Of Fictions and Factions

The media response to Andy Burnham's first week as Prime Minister has been both positive and sniffy. His communication skills have drawn praise, though doing a better job than Keir Starmer in this regard is just walking and chewing gum at the same time, to coin a phrase. His early announcements around the cost-of-living have been eye-catching but also small-beer in the grand fiscal scheme of things, while his willingness to start disappointing the left over defence spending and support for America's wars has brought a warm glow of contentment to Atlanticists everywhere. The Financial Times delivered a typical school report: "But so far, the parts of Burnhamonomics that are bold are not concrete, and those that are concrete are not bold." Meanwhile, the Grand Panjandrum of centrist opinion, Andrew Rawnsley, was prepared to be indulgent: "If the aim was to get off to a positive start, before pivoting away from sticking plasters and towards fixing the underlying problems, then perhaps some sketchy short-termist policies with sketchy funding is a price worth paying."

The most interesting response has focused on the reaction of those members of the Starmer cabinet who were promptly relieved of their duties on Monday. By Tuesday, Peter Walker in the Guardian reported that "Allies of Keir Starmer have questioned Andy Burnham’s pledge to end factional infighting after he removed or demoted more than half of the outgoing prime minister’s cabinet in his first reshuffle." The jarring detail here is the suggestion that Starmer had allies, as opposed to the contingent support of career opportunists. The man was promoted as a clean-skin who could gull the membership, but that just made him a willing (if ignorant) tool, not the intellectual pole around which a party tendency would coalesce. By Wednesday, this freshly-conjured grouping was being described by an unnamed Labour MP in a Politics Home report as "an incredibly powerful phalanx of skilled political operators who intimately know the government’s fiscal position", which sounded both delusional and threatening

Thursday was relatively quiet on the faction fabrication front but by Friday the Guardian had decided to go all in on the call-to-arms. According to Kiran Stacey, "Keir Starmer’s leaving party had been planned for some time. But in years to come it might be seen as the birth of a new Labour movement." By Sunday, Andrew Rawnsley had got with the programme: "Having previously said that he wanted to “move beyond” the “infighting” and “factionalism” that has “bedevilled us”, he sacked 11 cabinet ministers, many of whose common offence was declining to call for Sir Keir to quit. He then carried out a purge of Starmer loyalists in the junior ministerial ranks." Stacey's explanation for this sudden emergence was not the petulance and sense of entitlement of the likes of Darren Jones and Steve Reed but Starmer's own curious path to power: "One of Starmer’s biggest problems in government was that he did not have an identifiable faction of people who were willing to defend him at all costs – a symptom of both his late entry into politics and of his relative lack of ideology."

Given the ruthless purge conducted against the left of the party, the idea that Starmer lacked ideology or factional muscle is ridiculous, and that's before you consider his record in office, from unnecessarily persisting with austerity to backing Israel's "right" to murder civilians. For the last two years you would struggle to find anyone who would willingly identify as a "Starmerite", but now we are asked to believe that they are a disciplined army that could threaten a government majority of 158. The political press have a long tradition of inventing Labour factions, usually in order to isolate the socialist left - most notably the ever-useful and mutable "soft left", the Play-Doh of social democratic aspiration - but they've excelled themselves in conjuring a "movement" around the cypher of Keir Starmer and the totem of Rachel Reeves' fiscal rules. Stacey eventually concedes that this novel faction may only be the result of musical chairs: "But many of those whom Burnham sacked or demoted after entering office did have one thing in common: they were close to the former prime minister and had not called for him to resign."

Since Burnham won the Makerfield byelection, there has been a noticeable shift in the Guardian's use of the term "factionalism". During the Starmer era, it was rarely mentioned in the context of the expulsion of the left, despite that being a textbook factional operation that many participants were only to happy to brag about publicly, for example in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's tell-all book Get In. It is axiomatic to centrists that they are not factional, with the implications of blind loyalty and a refusal to face facts, while their critics are. Unsurprisingly, Rafael Behr now compares those disappointed opportunists with the "radical left", essentially to dismiss them as not serious people: "Labour’s radical left is always on a hair trigger, poised to denounce compromise as betrayal of socialist principle. Now there is also a small but aggrieved band of Starmer loyalists in exile poised to highlight (or relish) missteps and vulnerabilities." It's bad enough to lose your cabinet job, but to be expelled from the ranks of the sensible must really hurt.

The whining of Starmer's supposed "allies" is a return to the faux-factionalism of Blair/Brown, in which ideological congruity is obscured by personal hatred. The attempt to conjure the soft left as part of Ed Miliband's threat to market stability was shortlived, but you can expect that notional faction to reappear when the need once more arises. Andy Burnham was always going to get rid of the higher profile Starmer appointees to the cabinet, if only to emphasise that he was a new broom, so I don't think too much can be read into Reeves, Lammy, Reed, Kyle, Kendall, Hermer et al getting the elbow. None particularly distinguished themselves in office. Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood have offended many, at either end of the ideological spectrum, but they've also proved they can get stuff done, and Labour badly need tangible results by 2029. The same rationale explains why John Healey is now the latest Iron Chancellor: butter rations will be halved but we will definitely have more guns.

Insofar as the reshuffle advanced one faction over another, it was in the geographical rather than the ideological sense, with a noticeable shift to more Northern MPs in cabinet and particularly those from the North West. This is not just a symbolic attempt to push the narrative of devolution, reinforced by the launch of "Number 10 North" this week, but a reflection that Starmer was very reliant on a London core for his support, both in terms of MPs, party apparatchiks and the media. Whether this will impart a genuinely different flavour to the government is moot. It's notable that none of the MPs aligned with the Mainstream grouping, set up to counter the drift to the right under Starmer, got a sniff at a junior ministerial post. So far, Burnham does not look likely to diverge from the post-Thatcher consensus despite his early talk of an end to Neoliberalism and regrets over privatisation. A tilt towards Ordoliberalism, which historically valued devolution, seems more likely, which means there will be little challenge to property rights and little that is recognisably socialist.

In this context, the creation of factions serves to substitute court politics for the clash of interests that might have a more profound, and therefore destabilising, impact on policy. Though there have been the usual "warnings" from union leaders directed at Number 10, the discourse has barely featured the concerns of organised labour (outside of oil and gas jobs) any more than the particular concerns of civil society organisations. As usual, we've heard more from think-tanks than protest groups. Of course this is manna from heaven for political journalists and commentators, for whom ideology is a dirty word. Of the current political caucuses at Westminster, Blue Labour and the Labour Growth Group are likely to be absorbed into the main body of Burnham's support, while the soft left will remain quiescent. This leaves the for/against dichotomy familiar from the New Labour years but with those resentful of Burnham lacking any obvious champion, leading to the current absurdity of the Starmerite resistance. 

Looking back over the last 16 years, the PLP lacked the talent to succeed Blair and Brown, hence the Miliband(s) debacle and the runaway success of Corbyn. The result of that was the decision to import a leader from outside Westminster: first the unknown Starmer conning the membership; and then a recycled Burnham avoiding the need for an election through PLP discipline. What few are prepared to acknowledge is that this underlying dearth of talent, as much as the shenanigans, reflects the slow death of the Labour Party as an organic product of civil society, a process accelerated by the purge of the left. Burnham's municipalism (a more accurate label than Manchesterism) is a desperate attempt to reconnect with society through revitalised local government, even as it requires central government to mandate capped bus fares. The acid test will be council housebuilding. She wasn't central to the week's discourse, beyond ruling out rent controls, but the success of this government will probably now rest on the shoulders of Angela Rayner, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. She will no doubt shortly be awarded her own faction.

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 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 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.

Hate and (Class) War

Politicians are usually assessed by the public in two ways: what they have done and what they stand for. The two are not necessarily in harmony. Many people objected to Margaret Thatcher's monetarist policies and disregard for industry in the early 1980s, leading to very poor opinion poll ratings at the time, but voted for her and the Conservatives in 1983 because of what they believed she (very personally) stood for following the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands. More recently, the public came to despise Tony Blair because of what they felt he stood for - duplicity, arrogance, contempt towards the weak - despite agreeing with many (though not all) of his policies on the NHS, education and criminal justice. In some cases, a politician's image - i.e. their symbolism - can outweigh their record, hence Kenneth Clarke's reputation for conviviality, even when reduced to the props of a Havana cigar, a pair of suede Hush Puppies and an evening at Ronnie Scott's, always counted for more than his track record as Health Secretary or Chancellor of the Exchequer.

It's worth bearing this in mind when we turn to the issue that has baffled the best brains in British political commentary over the course of the year: why do so many people hate Keir Starmer? Some think that it is down to what he has done, or failed to do, specifically the bad policy decisions made by the government, such as the removal of the winter fuel allowance. But many of the policies that he has been criticised for from the left, such as the disability benefit reforms and the initial continuation of the two-child benefit cap, are still popular with the wider population. The regular criticism from the commentariat that no one knows what this government's true purpose is suggests a lack of major policy goals. This isn't wholly fair - the government has done a fair bit, if only due to the momentum given by plans laid well before this parliament - but it does suggest that the public's response would more likely be one of boredom rather than visceral dislike. Even the well-publicised u-turns and waterings-down, from environmental policy to Europe, are more likely to stimulate disappointment rather than outright hatred.

The latest attempt to explain this, by the Financial Times Political Editor, George Parker, is fascinating because of the insights it provides not into Starmer and the government but into the commentariat itself. For example, an unnamed polling director says "For a rather dull and inoffensive politician, Starmer does generate remarkable levels of hate", which displays a condescending assumption about the bovine nature of the electorate. The FT piece includes a chart showing Starmer's popularity ratings steadily falling since the general election. What the chart barely shows is that he was unpopular before then: the anomaly is having hit a net approval rating near zero at election time, which clearly reflected the spillover of popular optimism that we might finally be rid of the incompetent Tories. The reality is that the wider population never liked him and a greater exposure has not changed their minds. Luke Tryl, of the uber-centrist More in Common outfit, admits that Starmer was never popular but thinks that this means he, and the rest of the cabinet, haven't been given the benefit of the doubt in office: "People didn’t just think that they were rubbish, they thought they were bad faith actors."

Inevitably, some see the fault not in our political stars but in ourselves, or at least the swinish multitude, thus Tom Baldwin talks of "ungovernability" and fears that "Something is going on with the electorate". Gideon Skinner of Ipsos thinks Starmer & co have simply inherited a wider problem: "There has been entrenched pessimism over the way that government works going on for many years". The key to my mind in all this is Parker's assessment: "Starmer and Reeves have made plenty of mistakes, as even their allies admit, and the change they promised has been slow in coming. But for technocratic, low-key politicians, the level of opprobrium they attract from voters is striking." This reflects a worldview that simply cannot comprehend why anyone would object to dull technocrats. The commentariat spent so long promoting Starmer as the adult in the room, the competent manager, the liberal authoritarian of their dreams, that they failed to see how unpopular this style of centrist managerialism had become. With Reform and the Greens now being characterised as "twin populisms", it is clear that the lesson hasn't been learned.

One obvious reason for this reluctance to face reality, and thus for the continuing air of bewilderment among people paid to understand politics, is the complicity of the commentariat in pushing bullshit and excusing fraud from 2010's austerity onwards through Brexit down to today's partisan battles over Palestine, trans rights and asylum-seekers. It's also worth emphasising that while the bulk of the population have only a superficial understanding of the antisemitism shenanigans that roiled the Labour Party, and limited sympathy for its victims, there is a popular appreciation that the "winners" are unprincipled and untrustworthy, which is certainly one reason why Starmer is regularly accused of being a liar. But the Prime Minister isn't merely the face of an uninspiring and regularly disappointing government. He is also seen as a creature of the media, in much the same way that Boris Johnson was, and therefore symbolic of the entire politico-media class. Or the caste, if you prefer. And we should  really prefer that term in order to distinguish it from class in its proper sense.

What this disingenuous performance of bafflement reflects is a gap in the mental furniture of the caste, and that gap is class. Since the 1980s, if not before, political journalists and opinion columnists have excised the very idea of collective action, and thus of collective responsibility and the motivating power of shared interests, from their worldview. This has been replaced with an emphasis on the individual, the neoliberal monad, hence the greater focus on personal ambition. Even factional struggle has been reduced to personalities, famously in the case of Blair vs Brown. Today, ideology is seen in wholly instrumental terms, thus Wes Streeting can be commended for insincerely changing his tune to win over the "soft left". There has also been a steady normalisation of cupidity among politicians. The theme of the various investigations into expenses scandals over the years, usually led by rightwing newspapers like the Telegraph, has been "they're all at it". The purpose isn't to encourage the public to elect virtuous MPs who will clean the Augean stables but to accept that this is the way of the world.

But while class may rarely feature in newspaper commentary or in political programmes on TV it remains natural for the mass of people to think in class terms, however inchoate. When we look at Parliament, the common interests are those of the classic bourgeois recognisable since the days of Balzac and Thackeray: landlordism, the bribery of public officials, the preferment of friends and relations. But there is also a much more modern aspect to this, and that is the moralising, hectoring language of business leaders that has become the political lingua franca since Thatcher and has given us the stunted vocabulary of "hard choices", "modernisation" and "value for money". And a further layer is added by the contemporary appetite among politicians for the performance of an impossible discipline to appease an imaginary reactionary: impermeable borders, every malefactor punished, every sign of dissent cracked down on. 

This is, above all else, an ugly political culture that reflects an ugly class reality: the dominance of wealth in public policy and the media, the toleration of public squalor, and the hypocrisy of our foreign relations. Starmer is simply the clueless lightening-rod for the entire politico-media caste. The commentariat's bafflement at his unpopularity is an attempt to create some distance between themselves and a doomed individual, to deny all knowledge of his origins and elevation ("success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan"). But this is futile. It is precisely because most people have made the connection that Starmer is hated, and it is because the commentariat cannot acknowledge this that they remain in public denial. Until he is put out of his misery, we will have to suffer more columns wondering why he isn't as good as the writer hoped and more puff-pieces arguing that a more telegenic version, cut from the same managerial cloth, will surely turn round the government's fortunes. 

The End of the BBC

A pivotal figure in the assault on the BBC was Marmaduke Hussey. He was a pillar of the Establishment but also a Tory newspaperman: a former Chief Executive and Managing Director at Times Newspapers. As such, the ultimate call to kill the Corporation - and we shouldn't be in any doubt that what we are withessing is the latest stage in a long drawn out assassination - was made by Margaret Thatcher. She was driven by her belief that the BBC's editorial leadership was not made up of people who could be considered "one of us", like Hussey, and this made them tantamount to traitors in her eyes. Though the then Director General, Alasdair Milne, was also a pillar of the establishment, within months of taking up the role of Chairman Hussey had forced him out. Since then, the Director General has always had a target on his back (there have been no women) and appointments to the role have been deeply politicised. They have also alternated between TV "lifers" and those drawn from the newspaper industry.

As the BBC had always loyally reflected the interests of the state, as mediated by the government of the day, what this antagonism between Hussey and Milne reflected was not some leftwing drift at Broadcasting House but the growing gap between the Conservative Party and Establishment sentiment in the early to mid-1980s (the views of those disparagingly referred to at the time as "wets"). That gap closed over the years, not least because of the "commercial" turn of the Corporation during the regimes of Michael Checkland and John Birt, and because of New Labour's appointment of sympathisers, such as Greg Dyke, who it expected to stay "on side", most notoriously over the David Kelly affair. Since then, the BBC has been beset by repeated "scandals" centring on editorial judgement and the accusation of cover-ups, while the licence fee remains a perennial issue for rightwing newspapers, a fact that has less to do with concerns over the Corporation's funding and more to do with its very existence as a public service broadcaster.

There is an irony in the fact that as the Tory party has fallen apart as a political force since 2015 so its grip on the BBC has tightened, notably with the appointment of Robbie Gibb to the BBC board under Boris Johnson. Farage and his various understrappers have always been happy with the Corporation, though they'd never publicly admit it. They get disproportionate, indulgent coverage and little in the way of probing scrutiny. It's the Tories who remain the BBC's implacable foe, as they have been since the launch of commercial television in the 1950s. You could say that this reflects the reality that the Conservative Party has only ever been a front for the rightwing press and associated commercial interests, but then we have to acknowledge that those powers are waning too under the impact of the Internet, social media and streaming, so why is their grip tightening now? Is this merely the ebbing tide of the politicised appointments of the 2010-24 era?

One plausible answer is that any sign the BBC is becoming popular, particularly with the young, must produce a reaction to force it into becoming more conservative and narrow in its appeal. In other words, this is a defensive manoeuvre in the face of growing calls for the BBC to be genuinely impartial, not just over issues such as Gaza but in its coverage of emerging voices on the left, such as Zack Polanski. The bias that the BBC is encouraged to show, from sneering at trans people to kow-towing to Donald Trump, is less about enforcing a conservative worldview and more about minimising its potential audience. The history of the many calls for impartiality levelled at the Corporation makes it clear that what is really being demanded is silence and thus irrelevance. Just as the BBC should leave sport and entertainment to ITV, so it should recuse itself from any political analysis and leave the exposés of the malignant antisemitism and traitorous indulgence of Islam by the far-left to GB News and others.

According to Polly Toynbee, "Its enemies hate the BBC with the same venom they detest the NHS, as publicly owned and popular social endeavours." But the parallel between the two isn't particularly helpful, and not just because nobody on the right is seriously suggesting the NHS can be converted to an ad-driven model. The Tory ideal is for the BBC to withdraw from popular entertainment and focus on higher culture (albeit of a very conservative stripe, e.g. the Last Night of the Proms) and uncontentious public service broadcasting (essentially middle class programmes like Countryfile and Gardeners' World), leaving the bulk of the linear TV field to commercial broadcasters. In the case of the NHS, the ideal is to reduce it to a basic safety net for the poor. Viewed as positional goods, these are at opposite ends of the wealth/status spectrum: a high culture backwater and the return of pauper wards. Inasmuch as the BBC and the NHS have a similarity, it is in the lack of true democractic accountability, something that doesn't seem to bother Toynbee overly much.

A better way of understadning the animus against the BBC is to consider the role of youth. Political engagement among the young, unless channelled via respectable routes in the traditional parties, is habitually derided as naive or the product of brainwashing. Likewise, and despite her venerable age, Auntie is routinely accused of following fashionable nonsense and of being obsessed with "reaching a younger audience". This isn't without foundation - a steadily ageing audience will inevitably lead to the end of the licence fee model - but it is exaggerated as part of the persistent campaign to undermine the Corporation's claims to represent the entire nation. This is why there is such an emphasis on the idea that the BBC is indulging the radical young over issues such as trans rights and Palestine, and also explains why if any leftwing voices are to be allowed on the channel they must ideally be young and excitable, all the better to be dismissed as young and excitable. Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar probably only have a few more years in the limelight before they are considered worringly "grown-up". 

The elevation of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership presented a major challenge to the BBC precisely because of his age. He couldn't simply be patronised as a young fool. The initial response, beyond dismissing him as a old fool, was to use his supporters as a proxy, focusing on his success in attracting and energising younger voters, hence the prominence given to Momentum. But this ran into the brick wall of the general election in 2017, which proved that Corbyn's attraction went well beyond the young and clearly included many of the older Labour voters that Westminster opinion was convinced had been lost to the anti-EU right. This led to a switch in focus, first to the old standby of traitorous disloyalty (e.g. the attempt by Newsnight to link him to Moscow after the Salisbury poisoning in 2018), and then to the claims of institutional antisemitism (culminating in the infamous John Ware Panorama report in 2019). 

Just as the liberal press routinely occludes 2017, so the BBC will ignore its role in undermining the Labour Party and indulging the Conservative government under Boris Johnson in 2019, and will insist that it is and always has been politically neutral, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary from the 1926 General Strike through the Battle of Orgreave to today. In comparison, its questionable editing  of Donald Trump's 2021 Capitol Hill speech is a triviality. The real significance of the moment is that the UK's national broadcaster is being threatened by the head of a foreign government, and one with a track record of bullying media companies into agreeing sales to his own backers. The fear from the 1980s onwards was that the BBC would be broken up and replaced by components of the Murdoch empire, or at least placed ever more firmly under the thumb of newspapermen, but it's now more likely that it will be arm-twisted into a subservient relationship with the new media conglomerates centring on Silicon Valley. As in so much of her policy, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for the americanisation of British life.

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.

Intended Consequences

The Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, "woman" means "biological woman" quickly led to the common recognition that this is merely the opening salvo in what is likely to be a long and vicious conflict over trans rights. It was therefore both bizarre and yet laughably predictable that the politics desk at the Guardian should greet the decision as good news for the government, on the grounds that Keir Starmer and his ministers could now avoid the wider issue altogether. According to Peter Walker and Severin Carrell, "No 10 officials believe there will be no need to tweak the Equality Act, leaving their role as little more than a neutral voice in helping organisations adjust to the new reality.". This was immediately countered in the same edition of the newspaper by a legal expert, the barrister Sam Fowles, noting that the ruling shows "that parliament urgently needs to look again at the Equality Act." In short, the law is now a mess: "The court’s decision means there are now multiple legal classes of “woman” and “man”, each of which invites a different interpretation of the act: cis women, trans women with a GRC [gender recognition certificate], trans women without a GRC, cis men, trans men with a GRC, trans men without a GRC."

The appeal to the Supreme Court came about as a result of the Scottish Parliament passing a law in 2018 to require public boards to have 50% representation for women. The For Women Scotland advocacy group asked for the law to be struck down on the grounds that this provision included trans women, which the Scottish government said was consistent with the Equality Act 2010. As Fowles notes, there were reportedly no trans women on public boards in Scotland at the time, and this week's judgement does not in any way change the rights of cis women. In short, this was an appeal made deliberately to force the law to restrict trans rights in principle, regardless of the absence of any disadvantage in practice. The noise around the case has been heightened by the usual propaganda about assaults in prison, the potential for rapes in toilets and the "advantages" of trans women in sport. One consequence of this background hum, together with the increasingly prominent claims made by gender critical (GC) activists, has been the alacrity with which some official bodies have insisted that the ruling means trans women and trans men should be treated exceptionally. 

For example, the British Transport Police have proposed that suspects be searched based on their biological sex, which would mean male officers strip-searching trans women. The opportunity for cruelty and abuse in such a scenario should be obvious, just as the likely reluctance of female police officers to strip-search trans men should be. This eagerness to stretch the meaning of the narrow judgement has been reinforced by the prompt intervention of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, a body that is no stranger to politicised activism after its weaponisation of antisemitism against the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. When asked about the media's favourite topic of going to the loo, the EHRC Chair, Baroness Falkner, suggested  that trans people should use their "power of advocacy" to ask for facilities including a "third space" for toilets. This is revealing in its assumption that the EHRC has no role in advocating for trans rights, and in the way that it echoes the wilder GC claims about a nefarious "trans lobby", but it is also revealing in its belief that a singular third option would suffice, as if trans women and trans men should share the same facilities. 

I said on Thursday that it would be interesting to see how the Guardian handled the fallout given the well-known divisions among it staff, and guessed that the editors would give the main comment gig to Gaby Hinsliff while indulging Susanna Rustin and Sonia Sodha. We'll have to wait for the Observer on Sunday to read the last of these, but with all the weary predictability that is the hallmark of the paper's commentary, Hinsliff and Rustin have both been published already. The latter's contribution was typically triumphant, demanding plaudits for the GC activists who have risked precisely nothing and suffered precisely zero harm. Her conclusion is that the campaign against trans rights has "galvanised an extraordinary renaissance of the women’s movement in Britain", which suggests that in her view it is impossible to be both a feminist and pro-trans. But her most outrageous claim is that "the absorption of these ideas into western progressive orthodoxy has been a grave error. By re-energising socially conservative opposition to shifting gender norms, roles and behaviours, this uncritical adoption of a contested belief ... has fuelled a broader backlash against human rights." This is what is known as projection. The idea that Judith Butler has contributed more to the rise of the far-right than Marine Le Pen or Georgia Meloni, or Joanne Rowling for that matter, is ridiculous.

Hinsliff has long been an exemplar of the paper's centrist equivocation on trans rights, which has led to her being excoriated by more intemperate GC voices such as Julie Bindel, but this in turn makes her a useful bellwether to indicate the stance that the paper will now take. 7 years ago she was against the exclusion of trans women from Labour Party candidate shortlists. Now she talks of the Supreme Court ruling as something to be accepted but implemented sensitively: "But though it inevitably puts a degree of separation between trans and biological women, how far that separation goes is not yet set in stone. It will be for parliament to decide in principle and for people to decide in practice how exactly we all live alongside one another, what social norms we set and how far the clock goes back." Though she suggests that this may simply be a temporary setback for the arc of progress (turning the clock back to 2010), she is quite clear that this is not a matter for civil society: we should leave it to parliament to resolve and otherwise play nice. In other words, the paper's chief concern is about the tone of the debate. This is obviously naive at best and simply craven at worst. The reactionary right see this ruling as the first step in rolling back "gender ideology". As that spectre doesn't actually exist, it is clear that many other rights are going to be trampled on instead. 

Pro-trans articles in the Guardian have mostly been by legal experts, such as the trans woman barrister Robin Moira White. This choice doesn't reflect a subtle bias towards trans rights as evidence-based and rational, or even an indirect criticism of the Supreme Court's decision not to have any trans participants making presentations at the hearing. Instead it reflects the paper's desire that the trans rights case be constrained by expertise, civility and decorum. In contrast, GC contributions, such as Rustin's, are emotional and polemical. As many have pointed out over the last few days, the rage and vitriol of GC supporters has in no way been tempered by victory in the court. If anything, it has been further inflamed. For all the glib talk by the EHRC about respect, it is clear that a maximalist interpretation of "woman means biological woman" is going to be adopted. While lawyers may warn of the unintended consequences of the judgement, it is clear that for many GC activists the intended consequence has always been the practical erasure of trans people. If you wanted a legitimate example of a "chilling effect", the reluctance of politicians and public figures to use the phrase "trans women are women" in future would fit the bill perfectly.

In her comment piece for the Guardian, White makes the key point that gender recognition certificates are now "valueless for the purposes of the Equality Act", which clearly wasn't the intention in 2010, something that has been confirmed by Melanie Field, the civil servant who led the drafting process for the Equality Act. She also notes that the origins of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act lay in the UK losing a case at the European Court of Human Rights. Everything points to the need for parliament to intervene, yet as the well-connected Guardian political desk's immediate response suggests, the government has no intention of revisiting the issue. The question now is whether that reluctance will extend to finally withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, as many on the political right have been urging for years now. It would be fittingly emblematic if the human rights lawyer propelled into Number 10 by a centrist consensus that imagined eventual reaccession to the EU should oversee the UK becoming a human rights pariah and an even more craven lackey of the USA.

Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.

The Persistence of the Old Regime

One of the more dispiriting developments following Donald Trump's election as 47th President of the USA is the return to prominence of Carole Cadwalladr and her hyperbolic style of reportage. It's not that she ever went away, but her regular beat of Russian disinformation and the role of social media in fomenting small town riots has been, well, small potatoes in comparison to her preferred narrative of how the liberal international order is being subverted from within by the "techbros" of Silicon Valley. Though she sees this as a collective threat, she is also happy to personalise it, in time-honoured liberal fashion, by focusing on Elon Musk as a malevolent actor threatening democracy. With his elevation to Trump confidante, she is now firing on all cylinders, happily introducing herself as a main character: the canary in the digital coalmine who correctly espied democracy's enemies at work in the 2016 EU referendum and Trump's election campaign later in the same year.

In her first major article in The Observer following the election result she erected a notable dichotomy between traditional news outlets and newer media: between "clean, hygienic, fact-checked news" and "the information sewers", as she puts it. She characterises the old order as "[T]ruth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times." Unfortunately for Carole, this came around the same time that the NYT, along with most of the Western media, eagerly published ridiculous claims of a pogrom in Amsterdam, and after months of passive-voiced reports on deaths in Gaza following unattributed air-strikes. Despite admitting that 2016 didn't in fact spell doom for truth, Carole is convinced that this time it is for real: "The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied."

In evidence she cites a hardening of attitudes among the figureheads of Silicon Valley: "These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed." The idea that "the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite" is some sort of novelty in Western democracies will surprise many, from historians to former Observer journalists like Anthony Sampson, but the more useful idea here is the parallel with Russia in the 1990s. It would be easy to point out that the chaos was as much the work of Western advisers from the Chicago School of Economics as of Russian nomenklatura, or that the rise of Putin and the Siloviki was a reaction to that chaos, but the more telling point is the importance of certain industrial sectors, notably oil and mining, in the power struggles of the era.

Carole's belief is that technology companies are now the dominant power in the US, defining the culture and thus the politics, and that the leaders of these companies constitute an elite that will shape policy in Washington for years to come. The older politico-economic establishment, based on oil companies, manufacturing, retail and the like, will presumably be marginalised under the new order. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale and importance of technology companies to the US economy, let alone their cultural reach, and that's without considering that she is only really concerned with a narrow slice of the technology sector itself: she isn't bothered about IBM or Dell, let alone General Electric, and Apple as usual gets a pass. This is perhaps to be expected of a journalist who sees everything through the self-important prism of traditional media, but it also highlights a longstanding failure of the journalistic profession to understand the variety to be found among those she lumps together as "techbros", or even to take seriously the sociology of the wider capitalist class.

For all the emphasis on bleeding-edge technology, Elon Musk is tied to traditional industry sectors, notably car manufacture (Tesla), transportation (SpaceX) and telecommunications (StarLink). His shift to the conservative right, and his purchase of a media company, is what you would expect from such a background: simultaneously berating the state for its interference in the free market while being reliant on it for contracts and sympathetic regulation. Mark Zuckerberg, who has felt aggrieved by both Democrat and Republican administrations in the past, remains on the fence politically simply because Meta hasn't expanded beyond a business dependent on the goodwill of a broad cross-section of the population, leaving Carole to critique him for his choice of haircut. In preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, which it probably would have done as the voice of the Washington establishment, Jeff Bezos wasn't hedging his bets with Trump so much as indicating that he wants Amazon to be considered politically neutral, as befits the "everything store". 

The broader shift in political allegiance among Silicon Valley luminaries, from the fuzzy libertarianism of the 90s to the increasingly authoritarian conservatism of today, reflects material changes in the industry, notably the rise of abusive mediation and monopoly - what Cory Doctorow has polemicised, from the perspective of the consumer, as enshittification. This has led to greater antagonism between the state and technology companies, e.g. the recent ruling against Google's near-monopoly on search, but that in turn has simply made it more necessary for those companies to exert political leverage. Initially that was achieved through the Democratic Party, in combination with the banking interests that have long dominated it and with which the industry had an obvious synergy during the IPO mania, but more recently it has led to alliances with the Republican Party as the focus has shifted away from the proactive design of regulation to resistance against attempts to impose the costs of externalities on it, whether hate-speech or climate change. But far from supplanting traditional industrialists as political power-brokers, the technology company leaders have simply joined the club.

This is not to suggest that capitalist business-as-usual means there is no threat to democracy. Capitalism and democracy are inherently antagonistic, and managing capitalism for its own good (social democracy) or managing democracy to defend capitalism (neoliberalism) are both fraught with contradictions, which leads to a ceaseless quest to find new justifications for the maintenance of the hierarchies that democracy threatens. What remains distinctive about the Californian Ideology is its reactionary modernism, which combines social accelerationism with a supersession of democratic accountability. As William Davies described one of its current luminaries, "Figures such as Peter Thiel explicitly straddle the worlds of wealth management and ethnonationalist politics, proposing at the overlap of these two spheres a form of revolutionary reaction, in which capital breaks free of liberal democracy so as to restore some primordial past in the future." It's easy to be distracted by the wacky natalism, the revival of "race science", or the aristocracy of taste that is effective altruism and forget that this is ultimately about preserving wealth.

Donald Trump's picks for office have prompted much horrified pearl-clutching, but what has been less remarked upon is how many, beyond the usual rich industrialists and think-tankers, have been TV personalities or gossip column regulars, not the very online guys of Carole Cadwalldr's nightmares, which emphasises that Trump himself is an analogue president, a product of the TV and tabloid age. Similarly, the liberal press remain stuck in an imagined past of civility and decorum circa Lou Grant (forgetting the more pointed lessons of Network). As in 2016, they thought that Trump would self-implode by saying something offensive, then to women, this time to Puerto Ricans. Like Talleyrand's Bourbons in exile, they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. In the aftermath of this month's defeat, the Democrats have oscillated between blaming the brutish mass for their stupidity and blaming the left for alienating the solid citizenry. Leading neoliberals are already happily parroting conservative lines about pronouns and politicised academia. What we're witnessing is not a new era but an old one. This is the Restoration not the Revolution.