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.