Linehan's Law

When Graham Linehan was detained by the police at Heathrow Airport recently it generated some predictable warnings about the chilling effect of hate-speech laws on the exercise of free speech, which was ironic given the amount of media coverage then given to his tweets and his defence of them. The event was also marked by his supporters' hyperbolic claims, such as JK Rowling describing the UK as a "totalitarian state." The fact you can make the claim without consequence suggests the opposite. Now that the dust has settled, it's worth going back to the incident and reviewing Linehan's reaction to the police officers: "You know what this country looks like from America? I am going to sue you into the ground, I am going to sue you into the ground. Fucking bastards, how dare you. I won’t fucking calm down." What stands out here is not just his sense of entitlement (I'm surprised he didn't say "Do you know who I am") but his insistence that what matters is how this looks from the US, where he has now apparently relocated permanently.

The significance of that perspective becomes apparent when we consider the reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the American rightwing provocateur. This led British politicians, including the Prime Minister, to decry political violence and offer condolences, despite Kirk being a nobody on this side of the pond. Insofar as Kirk had a British audience it would be a subset of the far right groups that coalesced on Saturday for the "Unite the Kingdom" march in London organised by Tommy Robinson and graced by a video-call from Elon Musk who called for the overthrow of the government. This predictably led to violence directed at both anti-Fascist counter-protestors and the police. For Robinson's supporters, violence is a form of expression. They believe that they have a God-given right to get bevvied-up and chuck bottles at other people. Again, what we're dealing with here is a monstrous sense of entitlement. The flags that have been such a feature of the summer in England aren't symbols of inclusive patriotism but of exclusive ownership: this is ours; keep out.

Linehan was in the UK to defend himself in court against a charge of harrassment arising from another set of abusive tweets he had sent. In a prepared statement, he described himself as a "journalist", presumably not because he's actually doing journalism in any normally-accepted sense of the word, but because he imagines that journalists have a special dispensation that allows them to circumvent the laws on hate-speech. When you look at British newspapers, you can understand why he might have thought that. Alison Pearson's crusade in the Daily Telegraph to have Lucy Connolly, a self-confessed criminal racist, recognised as a political prisoner is a recent example of how mainstream conservatism in Britain has now imported the American right's instrumental contempt for the law. Two-tier justice is real, but it's an aspiration rather than a criticism, and one still best captured in Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The undercurrent of a number of recent "political" cases has been the idea that the law should recognise and reinforce particular hierarchies, such as the superiority of biological women and the inferiority of trans women. This has even led to inverting class hierarchies. For example, in the Sandy Peggie case it is the traditionally subordinate nurse who is deemed to have superior rights to the doctor because of her biology, thus justifying her impertinence. This highlights that the right are instrumental in their defence of established hierarchies, just as they are selective in their observance of the law. The division between the far-right in the streets and in electoral politics reflects not simply a sociological gulf - former football hooligans versus former Conservative Party activists - but a strategic division of political labour based on the prioritisation of different hierarchies. On the street, the dominant hierarchy is race, with religion as a proxy. In the media, the dominant hierarchy is class. For all the focus on immigration, Reform's programme is fundamentally Thatcherite, and for all their vocal anti-racism, liberal commentators cannot hide their contempt for the street. 

The problem with this race/class dichotomy is not that it creates a fatal tension between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage - the far-right has always melded the street and the legislature - but that it is destabilising of mainstream conservatism, for which political violence must remain a monopoly of the state. Just as middle-aged "lads" imagine that being draped in an England flag means that rucking with the police is patriotism, so the traditional hierarchies that conservatives defend can quickly be compromised when other hierarchies come to the fore. The incident of an almost parodically articulate young middle class man being chased by working class louts, forced to seek refuge at a refugee processing centre, is an example of how events can spin out of control. Lucy Connolly saw asylum-seekers as inferior to herself and thus their lives of little value. Alison Pearson's framing of her as a politcial prisoner is an attempt not only to obscure this bigotry but to re-establish the authority of the upper middle class to define our politics for fear that rage against the "liberal elites" might wash over the rest of the establishment. You can punch down but not up.

No British government is going to curtail immigration, or commence deportations, to the extent that would satisfy the far-right. As a result, the cross-party strategy appears to be to indulge and hopefully contain racist protest. This goes beyond legtimising "concerns" to turning a blind eye to low-level violence and intimidation. Starmer's eventual condemnation of Saturday's aggro as a defence of the flag was telling. Holding a sign saying "I support Palestine Action" will get you arrested. Shouting "paedo" at anyone who supports refugees won't. The political issue of the moment is the collapse of the Conservative Party under pressure from both the far-right (which it vainly apes) and a Labour government keen to occupy the Tories' traditional centre-right space. This rightward shift has been enabled by the political cartel's refusal to accept the left as legitimate, which has evolved from the false charge of antisemitism to a more sweeping criticism of leftists as "groomers" and "traitors": language no longer limited to the fringe but regularly deployed by the press and increasingly directed at the most conservative Labour government in history. This is a direct import from the US where the bogies of "antifa" and the "radical left" are routinely conflated with establishment Democrats.

Predictably, British centrist commentators responding to the Kirk assassination have been quick to insist that political violence is a problem equally on the right and the left, despite the obvious disproportion between the two. Some have even gone so far as to devote the majority of their attention to the perceived incivility of the left, seeing it as the ultimate cause of rightwing violence, which dangerously echoes the position of Donald Trump and others in the US. What this reaction makes clear is that centrists are also motivated above all else by the preservation of traditional hierarchies: civility is not about your manners but about your authority. But just as the hierarchy of class can be undermined by the hierarchy of race, so the hierarchy of liberal virtue can be swept away in the mistaken belief that dumping the European Convention on Human Rights, in favour of an American-style protection of hitherto illegal forms of hate-speech, is an advance for all of us, rather than just a victory for a minority of angry, middle-aged bigots.

Identity Politics

The case for national ID cards is once more being promoted enthusiastically by the Labour Party and this time by the liberal press as well. And once more the arguments are the same: it will help fight crime, it will reduce benefit fraud, it will squeeze the black economy etc. The suggestion that ID cards will help solve the immigration "crisis" isn't exactly novel, but it is now the headline. What remains fascinating whenever the topic comes up is the complete absence of evidence (speculative assessments by the Tony Blair Institute notwithstanding) to support any of its claimed benefits. What makes it doubly fascinating is that the Windrush scandal has barely passed from memory: an occasion on which the discriminatory interpretation of citizenship led to a cavalier abuse of power and the unnecessary suffering of many people. Bizarrely, some supporters are even claiming that the scandal would have been avoided if everyone had had an ID card; an unprovable counterfactual that completely ignores the actual history of events and the political pressures that led to the performative cruelty of the "hostile environment".

The prominence of immigration has caused some rearrangement of the political forces around the debate. Where once Tory newspapers would have rehearsed both sides of the argument - authoritarian versus libertarian - their opposition to the idea is now muted because of the salience of immigration and their own insistence on the existential threat that it poses to the nation. The Observer, which was previously firmly in the libertarian camp (it ran a "Liberty watch" campaign during the New Labour years), looks like it will provide the forum for the latest debate, though its editorial view, as it shifts further right, is now predictably blithe about the risks. Kenan Malik, for the libertarians, recently outlined the danger of dividing sheep from goats: "Mistreating and abusing citizens is not morally more reprehensible than mistreating and abusing those deemed “illegal”. What it reveals, though, is that if we turn a blind eye to such treatment on the grounds that “it’s only illegals being treated this way”, it will not remain “only illegals”. And once such forms of policing become acceptable, they can easily be transposed to dealing with other groups deemed a social menace, such as strikers or protesters." 

In contrast, Will Hutton has nailed his flag firmly to the authoritarian mast: "Immigration above any other issue fuels populism. Part of the fightback is to douse these flames – say, by introducing universal ID cards so we know who is here, building special purpose centres to house illegal migrants, and processing claims and necessary deportations fast and visibly. This should never be presented as a concession to implicit racism. Rather, it is to keep rules and be fair." While Malik is fairly indirect in his approach, leaving it to the reader to note the implicit mission creep of any ID scheme, Hutton is bracingly direct in his solutionism, which tells something about the respective confidence of the two camps but also about the uncertainty that besets liberals who have hitherto warned us of the danger of identity politics. A national ID scheme appears to flatten the population into a single mass, but it is also identity politics writ large: an extreme form of imagined community. The problem is that while the geographical borders of the country are clear, its demographic limits are not.

We know from the Windrush case that there isn't a clear, dividing line between citizen and non-citizen - between "them" and "us" - so all the talk of rules fairly applied is just hot air. What matters is the political direction and the operational practices of the Home Office. But what Hutton's contribution does make clear is that the introduction of ID cards is the necessary precursor for the mass deportation of people who have been in the country for years. His blunt advocacy is wrapped up in the usual panegyric to Enlightenment values, but it's one that does serious injury to history. Consider this: "The BBC, for example, was established as a public body to use the new broadcast media to disseminate impartial information better to inform and educate British citizens." The corporation was established as a commercial company in 1922, under licence by the GPO, by a cartel of radio manufacturers to provide "orderly management" of the radio spectrum and boost the sale of radio sets. It quickly acquired a political colouring when the establishment realised the benefit in terms of controlling public opinion, notably during the General Strike of 1926. In 1927 it was reconsituted as a public corporation and informal government censor. These facts are well known.

You might wonder why Hutton has dragged the BBC into the debate. The intention is to convince us that a British ID card scheme would be as reassuring as "Auntie". It appears he hasn't been watching BBC TV or listening to the radio of late. If the Tory press sets the agenda for the national broadcaster, don't be surprised if it sets the policy of the Home Office. According to Hutton, "The Overton window of what is acceptable has been moved so far to the right by the populist upsurge." But this confuses cause and effect. It is the political centre - supposedly the repository of Enlightenment values - that has pushed politics to the right since 1980, long before any "populist upsurge". Inevitably, he must drag in the newspaper's obligatory criticism of social media: "But just as the Enlightenment was propelled by a quest for truth and fact, today’s anti-Enlightenment populists are fuelled by social media and disinformation. ... Reform could never have climbed so high, so fast, without a credulous public deluded into thinking social media carries truths that mainstream politicians and media conspire to disguise."

The Enlightenment exploited the novel media of the day to advance its ideas: The Marriage of Figaro being a famous example. Even more pertinent to Hutton's claim was the rise of the scabrous anti-establishment pamphlets that did so much to stoke the French Revolution. Though there is a long tradition of liberals decrying 1789 as the wrong turn that would lead to the gulags, there is no doubt about the central role that Enlightenment ideas had in its gestation and development. The area where Hutton finds common cause with Malik is in the criticism of identity politics: "Have liberals made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Tolerance has mutated into advocacy of minority rights so fierce that the majority feel actively menaced. The charge of being “woke” has some legitimacy." At this point Hutton could be writing for the Sunday Times or Sunday Telegraph. What he cannot apparently see, while Malik shifts uneasily in his seat, is that there is no "majority" defined by their exclusion from minority rights. To suggest otherwise is to drift perilously close to the kind of politics that sees road signs in Welsh or Gaelic, or the mere existence of trans men and women, as an affront.

In the liberal lexicon, populism has always been a synonym for democracy, but in offering ID cards as a counter to it Hutton is reducing it to mere bigotry: that "implicit racism". But even the academics who have made a career out of analysing the subject agree that the primary fuel is economic stress, hence the current wave of populism can be traced to 2008 and its reverberations, notably austerity. It is a common observation that anxiety over immigration is simple displacement, hence it fluctuates in response to media prominence and is often highest in areas with the fewest immigrants. Other factors that have stoked populism include the cartelisation of politics and its related ideological convergence and corruption. Immigration may be seized upon as an issue, but it is not a significant explanatory factor. After all, the great wave of postwar immigration did not lead to more than a few isolated and evanescent cases of populist political advance, and many of those, e.g. Poujadism, had very clear economic roots.

Hutton believes that we, that nebulous "majority", should "go on the front foot to argue for Enlightenment principles, from vaccination to the environment. The entire anti-Enlightenment, anti-truth, disinformation biases of social media must be contested. The success of the Online Safety Act in dramatically lowering harmful content should be built on. Take on the tech giants. Insist information on their platforms is mediated, that anonymity is impossible and that standards of fact in the analogue world are reproduced in the digital world. Even consider launching public social media platforms, reproducing the same thinking 100 years later that justified the BBC." As with his potted history of the Corporation, this is misleading. The Online Safety Act has not dramatically lowered harmful content. It has simply led to the increased use of VPNs. Hutton's suggestion that all online content be mediated and that there be no anonymity is obviously absurd, but making such unrealistic demands is simply seasoning for the less palatable dish that he offers, namely a national ID card that would undermine the traditional liberties that were central to the British conception of the Enlightenment.

Liberal Preferences

Chris Dillow, building on a post by David Allen Green, notes that UK politics is in crisis because "destabilizing forces have strengthened and stabilizing ones have weakened." What he means by this is that the tendency to rein in the extremes is no longer instinctive among the main parties (obviously stamping on herbivorous lefties is another matter). He gives a good example in the relative treatment of Enoch Powell after his Rivers of Blood speech (sacked by party leader Ted Heath) and Robert Jenrick after thoughtlessly hobnobbing with Fascist activists (not a hint of disciplinary action from Kemi Badenoch). Instead of negative feedback, we get positive feedback as bigotry is mainstreamed, urban myths are cast as legitimate concerns, and someone who incited racial hatred and advocated burning people to death is hailed as a political prisoner. Elsewhere, economic illiteracy is promoted by both politicians and the media because they believe the electorate is ignorant and can only be appealed to through crass simplifications such as the nation's "maxed-out credit card".

As Chris explains, "All I'm doing here is spelling out a few mechanisms in support of David Allen Green's recent attack on the complacent idea that 'unpleasant situations will resolve themselves' and that balance will be restored. For this to happen, there must be negative, stabilizing, feedback mechanisms. But our political-media class has weakened these, preferring to pander to racism. I'm not surprised that so many in this class choose barbarism over socialism. What is surprising is that they choose barbarism even over liberal democracy." So why do they make that latter choice? One place to seek an answer is the house journal of British liberalism, The Guardian. I would argue that its most typical columnist is John Harris, who can be characterised as a liberal pessimist in that he regularly chides "progressives" for not doing enough to resist racism or improve public services, but whose only solution is vapid symbolism and otherwise cultivating your garden. There are others who are more optimistic (Polly Toynbee) and more pessimistic (Rafael Behr), but Harris is representative because he tends to sway between those poles, like a depressed ruminant who spots a buttercup.

He certainly wasn't an advocate of Labour's shift to a more genuinely progressive politics under Jeremy Corbyn, though his attempts to parse the upswell of enthusiasm that gave rise to it between 2015 and 2019 are interesting precisely because of his need to welcome that progressive intent while dismissing the left as a viable vehicle for it. Thus during the leadership contest in 2015 he welcomed that Corbyn offered clarity, but by the time the 2017 general election came into view, he was dismissing a Corbyn-led Labour Party as deeply irrelevant. Immediately after the unexpectedly positive result for Labour, Corbyn was apparently chiming with the times. By 2019 Harris was fully on board with the hunt for antisemites, insisting that Labour's only hope was to ditch its fringe views and toxic culture, and even adopt his favoured panacea of localism for good measure (nothing fringe about that). Viewed rapidly like a flip book, what we see is a liberal, keen to avoid the charge of being an out-of-touch curmudgeon, frightened by the prospect of a government promising mild social democracy.

In his latest contribution to the discourse, Harris claims that while the far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum-seekers have been damp squibs, progressive forces are "so dumbfounded and confused by what is happening that they seem almost completely unable to respond". What he fails to acknowledge is that the left is not silent, it is merely marginalised by the media (the larger counter-demonstrations have been barely reported, and when they do appear in the Guardian it's as likely to be an opportunity for tone-policing). The real culprit here is the Labour government, which has provided rhetorical cover for street-level racism while simultaneously curtailing the rights of protest by anti-racists. And it is the media that explains how protests with minimal support on the street beyond the old Fascist right can dominate politics. Indeed, if you're looking for a "new right" you should start with the increasing derangement of newspaper columnists like Allison Pearson and Melanie Phillips, not with the latest neo-Nazi groupuscule to emerge from under a rock.

Harris's prescription in the face of an increasingly Fascist press, and a complacently centrist TV insisting on impartiality between truth and lies, is nostalgia, and specifically the symbolic power of Rock Against Racism. What he doesn't appreciate is that RAR and the Anti-Nazi League reflected a wider revolt against the political establishment in the late-70s and early-80s that notably roiled the Labour Party. What Harris wants is the free concerts, not Tony Benn bidding for the Deputy Leadership or Ken Livingstone defying the Thatcher government. His claim that "The prominence of Palestine flags at this year’s festivals proves that music’s radical edges have not been completely blunted" is an admission that he sees this radicalism (of the music note, not the people) as purely symbolic, otherwise he might wonder whether there was any connection between opposing genocidal racism abroad and defending migrants at home.

Chris Dillow's model of stablisation through negative feedback depends on authority. When Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell he not only had the authority of his position as Conservative Party Leader, he was also the representative of an establishment that still commanded popular respect, despite the downward trend since the Suez crisis, not least because of its eventual resistance to Nazism (Heath himself had opposed appeasement in the 1930s). The establishment has lost a lot more respect since the 1980s, due to the secular failure of its preferred economic policies, the decay of the public realm, and because of specific scandals of trust, from Iraq to MPs' expenses. As the establishment's man, Keir Starmer has clearly failed in his goal of restoring the authority and gravitas of government after a decade and a half of disastrous Tory rule. Yet his political strategy, to occupy the centre-right of politics and marginalise both the far-right and the left, remains unchanged, largely because the Conservative Party has fallen apart in the face of Reform's rise, leaving the ground clear to Labour. He has the field, but the battle may already be lost.

Starmer's problem is that his centre-right offer acts as positive feedback to Reform, which encourages right-leaning voters to go for the full-fat version, while it alienates both centrists and soi disant progressives like John Harris because it fails to reflect their self-image as rational and virtuous. Who can provide the negative feedback to arrest the rightward drift of politics in such an environment? Harris may posture about that drift, but he has played his own part in it. Consider this classic of the legitimate concerns genre from a couple of weeks ago: "Just to be clear, the grim scenes that have materialised at those hotels are the signs not just of far-right activism and provocation, but broken policy. No one should underestimate how much the grooming gangs scandal has given many people a deep fear about the safety of women and girls, not least in places that have long felt ignored and neglected". The roots of the grooming scandal lay in the habitual contempt shown by the police and social services to working-class girls, not in the shortcomings of asylum policy.

The problem then is that liberals are not defending liberal democracy and are happy to accept the right's framing of social ills. One way of explaining this is to note that centrists, the largest component of the British politico-media class, aren't actually liberals, neither in the broader sense of defenders of civil liberties against authoritarianism, nor in the narrower sense of advocates of free markets (their's is a capitalism of managed markets and corporate graft). That broader sense is still prevalent in British society, but it has no real political articulation at present, and its more vigorous proponents regularly find themselves marginalised as extremists by the media and even criminalised by the state. At this point we have to ask if the UK is actually a liberal democracy in any meaningful sense. The classic definitions of the term usually focus on the mechanics: fair elections, an independent judiciary, the separation of powers etc. But the acid test is arguably equal protection under the law. This is, for example, why Israel cannot be considered a liberal democracy. 

In the UK we have not gone so far as to pass a basic law that guarantees superior rights for certain groups, and thus inferior rights for others, but that may well be on the cards should Reform get into government and withdraw us from the European Convention on Human Rights (both the government and media are already assessing Farage's mass-deportation promise in terms of achieavability rather than morality or civil rights). But this won't be a sudden lurch away from liberal democracy. The current government's unwillingness to secure the rights of trans people, and its proscription of Palestine Action on the flimsiest of pretexts, are clear indicators of the direction of travel. And before that, we can see a common thread of contempt for those who resist the politico-media consensus running backwards through the Labour antisemitism nonsense, via Brexit and the dismissal of the Iraq War protests, all the way to Thatcherism. British centrists chose barbarism over liberal democracy a long time ago.

A Taxing Issue

The United Kingdom is richer today than it has ever been, both in the material sense of stuff (the conversion of natural resources into useful things) and in the accounting sense of the ratio of measurable wealth to GDP. It is estimated that household wealth is now six times GDP, having risen from four times before the millennium. There has been a clear trend since 1980 of rising household wealth, to a large extent property and to a lesser extent financial assets (shares, savings etc). This rise has mainly been passive - i.e. the result of rising property and asset prices rather than any increase in direct productivity or trade. Average household density is actually in decline. Together with rising rents and mortgage costs, this means that "housing services" now cost much more, even allowing for inflation. Meanwhile, houses and flats are exportable only in the sense that a foreigner can buy one, but this does not lead to the production of more houses over-and-above domestic demand, because those properties are typically recirculated into the rental market. 

It is generally accepted among economists that we should tax wealth more than income, essentially because the one is potentially inactive (if not invested in productive use) while the other is invariably active (you must be producing value to command a wage). In other words, wealth may be a wasted opportunity and tax is a way of incentivising its productive use. The problem arises because wealth is also a way of building financial reserves for future use, whether in the form of anticipated capital projects or a fund for future expenditure. This is why we give tax-breaks for certain types of saving as well as for investment. The problem that bedevils the discussion of the taxation of property is the extent to which it represents a simple store of value, like gold, versus a savings account. In other words, is your house (in whole or in part) a luxury good or is it your pension? 

The foundation of popular neoliberalism has been the financialisation of both domestic property and precautionary savings. The first has meant treating your home as an investment in the hope of rising property values, which has inexorably led to a political consensus that has constrained housebuilding while loudly claiming to be in favour of more homes. The second has meant excising the role of the state in providing collective insurance, instead relying on the individual negotiating with impersonal markets, which at the margin leads to an appetite for high-risk/high-reward shortcuts such as crypto. The two intersect in the idea that your house - or your other house if you're a buy-to-let landlord - is also your pension, though one of the things declining household density tells us is that many older couples, notably those who secured defined benefits pensions before the shutters came down in the 1990s, are in no hurry to liquidate their prime asset and downsize.

Despite this massive increase in the nation's wealth, we are repeatedly told that the current Chancellor of the Exchequer is "desperate to find money". Because of the government's promise not to increase income tax (perhaps the only promise it will keep over the life of the parliament), attention has turned to the taxation of wealth, first through inheritance and now through property. The candidate mechanisms being discussed include the replacement of Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) with an annual levy proportionate to value and the extension of capital gains tax (CGT) to the sale of higher value properties. Inevitably, there is also talk of finally fixing council tax, whether by folding it into the annual levy or simply revaluing the existing property bands to address the current inequities. Many of these ideas have emerged from the centre-right of the political spectrum where there is clearly anxiety that without reform more radical measures may become popular (a land value tax, equalising CGT with income tax etc). But unpicking the Thatcherite dispensation takes delicacy, because of the intersection of property and savings.

Tim Leunig of the think-tank Onward is one of the leading lights of this tendency, proposing a "horizontal split" between local and central government tax receipts. The former would be funded by a local tax based on property values up to a maximum of £500,000 - i.e. a house worth £1 million would be assessed for tax as £0.5 million. Owners (not residents) of properties over that value would additionally pay a national annual levy based on the most recent sale price, the receipts of which would go to central government. This would be immediately advantageous to owners of high-value properties in terms of a lower local tax. In theory, that gain is more that wiped out by the national tax, but that depends on when the property was last sold, leading Leunig to propose a further supplement to balance the tax burden in the case of properties not sold (e.g. repeatedly inherited). At this point it becomes obvious that there are too many potential loopholes, and too much reliance on adjustment by HMRC, which creates opportunities for the tax advisors of the wealthy to exploit.

Leaving aside its chances of adoption, the notable feature of Leunig's scheme is its crude division of society by wealth into two classes. His attempt to justify this by splitting the receipts between local and central government is hardly convincing given that the latter still has to fund the former through grants: no local authority is wholly self-financing. The Thatcherite dream of full accountability to local taxpayers, which drove the Poll Tax, was always in tension with the desire to emasculate ideologically hostile councils through Whitehall diktat. The fundamental problem for our society remains the anticipated decline of income tax receipts as a share of government revenue due to demographic change: more elderly and fewer working-age people in the population. The secular growth in wealth, and the potential to tax it, offers the only real solution to address this trend as further taxes on consumption (e.g. VAT, fuel duty etc.) would be inflationary and hugely unpopular. Worrying about the division of receipts between local and central government is a distraction.

Others have taken a more overtly divisive tack. For example, Phillip Inman in the Guardian sees it in generational terms as the boomers versus the rest. That many boomers are not wealthy, while some millennials are (often due to inheritance), does not lead him to qualify the explicit threat: "If boomers cannot bring themselves to act collectively and patriotically for the greater good, as seems unlikely for many reasons, then it will be legitimate for the government to pursue their lottery winnings with higher property and pension taxes." This is unhelpful because it personalises the issue of wealth ("lottery winners"), though it should be said that Inman's critics fall into the same trap in talking about virtue. The reality is that boomers were simply those in residence when the financialisation of property and pensions took off: some benefited, some didn't. That unearned wealth will now pass down the generations. To address that inequity means addressing the wealth, not blaming the individual.

Wealth can be divided into two classes: land and money. The former is easy to tax because it is immobile and relatively straightforward to value. The latter takes two forms: accumulated money (e.g. a bank deposit) and transacted money (e.g. a payment or a receipt). Accumulated money is difficult to tax because it can be hidden or offshored. Transacted money is relatively easy to tax at the point of the transaction, hence our reliance on VAT, PAYE, CGT, SDLT etc. The problem with this is not the levying of tax but the rates chosen. For example, we levy higher rates on earned income (income tax) than we do on unearned income (CGT or dividends). The rationale for this differential is to avoid discouraging transactions, but that makes little sense in the real world. The reason we don't put VAT on food is not because we think doing so would lead to everyone dieting. Likewise, investors who rely on capital gains to provide an income aren't going to sell up and take jobs instead. After all, who would they sell to?

The obvious solutions to the Chancellor's problem are a land value tax (LVT) and the extension of income tax to all unearned income, e.g. capital gains, dividends and inheritance. The first would give us a more efficient tax system: receipts would be predictable (SDLT is not); avoidance minimal (assuming the government doesn't grant exemptions); and the tax itself progressive (on the reasonable assumption that there is a correlation between land ownership and wealth). The second would also have the advantage of simplicity; would discourage avoidance (e.g. individuals masquerading as a company to treat wages as a dividend); and would also be progressive (the people who make capital gains and earn dividends tend to be wealthier). Neither has any realistic chance of being adopted, precisely because they would shift more of the burden of tax onto the truly wealthy. The most realistic outcome at present remains a revaluation of council tax as this would spread the pain across most of society. We remain trapped in Thatcher's legacy, despite the obvious failures of popular neoliberalism.

Conservative Pessimism

In last Monday's Guardian you could read both John Harris describing his dismay at the right's "ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown" and Nesrine Malik noting that the call for the deportation of immigrants has become mainstream. Harris inevitably felt the need to drag in the left as a pointless comparison: "Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'." Leaving aside the crude strawman, not to mention the plentiful evidence that capitalism is trashing the planet, the point to note here is Harris's belief that this is a new development on the right, with the none-too subtle hint that the left remains trapped in the past so we shouldn't look for any answers there.

Similarly, the normally acute Malik falls into the trap of assuming that the calls for mass deportation are novel. She is correct that this language has been amplified by politicians in recent years, notably by Keir Starmer, but she is mistaken in claiming that "the last time a member of a political party even hinted at any sort of deportation policy was in the late 00s, when British National party leader Nick Griffin ... stated that he would 'encourage' voluntary repatriation of legal migrants and 'those of foreign descent to return to their lands of ethnic origin'." There been plenty of hints in the interevening period. After all, what do you imagine most people think when they hear the phrase "one in, one out"? And repatriation was never limited to the neo-Nazis, as Enoch Powell's many supporters proved. In fact, both ideas - that society is coming apart at the seams and that immigrants should be "sent back" - have been common among Tories since the 1960s when the Monday Club was founded. The views may not have been considered respectable by many Conservative grandees, but they were common among the rank and file. Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 owed much to both: the belief that the country was falling apart during the "Winter of Discontent" and the perception that immigration left many people feeling, as she put it, "swamped".

Going further back, in 1945 Winston Churchill infamously predicted that a Labour victory under Clement Attlee would lead to the creation of a British Gestapo. This wasn't a lunatic exaggeration fuelled by too much champagne but simply the continuation of pre-war practice. Between 1919 and 1924 the Conservative Party defined itself primarily around the anti-Bolshevik "Red Scare", culminating in the notorious Zinoviev letter, a forgery published by the Daily Mail to (successfully) damage Labour's chances in the general election. The mainstream right have always been hysterical when out of power, or facing that prospect, and the form this takes is invariably hyperbolic warnings about threats to our way of life emanating from a coalition of foreigners, traitors and idiot do-gooders. In its contemporary guise, Bolsheviks and sandal-wearing vegetarians have been replaced by rapacious asylum-seekers and trans rights activists. There's nothing novel in anything that either Nigel Farage or Robert Jenrick has said lately, though there is an important difference in their manner of delivery.

Pessimism is the natural tenor of conservative thought. The roots of the right's philosophy lie in the Hobbesian vision of a war of all against all, not in Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott's eulogisation of the small platoons and the familiar. Burke was actually a stinging critic of the Ancien Regime, along with Joseph de Maistre, precisely because he feared it lacked the rectitude and courage to defeat revolution from below. It is fear that is central to conservatism, and that fear routinely manifests as a belief that the country is going to the dogs and that we are being invaded by grasping foreigners. In this context it's worth noting that revolution from above, in the sense of the elite restoration of tradition in the face of such threats, is not only countenanced but seen as exemplary: hence the eulogisation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which apparently saved the country from absolute monarchy, Catholicism and foreign fashions. 

In contrast, the common thread that runs through the political philosophy of the broad left, from incremental liberals to ecstatic insurrectionaries, is optimism: the belief that things can get better and that politics can effect change. Even John Harris's crude caricature of the Marxist left gets this right: the certainty that there will be another crisis and thus another chance for progress. One way of thinking about Labour's current troubles is that despite expelling most of the left, the PLP remains divided between the optimists - e.g. Blairites insisting that AI will solve all our problems - and the pessimists - the authoritarians insisting that if we don't stamp down hard on little old ladies with cardboard signs Vladimir Putin will be strolling up the Mall tomorrow. Starmer is clearly in the latter camp. His fundamental mistake is the failure to understand that the "conservative" voters he is trying to attract are motivated by optimism as much as pessimism, hence the talk of hard choices and the need for crackdowns has failed to win them over.

Michael Oakeshott's famous quote reflects the instinctive pessimism of the Tory elite: "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." But success in democratic politics requires a mix of optimism and pessimism. Since 2016, voters in Britain have, perhaps paradoxically, tended towards optimism: displaying an appetite for the unknown and untried that led first to Jeremy Corbyn's ascent and then to Boris Johnson's victory in 2019. While Nigel Farage may currently lay on the horror stories of national decline with a trowel, it is his cheerful optimism that garners support for the mystery that is Reform, and it is Starmer's ingrained pessimism that means Labour's hopes of attracting conservative voters, or even retaining left-leaning ones, will likely continue to be frustrated.