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".