You Have to Want to Change

The Global Justice Project is an initiative whose aim is "to stimulate research, policymaking, and citizen engagement to shape a fairer, more democratic and sustainable 21st century". Though a collective effort, the project has been closely identified in the media with Thomas Piketty, which has inevitably led to curt dismissal by those who either deny that wealth inequality has grown or that is driving the erosion of democracy and the degradation of the planet, and have done so since the Frenchman published Capital in the Twenty First Century in 2013. While that mighty tome proposed a globally-coordinated wealth tax, the GJP proposes three key initiatives in line with its more holistic ambitions and the expertise of the collective: fast decarbonisation of energy systems; a shift away from overconsumption towards sufficiency, which would entail a sharp reduction in labour hours and the use of raw materials; and "a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, between countries and within them." Parallel to this, leading progressive economists, including Piketty, have also signed up to a roadmap to "end poverty and inequalities on a liveable planet", as proposed by Olivier De Schutter, the former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

Rather than getting into the detail of the proposals, what I'd like to consider is the political viability of such radical change and what that in turn might look like on a smaller, more domestic stage - i.e. the UK. Dan Neidle, the British tax lawyer who has become a media fixture since his retirement from Clifford Chance, largely by publishing opinion about the tax affairs of prominent individuals and shaking his head wearily at the government, dismissed the GJP, aka "Tomas Piketty and a large team", as "potty" (Noah Smith called it "total nonsense"). Neidle's central claim is that it would require "unprecedented global cooperation" and "a powerful and benign world authority", but that if such things were possible they would already exist and we would therefore already have solved the problems of decarbonisation, over-consumption and inequality. He describes this as a circular argument. In fact, what he is offering is a non sequitur. Bretton Woods (the WTO, the World Bank) was a system of "unprecedented global cooperation", but it did not raise up the developing world or restrain global warming. Equally, the US has long claimed to be "a powerful and benign world authority" (not least through the exorbitant privilege of the dollar), but sees fit to attack other countries, murder non-combatants and kidnap heads of state at will (that's just this year).

It is perfectly reasonable to be sceptical of the GJP's ambitions, particularly when you consider the track record of other attempts at global coordination of the economy and climate, such as GATT and COP. But those initiatives have run into the sand because there are competing interests between nations. The classic example is the desire of developing countries to catch up economically before the music stops and planetary constraints oblige us to move to a steady state or even degrowth. The GJP explicitly addresses this through wealth transfers (and does likewise for domestic inequality). Whether you think that is politically feasible is another matter. The point is that history is littered with examples of international wealth transfers, specifically in the form of colonial empire. What is being proposed now is a coordinated transfer of accumulated wealth (think of it as reparations plus) rather than genocide, slavery and coercive exploitation. Even on the more modest scale of regional cooperation, the flow of money between net contributors and net beneficiaries in the European Union over decades has shown that transfers are hardly Utopian. 

If we think the degree of international coordination needed to implement the GJP's proposals is unrealistic, perhaps we should return to the idea of "socialism in one country", specifically the UK. Might Andy Burnham's proposed break with "40 years of neoliberalism" offer a more realistic course towards a radical reimagining of our political economy? According to David Edgerton & Karel Williams, writing in the New Statesman, "What we have is more of the same, with added vibes, plus a reversal of policy in certain areas, at the limits of what Labour radicalism will permit. It represents something more like political rhetoric than political change: when Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair are associated with the free market, competition and private finance, it is argued that a small reversal in policy will itself improve things." Again, the point to emphasise is not that reversing the Thatcherite/Blairite dispensation is too challenging to even consider, but that there is a lack of political will to do so. Burnham is currently making promises left right and centre to win election as an MP and potentially as Prime Minister, but he doesn't look like a man with a radical plan.

Edgerton and Williams see the foundational economy and universal basic services as the vector for more profound social and economic change: "Improving household liveability should be the focus of expenditure. This should include making essential market goods affordable, ensuring foundational services work and are accessible, and integrating policies around the goals of preventing social harm and promoting environmental responsibility and social solidarity. We need to think about expansion of domestic food production as well as reforming food distribution and consumption." They make good points, notably that radical change to our political economy must start from tax reform ("Our tax system remains stuck in the 1940s when PAYE was introduced to tax the individual male bread winner"), but I feel their focus on "the four market essentials – housing, utilities, energy and transport" misses that one of those, housing, is an 800-pound gorilla. There is also a wider problem here, which we see with mainstream commentators as well, which is to view measures to alleviate poverty in supply-side terms ("making essential market goods affordable"). 

The UK economy has proven highly vulnerable in recent years to fluctuations in energy prices, arguably more so than in the 1970s when oil-fuelled inflation triggered labour militancy to push up wages in response. Then it caused inflation, but that was more of an issue for rentiers than for working households. Today, there is no countervailing tendency to force wages to keep pace with rising household costs (despite the Bank of England's attempt to revive the bogey of the "wage-price spriral"), with the result that even relatively small increases in energy costs can trigger a cost-of-living crisis as they impact other essentials such as food and transport. But this lack of financial resilience isn't simply down to weaker trade unions but to the fact that housing costs take up so much of household income, and to the fact that the dynamic is for those costs to expand as much as possible. In other words, there is simply no slack in most household budgets. Reforming planning laws to encourage more housebuilding will not alleviate poverty so long as rents are set by the market, both because developers are incentivised to build higher value properties and because those regulatory reforms will make it easier to do so.

It would be nice to fix our sewers and reservoirs, and fully electrify our railways and modernise the NHS, but this requires a level of real resources significantly greater than can be produced domestically, essentially because of 40 years of deindustrialisation following Thatcher's misguided Monetarism and Blair's equally misguided belief in a financial services-led economy. We could import resources - steel, bricks, engineers - but this would require us to export an equivalent amount or risk a balance of payments crisis and inflation. So, if we have only limited real resources, what should we prioritise? I would suggest that we focus on social housing initially. Not only does this address a pressing need, but it also gives us the opportunity to materially affect household spending by deliberately lowering rents, a policy that would be extended to existing council houses and flats. You might argue that this will deprive hard-pressed councils of revenue, but there is a solution to that as well, which is to buy out private landlords (using central government money - essentially by issuing mortgage-backed securities) and so increase council stock and revenues (even if those previously private tenants see their rents reduced in line with council rents).

This looks like a subsidy, but in fact it is simply deferred income as the rent can be increased once the cost of other essentials come down. So long as the investment - i.e. the cost to build and maintain - is recouped over the useful life of the asset (hopefully many decades in the case of housing - most UK council houses are over 50 years old) the timing of payments is simply a matter of cashflow, and that really isn't an issue for a monetary sovereign. Just as welfare spending is an automatic stabilisier of aggregate demand in a recession, so we should flex rents to help social tenants meet spikes in the cost of basics. This is a more practical approach than capping utility bills or freezing grocery prices. That the cost of living debate has been limited to those proposals, and the predictably choleric response of market fundamentalists, tells you how wedded the media have become to the idea that the crisis is a supply-side issue rather than the consequence of inadequate demand, and specifically demand among low income families. It sometimes feels like no one at the BBC has ever heard of Keynes.

Lowering rents is functionally no different to lowering interest rates that feed through to lower monthly mortgage repayments. The difference comes down to who benefits: tenants or mortgage-holders. The state currently has limited control over interest rates, due to the self-denying ordinance that is the Bank of England's "independence", and apparently no control over gilt yields (though in reality these are tied to inflation expectations and thus other government decisions). But it has complete control, if it wishes to exercise it, over council houses and their rents. After all, without that control Right-to-Buy would never have got off the ground, and nor would the Thatcher government have been able to impose an effective moratorium on building replacements for the properties sold off. The learned helplessness of British politics means that we easily forget the power of the state to remake society, even when such changes have been made in recent memory. It is no surprise then that more ambitious changes, on a global scale, are met with derision. But we should always remember a simple truth, most recently stated by Simon Wren-Lewis: "levels of poverty and inequality are what political elites and their influencers want them to be". That we have a government elected on the promise of "change" that has decided to change little does not mean that change is impossible, but that change is simply not what the government and its primary backers want.

Arsenal Win League: A Nation Mourns

The response to Arsenal winning the Premier League for the first time in 22 years has been predictably partisan. To mangle Tolstoy's famous line about families, fans of the club have been happy in pretty much the same way while those unhappy about the outcome have exhibited a lot more variety in their discontent. While I am firmly in the former camp - generically relieved we got over the line and happy for the players, staff and fellow fans - it is the latter that are of real interest because the variety of their views tell us a lot more about the state of the game, and arguably the country. Arsenal have been accused of being boring, of being lucky with refereeing and VAR decisions, of time-wasting, of being too physical at corners and generally of taking it all too seriously, which is nothing if not ironic. They apparently stank out the Champions League Final in Budapest by stopping Paris St Germain from exhibiting the full range of their balletic skills. Mikel Arteta has personally killed the beautiful game, has despoiled the sanctity of the technical area and has generally been insufferable with his Lego hair and motivational gimmicks.

Hating Arsenal isn't new. The club's contested move from Woolwich to Islington in 1913 and its controversial promotion to Division One in 1919 at the expense of Tottenham Hotspur (among others), both engineered by Chairman Henry Norris, obviously explains the roots of their chief local rivalry. More interesting is how quickly Arsenal riled everybody else, first by spending big - they were known as the Bank of England club in the 1920s - and then by dominating the top division during the 1930s under Herbert Chapman with innovative tactics on the field and innovative marketing off it, notably renaming Gillespie Road Tube station. I'm not going to recap Arsenal's history from then till now, but suffice to say it went through many iterations and corresponding periods of fluctuating fortune. What was consistent was the club's willingness to reinvent itself stylistically, its faith in unconventional managers, and the premium it placed on coaching. Compare and contrast George Graham and Arsene Wenger's teams. Consider the promotion to manager of George Allison (a journalist) and Bertie Mee (a physio). Consider the crucial roles of Tom Whittaker and Don Howe.

Mikel Arteta is a typical Arsenal manager: unproven when hired, having a strong identification with the club's values (as he interprets them), and having a highly systematic approach, both on the pitch and off it. Nicolas Jover may be a figure of fun for many opposition fans and pundits, but that's because he has been unusually successful, not because other teams don't have set-piece coaches. Arsenal have just done many things better than other clubs, not only in the Premier League but in the Champions League as well. It's easy to forget after Saturday's final that not only did Arsenal win the league phase without dropping a point, but they didn't lose a knockout game in normal time: won 11, drew 4, lost 0. They scored 30 (an average of 2 a game) and conceded 7 (under 0.5). The final was obviously a contrast in styles of play, as expected, but it is silly to reduce this to the claim that only PSG wanted to play football - a tired old trope of unimaginative pundits - and that what Arsenal offered was somehow "anti-football". Arsenal were never going to try and emulate PSG's semi-fnal first leg against Bayern Munich, and neither were PSG.

What's interesting about criticisms of Arsenal is that they can easily accomodate variations in style, and have done from Chapman's day onwards. Thus late-era Wengerball could be praised for its beauty while the team was derided as lightweight and lacking courage on a wet winter night up against Stoke's muscular midfield (the clubs's long wait between titles was punctuated for many fans by a series of unpunished GBH assaults: Diaby, Eduardo, Ramsey). Bertie Mee's double-winning team might appear the antithesis of this, but they would also be condemned for their dour pragmatism, grinding out an FA Cup semi-final replay win against the artistry of Stoke. This is why the perennial criticism of the club oscillates between "boring" and "lucky": the one to describe a team that overpowers its oppponents, the other to describe a team that nicks a win. Both are really claims that Arsenal are somehow inauthentic, as is the "anti-football" trope, which ultimately goes back to that relocation north of the river. 

This concern over authenticity also explains the negative reaction of many to the sight of Arsenal fans flooding the streets around the Emirates Stadium on the night the title was clinched and Sunday's victory parade around Islington. What was made clear over the last fortinight was the enormous support that Arsenal enjoys not only across London but across the world. The club's history meant that it always retained strong support in South East London, which was reinforced down the years by the recruitment of players like David Rocastle (Lewisham) and Ian Wright (Brockley). It also became the favourite club of European refugees in the 1930s (it actually has more Jewish fans than Spurs), and of Irish and West Indian immigrants in the postwar years, which pushed its support out to West and South London. Arsenal's popularity also reflected its accessibility, both in the sense of the lack of intolerance towards minority fans and in its convenient location for two Tube lines (it was easier to get from Brixton to Highbury on public transport than it was to get to Stamford Bridge, even before the national Front started recruiting in the Shed End). Arsenal is the only truly pan-metropolitan club. 

Its periodic success and dramatic victories (the 1971 double, the 1989 win at Anfield etc) during the era of televised football meant it acquired fans across the country, while the global reach of the Premier League and Arsenal's particular popularity in francophone Africa during Wenger's tenure saw it become a truly global club, if some way behind the likes of Real Madrid and Barcelona, or even more parochially of Manchester United and Liverpool. Its pioneering support for the women's game also helped expand the fanbase in new directions. The point is not the number of "genuine" fans, assuming this can even be accurately gauged (proxies like social media followers or the number of "official" supporters clubs are unreliable), but the anger that Arsenal's diverse fanbase seems to elicit among the fans of other English clubs. This encompasses both ethnicity (which can easily slip into xenophobia and racism) and the idea that Arsenal attract a disproportionate number of middle class fans who adopted the club as a form of cultural capital after reading (or watching) Fever Pitch (think of the Roger Nouveau character in The Fast Show).

For many fans of the bigger English teams, this concern with authenticity is often an expression of anxiety about their own club in the era of foreign ownership and the "pricing-out of working-class fans": the number of "plastics" or "tourists" at Old Trafford and Anfield, the role of petro-dollars at Chelsea and Manchester City. Arsenal is a convenient outlet for this unease: the game is being destroyed by global forces so surely the most cosmopolitan club must take much of the blame. That its owners are now American plutocrats rather than the scions of old English banking families is seen as evidence of the club's loss of its soul, like its move from the marble halls of Highbury to the Emirates Stadium, even though the club in the wider social sense has never been simply a reflection of its owners or its location (again, see Norris and the move from Plumstead's Manor Ground), and even though other big clubs have seen even more dramatic changes in ownership and ground.

The stylistic criticism of Arsenal is tied up with the claim that the team will always fall short: that there is something missing because the club is inauthentic. Thus even the Invincibles failed to win the Champions League, while the 2006 vintage couldn't hold a lead against Barcelona when down to 10 men (had Arsenal grimly hung on and won the game, the criticism would have been both "boring" and "lucky"). Finishing second in the Premier League for three seasons running was put down to "bottling" rather than the vagaries of competition, still less the advantages enjoyed by a team led by Pep Guardiola, the most successful manager of the modern era in Europe. It has been amusing to see the Catalan, who was often dismissed as a "bald fraud" by the fans of Liverpool and Manchester United, now being eulogised by those same fans in his final season precisely because they hoped he would once more edge past a nervous Arsenal in the final stretch.

The tale of Arsenal's season is simply told. They won 29 points over the first 12 games, then 27 over the next 13 and 29 over the final 13. In other words, they were consistent. The final lap of 5 games saw Arsenal win all of them, while City could only manage 2 wins and 2 draws. But nobody is about to say that City bottled it. Arsenal finished 7 points ahead of City largely because Guardiola's team have been sub-par for two seasons now. They won with 91 points in 2024, beating Arsenal by 2, but then recorded 71 and 78 points in 2025 and 2026 respectively. Arguably, Arsenal should have won last season, and would have done had they repeated their 2023-24 performance. What cost them was drawing 14 games. In short, an Arsenal title win has been imminent for some time, both because of Manchester City's relative decline and because nobody else was coming through (Liverpool's troubles this season reinforce the point and it's likely that Manchester United won't get near the title until they replace their entire defence, no matter how many plaudits Bruno Fernandes wins).

Arsenal fans can look forward with confidence. Arsene Wenger was intermittently successful, but always against the odds: first the generational talent of Alex Ferguson and Manchester United's wealth; then Chelsea's new-found wealth and ruthlessness; finally the financial constraints of the new stadium debt. Arteta doesn't face similar headwinds domestically, at least not yet, which means the club can realistically plan for more success over the next 5 years. Likewise, what the European campaign showed was that Arsenal can compete at the very highest level and, with a bit of luck, may yet pick up the big-eared pot. For some pundits, this is as a good as it gets. As Jonathan Liew put it, "What if this is a club already operating at 105% of their capacity?", as if it was about to blow a gasket, a variation of the usual trope of Arsenal falling to pieces at the sharp end of the season. But if the response by the fanbase is any guide, it looks like Arsenal still have plenty of headroom for growth in popularity and therefore revenue and that, allied to a realistically ambitious ownership (Spurs and West Ham take note), means they haven't topped-out yet. And it is the fear of that possibility that informs the negativity of the football press and the angst of so many other English fans.

Decanting

The Daily Telegraph had a classic example of the self-refuting headline last week, "London’s social housing problem nobody dares discuss", in which Sebastian Milbank, who sounds like an Evelyn Waugh character, proceeded to discuss at length the problem of social housing in London. That problem was narrowly defined as "council flats are wasted on poor people" (I paraphrase). The article claims that the capital's economy is constrained not by high housing costs, or too much capital stuck unproductively in property, but by social housing not being on the market: "This massive stock of housing, built on the most valuable land in the country, is permanently off the market. You cannot buy or rent any of it, no matter how hard you work, and waiting lists can stretch over decades." I'm not sure if Seb understands that council tenants do indeed pay rent. Maybe he thinks a council flat is a handout. What irks him is the high number of economically inactive people, but there's also another, sadly predictable dimension to this: "Not only do most of those who live in London’s social housing not work, around half of the lead tenants are foreign born."

After the great success of Right-to-Buy, the Tories want to implement a policy of Obliged-to-Sell. This is a shift from the demand-side to the supply-side, so it chimes with the fans of "abundance" and thereby gains the support of liberals who believe the state should concentrate on infrastructure rather than on welfare. This includes the professional YIMBYs who are prominent on social media, though they prefer to talk about the "misallocation of resources" (i.e. the economically inactive taking up space that could house a thinktank drone) rather than about how many council tenants are migrants or disabled. There is also a tendency to forget that most of the economically inactive are retirees, who are disproportionately represented because they managed to get a tenancy in the 1970s before Right-to-Buy and the de facto moratorium on council house building kicked in during the 1980s. The focus on the inactive also means a lack of attention is paid to council tenants in work. This blindspot reflects that they are disproportionately unionised public sector employees, such as transport and NHS workers, and therefore the ideological enemy.

Over the last 40 years, following the postwar dip caused by decanting to the suburbs, the inner London population grew by over a million¹. This is still lower than the peak in the early 1900s, however that is the result of slum clearance and the reduction in density (i.e. overcrowding in those slums), which nobody is seriously proposing to reverse. Far from being an inhibitor of the economy, the growth in jobs has actually outpaced the growth in homes over the last 20 years. Ironically, this reflects increasing densities (the number of people per home), after a long period of falling densities, and an increasing rate of economic activity across the population. Housing is under stress in London but this is because of high demand and constrained supply, not because of the misallocation of resources to social housing or because of a high percentage of the economically inactive among social housing tenants.

Since Right-to-Buy ran out of steam around the millennium, council housing stock has remained fairly constant in absolute terms, but that means a relative contraction as a share of total stock due to the growth in the private rental sector, which in turn reflects the growth in the total population and in the number of jobs. This can be seen clearly in the chart below. What Mr Milbank is talking about is a fraction of housing stock that is ever less significant to the total. As the chart makes clear, that growth in population has been economically captured by the private rental sector. Home owners will have seen their property prices rise, but this is notional wealth that can only be realised by downsizing or moving out of London, and increasingly these are less favoured options because of the need to provide for children who could not get on the property ladder otherwise. In contrast, rents are current income and they have been rising faster than GDP growth, hence the popularity of Buy-to-Let.

That the growing unaffordability of London property has coincided with the growth of the private rental sector is not mere correlation. Why has the sector grown? Because rents have risen rapidly, so promising greater returns to investors. The growth in rents has proceeded even during the cost-of-living crisis because landlords correctly calculate that tenants will reduce discretionary expenditure, and even expenditure on other necessities, such as food and clothing, before they consider moving to a cheaper tenancy. This makes it very difficult for  young people on entry-level wages to rent, while those who can just about afford it have low disposable incomes which lowers aggregate demand. The real issue in London is not council tenancies "wasting" a resource but high rents in the private sector. 

The flip-side of the proposal that London council properties be put on the market so that they are "allocated" to the more economically productive is the decanting of the less productive elsewhere. This has in fact been happening for years, since well before Boris Johnson, the then Mayor of London, insisted there would be no "Kosovo-style social cleansing" on his watch (there was). There is an army of  service staff who live in the cheaper suburbs and face long commutes to clean offices and wait on tables in Central London, who fifty years ago could have reasonably expected to get a council tenancy. Much the same story can be told of other European cities, such as Paris and Berlin, where gentrification has produced the distinctive "doughnut" of a denuded city centre. London is by no means the worst and its history of large council estates in the heart of the city has meant it remains socially mixed, even if those estates are increasingly neglected (Grenfell Tower) or sold off to private developers (the Heygate Estate).

The solution, pretty obviously, is to build more council houses for the general population instead of treating them as a reservation for the "economically inactive" (a crude misrepresentation as most council tenants are in work). The problem is that local authorities were first constrained from building new housing, and then encouraged to pursue public-private partnerships in which "affordable homes" would be delivered by property developers (they rarely were). Once the remaining constraints on council house building were removed, local authorities then found themselves starved of funding due to central government austerity. The predictable result was even more reliance on the private sector, both in terms of "estate regeneration", with its inevitable decanting out of London, and private landlords charging extortionate rents for people that the local authority had a statutory obligation to house. This latest Telegraph initiative, with its supporting cast of manic YIMBYs, is simply picking over the bones.

1. Charts from Housing in London 2025 and London’s housing stock - London Assembly Research Unit November 2024

The Starmer Legacy

To no one's surprise, the local election results have led to the demand, both inside and outside the Labour Party, that Keir Starmer stands down as Prime Minister. While short-lived premierships are not unknown, particularly over the last decade, Starmer's fall is spectacular. A man who arguably rose without a trace is destined for well-deserved obscurity. The first point to make is that his limited popularity started to drop immediately after Labour's general election triumph in 2024 when only 34% of the vote secured the party 63% of the seats in the House of Commons. His performance since then, from the winter fuel allowance fiasco to his support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, has accelerated this trend, but he was never popular to begin with, even among Labour Party members and supporters who had seen him steadily renege on all the promises he made to win election as party leader. With the end of his ultimately barren political career imminent, the question we have to ask is what was the significance of Starmer? We understand the shenanigans and dumb luck that propelled him into Downing Street, but why him and why now?

Some commentators have taken to wondering if the country has become ungovernable, or if we are cursed by zombie politics, or if the problem is simply that our politics is fundamentally stupid. The common theme here is learned helplessness. The elevation of Starmer as first party leader and then Prime Minister is perhaps evidence that the country didn't think it could do any better, a feeling that persists and means Starmer will probably remain in situ for a while yet. Labour Party members may bemoan that they were deceived, but anyone remotely engaged with politics in 2019 could have told them that this was on the cards. Starmer was the clean-skin of the right, with the backing of shadowy Blairite fixers like Mandelson and McSweeney, and would purge the left as soon as he could. Likewise, the much-ridiculed claim in 2020 by the historian Glen O'Hara that what mattered was managerial competence - "Starmer can chair a meeting. He can draft a minute. He can lead a team. He can hold a press conference" - was quite simply a counsel of despair: a paean to lowered expectations, not an encomium. The irony is that subsequent events, and the anonymous briefings about his indecisiveness and lack of political nous, have shown that initial assessment to have been optimistic.

To understand the meaning of Starmer we have to put him, and this pervasive sense of learned helplessness, in its historical context. Unfortunately, this doesn't suit the fashionable concerns of our media, for whom history is just so much going over old ground and old arguments and so to be avoided. But this ahistoricism is also to be found among those who pride themselves on taking a longer view. For example, Simon Wren-Lewis thinks there was a change in the intellectual rigour of government between 2003 and 2008: "After these years when evidence-based policy making was the ideal, it was a genuine puzzle as to why the Western world had collectively decided to ignore basic macroeconomics and cut government spending in the middle of the worst recession since WWII when interest rates were stuck at their lower bound. Yet from today’s perspective, where everything from harvesting policy-based evidence to simple lying is so endemic, it all seems much less of a puzzle." But you might as well ask why the government adopted similar austerity measures in the 1930s when there was credible advice (notably from John Maynard Keynes) to do otherwise. The answer is: they did it because it was in their class interests to do so, not because of some sudden lapse in character. 

The idea that New Labour was wedded to evidence-based policy-making is obviously a myth (2003 was also the year of the instrumental lying over Iraq), but so too is Wren-Lewis's claim that "Brexit marked the first triumph of populism in the UK." Contemporary rightwing populism is marked by an anti-state fiscal obsession ("We'll make public spending savings and deliver tax cuts"), by xenophobia ("The immigrants are to blame for society's ills"), and by a belief that traitorous "elites" are undermining the nation (often in cahoots with the immigrants). If we're looking for this worldview's first triumph in British politics, surely the place to start is Margaret Thatcher's ascension to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Whatever her preferences in economic or political theory (monetarism, Hayek etc), her rise was founded on the idea that the establishment was rotten (the "wets", the traitorous BBC), had sold out to left-leaning elites (the trade union "barons", the liberal public sector that derided Victorian values), and was cultivating ethnic minorities against the interests of the nation ("people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture"). Curbing organised labour, restraining "loony left" councils, and imposing the national curriculum in education were all populist measures.

One explanation that Wren-Lewis offers is the role of the press in advocating austerity after the great financial crash: "The media made it hard for opposition Labour voices to argue that the government was going too fast, too hard on cuts, so Labour eventually gave up." But this is inaccurate. Alistair Darling was already promising deep, real-terms spending cuts in 2009. He may not have a made a virtue of it, as George Osborne did, but there was unquestionably a political consensus on austerity even before the 2010 general election. Thereafter, Labour's opposition to the cuts was little more than quibbling, which directly led to the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 on a platform of actually opposing the cuts (a point Wren-Lewis is willing to concede in a footnote). The question that should be asked is why there was a cross-party consensus on austerity in 2009. Can it be solely attributed to this country's horrendous media? Again, a comparison with the 1930s suggest that the economic orthodoxy - that budgets must be balanced through spending cuts and/or tax rises during a recession - was hegemonic across the major parties, hence the split in Labour in 1931.

Wren-Lewis continues: "The right wing media is hardly a source of informed and balanced commentary. To some extent that has always been true, but it does seem to have got worse over the last few decades: just look at the Daily Telegraph, or GB news. The transformation of social media, to the extent that it influences political debate and discourse, has been more dramatic, and is now clearly a source of simplistic views that tend to match those of its owners." Again, the British press is no more reprehensible than it has ever been. It hasn't got worse, it simply started out bad amidst the imperialist jingo of the late nineteenth century (when expanded literacy and growing affordability led to a boom in newsprint) and has never got any better. Simon's suggestion that social media reflects only the views of the its rightwing owners is bizarre, particularly coming from someone who is quite active online and regularly gets into spats with people whose views are a million miles away from Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch.

My point in all this is that British politics has been on a populist trajectory since at least the 1970s but one that obscures a much more persistent conservatism. You could see the Major years and New Labour as a countermovement to Thatcherite populism, but in fact continuity was more obvious than change, hence the persistence of the fundamental economic dispensation (shrinking the state's role, protecting investors, restraining organised labour), the running sore of xenophobia (recast in terms of "bogus asylum-seekers"), the general tendency towards authoritarianism (ASBOs), and the  systematic marketisation of the welfare state. That said, there was a discernible shift in the political landscape around the millennium, arising from fundamental changes in political economy and the material base. Keir Starmer's ascension can be seen as emblematic of the way that three specific developments associated with this shift worked themselves out. They are: the intellectual bankruptcy of the political centre; the assisted death of the Labour Party by its own right wing; and the terminal delinquency of the press.

The political centre as a distinctive body of thought (the Third Way) came to prominence in the 1990s first under Bill Clinton in the US and then under Tony Blair in the UK. But it was already crumbling, essentially because the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marginalised the idea of socialism for a generation. This meant that the premise of a middle way, a grand bargain between social democracy and free markets, was no longer required, which led to the era of liberal triumphalism and ultimately the folly of both Iraq and the dominance of financialisation. With the return of socialism as a viable alternative after 2008, if only rhetorically, centrist politics found itself without any space for manoeuvre - there was no meaningful middle way to plot any longer with social democracy all but gutted - obliging it to make common cause with conservatives in defence of the market. This was a key contributor to the emergence of cartel politics, with its emphases on fiscal orthodoxy, technocracy and the exclusion of the illegitimate fringe. It also compromised the media (the influence is bidirectional) by encouraging the idea that political journalism was about policing the boundaries of the cartel. The result of this in the UK has been the conscious strategy of Labour to replace the Conservatives as the dominant party on the centre-right, pursuing largely the same policies but with an appeal to managerial competence and recourse to the mawkish class sentimentality embodied by Starmer ("My dad was a toolmaker").

This shift explains the purging of the Labour left, a move that Starmer has taken to a level that would have been unthinkable to the likes of Hugh Gaitskell or Neil Kinnock. It's easy to dismiss the Labour right as slaves to factionalism and spite, but while this is a fair assessment of the pyschology of many individuals, the underlying dynamic is a pragmatic realisation that you cannot be a centre-right party and have a socialist leftwing. Fluffy liberals (aka the soft left), yes; Marxists, no. The problem that Labour faces is that while it has defined the left and right "extremes", in the form of the Greens and Reform, it hasn't managed to squeeze the fillings in the political club sandwich: the Liberal Democrats between it and the Greens, and the Conservatives between it and Reform. The reason for this is Starmer's lack of credibility, which is a consequence of his route to power. Many people have longstanding political loyalties (and antipathies), and Labour has been unable to provide a charismatic leader in the mould of Blair capable of reconstructing the party's electoral base. The problem for the Labour right today is that they don't have anyone of that calibre in waiting.

The third development is the economic decline of the press. This has been offset not by recourse to social media, as Simon Wren-Lewis imagines, but by the colonisation of TV. GB News is simply a visual tabloid - somewhere between the Sun and the Daily Mail - while political coverage on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 has descended to little more than apeing the comment pages of the Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. With newspapers increasingly consumed online with multimedia content, and with the decline of linear broadcasting leading to TV journalism being chopped up into short videos, and increasingly dominated by longer-form creator content, a merger of the two forms seems inevitable. This gradual process has led the press to become ever more directive about how TV should conduct itself. Whereas once Rupert Murdoch's interests were in breaking up broadcasting monopolies and undermining the state broadcaster, his successors will be far more interested in securing control of those broadcasters' political coverage. Were we to revive the Leveson 2 Inquiry, its scope would have to be considerably widened.

The significance of Starmer is to be found in the Labour Party's demographic challenges. Its skilled working class electoral core had shrunk through the twin pressures of deindustrialisation and embourgeoisement in the 1980s and 90s, leading to the New Labour reconfiguration around totems like "Worcester woman". But this obscured that its actual core vote was increasingly minorities and the educated but economically precarious young clustered in cities. The decision to colonise the centre-right, thereby marginalising both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, required it to adopt an electoral strategy focused on post-industrial small towns and white-coded social conservatives ("Workington man"), along with the comfortable (and multi-ethnic) professional middle class from which its own candidates now largely hail. Purging the left was seen as attractive to both groups. The result of this, as seen in the local elections, has been the erosion of its urban core but no compensation in small towns. The latter is less to do with the success of Reform than the fact that small towns also have young and ethnic minority voters, not to mention more mature "lefties", many of whom are now shifting to the Greens in England and Plaid Cymru and the SNP in Wales and Scotland, allowing Reform to win on low vote shares much as Labour did in the 2024 general election.

The learned helplessness of the current political conjuction arises partly from this conscious attempt to reconfigure the party landscape. The centrist media's obsession with "populism" - i.e. the disparaging frame for emergent demands from outside the cartel for a "new politics" - together with its unwillingness to properly investigate the Labour Party's purging of the left as a political endeavour, rather than the "crisis of antisemitism", means that this strategy of reconfiguration has little salience in political analysis. At best, the attempt to win over social conservatives is described as the recapture of the party's historic core of non-graduate, manual labour (the "white working class"). Likewise, the decline of the Conservative Party is seen chiefly through the prism of the "revolt on the right" and the legacy of Brexit: a failure to resist the seductive powers of Nigel Farage rather than a failure to resist Labour's march onto its traditional territory. Prior to 1995 (i.e. the start of New Labour), no Conservative MP had defected directly to the Labour Party in its history. Since then, seven have, with an acceleration in recent years.

In addition to this increasingly volatile party landscape, the other factor encouraging the learned helplessness of the politico-media caste is the steady decline of state capability following the UK's extensive application of privatisation and outsourcing since the 1980s. This has seen government increasingly adopt the role of a regulator, setting targets and parameters, rather than an author of action. The recent Whitehall farce of the inquiry into Peter Mandelson's appointment as ambassador to the US was an object lesson not only in obfuscation and avoidance but a clear sign that there remains a gulf of understanding between government and the Civil Service. The former is driven by announcements and "resets" - performative actions that achieve little - and remains baffled that there are no levers of power that it can simply pull to get the desired outcome. The latter suffers the delusion that it has control over fragmented processes that long ago breached the boundaries of the state, ironically returning us to the culture of corruption and the promotion of "interests" that marked the era before the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms.

Keir Starmer will likely cling onto office for a while yet, not simply because there are no compelling alternatives among the PLP ranks (Streeting is obviously Marmite, even among that narrow constituency) but because the wider Labour movement is enervated (trade union general secretaries may publish their demands in the Guardian or Daily Mirror but they won't actually do anything) and the soft left remains a disorganised wannabe faction that lacks a coherent ideology ("Manchesterism" is little more than municipal buses - i.e. mitigating market failures). But perhaps I too am indulging in learned helplessness. Perhaps if Andy Burnham returns to Parliament he might recommit Labour to a robust social democracy that defies the financial markets and unwinds the damage done by both New Labour (of which he was a minister) and the Tory misrule of the last decade and a half. Perhaps. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, and all that. But I can't help feeling that the legacy of Keir Starmer, at the controls of a driverless train whose route was set by others, will be a diminished Labour Party that eventually convinces itself the best course of action in a fragmented political landscape will be a coalition with the parties to its right, rather than its left.

I Can't Hear You

The Israeli-born and now US-based Holocaust historian Omer Bartov has been on a journey. Returning on a visit to Israel in August 2024, he was deeply disturbed not only by the rhetoric of IDF soldiers protesting at the very idea of coexistence with the Palestinians of Gaza but at the degree to which such views had become the common sense of the country. He identified two sentiments: a fear and rage that "threatens to make war into its own end", and "the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza". The parallel with his own study of European societies in the 1930s and 40s should be obvious. A year later, Bartov wrote a noted article for the New York Times - I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It - in which he reluctantly came to the conclusion that Israel was "committing genocide against the Palestinian people". Bartov has now published a book - Israel: What Went Wrong? - in which he discusses how this acceptance of genocide came about, and more particularly how Zionism evolved from a movement of liberation to a settler-colonial project.

I've not read the book, and probably won't because the arguments as summarised in his interview with the Guardian are already well-known. Chief among them is "the original sin of Israel’s founding, the resistance to granting meaningful legal weight to the lofty words contained in the nation’s declaration of independence, coupled with the founders’ subsequent failure to adopt a national constitution and bill of rights." The determination of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, to avoid enshrining citizenship in a constitution, thereby either having to grant rights to Palestinians in situ or immediately formalise a system of apartheid, was not some personal eccentricity but the core of the new state's rationale. As such, genocidal intent has been there since the expansion of Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 30s, even before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. To imagine that Zionism has only lately been perverted, that it has "become" genocidal, is to ignore the logic of its declared goal to create an exclusive Jewish homeland. This is the delusion of liberal Zionism: that there was ever the possibility of satisfying the Zionist cause while also respecting the rights of Palestinians. Ben Gurion recognised this.

What is interesting, if depressing, about Bartov's journey is that he still holds out hope for the return of a liberal Israel. As the interview notes, "Bartov does see a narrow path toward the nation’s peaceful coexistence with its neighbors. A section of the book is devoted to the confederation plan championed by a group of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals called A Land for All – a version of which was originally considered by the United Nations in 1947. Under this scheme, sovereign and independent Palestinian and Jewish states would exist side by side, divided roughly along pre-1967 borders. Citizens of both entities would be allowed to live and travel freely throughout the combined territory, but would vote only in their own national elections – not unlike the way an Italian, for example, can live and work anywhere in the EU while voting in Italy." Before getting into the details of what this plan actually means, or how such a Utopia might come about, it's worth marvelling at the strained parallel with the EU.

The first point to make is that the previous version (the "Partition Plan") failed in 1947 because it was so obviously biased. The Jewish state would have 56% of the Mandatory Territory, the Palestinians would have 43% (the remaining 1% being an internationally-administered Jerusalem and Bethlehem). At the time, the Palestinian (and non-Jewish minority) population was twice the size of the Jewish population: 1.2m versus 600k. Among other things, this would have meant that 45% of the Jewish state population would be Palestinian. Given everything that has happened since, notably the mass expulsions of the Nakba in the following year, it is reasonable to assume they would have been second class citizens and encouraged to depart. The Arab states at the UN clearly saw this as a land-grab and voted against it. The second point to make is that the "pre-1967" borders were not those of 1947 but of 1949, after the First Arab-Israeli War when Israel increased its share of the former Mandatory Territory to 78%, reducing the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza. What happened in 1967 was that Israel then took over those areas as well and set about steadily eroding them through settlements and military exclusion zones.

The latest iteration of the confederation plan, as explained by Dahlia Scheindlin, is a liberal attempt to craft a solution that avoids pluralism in any form. It is presented in contrast to two inferior alternatives: "the two solutions usually discussed by policymakers: the failed “two-state solution” framework of the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the “one-state reality”—the currently emerging de facto condition of a single state of Israeli citizens and oppressed Palestinian subjects." What is not to be considered is the single state solution - i.e. equal rights for Palestinians in a merged Israel and Palestine. This is because Zionism always trumps liberalism in liberal Zionism. The plan has obvious echoes of 1947 in its asymmetry. For example, "Palestinian refugees can attain Palestinian citizenship, along with the right of residency in Israel. Existing Israeli settlers will retain Israeli citizenship with residency rights in Palestine if they abide Palestinian laws and sovereignty, and most will not be expelled from where they currently reside." Compare "can" to "will". In other words, the illegal settlements in the West Bank will remain. The freedom of movement and residency is "to be implemented over time", which may mean never.

On the question of enfranchisement, the plan proposes that "Palestinians and Israelis will be able to vote in the national elections of their respective states and in local elections, in whichever state they reside." The problem this gives rise to is the tension it creates between the grant of residency and political influence. Palestinian refugees currently in Lebanon or Jordan aren't going to be granted residency in Israel, and indeed there is every reason to suspect that Israeli Arabs would become more vulnerable: "Palestinians who already have Israeli citizenship will retain it, with the option to have dual citizenship in Palestine." As the UK showed with Shamima Begum, dual citizenship is handy if you want to expel a nominal citizen. Will Palestinians in the West Bank be granted residency in West Jerusalem if they can then form a decisive voting bloc in local elections? The suggestion is that it would be the capital of both states but "structured, by institutional design, to represent both communities", which sounds like the power-sharing that has led to paralysis in Northern Ireland. As that parallel indicates, the likely outcome is for local government to become attenuated and more power reserved to the national authority - i.e. direct rule.

The confederation plan is a phantastic object meant to assuage the cognitive dissonance of Israeli progressives and their supporters in the West. At the heart of the Zionist project is the rejection of pluralism in favour of ethnic exclusivity, the original argument that split Jewish opinion between the Zionist nationalists and the socialist Bund. Liberal opinion in Israel survived for decades by denying this reality in favour of a mythos built on self-defence, cultural superiority and a self-conscious democracy. But this has been too difficult to maintain since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the failure of the Oslo process. Israeli society has become more intolerant towards dissent in its own ranks, with the political left redundant and religious conservatism on the rise. Liberal opinion is now firmly on the right of the political spectrum, more concerned with the image of liberalism than its active practice. This isn't exclusive to Israel: this drift to the right is visible in most countries. But Israel has a particularly acute case of it because it is engaged in systematic violence, from settler assaults in the West Bank (deplored but not restrained) to the invasion of Southern Lebanon.

The latter outrage is symbolically important because that country exists as an affront to Israel. As Ussama Makdisi puts it, "Israel’s expansion into Lebanon and apparent weaponization of Lebanon’s religious diversity ultimately underscores its own commitment to its prevailing ideology as a Jewish state committed to subjugating its regional environment: from the occupied Palestinian territories to the Syrian Golan Heights, and now to southern Lebanon. In that way, Lebanon is its antithesis: a state that reflects, however imperfectly, an indigenous pluralism." Makdisi notes that "Hezbollah does not resist Israel simply because it is a Shiite organization supported by Iran; it resists Israel primarily because Israel has repeatedly invaded, scorched and occupied Lebanese land, and because Israel uprooted and terrorized its community." The attempt to cast Hezbollah as simply an Iranian proxy is a conscious tactic to undermine Lebanon as a state and to suggest that the centuries-old Shiite presence in the south of the country is anomalous as much as it is is a threat to Israel. In other words, Lebanon's legitimacy as a state is called into question by virtue of it multi-ethnicity and its historic attempts at power-sharing. Israel has repeatedly undermined the latter over the years, not just for contingent tactical advantage but because it vehemently rejects power-sharing in principle.

This rejection of pluralism is increasingly visible in the diaspora as well. The current demand is that solidarity with the Jewish community against antisemitism must be exclusive, not qualified by appeals to a wider anti-racism and certainly not tainted by association with the idea of equal rights for Palestinians. This is a demand that some in the West have been happy to cynically exploit for domestic political gain, thereby denigrating the entirety of progressive causes in some cases. It might seem odd that this line has been pushed in particular by the Guardian, but that paper's commitment to liberal Zionism is arguably its most consistent value since the millennium. Leftists arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism fail to appreciate that for many Jews they are identical because they have come to identify Israel exclusively with Zionism. There is no domestic anti-Zionist opposition to speak of, outside of those with religious scruples, while diaspora anti-Zionists are routinely dismissed as self-hating Jews.

Israeli society is, as Omer Bartov noted, fearful and angry and lacking in empathy. It should come as no surprise that Jews in the UK are encouraged to exhibit the same traits, if only in sympathy with Israel. The refusal to accept that sincere anti-racists can deplore antisemitism as much as Islamophobia or the denial of Palestinian rights is necessary because to admit otherwise would be to accept the contention that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and that would be a betrayal of Israel or, to put it in Bartov's terms, what it has become. The demand for solidarity with the Jewish community therefore comes with strings attached. You cannot dilute it by extending your empathy to other communities. Your solidarity must be exclusive. For liberal newspapers steadily backtracking on their support for progressive causes, from trans rights to the NHS, this is a model exercise in virtue but also a wonderful opportunity to express their contempt for the left. "Where are those who are usually so vocal in their opposition to racism" asks Jonathan Freedland, a man who has had his fingers in his ears for decades.

Will AI Revive the Centre?

In parallel with the media fears that AI will bring about the collapse of Western civilisation, or at least the loss of jobs among journalists and commentators, there has been a countervailing, more hopeful narrative that AI may in fact save us from the horrors of social media, or at least its negative impact on journalists and commentators. The latest to make the link is John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times. The headline and lede provides a summary of his argument: "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite. Large language models elevate expert consensus and moderate views, in sharp contrast to social platforms". He doesn't offer any evidence for the claim that social media is populist, or even explain what that means in this context. The subject of political polarisation plays an important ideological role in the US, as the corollary of "bipartisanship", hence it is there we find the best evidence for historic trends. And what these show is that polarisation between Democrats and Republicans started to increase in the 1970s for well-known political reasons: the decline of the postwar social and economic consensus and the deliberate embrace of divisive anti-state rhetoric by the Republican Party. 

Social media may have helped amplify that polarisation over the last twenty years but it didn't cause it, so the idea that the technology is inherently polarising is unproven, while the claim that it is populist is simply a category error. In fact, there is evidence that social media increases exposure to different viewpoints: that structurally it tends towards diversity rather than the uniformity of the filter bubble, and that it is traditional media that has more consistently amplified political polarisation (i.e. the New York Times or Fox News). This makes sense when you consider that the consumer of social media has far more (potential) control over what they see and read, despite all the tales of malign algorithms, than the consumer of a tightly-edited newspaper or TV programme. Burn-Murdoch's second claim, that LLMs favour expert consensus and moderate views, assumes that these are related: that the one gives rise to the other. The infamous case of climate change, where the expert consensus has been undermined by traditional media airing the views of lobbyists and motivated sceptics in the service of "balance", suggests otherwise. 

The underlying belief of the hopeful narrative is that LLMs avoid the structural bias and partisan editorialising of traditional media because of their omnivorous nature and because they lack the status consciousness and condescension of human experts. In contrast, social media is problematic because it airs the uncurated opinions of millions, many of whom are idiots. In this worldview, LLMs embody the wisdom of crowds while social media embody the madness of crowds. The idea that media have these inherent epistemological qualities is evident in Burn-Murdoch's potted history, which is worth quoting at length: "Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying radical and anti-establishment voices. TikTok and the printing press arrived almost 600 years apart but share these characteristics. Others push the opposite way: radio and television had high barriers to entry, creating a monopoly for the voices and views of elites and experts."

The idea that the media changes whose voices are heard is crude technological determinism. The reality is that new technology is absorbed into existing power frameworks. There is feedback from the one to the other and thus change - newspapers gave rise to press barons, for example - but the power framework is dominant and adapts. This is evident in the fact that capitalists control most social media platforms and AI chatbots, an outcome that surprises no one. Equally, few people question whether AI must necessarily follow a capital-intensive development path. We worry about covering the Earth in data centres, but alternative paths are unthinkable, particularly those that would democratise decision-making (that would be populist). Burn-Murdoch's yoking of "democratising and polarising" should raise eyebrows, but we should also remember that "moderate" does not simply mean average. The word comes from the Latin for controlled. And it is control which commends AI to centrists rather than its tendency to "elevate expert consensus", just as the valorisation of such concepts as consensus, bipartisanship, civility and the like is ultimately about ensuring that political discourse is kept within strict bounds.

To return to Burn-Murdoch's history lesson, the moveable type printing press, when introduced in the mid-15th century, was a very expensive and initially rare piece of technology that required a team of craftsmen and labourers to operate. It was the IBM mainframe of its day. It was also quickly put under state control - e.g. the Stationers Company monopoly in England. The idea that ordinary people could access and make use of the press, in the way that they can with a social media platform like TikTok today, is absurd. Cheap prints (chapbooks) did not arrive in any great numbers till a century later and were still subject to censorship up until the Statute of Anne in 1710. And while there was a radical fringe, particularly in respect of religious nonconformism and political dissent during the 17th century, most chapbooks were little different to the popular press of later eras, their content dominated by tall tales, true crime and bawdiness.

While television transmission had high barriers to entry, radio did not. Amateur broadcasters ("radio hams") were a feature from the 1920s onwards, which was hard on the heels of broadcast radio's expansion following the introduction of vacuum tube receivers. It's certainly true that the bulk of broadcast spectrum, and the listening audience, was quickly taken over by large commercial firms and state corporations, like the BBC, but radio was always a more democratic medium than both television and print (for most of its history). Even today, despite the impact of the Internet and the decline of radio as a hobby, there are over 100,000 amateur broadcasting licences held in the UK. Understanding the history is important because it highlights how the existing power framework (the role of the state, the dominance of capital) absorbs the new media. But it also highlights how that media can be adopted and potentially repurposed by the people (democracy).

Burn-Murdoch's central claim is "that where social media’s inherent mechanisms push towards personalisation and fragmentation, LLMs are innately “converging” — their underlying dynamics push them towards objective reality". He sets out to prove this by comparing the responses of AI chatbots on political topics to the general population: "I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions."

The data he provides to justify this is questionable. The profile of the general (US) population employed in his charts above suggests that Americans are mostly to be found left of the political centre and predominantly at the left extreme (the Y-axis is responses). After some toing-and-froing with him on Blue Sky, it became evident that the source data he was using was designed to accentuate differences between Democrat and Republican voters and that the far left position was essentially that of Barack Obama. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that this converging is simply the product of an LLM-based AI chatbot lacking intentionality and simply tending slightly towards a median position, which he describes as "objective reality", despite an LLM being at one remove from reality. More interesting is to wonder why the chatbot doesn't converge to a greater degree. In other words, why don't we see a normal distribution (a bell-curve) in which the moderate position is predominant? That would be the actual "opposite" of the supposed polarising effect of social media. 

One explanation is that AI's ability to counter the anchoring and confirmation bias that users bring to it is undermined by its desire to be agreeable. There is a commercial rationale to this. People won't use a tool that is confrontational and repeatedly tells them that they're wrong, a problem well-known in areas such as public health policy where expertise is often viewed with suspicion (think vaccines or diet). As Dan Williams puts it, "Being human, experts are often biased, partisan, and simply annoying, and when they seek to “educate” the public, it can be perceived—and is sometimes intended—as condescending and rude. In contrast, LLMs deliver expert opinion without such status threats." This tendency towards sycophancy is well-known. Williams recognises the risks it entails, and the related risk that personalisation may simply reflect the idosyncracies of users, but ultimately he thinks "LLMs will produce much more reliable, expert-aligned information than most of these real-world alternatives [i.e. traditional media and information sources], even if sycophancy and personalisation introduce genuine biases."

I suspect the key for Burn-Murdoch and other political centrists is not that AI "elevates expert consensus and moderate views" but that it marginalises what he describes as extreme or fringe positions: "In addition, I found that while conspiratorial beliefs about topics including rigged elections and a link between vaccines and autism are over-represented among people who post to social media relative to the overall population, the opposite is true of AI chatbots, which almost never express agreement with these claims." But some of today's fringe opinions may turn out to be right. LLMs are expressions of conventional wisdom, but that means they will certainly be wrong about many things because expert opinion is currently wrong or incomplete. That he cites rightwing opinions on election rigging and vaccines is interesting, as not a few leftwing "conspiracy theories" have been proved right of late. In fact, many critiques from the political left have been categorised by centrists as conspiracy theories solely in order that they can be dismissed. Ironically, this has led to many centrist conspiracy theories, such as the prevalence of antisemitism on the left.

Noah Smith offers a typically more trenchant view when he claims that "the people who create LLMs have difficulty imparting their political bias to their creations", but also thinks that "Because of the way they’re trained, LLMs will be a force for homogenization and moderation of opinion", which is just another way of saying that they will promote an orthodoxy. As ever, centrism is deemed to be beyond ideology and therefore bias. It's just common sense, or Burn-Murdoch's "objective reality". Smith's claims are contradicted by Burn-Murdoch's data which show that the chatbots in his study do exhibit a bias consistent with the preferences of their owners (thus Grok is clearly more conservative while the others are more liberal) and that they maintain the (apparently) polarised distribution of the general population, despite "nudging" to the centre. In other words, the evidence actually points to the marginalisation of heterodox opinions more than it does to homogenisation.

The confidence displayed by these supporters of the hopeful narrative has to be read in the context of the last 18 years, since the financial crash of 2008. What that event, and the subsequent failure of austerity, showed was that the political centre was bereft of ideas. It was unable to satisfactorily explain why financialisation was always doomed or why neoliberalism would always tend towards greater inequality without conceding ground to the left, and it had no coherent response to the rise of rightwing anger and bigotry, falling between the stools of pandering ("legitimate concerns") and contempt ("deplorables"). The traditional arguments of centrism - of moderation, technocratic pragmatism and the "third way" - no longer work. The problem that centrist politicians face is not that they are poor communicators, a la Starmer, but that that they have no convincing story to tell, a la Macron or Harris. 

The belief that AI may help nudge the population towards more moderate views is a counsel of despair. The democratic ideal of a Habermasian discourse has given way to the subconscious sculpting of opinion through a technology dominated by the rich. This is little different to the ideological role played by earlier media, such as newspapers and TV, even if it takes a more subtle form. For all the talk of "expert consensus" and "moderate views", what matters is simply the marginalisation of views beyond the narrow bounds of centrism. The role of social media in this, or more accurately the caricature of social media as a cesspit of malign propaganda and wilful ignorance, is simply to provide a "worse" alternative that flatters AI by comparison. To that end, the myth of the filter bubble is joined by the myth that social media is inherently polarising and even "populist". AI won't revive the centre by stealth, and it won't marginalise the "extreme" left any more than traditional media have done, but it may well put a few journalists and commentators out of work.

War! What Is It Good For?

Corey Robin recently made the point that "Despite the differences in personnel between the Bush and the Trump administrations, the parallels between the war in Iraq and the war in Iran are pretty straightforward." Central to this similarity was the way in which "a small group of influencers—neocons in Bush’s case, the Israelis in Trump’s case—make the argument for war on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy." Fear at the advance of a rival has been a common cause of war since Thucydides spoke of the "growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta", while naked opportunism has never gone out of fashion. But the combination of the two is particularly characteristic of empires engaged in peripheral but asymmetric rivalry.

Once the nineteenth century "great powers" moved beyond the phase of unapologetic incursion and expansion, which globally came to an end with the Treaty of Versailles and the redistribution of German and Turkish possessions, and notwithstanding the temporary revival of territorial aggrandisement by Fascist Italy in Africa and Nazi Germany in Europe, colonial wars were essentially defensive: the "policing" operations and resistance to liberation movements that marked the interwar years and then the 30 years between the end of World War Two and the fall of Saigon. Intervention in Korea and Vietnam were both sold as necessary to prevent communist advance elsewhere (what became known as the Domino Theory), but also as wars that could be contained - an opportunity to strike a decisive blow without risking escalation - because the Soviet Union made it plain it wouldn't put its troops on the front-line in the first and China did likewise in the second.

One reason for presenting these conflicts as discrete reactions to local provocation was to avoid identifying the links and similarities, as Robin has done, other than the convenient link of a communist masterplan for world domination. In other words, to avoid admitting that these were essentially imperial wars of choice "over there" in which the trigger was not a communist plot (the liberation movements were typically nationalist, with communist parties coming to the fore as a result of a Cold War paradigm being imposed by the US), or some barbarian recidivism (the British stance in Kenya, for example), but usually an attempt by the hegemon (global or regional) to force the geopolitical map into a preferred shape or simply to remind the "natives" who's boss. The history of British and American dealings with Iran since the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh is a textbook example.

The claim that the Iran War has been a strategic defeat for the US and Israel should be treated with scepticism, and that's before considering that the war may well not be over as Israel continues to pound Lebanon and Iran continues to restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz in response. The claim is independent of the state of the conflict and stems from the belief that Trump and Netanyahu have failed in their aims and left Iran stronger. Up until literally the day before the ceasefire was announced, these same commentators were claiming that the US did not have any clear war aims, so in what sense has it failed to achieve them? If the actual aim was to (once more) trash a Middle Eastern country, pour encourager les autres, then arguably it's mission accomplished, once again.

Likewise, Israel got cover for its incursions into, and possible continued occupation of, Southern Lebanon. For all the noise made by the Israeli opposition, Netanyahu has not diverged from mainstream policy, whether couched in terms of "mowing the lawn" or Eretz Israel. Israel does not want regime change in Iran as this would jeopardise their own position vis-a-vis Lebanon and Gaza. Tehran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas has always been primarily opportunistic, but so too has Israel's demonisation of both groups (and willingness to covertly strengthen them at times) and the supposed malevolent influence of Iran. The fears of the Israeli opposition centre on the idea that Netanyahu is jeopardising the relationship with the US by alienating the national security establishment in Washington (always more important than Trump, who will be gone ere long). They're less bothered about alienating European leaders, which is why the latter have suddenly been emboldened to criticise Israel's bombardment of Lebanon (in the expectation that Trump will rein Netanyahu in).

The idea that Iran is stronger now because it controls the Strait and will exact a lucrative toll (supposedly worth 20% of its current GDP, according to analysts at J P Morgan) ignores that the waterway is evenly divided with Oman, which presumably isn't about to block its half of it or even charge a toll (as that would monumentally piss off its neighbours in the Gulf). And the idea that the world has suddenly woken up to the vulnerability of the Strait is preposterous. Not only did the 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal bring home the sensitivity of the global economy to the interruption of such strategic sea lanes, but the specific criticality of the Strait of Hormuz was already proven back in the 1980s during the Tanker War episode of the wider Iraq-Iran War. The progress of the war to date has shown that the Gulf states are capable of defending themselves against Iran, short of an unlikely seaborne invasion, and the US fleet will continue to patrol the Gulf, even if the chances of an amphibious landing on Iranian territory remain remote.

The reports of how this particular casus belli sausage was made, notably the New York Times article by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, place great emphasis on Netanyahu's ability to sway Trump. The idea that various people have a hold on the US President, whether through Putin's kompromat or Netanyahu's Svengali-like persuasive powers (an old antisemitic trope, it should be noted), ignores that his decison-making process is often peremptory and even arbitrary. As the article makes clear, Trump wasn't particularly interested in the idea of a popular uprising in Iran and regime change, which were based on optimistic claims by the Israelis that few in Washington thought credible. What attracted the US President was killing Iran's Supreme Leader (whose title must be a provocation to Trump's vanity) and destroying the Iranian military almost at a whim. In other words, it was the spectacle of hegemonic power unrestrained by morality - we can kill anyone we like and no one can stand up to us - that proved decisive.

Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, America's military doctrine has been not only to over-match all possible rivals but to use overwhelming force when conflict occurs. It is the spectacular use of that force that has driven strategy, rather than any attempt to bring about genuine regime change, let alone democratisation, hence the decision not to invade Iraq after the shock and awe of the First Gulf War, and the abject failure of "nation-building" after the Second Gulf War. As Jean Baudrillard noted in 1991, this isn't war but a masquerade: a performance of war that amounts to an atrocity. Since then, the US has conducted atrocities, in this sense of spectacular expressions of destruction and killing power, across the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and its approach has enabled similar atrocities by Israel (in Gaza and Lebanon) and the Gulf states (via proxies in Syria and now Sudan). The assassination of foreign leaders is at one with the bombing of schools and hospitals. The violence is an end in itself, not the means to any geopolitical reordering.