Liberal Nihilism

In a review of the Serbian historian Miloš Vojinović's The Political Ideas of Young Bosnia, Branko Milanovic draws a parallel between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914 and the recent killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York: "When youth is idealistic and when making political change is impossible, individual acts of terror appear as the only venue left." The review is interesting on Vojinović's exploration of the milieu that formed Gavrilo Princip, but the connection between 1914 and 2024 is tenuous, to say the least. The most obvious difference is that Luigi Mangione, the chief suspect of the New York killing, was not (as far as we know) a member of an organised revolutionary society called Young America. The media has long treated political violence schizophrenically: oscillating between its characterisation as the actions of deranged individuals and the product of a malevolent conspiracy that compromises entire social groups. A good example is the recent murders in Magdeburg in Germany, where the press has been torn between the narrative of a lunatic loner and the idea of an Islamist sleeper.

The popular response to Thompson's killing, and in particular the ironic canonisation of Mangione, recalls the "propaganda of the deed" that distinguished revolutionary violence in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This depended on the conflicting role of the emerging mass media as both the agent for the state's official narrative and as the broadcaster of revolutionary demands and slogans, which led during the IRA's campaign in the latter half of the 20th century to various constraints on the media in an attempt to deny them the "oxygen of publicity". In contrast, Mangione's memeification is an organic product of popular anger with the costs of healthcare in the US, not the calculated PR of a revolutionary group. Likewise, the debate around the motives of Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, the chief suspect at Magdeburg, has largely been conducted through a selective trawl of his social media output. The turgid manifestos of loners (Valerie Solanas, Ted Kaczynski, Anders Breivik) have given way to briefer statements, of which the shell casings incribed "deny", "defend" and "depose" may prove to an apotheosis.

In today's Observer, Kenan Malik extracts two themes from the Magdeburg killings. The first is his usual hobbyhorse of the dangers of identity politics. Malik has carved out a media role as the liberal alternative to Spiked! in decrying the rise of identity politics since the 1970s. It's important to note that neither is sincere is arguing that this has supplanted class analysis to the detriment of progress, in the manner of Ellen Meiksens Wood. Rather they are accentuating identity as a problematic, either in defence of a traditional working class ideal that turns out to be reliably reactionary, or in attacking a misguided indulgence of conservativism that undermines liberal universality. That Abdulmohsen has not presented himself in identitarian terms, and has even insisted on his secularist credentials, does not present Malik with any problems: "We may never know Abdulmohsen’s motives". He simply insists that "understanding western jihadism may help throw light on his actions". For Malik, the key is the degeneration of Islamism to the point where "The line between ideological violence and sociopathic rage has been all but erased". 

In other words, Malik is highlighting a propensity to nihilism, which roots his analysis in the paranoid, anti-democratic narratives of the late-19th century. He then segues to his second theme: anti-politics. Noting the failure of neoliberalism to "end history", and the serial failures post-2008 to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, he imagines that "Anger without change has led to a growing sense that politics itself is the problem." This isn't much use as analysis, if only because politics has always been the problem. The idea that there is a better politics is a liberal delusion (and the raison d'etre of the Observer). Our politics reflects the reality of our society. Malik would be better off asking why we are so poorly served by our political institutions rather than trying to psychoanalyse the population. He ends his piece with this spectacular confection: "Wannabe jihadism, racist populism and individual acts of nihilistic terror can seem disconnected phenomena but all are in very different ways expressions of disaffected rage while trapped within the cage of identity in an age of anti-politics." There is no diagnosis here, let alone a prognosis, merely a hyperbolic pessimism that ironically echoes the nihilism it decries. 

For a little light relief you could turn in the same issue of the Observer to the editorial on the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen. This identifies the famously parochial novelist's continuing popularity, even "modernity", in the way that her characters offer a necessary corrective to contemporary failings: "The hallmark of our age is emotional incontinence. Nothing is held back; our individual wants and needs are paramount. The pathos of Austen’s prose, however, is derived almost entirely from her characters’ adherence to convention, and thus to self-sacrifice. In their reticence and restraint, we find a well of emotion that’s all the deeper for being so quiet and constrained: a profundity that returns us ultimately to what’s important, which is not ourselves, but other people – whether we love them, or not." Austen's popularity only begins during the late-Victorian era and didn't fully flower until the 1940s. She is modern in the sense that she appealed to a postwar nostalgia for the economic and social dominance of the English gentry. In the context of her own times, which were artistically dominated by the emotional incontinence of the Romantics, she was a minor figure whose "two inches of ivory" reflected a conscious turning away from the wider world of agrarian revolt and industrial modernity as much as her own constrained circumstances.

Her reticence and restraint extended beyond matters of the heart to the source of her characters' wealth (e.g. the slave trade) and the class politics of the time (e.g. Luddism). She was, and remains, a true Tory. That the Observer should praise her is no surprise. The paper has always had a soft spot for romantic Tories and the sale to Tortoise Media is likely to accentuate that (yet more profiles of Rory Stewart alongside regular updates on Jess Phillips' state of mind). Nor does it surprise that the editorial should emphasise her emotional continence and bemoan that "self-discovery of a certain kind [has] become horribly central to our culture". I'm only bemused that it didn't rope in the usual attack on social media (maybe Carole Cadwalldr's influence is waning). Just as Kenan Malik's gloomy angst recalls the Edwardian liberal mind, so the paper's indulgence of Austen reflects the steadily-growing liberal backlash against all things "woke", from trans rights to Palestine. Committed to propping up a Labour government that lacks meaningful policies and whose instincts are conservative, the Observer is reduced to a combination of liberal nihilism and anti-modern nostalgia.

The Heavy Thud

Keir Starmer's speech a couple of weeks ago was widely seen as a challenge to Whitehall, which owed everything to the Prime Minister (or his speech-writer's) tendency to sprinkle his deathless prose with clunking metaphors: "Our plan commits Whitehall to mission-led government. An approach to governing that won’t just deliver change but also change the nature of governing itself. ... Make no mistake – this plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down. A demand, given the urgency of our times, for a state that is more dynamic, more decisive, more innovative; less hostile to devolution and letting things go; creative - on the deployment of technology harnessing its power to rethink services rather than replicate the status quo in digital form." To make sure the message got through, he even combined a recent Americanism with a standard postwar lament: "I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here, but I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline."

A few days earlier, the Prime Minister had appointed a "safe pair of hands", Sir Chris Wormald, as his Cabinet Secretary, which suggests that continuity rather than change may prove to be the order of the day, but he again took the opportunity to up the rhetorical ante: "To change this country, we must change the way government serves this country ... From breaking down silos across government to harnessing the incredible potential of technology and innovation, it will require nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform." Leaving aside his penchant for 1980s management speak, this is a continuation of the new public management rhetoric that Tony Blair did so much to advance around the millennium: new ways of working and the smart application of technology can radically transform the state. I emphasise rhetoric because the actual practice was, to borrow a term, tepid. After all, Blair didn't drag the machinery of government into the 21st century. If he had, Starmer wouldn't be trying to sell us on a complete rewiring job now. 

Blair's technophilia was (and remains) notoriously shallow. Another area in which he has been consistent is the claim that political delivery is hampered by the machinery of government, a mantra that Starmer is happy to repeat. In his review of the "gauntlet", Andrew Grice in the Independent rehearsed a now-famous anecdote: "As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff and now Starmer’s national security adviser, put it: 'When you arrive in Number 10 and pull on the levers of power, you discover they are not connected to anything.'" This is misleading in suggesting that power is exercised by some procedural mechanism, rather than by persuasion, lying or bullying. People have to be made to do stuff. Blair didn't lead the UK into the quagmire of Iraq by pulling the Iraq quagmire lever but by twisting arms, dissembling and intimidating any opposition. It's also an example of projection: the conservative reluctance to actually change anything substantial, which underpins the protestations of progressive intent, is attributed to the state's functionaries, thereby exculpating the political class. Grice duly obliges with another anecdote: "Ministers tell me Starmer’s criticism is justified. Some have been shocked by the quality of the civil service they discovered and by how slowly the machine cranks into gear."

I'm confident that many civil servants will also have been shocked by the quality of ministers and their advisors, but the narrative of ineptitude is one that the liberal press only tends to deploy in respect of its foes, for example Trump's appointees in the US or leftwing shadow cabinet ministers when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. The implication is that ministers and top civil servants are from different tribes, mutually surprised by their strange habits and alien mindset, but nothing could be further from the truth in the UK. To start at the top, Keir Starmer is a former civil servant who ran the Crown Prosecution Service, not an arm of the state noted for its dynamism or innovation, while Rachel Reeves is a former Bank of England employee, even if she did fluff up her CV. In terms of their social backgrounds, Labour ministers are quite similar to senior civil servants: Oxbridge, a complacent respect for meritocracy and very limited expertise outside of the traditional sectors of law and finance. They have far more in common with each other than either does with Conservative politicians.

Grice is also revealing about ministers' archaic understanding of organisational dynamics and their naivety about technology: "Wormald will need to make cross-departmental working happen; ministers grumble there is still a “silo mentality” in Whitehall. His other challenge will be to introduce AI into public services; it could deliver huge savings and boost productivity, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels." AI isn't being sold on its potential to boost public service productivity, i.e. deliver more for the same cost, but on its potential to cut service delivery costs in line with the Treasury's across-the-board 5% target. A little vignette from today's news is the report that civil servants are thinking of standardising their document-sharing technology: "No 10, for example, uses Microsoft to share documents, while the Cabinet Office uses Google, leading to frequent delays as people pass information from one department to the other." The issue is not "silos" (email exists) but dumb purchasing. You have to pay Microsoft a licence; Google's tools are free. 

The point is that government's long track record of IT project failures and wasteful procurement is the product of both ministers and senior civil servants and their common groupthink. The institutions of the UK state inevitably reflect the culture and overlapping ideology of the leading political parties. This is a synergistic relationship at the top level, not among the ranks: lowly DWP staff don't influence the parties any more than CLP members influence Whitehall. The revolving door between the senior echelons of the parties and business is the same revolving door that exists between the Civil Service and business. Just as Whitehall colours politicians in power, as humorously portrayed by Yes, Minster, so the politicians, and increasingly their burgeoning special advisors, colour Whitehall. If you want to understand why the state appears overly-legalistic, technologically illiterate and wedded to a bureaucratic and bossy approach, you could do worse than note the CVs of the political class, which bias towards the law, parasitic business and the public/private nexus of the third sector. 

The apparatus of the state, long-used to a duopoly of alternating governments, is obliged by the prime directive of any organisation (to preserve itself and minimise change) to find common ground, which in turn encourages the parties to move towards a mid-point between their positions on the political spectrum. This will occasionally be disrupted by a genuine shift in the political consensus, such as after 1945 and 1983, but opening up a gulf between the parties invariably leads to a countervailing readjustment: pressure to "close the gap". This is not just a political calculation by the opposition to keep adjacent to the governing party by accepting much of its programme as a fait accompli. It also reflects the pressure exerted by Whitehall to maintain continuity once the administration changes (in other words, inertia). What is notable is that these major shifts tend to come roughly 40 years apart (you can include the 1905 Liberal government as well, with its constitutional and social reforms), so we're arguably due a genuinely reforming administration around now. But while Labour under Starmer have been happy to push the rhetoric of progressive reform, their actions have been either underwhelming or positively conservative.

The long periods of Tory rule mean that there is an ideological bias towards them within Whitehall over-and-above any sympathy due to class or culture. This is famously apparent in the Treasury's commitment to "sound money" and its preference for the interests of savers over workers, but it is also evident in other areas of government from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence (both still important components of the social elite) to the various welfare departments where a minatory attitude towards claimants is embedded within their systems and organisational culture. This explains why Labour have historically been more prone to decrying the conservative resistance of the "men from the ministry", but also why the Tories took up a similar complaint against "the blob" after 13 years of Labour government. But while the rhetoric suggests a return to that progressive critique of Whitehall, the lack of any criticism of the Treasury, and the dominant role that it has taken in insisting on cuts to other departments' expenditure, tells you that this will be a conservative government in all but name.

It is highly unlikely that Keir Starmer would lead a revolution in the machinery of government anyway. He climbed the greasy pole by working with the system, not against it. He is not a natural disruptor by temperament and he isn't going to indulge a gadfly like Elon Musk, let alone another Dominic Cummings. Morgan MacSweeney's priority will remain control of the Labour Party, not reform of the state apparatus. Starmer's project is the restoration of the state's authority and dignity after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn, and while that means showing that the state can be trusted to deliver, it also means avoiding chaos. While Tony Blair continues to yearn for national ID cards, Starmer and his lieutenants are focused on the more mundane task of filling in potholes. Possibly using AI. A thoroughly unoriginal and uninspiring man, his eventual memoirs will no doubt repeat that tired old Jonathan Powell anecdote but presumably garnished with a clumsy metaphor about not having the right tools to do the job.