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.

The Inactivist State

The big story of the week has been the long-expected cancellation of phase 2 of HS2, the high-speed railway lines between Birmingham and Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds (the latter had already been scaled back in 2021). Rishi Sunak's talk of taking "tough decisions" after years of govermental dither and delay has failed to change the perception that his administration is weak and knackered, while Keir Starmer's refusal to commit to restoring HS2 to its former glory has been judged sober and responsible in the circumstances, though I doubt anyone seriously believes he will change in his mind in office as many still believe he will do over Brexit. The merits of the original plan were always highly questionable, both because the positive return on investment depended on the northern legs being delivered and because high-speed rail should be about covering very long distances (London to Leeds really was the minimum) rather than creating what is now effectively a fancier version of the Metropolitan line. 

The chief argument for cancellation, however, wasn't a flawed concept but spiralling costs. This has been attributed variously to incompetence, greedy bosses and inflation, but arguably the biggest issue was the gold-plating of the London to Birmingham line to satisfy voters in Conservative constituencies. Had the project started with the northern branches, the economics would look very different today and a decision to proceed with the final southern leg would have likely been positive (and if undertaken by a Labour government with no seats to protect in the Chilterns, might not have resulted in such indulgence). But this is all history and counterfactuals. What I really want to focus on is not HS2 but what this week's decision says about the capabilities and will of the state. At the 2019 general election, both the Conservatives and Labour offered a vision of state activism: the one focused on "getting Brexit done" and launching the ship of state on the ocean of free trade; the other on public investment to repair the damage wrought by austerity and a green transition to combat climate change. At the general election next year neither party will be offering a comparable vision of state activism.

The idea that a Boris Johnson-led government would be activist, leveling up the North and securing trade deals all over the globe, was always dubious, and not just because of the man's own laziness. Beyond cosplaying Churchill demanding "action this day", his record before enetering Number 10 was one of opportunistic rebranding (the London bike-hire scheme) and accepting the kudos for projects long planned before his arrival on the scene (the London Olympics and, arguably, Brexit). Insofar as he made things happen during his time as Mayor of London, it was largely by giving the green light to property developers, though the notorious garden bridge over the Thames proved (ahem) a bridge too far. Johnson has always been a conservative, albeit of an optimistic rather than pessimistic cast: in love with tradition and antiquity, substituting conviviality for social justice, and convinced that problems can be overcome by a positive attitude. Faced with the opportunity of heading an energetic state during the Covid-19 pandemic, he dithered over lockdown and oversaw a culture of indulgence and greed at the heart of government.

State activism is only an issue in a democracy when it might lead to an assault on property and power relations. For that reason, the restraint of democracy inevitably produces conservative governments whose chief feature is a reluctance to undertake anything novel coupled with energetic maintenance of the status quo. When they display activism, it tends to be in those areas that do not threaten to advance democracy, and often act as a bulwark against it, such as defence spending and the criminal justice system. New aircraft carriers and jails are no less activist than new railway lines and hospitals, but while the latter are seen as the response to a public demand, the former are not, even allowing for the media's determination to ventriloquise one. For all the differences in style and rhetoric, four of the last five Conservative Prime Ministers have shared a common characteristic in their aversion to state activism, while the one exception, Liz Truss, was unceremoniously booted out of office when she tried to actively manage the economy. 

Cameron and Osborne's (and let's not forget Clegg's) austerity was inactivism as a government-wide standing order. The purpose was not to shrink the state but to weaken it and allow it to degrade. The vision was that this would encourage people to reduce their reliance on public services and thus walk away from the state's "teat", a vision that also inspires Rishi Sunak, a man who doesn't appear to have ever used a public service in his life. While you will still hear many claim that Jeremy Corbyn lost the EU referendum, it was Cameron's insouciance that did it, though in this he was simply continuing a tradition from the 1980s by which governments deliberately failed to make the case for the European Union, preferring to employ it as an all-purpose whipping-boy. Theresa May's activism never extended beyond the Home Office's "hostile environment", while her attempts to grasp various bulls by the horns as Prime Minister (social care, the Brexit deal) invariably led to panicked retreat at the first sign of opposition.

There are exceptions to this rule of conservative inactivism, such as when the state must be employed by capital to violently revise social and economic relations, as in the 1980s. Breaking the NUM was as much an example of state activism as the creation of the London Docklands and the market-making deregulation of the City. That phase of activism pretty much came to an end with Margaret Thatcher's fall. Indeed, her departure was arguably triggered by British capital deciding that the time for change was over (the last great achievement being the EU Single Market), hence the elevation of a Prime Minister, John Major, whose administration was characterised by careful reversals (the Poll Tax), willing subordination to markets (the ERM), and policy triviality (the infamous cones hotline). His ultimate failure sprang from his inability to restrain those parts of his party ("the bastards") who wanted the careful reversal extended to the Maastricht Treaty.

1997 presented an obvious contrast in the way that New Labour embraced activism as a style, but as history would show, the substance of its programme of "reform" was either the maintenance of order under cover of progressive rhetoric or the further pursuit of capital-friendly reorganisation. It's also easily forgotten how much Blair and Brown's message, particularly in the early years, concerned assurances of what they wouldn't do, which makes the sight of Blairites today warning Starmer over his "caution" frankly hilarious. 2024 won't be a re-run of 1997, but the offer to the electorate will be essentially the same, both in its modesty and its assumption that a change of management is all that is required. At the fag-end of Tory administrations, Labour has a tendency to talk about "wasted years", as if they would have got more done, but in reality what they are criticising is neglect - a failure of stewardship - rather than missed opportunities.

Democratic state activism, in the sense of an increase in popular control and a consequent decline in inequality, ran out of puff in the early 1970s. The result of this has been a gradual degradation in the social fabric, inadequately offset by intermittent public investment that turns out to have been primarily opportunities for new private profits (PFI and its variants). The exception that proves the rule has been London, but the basis for that has not been a metropolitan bias by central government but the relative political power of the capital compared to other cities and regions and how that can impact on people's lives, for example Transport for London. But even in the capital there is a sense of drift after the heady years of activism under Ken Livingstone (and Boris Johnson floating on the vapours of his predecessor's work). Despite the hysterical Islamophobia of the right, Sadiq Khan's tenure has been one of cautious management and a reluctance to expand the scope of the mayoralty or the assembly.

The Tories have spent this conference week claiming that they will stop various bad things that were never going to happen anyway, such as a tax on meat and the need for 7 dustbins. Many of the government's critics have derided the triviality, but this misses that the focus on such mundane matters that would (if true) affect everyone is an attempt to celebrate inactivity and thus an appeal to genuine conservative values. It might seem bizarre that this has led to the Tories insisting that the country is near broken and that only they, the party of government for the last 13 years, can be trusted to remedy this, but again this is to underestimate how persuasive a promise to do nothing can be. It is also to ignore that Labour are pitching the same message, having matched the Tories on most commitments and equally on most refusals to commit. The implication is that if the country is broken it can be fixed by changing the management team but otherwise by hardly departing from Tory practice. There's a lot more inactivism to come.