielders and wide players, they also tend to have a standout goal scorer. When Arsenal last won the league in 2004, Thierry Henry banged in 30 and Robert Pires, the next highest scorer in the team, got 14. With Haaland going nowhere and Harry Kane probably going somewhere, the day of the goal-a-game player is clearly not over.

The club has more pressing matters on the transfer front, but I can't help suspecting that a top-drawer striker will become the priority in a year or two. Nketiah isn't quite at that level, though he's been a profilific scorer in his career to date, and nor is Folarin Balogun, despite his impressive numbers on loan at Reims. Bear in mind that Alexandre Lacazette just scored 27 over the Ligue 1 season, compared to Balogun's 20, and he never scored more than 14 in the Premier League and in his last season at Arsenal managed only 4. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I suspect Nketiah will find his level as a striker for a mid-table team. I actually really like him as a player, in terms of his style and opportunism - he reminds me of Emilio Butragueño (who incidentally never scored more than 19 in a La Liga season and usually got half that) - I just don't think he's going to be a 30 goals a season striker. Of course, Arteta may (and not for the first time) prove me wrong. If we can get 4 players scoring 15 goals in the league a season then the title would look more likely than not.

In terms of highlights, the fightback against Bournemouth is obviously up there, though the actual significance was the evidence of sloppy concessions creeping into our game rather than the emergence of Reiss Nelson from his chrysalis. Bukayo Saka's reliability was never in doubt, but the maturity of the 21 year-old remains startling. If I were a betting man I'd have a crafty fiver on him being the first black manager of England. It was also pleasing to see the way that Martin Ødegaard embraced the captaincy without it negatively affecting his game. Indeed, his determination to play outrageous balls on the pitch while presenting as a level-headed, emotionally-literate adult beyond his years off it was exemplary (compare and contrast with Granit Xhaka's short-lived tenure). But perhaps this misses the point. To return to the opening of this post, what will probably last longest in the memory is the sense of connection between the players and the fans. 

After what felt like a decade of growing alienation during Wenger's later years, and even at points early in Arteta's reign, there was clearly a collective decision for fans to get behind the team during the 2021-22 season, particularly once young talent like Saka and Emile Smith Rowe was pushed to the fore, and the success (relative) of the season just gone can, I think, be put down to that as much as the tactical tweaks of the manager and the transfer nous of Edu, the sporting director. It has also been noticeable how Josh Kroenke taking a more public role, and his father Stan wisely staying in the background, has improved relations all round. From the promotion of the women's team through the return of Jack Wilshere to the redecoration of the outside of the Emirates Stadium, there has been a real sense of Arsenal rediscovering itself as a club, rather than a marketing opportunity.