Uncomfortable Truths

The British state is no stranger to formally recording ethnicity, from census-taking to the analysis of healthcare outcomes, but the purpose has typically been to make minorities legible in the context of trying to avoid negative discrimination, or at least trying to satisfy the critics of institutional racism. Parallel to this has been the tacit prejudice of officials: the police's discriminatory use of stop-and-search against Black youth, the DWP's disproportionate sanctioning of ethnic minority claimants. What we have not seen for many years is government policy directed towards formal monitoring on the basis that ethnicity and religion are causal factors in the formation of criminals rather than the characteristics of victims of crime or discrimination, though you could argue that the Prevent programme went there in all but name in using "Islamic radicalisation" as a proxy for the institutional suspicion of Asians, Arabs and Muslim converts. 

The "audit" of child sexual exploitation (CSE) cases undertaken by Louise Casey at the government's behest has "criticised a continued failure to gather robust data at a national level" on ethnicity, but also tells us that offenders in three police areas were "disproportionately likely to be Asian men", while further suggesting that "Ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities." That last point is a case of using the traditional justification for monitoring, the need to prevent harm being done to a whole community, to justify a prejudice about that same community.

Casey's claim that it is "not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders" is a distraction. The charge isn't that it is racist but that it is irrelevant. After all, what would the outcome be if we discovered a national correlation? Would we conclude that it was the product of "cultural or social" factors, as Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, all but suggested in her brief to Casey, or might we ask whether the correlation was spurious but indicative of something more relevant. For example, the higher rate of drug-deaths in Scotland, compared to England and Wales, certainly correlates with cultural and social factors, but this has not led to the demonisation of Scottish society or suggestions there is something awry in its culture. That's because the significant correlation is with deindustrialisation and deprivation, not sectarian football rivalry or a fondness for shortbread. 

If a correlation with culture and social factors is established in respect of grooming gangs - and let's not be under any illusions that this is the only acceptable outcome for many, not only on the far right but in the respectable centre of politics too - what consequential actions might the government take? Will all men of Pakistani heritage be expected to get DBS certificates? And perhaps wear them pinned prominently to their jackets.

We know that crime correlates with opportunity. This is why police officers are disproportionately more likely to be convicted of corruption in a public office, or small business people of VAT fraud. If an ethnic minority is disproportionately represented in the night-time economy of fast food outlets and taxis, then the attraction that these hold for vulnerable youngsters will inevitably create opportunities for abuse. But nobody is suggesting that those parts of the economy need to be more closely regulated or policed. This stands in contrast with the response to institutionalised child sexual exploitation in children's homes and borstals. As the facts steadily came to light over the decades, there was a concerted effort to enact controls and safeguards. The ripples of this interventionist approach continue down to today, with scandals and chastening reform affecting such august bodies as the BBC and the Church of England: the very heart of the British establishment. That this initiative has slowly shifted focus shift away from the disciplinary state of the 1970s to the contemporary agencies of social authority is no accident. 

The political opportunity afforded by CSE is in the realm of hegemony, the chance to define the sacred and the profane and thus define new boundaries between the good people and the bad, hence the Conservative and Reform parties have sought both to advance a racist narrative - the threat to "white British women" - and to pin the blame on the failures of a liberal elite. There are obvious overlaps with the "I don't recognise this country anymore" crowd of proud bigots, but also with those Labour politicians, such as Cooper and Starmer, who appear to imagine that ceding the essence of the racist argument - that these "strangers" are a threat to national identity and cohesion - and pandering to "legitimate concerns" will allow them to channel public opinion towards their own brand of authoritarian mangerialism. 

The term "uncomfortable truths" is a rhetorical advance on "legitimate concerns" in that it suggests ichoate fears have been replaced by incontrovertible facts, but there's really no practical difference in use. Whereas the older term sought justification the more en vogue one appeals to subjectivity. The result is an ironic detournement of the language attributed to "snowflakes" - "I'm not comfortable with that" - in the cause of confrontation. It isn't the people who use the term who are expected to be uncomfortable, after all.

Casey's claim that the ethnicity of perpetrators is "shied away from" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The simplest explanation for why ethnicity was not systematically recorded in respect of child sexual exploitation cases is that it wasn't deemed relevant, not because police officers were scared of upsetting local communities that they otherwise barely tolerated, or because grizzled council officials were excessively "woke". This doesn't mean they were oblivious, but that they treated ethnicity informally as an explanatory factor: "What do you expect from these people?", much as they assumed the (usually) working-class girls entrapped by these gangs were "slappers" or "teenage prostitutes". They now have a green light to formalise their prejudices. Having turned that light on, it is both disingenuous and hypocritical of Casey to subsequently claim that we shouldn't over-interpret the "data", and for Labour politicians to claim that the Tories are trying to "politicise the scandal". 

One thing that the government appears to have given little thought to is how far the monitoring of ethnicity is likely to spread in the criminal justice system, which could indicate naivety but is perhaps more likely to indicate comfort with its maximum employment. For example, I suspect we're going to see pushback against the long campaign to restrain stop-and-search in London. If the data on ethnicity shows that men of Jamaican heritage are disproportionately involved in drug-peddling then the Metropolitan Police will argue they have reason to target Black kids in South London for frisking. Just don't expect a report any time soon confronting the uncomfortable truth that white ex-public schoolboys are disproportionately involved in City fraud and suggesting that Eton and Harrow have questions to answer. But just as ethnic and religious monitoring was originally about making under-served and peripheral communities legible to the state, in the ostensible service of integration and equity, so this latest turn will also keep a narrow focus on those groups deemed to be outside of the nation, or at least semi-detached and potentially disloyal. To be monitored has never been a privilege.

Woke

The first thing to note about Gaby Hinsliff's extended essay in the Guardian is the title: How does woke start winning again?, which suggests that woke had a successful period of dominance in the recent past. The standfirst also employs the idea of progress halted, but with the implication that this was inevitable due to the misjudged approach of campaigners: "British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed?" Hinsliff would no doubt point out that journalists don't write their own headlines or standfirsts, but neither is unrepresentative of the essay in suggesting that woke is simultaneously hegemonic and embattled. This confusion arises because of her use of "woke" and "progressive" as interchangeable whern they are actually quite different and often in conflict. Wokeness is a critique of actually existing conditions, specifically a recognition of systemic injustice. Progressivism, as conservatives often point out, is a secular teleology based on the religious idea of the perfectibility of humanity, but one whose lofty aims are in practice subservient to quietism and the defence of the status quo, not because the ultimate triumph is not in doubt, but because of its imbrication with liberalism.

Hinsliff starts by recalling the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol in 2020 that led to the statue of Edward Colston being toppled and dumped in the harbour. She notes of the recovered statue and contemporary protest placards that they "evoke the radicalism of a summer that already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change." What's missing here is the way that the protests were channelled by the media into a debate about statues, and then into a fruitless standoff against the far right who answered the implicit call to defend our stone heritage against the leftist wreckers, resulting in Tommy Robinson fans careering drunkenly down Whitehall with one them unironically pissing on the memorial to a murdered policeman in Parliament Square. Though that incontinent "defender" was jailed for 14 days, there was quiet satisfaction among the establishment that the BLM protests had been derailed. If Hinsliff is looking for the legacy of that summer, she might consider last year's attacks on asylum seekers and the language of beleaguerment employed by the press and politicians (an "island of strangers" etc.)

Both liberal and conservative commentaries on "wokeness" play fast and loose with history. Conservatives tend to accuse critics of presentism, of applying today's values to actions that in their historical context were neither remarkable nor seen as objectionable. This invariably ignores that in many cases those actions were condemned at the time, slavery being an obvious example and colonialism another. Liberal commentaries take a different approach because of the belief in progress: the aim is to detach today's protest from history, as if the protestors weren't keeping to the progressive script. This is done by recasting the history as meek and mild, the protestors as unobjectionable and even heroes by today's standards. Hinsliff cites Bristolian antecedents "once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott, who walked to work in protest against the bus company’s refusal to hire black drivers (and helped pave the way for the 1965 Race Relations Act)". The bus boycott was not considered "shockingly radical" at the time. Indeed more people were probably shocked at the collusion of the TGWU in enforcing a colour bar, while simultaneously opposing Apartheid in South Africa, than in black (and white) Bristolians refusing to use the buses.

Liberal commentators often appropriate radical history to suggest that progressive change would have happened anyway (Martin Luther King's "arc of history" line predictably makes an appearance, his critique of capitalism does not) and to highlight the unhelpfulness of "activists" in advancing that cause. It is a constant exercise to remove the taint of radicalism from any successful development and reserve the term for those considered wrong turns or dead ends, the orginal case study being the French Revolution. This leads not only to misrepresentation but to a simplification of once-challenging concepts. Thus Hinsliff claims the term was "borrowed from a phrase used as far back as the 1930s by black Americans, urging each other to “stay woke’” to the threat of racial violence". In fact, the phrase originally meant staying alert to the reality of systemic racism, in other words the polite refusals and condescensions rather than the lynchings. As such, the word has expanded to cover an appreciation of other forms of systemic repression and abuse, but it hasn't really changed its meaning, let alone been "borrowed". It is a critique of the liberal worldview in which progress is inevitable, incremental and defined by those already in positions of authority. 

Hinsliff does correctly note that the "war on woke" has been turbo-boosted in the UK by the recent Supreme Court judgement on the interpretation of sex in the 2010 Equalities Act, but she counterpoints this with other examples of an anti-woke turn across the political spectrum: Reform's anti-woke platform (which is mostly hot air), Starmer's turn to reactionary rhetoric (which heralds nasty policy), and Ash Sarkar's media-friendly book in which an irritation with identity politics and decolonisation is given a leftwing patina by the appeal to class. This allows Hinsliff to claim a consensus: "On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted liberal beliefs – few people today would put a slaver on a pedestal – than an associated style of highly online activism, seen as prone to denouncing opponents as morally evil, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest over practical change." This is a conservative characterisation in its emphasis on perversity and futility, but also a liberal characterisation in its obsession with civility and decorum.

Trying to find a way forward (remember, the standfirst suggests that progressives need "new tactics"), Hinsliff turns to Luke Tryl of the cross-party More in Common think-tank. Ignoring the cringe-worthy marketing methodology of "political tribes", we find the claim that "Progressive Activists [are] further from mainstream public opinion on cultural issues than they realise. They’re the only group where a majority thinks that immigration should be as high or higher than it is now, and that protecting people from hate speech matters more than defending free speech (a key rationale behind “no debate” – the idea that trans identities aren’t up for discussion – and “no platforming”)." This ignores that progressives, defined by More in Common as "well-educated, highly engaged", are more likely to have an accurate understanding of levels of immigration, i.e. that they are much lower than the impression given by the media and consequently the common perception, hence "further from mainstream public opinion" isn't quite the gotcha Tryl imagines. It also ignores that we have laws against hate speech but no formal rights to free speech. Insofar as free speech needs defending, it is from restrictions on the right to protest, not from protestors.

Tryl's key conclusion, presumably shared by Hinsliff, is that "Progressive Activists overestimate by a factor of two to three how much others agree with their core beliefs, from abolishing the monarchy to letting children change gender. Consequently they tend to invest too little time on persuasion, focusing instead on mobilising the masses they wrongly imagine are on board." This is interpreted as arrogance and self-absorption by "purists", rather than a tendency to think well of other people or even the naivety of the unworldly, echoing the traditional conservative critique of reform. Again, notice the conservative emphasis on futility: don't protest, kids; you'll only alienate the silent majority. Hinsliff picks up the theme: "Core to woke philosophy is what is sometimes called “systemic thinking”, or the idea that society consists of overlapping systems of oppression, from capitalism to patriarchy, which we are socialised not to notice and to which we must be awoken by unpacking the power dynamics hidden in everyday interactions". This neatly undermines her own stunted history of the term, but it also undermines the claim that the woke don't care about explanation or persuasion: a systemic critique is literally a case of "Have you thought about it this way?" rather than "I have the key to all the mysteries" (or "rejecting supporters who don’t endorse a complete worldview", as she puts it).

Hinsliff resolves this by a retreat to the liberal concerns with civility and decorum. The woke are simply rude and offensive: "dismissive of other people’s small but well-meaning efforts ... correcting other people’s “mistakes” ... pile-ons and point-scoring ... shouting". This results in a line that wouldn't have been out of place in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph when she raises the topic of class: "Were activists who scolded critics to “educate yourself” or “do the reading”, while speaking the language of undergraduate sociology essays, always likely to grate on the two-thirds of British adults who don’t have degrees?" Not only has she shrunk the Progressive Activists that More in Common estimate constitute 10% of the population down to a bunch of mouthy students, but they all appear to have studied sociology, a subject that has been in dramatic decline for 40 years now. This is like a cartoon in Private Eye, circa 1981, printed on the opposite page to the latest Dave Spart column. At this point Hinsliff rather loses her way, with discursions into whether woke language has hamstrung the Labour Party (a reminder that "the many, not the few" was first employed by Labour under Blair in the revamped Clause IV) and the tale of an academic who steadily moved to the right because he was challenged by students (a tale as old as academia). 

The essay finishes with some anecdotes from climate protestors whose purpose is to convince us that dramatic protests have had their day and we must work more cautiously in "an era of populist politics, tight budgets and renewed emphasis on energy security". While we are meant to submit to these artificial constraints (who sets the budget, Gaby?), the planet fries. Perhaps the most depressing part of this is Hinsliff's conclusion that this new sobriety and maturity (she doesn't use those words, but they hover over the entire essay) "reflects growing interest within the climate movement in focusing on what Roger Harding, co-director of the small eco-charity Round Our Way, calls “working-class, red wall voters who are not about to become vegan anytime soon” but still worry about the planet." After the caricature of domineering, middle class, twenty-something activists patronising the proles with their fancy jargon, we get the caricature of a reactionary working class that must be indulged in its prejudices in order to bring it onside for incremental change. For all that it reads like a cross between a Times editorial and an undergraduate essay on Animal Farm (see, anyone can do this), Hinsliff's magnum opus never loses sight of its main contention: that we can only have nice things if we behave ourselves and don't badger the authorities.

It's the Only Language They Understand.

If you want to shrink the prison population, reducing the tariff for murderers in exchange for the modern equivalent of the leg-iron (a "tag"), or chemically castrating a small number of sex offenders, will make little difference. Yet this recourse to the almost Medieval is the predictable focus of the media, and thus politicians, when the obvious short-term solution to over-crowding is a general amnesty for non-serious crimes. Outside of newspaper columns, there is no dispute that the reason British gaols are full is that we send too many people to them for often trivial reasons, not because we haven't built enough of them. It is standard to bemoan the failure of the prison system to rehabilitate, but while this can be fairly attributed to overcrowding and insuffcient resources, it is also the case that many people reading reports that prisoners spend 23 hours a day locked up will respond with "good". In other words, even if resources were infinite, it's unlikely we would prioritise rehabilitation over punishment. 

The government's current sentencing review, which was headed by David Gauke, the former Conservative Justice Secretary, is typical in reiterating this priority even as it admits the spiteful dynamic: "The purposes of sentencing, as set out in legislation, are punishment, reduction of crime, reparation, rehabilitation and public protection. The Review’s Part 1 report History and Trends in Sentencing found that over the last two decades, sentencing has focused disproportionately on punishment with a view from politicians and the media that 'the only form of punishment that counts is imprisonment.'" The response of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners was similar in its view: "The deprivation of liberty by imprisonment is a powerful tool, and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are clear it must be used to punish, and keep the public safe from, the most serious offenders. However, we support greater use of community supervision for those convicted of lower level crimes because the evidence shows short custodial sentences do little to rehabilitate repeat offenders". 

What we're witnessing in the latest floating of alternatives to prison is neither pragmatism nor idealism but a determination to maintain punishment at the apex of the hierarchy of purpose for the justice system. Convicts must suffer, hence even the mild inconveniences of tagging and curfews are preferred to the socially useful contributions and reparations of community orders that the press routinely deride as "soft". But the instinctive liberal response - that we should issue fewer custodial sentences, that prison conditions should be more humane and that we should properly support rehabilitation - has its own flaws, not least that it obscures the nature of the prison and the role it plays in society. For this reason, a decision to avoid the use of prison can potentially lead to worse outcomes. A famous example of chemical castration as an alternative to porridge was Alan Turing whose subsequent suicide eventually led to an apology by the last Labour government. No doubt Shabana Mahmood, the current Justice Secretary, is aware of the history, but she has a feral press to placate so it's (chemically, and with consent) "cut their goolies off". It's the only language they understand.

Prisons are the product of another age, specifically the Victorian era of high industrialism and the consequent reduction of labour to standardised units, as explored by social historians such as Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Their mix of the modern (surveillance and regimentation) and the anti-modern (a regime predating all that nonsense about human rights) remains a virtue for many. The reason prisons are antiquated in their operation as much as their fabric is because as a society we don't want to let go of that Victorian regime. We find modern prisons, with their functioning toilets and air-conditioning, irritating because there isn't visible suffering beyond the boredom of incarceration. Insofar as there has historically been an aversion to the use of prison it has been wholly on the basis of class (nicely satirised in Kind Hearts and Coronets), hence the reluctance to jail whitecollar criminals or the preference to send them to "open prisons" if a custodial sentence was unavoidable. 

As some point, there will be a dissolution of the prisons as dramatic as the dissolution of the monateries. Prisons are costly and ineffective, in terms of punishment as much as rehabilitation, as indicated by the high levels of recidivism. There will still be a need for the incarceration of "dangerous criminals" for public safety, but that definition will inevitably elide with that of the "criminally insane" or the "terrorist", whom society is happy to consider as categorically different, not least in their obscurity (the old idea of the oubliette). For the vast majority of crimes we will inevitably drop custodial sentences. The problem is that we will do that by normalising the idea of punishment within society rather than apart from it. Like the leper colonies and madhouses of the late Medieval period, the first purpose of the recognisably modern prisons that emerged in the Age of Enlightenment was quarantine, a principle taken to the extreme of preventing any intercourse between prisoners themselves, or even allowing the prisoner to see his gaolers, as in Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon.

We have already shifted the idea of reparation out of the prison system into society with community orders and ritual apologies to victims. The next step will be to shift punishment out as well. It isn't a coincidence that there have been a number of high profile cases of prison staff being prosecuted for having sexual relationships with prisoners in recent years. The subtext is the evaporation of boundaries: the very antithesis of Bentham's regime. That these incidents are often explained as the result of a crisis within the prison service (low morale, poor vetting, inadequate training) is illustrative of the belief that prisons are no longer fit for purpose: that the system is breaking down. But the more telling feature of this trend (the prominence of reporting rather than incidence) is the sense of the outside world breaching the prison wall, whether in the form of drugs and mobile phones smuggled in by drones or the sexual opportunism of warders. It is in this context that we should see the government's plans. Chemical castration is a punishment enacted within society. Tagging and curfews likewise. Punishment is moving out of the quarantine of prison and into society at large, and once that happens the need for forbidding walls diminishes.

The reason the prison population has grown is because the high threshold for custodial sentences has fallen over time. The threshold was obviously very low in the 18th and 19th centuries, as prison became an industry in itself and a key component of industrial society, but it rose over the course of the 20th century, due to "reform", reaching a peak in the 1970s as part of the sociological turn in which institutionalisation was seen as failure. It then fell once more, as politicians under pressure from the reactionary press decided that sending more people to gaol was a reasonable compensation for not reintroducing the death penalty. Tony Blair's mantra "Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime" was an early sally into social punishment, blurring the boundaries between society and its criminal element, the most famous example of this being ASBOs: a device that recognised a social ill but simultaneously insisted that redress should be social as well, so placing both crime and punishment beyond the penal system.

The danger is that the threshold will remain low but be transferred across to punishment in society. In other words, you could easily find yourself serving a non-custodial sentence for an offence that 50 years ago wouldn't have resulted in more than a caution. We could see a lot more people tagged and curfewed. Not just a handful of murderers who have served half their sentence but youth done for smoking weed or the poor for shoplifting (whitecollar criminals will once more tend to be spared the worst). The choice that faces us as a society is whether the priority of the justice system is punishment or restitution (i.e. the rehabilitation of offenders and the reparation, where possible, of victims). The discussion of alternatives to prison is being carefully curated to emphasise that punishment remains the priority. The full development of a prison industrial complex run by private companies like Sodexo has been ruled out on the grounds of cost and incompetence, but the privatisation of punishment in society, managed by the likes of Serco, continues apace, and despite the same failings. 

It's All About You

Jonathan Liew's midweek column in the Guardian starts with sarcasm - "Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card" - but doesn't manage to advance much beyond it, unless you consider the Punch-style whimsy - the idea that you can be a football writer and know almost nothing about the leading referees - as an improvement. What the column doesn't do (well, obviously) is talk about the Myles Lewis-Skelly red card, other than to imply that those who have questioned it were guilty of hyperbole: "That was almost certainly not the worst decision you’ve ever seen." Liew has some self-awareness in an otherwise self-regarding piece: "nobody needs another sensible middlebrow columnist explaining in deeply patronising serif font that, actually, it’s the fans who are the problem here." But this is merely the downpayment on his final conclusion that "much of the stigmatisation of referees is a sublimation of other grievances: fan disenfranchisement, rising prices, malign owners, useless administrators, a sport that at an elemental level no longer works for us." Everyone and everything else is to blame.

At heart, most Guardian sports journalists prefer other sports to football - cricket, rugby, tennis, you get the idea - so their attitude towards the game is one of barely-concealed class disdain mixed with professional ennui. Compare and contrast the coverage whenever cricket or rugby are in "crisis". The class angle is obvious when you see Liew equate anger over refereeing standards "with “two-tier policing” and “legitimate concerns about immigration” as something over which the little people can obsess." In suggesting we shouldn't dismiss such concerns he is not just being patronisingly ironic in Guardian house-style, he is reverting for comic effect to the newspaper's atavistic view of football fans as part of an uncultured mob. There are plenty of people angered by Michael Oliver's decision who voted remain in 2016 and would support greater generosity towards asylum-seekers today (some may even be fans of cricket). That these issues are not of equivalent political or social importance does not mean that one in particular should not be addressed.

By submerging refereeing into a general bleat about football as a rapacious industry and football fans as unreasonable consumers, Liew seeks to dilute the issue of the PGMOL's high-profile errors and questionable use of VAR. The latter has raised standards, but by winnowing the chaff it has also highlighted arbitrariness (the Lewis-Skelly red card could have been challenged by Darren England at the time). Liew's plea that referees "should be anonymous" is both irrelevant to the issue of poor judgement and the inadequate recourse when referees get it wrong. VAR has helped, but it has been implemented in a way that seeks to protect the referees rather than the integrity of the game, hence the long delays and poor communication. Despite his disdain, even Liew cannot help but admit that the quality of refereeing is a legitimate concern (sic) and one that has become more pronounced as the referees have lost the anonymity that he cherishes. In his words, the PGMOL has become "a sort of floating body in the ether, run neither by the Football Association nor the Premier League and thus answerable to nobody but its own insatiable main-character energy".

In the event, Arsenal appealed the red card and it was duly over-turned by the independent regulatory commission. This wasn't unexpected, given the near-unanimity among ex-players and coaches (who provide the bulk of the 5-man commission) in the aftermath that it was a yellow card, but you don't have to be paranoid have to wonder whether the game's "guardians", such as the FA, may have been irked by the outcome and whether that may have contributed to what in football parlance is referred to as "a bit of afters", with Arsenal charged for failing to control their players. The media management of the fallout included the report that Michael Oliver's family had faced social media abuse and threats, the aim apparently being to paint the referee as the real victim, which is never a smart strategy. The coincidental Sun interview with David Coote, which linked his well-known troubles with the pressure of being secretly gay, likewise came across as special pleading on behalf of the referees obliged to survive in "the macho world of football". The whiff of thuggery is never far from the surface in media descriptions.

The Guardian, in the person of Barney Ronay, cast a typically withering glance in the direction of Coote's revelations and his choice of newspaper in which to make them, including the now standard ironic self-deprecation ("why is this person in the Guardian newspaper now complaining"). Not only did he criticise the grubby motives of the Sun ("monetising Coote's distress"), but he also suggested that associating homosexuality with bad behaviour would not encourage other gay referees to come out, which is a fair point. But that negative association is also being made by Ronay, albeit in a deniable "look what this other paper printed" fashion. Just as Jonathan Liew's column didn't need writing, so neither did Barney Ronay's, and both can be accused of making themselves the main character in their relationship with football, as well as chasing clicks by contrarian sneering. Typically, Ronay's final conclusion is that the game itself is rotten, "the real takeaway is how brutally football has chewed this person up", which chimes with Liew's take that football is essentially vicious.

Let us return to the Lewis-Skelly red card decision. One of the regular reasons for dismissing criticism of referees is what Liew describes as "conspiracy hokum": the idea that refs have it in for your favoured club. It's important here to distinguish between bias and corruption (e.g. Coote has faced questions about whether he issued a yellow card as the result of a betting tip to a mate). There is no substantiated evidence of corruption in the English Premier League, but that referees are subject to unconcisous bias is academically well-established. They are influenced by the crowd, they tend to favour home teams and currently successful teams, and there is a degree of regional sympathy. This last point is particularly salient in English football because of its partisanship: every referee is also assumed to be a fan (many are happy to publicise their allegiances). Most PGMOL referees hail from the North West or elsewhere above the Severn-Wash line. London is barely represented (compare and contrast its contribution to players and coaches), which gives rise to a certain paranoia among some fans of teams in the capital.

The issue is not that the PGMOL is a closed shop, though its lack of diversity does make it look like one, but that it is an intrinsically conservative institution with its own cultural norms, which above all means defending your mates against players and coaches and treating fans as ignorant and ignorable. The focus on bias, which the media implicitly stokes as much as it formally derides, is a moralistic distraction from this sociological point, not least because unconcious bias tends to be very marginal and in some cases (e.g. home advantage) will even out. What matters to fans are game-changing incidents, which in football is a reflection of how many such incidents there can be and how their impact varies over the duration of a match. Issuing a red card in the opening minutes or a penalty in the closing minutes matters a lot more than vice versa. And what some fans have begun to suspect is that referees are sensitive to this, hence the chants of "Who's the wanker in the black" and "You don't know what you're doing" have increasingly given way to "It's all about you".

It is this suspicion that referees want to be the centre of attention that drives the current dissatisfaction, not the "sublimation of other grievances" as Liew put it. And, whether you consider it bias or not, a controversial decision involving a big club (or a national team) is more likely to raise the profile of a referee than a similar decision involving a small club. This is why Liew's appeal for referees to be "highly paid and totally anonymous" is naive, even allowing for the weary irony. English referees have been making themselves the centre of attention ever since matches were televised - e.g. Jack Taylor awarding two penalties in the 1974 World Cup Final and Clive Thomas denying Brazil a winning goal against Sweden in the 1978 World Cup. The very existence of the PGMOL is a by-product of television and the money it has injected into the game, while the characteristics the organisation displays - prickliness, pedantry, vanity - are those that could be recognised in Taylor and Thomas all those years ago. What football needs is not more VAR or less VAR but more humble referees, which would require a massive cultural change at the grassroots. But so long as top-division games are comprehensively televised, don't expect it to filter up to the PGMOL.

Zones of Interest

Elections focus our understanding of society not only in terms of political preference but in terms of geography and demography. Though there has long been a vogue among political scientists to divide society into competing blocs defined by "values", as opposed to the more traditional socio-economic dimension that dominated twentieth century psephology, these have usually been interpreted through a combination of the where and the who: the "left behind" regions of a post-industrial society and the fortunate generation of "boomers" who have monopolised property wealth. In recent decades the where has perhaps been dominant, certainly in the UK where Brexit and immigration focused politics on national boundaries more than social composition and where "levelling up" has been presented as a matter of spatial equality rather than class differentials. That may now be changing as the focus shifts towards the antagonisms evident between the young and the old (much of what is classed as "culture wars" is really just inter-generational conflict). We are then in a transitional moment in which social tensions appear specific to place one moment and then particular to age cohorts the next. This is particularly evident in the flexible use of the idea of "zones".

No-go zones are a longstanding fixation of the political right. While this is often couched in lurid tales of foreign lands - think of American claims that London toils under the yoke of Sharia law - the typical no-go zone is very much domestic: the slums, the wrong side of the tracks, the lower depths. That said, these days you will see foreign horror stories imported wholesale, thus British reactionaries will trust Fox News reports about London over the evidence of their own eyes. These territories are usually defined by an alien population, whether in the form of a immigrant ghetto or a lumpen proletariat of scroungers and welfare queens - i.e. people we have neither sympathy for nor empathy with because they are culturally or morally other. A common theme in the characterisation of these areas is violence. This is not just a feral disregard for law and order, where the ostensible focus on the former ("knife crime") is really about the necessity of enforcing the latter ("robust policing"), but the product of an intrinsic barbarity: a propensity to "mindless violence", which must be distinguished from the judicious volence of the state. In this, the threat of Islamist or other radicalisation and the prevalence of vice are, despite their apparent contradictions, of a piece.

A variation on the no-go zone defined by territory and a fixed population is that of public spaces occupied by a transient crowd whose very presence excludes others. This isn't always presented negatively in the media as a "mob" challenging our way of life. It may even evoke fulsome praise - think of the anti-Brexit protests or marches against antisemitism of a few years ago. What's noticeable is that occupying space has expanded from a tactic favoured by the disempowered to a performance of privilege and the defence of hierarchies, even at the risk of challenging order. A recent example was Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism goading police officers. In its intent and execution this was no different to the Football Lads Alliance claiming to be defending statues from BLM "thugs". The premise of the protests against the dystopian fantasy of 15-minute cities is that control of public spaces by the "elite" is a vector of the "woke" conspiracy. This extends beyond the far-right protesting drag queen story hours at public libraries to gender critical feminists obsessing over public toilets.

One of the more bizarre sights of recent years has been the focus on college campuses as the highest form of public square, where cherishing freedom of speech is paramount. This despite them being mostly private institutions deliberately shielded from wider society through by-laws and the power of money. That the NYPD can descend on Columbia University and arrest students protesting in support of Palestinians is precisely because it isn't the public square. Some liberal commentators have been disturbed by the apparent hypocrisy of rightwing commentators who previously berated students as "snowflakes" incapable of accommodating different views and their new insistence that disputing US (or UK) support for Israel's actions in Gaza must be stopped for fear of making Jewish students feel uncomfortable (which, incidentally, in equating Jewishness with Israel is antisemitic). But there is no hypocrisy here. They see colleges as sites of privilege; they're just insistent that it should be their own worldview that is privileged.

Liberals are less likely to fixate on territorial zones, recognising that this would require consideration of the socio-economic factors that clearly define their spatial reality, such as power differentials and ingrained poverty, but they can divert their feelings of disgust towards the hoi polloi into idealised zones that have been corrupted. Perhaps the most telling of these has been the family unit, which is typically described in terms that are all too obviously class-based: the "problem families" of the working class versus the "high achievers" of the middle class. This is in a long tradition of the sanctification of the (nuclear) family unit that goes back to the Protestant Reformation and which achieved a peak of idealisation in contrast to the harsh reality of capitalism during the Victorian era (i.e. as a refuge, not as a rebuke). A specific aspect of this is the zone of childhood innocence (think Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies), which offers the opportunity to indulge in the grief of the individual as a distraction from the grief of a people.

Today the zone of innocence manifests chiefly in a paranoia, shared by both liberals and conservatives, about the negative effects of smartphones and social media. This goes beyond banning TikTok as a security risk to attempting to micromanage childhood. As this latest moral panic has gathered momentum, it is clear that the concern resides chiefly - as ever - with middle-class children, hence the threat is couched in terms of traditional virtue, such as educational achievement - e.g. Jonathan Haidt's "Smartphones vs smart kids". In contrast, the cultural expressions of working-class children are still more likely to evoke baffled disgust, rather than sympathy, not to mention legal censure. A secondary manifestation, though necessarily narrower in scope, has been the rise of trans scepticism, the idea that children who believe they should be another gender are simply confused and ought to be encouraged to think otherwise. The delay in the use of puberty-blockers is presented as a precautionary concern over irreversible change, but it looks a lot like a desire to preserve childhood innocence by paradoxically embracing puberty.

What all of these expressions share is a concern with property rights, whether in the negative sense that property values may be undermined by too close a proximity to the poor or immigrant, or in the positive sense that existing property must be defended against the importunate and naive claims of the young (that the Mayor of New York is desperately searching for evidence that Columbia students are being led astray by middle-aged "outside agitators" is telling). Beneath the anxiety about social media lurks the traditional fear that childhood could be "stolen", which is really a fear that children themselves could be spirited away, either physically or by being alienated from their parents. Once it was Gypsies who were thought to steal children, now it's "groomers", a term so capacious it covers trans rights activists, Islamists and the Chinese government. As we have increasingly delayed adulthood as a social life stage, through low wages and unaffordable housing, so we have extended the ideal of innocent childhood past 18 and increasingly now past 21. With politicians reversing course on trans rights and climate change, thereby making it clear that they don't value the opinions of the young, the idea that you should be able to vote at 16 increasingly looks out of step with our reactionary times.

The Manufacture of Dissent

Martin Kettle in the Guardian thinks that "Ulez reveals a systemic problem with how UK government works – or rather, doesn’t". As the lede summarises his argument, "Most people want cleaner air and a better NHS, but partisan politics gets in the way. To bridge the gap, we need citizens’ assemblies." The reason why centrists advocate citizens' assemblies is the expectation that they will inevitably deliver centrist outcomes, but it should be obvious that they only do this where there is first of all a political commitment to reform and enough of a cross-party consensus to ensure legitimacy for the outcome (e.g. in the case of Ireland's abortion reforms). The idea that partisan politics stands in the way of a better NHS has surely been disproved by history. On the contrary, the problem has been a cross-party consensus (for all but a few years) that the service must be reformed through marketisation and the greater involvement of private healthcare companies. What stands in the way is not partisanship but the cartel, and for that reason there will never be a citizens' assembly on the NHS.

On the specific issue of cleaner air for Londoners, Kettle claims that "In principle, people support action, provided the measures seem sensible, appropriate and fair, and that adequate preparation is made for the transition. It is clear this did not happen over the extension of Ulez. The upshot is that measures that would and could have secured sustained public backing, as well as being of public benefit, have become needlessly contested and at risk of being derailed. That failure is the result of our political system." This is misleading both on the scheme's introduction and the claim that it has become "needlessly contested". The original ULEZ scheme was announced by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in 2015 and was set to cover the same area as the congestion charge zone in 2020. In the event, it was introduced earlier by the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan, in 2019. In 2021, the ULEZ area was extended to the North and South Circular roads. It was estimated that this would impact 140,000 vehicles. The further expansion to all 32 boroughs this year is expected to impact a further 40,000 vehicles. The plans have been widely publicised and remain popular across London as a whole.

To suggest that anything is "needlessly contested" is patronising, implying that there is a predefined agenda for politics. This is the same sort of thinking that imagines a citizens' assembly would produce common-sense consensus and mutual respect, rather than antagonism. If you put an angry outer borough van driver in the same room as an inner borough parent with an asthmatic child, you're not necessarily going to get consensus. One feature of genuine political contest, as opposed to polite disagreement, is the willingness to defy the law and it was predictable that on the issue of ULEZ the Tories should have suddenly become defiant. The party of law and order has always been happy to indulge law-breaking and disorder, while the rightwing press has frequently campaigned explicitly for both. This should not surprise us in the least, any more than the Labour Party's consistent commitment to both upholding the law and rejecting activism as unhelpful. That the current party leader is a former chief prosecutor is incidental though emblematic. But why has ULEZ become such a contested issue?

Phil Burton-Cartledge sees the protests in the context of petit bourgeois politics, employing the frame outlined by Dan Evans's book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite-Bourgeoisie. "Looking at mobilisations of the petit bourgeoisie in the 21st century, there is a certain commonality to them. Whether it was the petrol protests in 2000 or the Countryside Alliance demonstrations a year later, the Fathers 4 Justice stunts, and latterly the cocktail of Covid conspiracism, 15 minute cities, and now ULEZ what they all have in common is the perception the state, or rather a busybody and overly managerial section of the state is getting in the way, professing to know better than them, and is stopping them from doing as they please." His purpose in this is to highlight the dangers that such political ressentiment may present an authoritarian and managerial Labour government, despite Keir Starmer showing every sign that he instinctively sympathises with petit bourgeois politics as much as he respects the dignity of the state.

But there are a couple of problems in this analysis relating to scale and persistence. The Fathers for Justice stunts will never enjoy widespread support, but their specificity also means they will continue at the margins of society: there is an endless supply of divorced dads who imagine the state is a misandrist conspiracy. In contrast, the Countryside Alliance is a substantial organisation, though it's pretty obvious that the bulk of its support comes from field sport enthusiasts rather than smallholders and agricultural workers. It isn't a reactionary spasm by the petit bourgeosie that will burn itself out but an astroturf organisation for large landowners and second-homers that will likely persist long into the future. The same cannot be said for Covid conspiracism, which has already ceded priority among the far-right to anti-drag queen protests. Likewise, the 15-minute city demonstrations appear to have petered out already, while the anti-ULEZ protests haven't mustered more than a few score attendees so far (of course, this may change, particularly if the 15-minute crowd shifts attention). 

The question is, how do such isolated and marginal protests take on the appearance of mass movements, if only temporarily? The answer is media coverage. Consider this from the Telegraph: "Protesters descended on Whitehall on Tuesday to demand that the expansion of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) be scrapped. Dozens of campaigners waved placards with messages such as “stop the toxic air lie”, and mocked-up car registration plates reading: “get Khan out”." (my emphasis). One reason why the Countryside Alliance has prospered over the years is that it has enjoyed disproportionate and sympathetic support from newspapers such as the Times and Telegraph. One reason why ULEZ has become a political issue is that those same papers have shifted from supporting what was originally a Conservative Party policy, encouraged by Grant Shapps as Secretary of State for Transport as recently as 2020, to outright opposition. 

The reason for that shift was the presumed political utility of ULEZ as a wedge issue in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July. That Labour's vote increased and the Tories' fell, making a seat previously considered safe enough for a sitting Prime Minister into a tight marginal, was taken not as evidence that the electorate increasingly favours cleaner air but that Sadiq Khan had somehow managed to lose Labour a shoo-in. This was a framing shared both by the jubilant Tory press and by the Labour leadership, and it was notable that both promptly extended the critique beyond ULEZ to green policies more generally. While Labour remains officially committed to Net Zero and cleaning up the environment, it has made it clear that this will not trump its commitment to economic growth, and I suspect that it considers indulging sole traders with polluting vans to be a contribution to the latter.

The Tories can be accused of reckless opportunism in deciding that "green crap" is the dividing line on which to fight the next election, not least because they will inevitably be drawn towards starker opposition in order to accentuate the differences between themselves and Labour. They haven't got much else to offer. With Rishi Sunak's attempts to rebrand the party as competent managers of the economy going slowly nowhere, and with Labour having successfully closed off most avenues of attack by reneging on their promises and insisting that they would stick to Tory spending plans, it was always likely that the coming general election would focus on the cost-of-living when not distracted by penises and censorious students. The question of who should bear the cost of the Net Zero transition is actually quite a cunning one because Labour simply will not admit that the cost should be borne immediately by the state but funded over time by increased taxes on wealth.

Both Martin Kettle and Phil Burton-Cartledge see the anti-ULEZ protests as an organic product of popular dissent, the one the regrettable result of the failure of partisan politics to provide leadership, the other an expression of social anxiety by an innately hysterical class. But I think both are wrong. In the normal course of events, the expansion to the outer boroughs would have produced grumbling, limited compromise and a few upsets in local council ward elections. What has turned it into a cause célèbre is the salience decreed by the media, which predominantly means the Tory newspapers, and while that is partly about helpfully crafting a wedge for the Conservative Party, it is also about protecting what they consider to be their own interests, or more accurately the interests of their owners and their owners' class. It was always likely that capital would drag its heels even once the imperative of climate change became indisputable, and it was equally likely that this would eventually take the form of popular resistance to an overweening state. And if that resistance doesn't naturally arise, it will be cultivated.

A Decade of Bullshit Jobs

In a recent Jacobin essay, the sociologist Matteo Tiratelli took issue with David Graeber's celebrated idea of bullshit jobs. His purpose was not to say that they didn't exist, though he convincingly shows that the definition of the term is misleading, but that the heart of the matter is not a subjective sense of meaninglessness but a disconnect between work and the common good: "David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs asked a vital question about contemporary capitalism. But its theoretical starting point led it down a blind alley. The central problem with work today is not that a growing proportion of people feel their own job to be pointless. It is that the economy as a whole is not oriented around satisfying true human needs. Instead, we find our working lives consumed by dysfunctional bureaucracies that constrain our capacity for play and creativity. We waste time trapped in processes that exist only to give our bosses more control over us. And we’re directed to jobs that wouldn’t exist if people had the power to choose where to invest our increasingly scarce resources. That is where the real bullshit lies."

Where Graeber and Tiratelli overlap is in the assumption that bullshit jobs play a disciplinary role, both by occupying us and so preventing dissent at the level of society and by keeping us under the thumb of  bureaucratic management within the confines of the firm. But for me this misses out a crucial question. If we accept that many jobs are pointless, in the sense that their disappearance would not be a negative and might even be a net positive for society, why do they exist? Put another way, why do capitalists spend money on tasks that don't need doing and which they appear not to value? In his How to be an Anti-capitalist in the Twentieth Century, Erik Olin Wright notes one of capitalism's self-destructive tendencies: "Each employer wants to pay employees as little as possible in order to maximize profits, but this then depresses the buying power of consumers in the market, which in turn makes it harder to sell the things capitalists produce". It doesn't make much sense to heighten the exploitation of labour and then fritter away the gains on unnecessary roles that produce no surplus value.

A key sociological point to make about bullshit jobs, at least in the examples favoured by Graeber, is that they are predominantly "white collar", as we used to say. We can all think of pointless jobs that are coded working class, such as security guards, but the dominant image that comes to mind is someone in an office laboriously updating a spreadsheet that no one else will look at. In other words, regardless of the physical and cognitive demands of the work, these jobs are typically occupied by people who would be considered middle class, whether under-employed professionals or harried clerks. Paying supernumerary workers to ensure a large enough middle class to both preserve political dominance and maintain a buying public for goods and services is rational in aggregate, but self-interest would rule it out at the level of the specific firm. Capitalists are themselves subject to capitalist ideology, hence they are capable of irrational actions, even actions contrary to their own immediate interests, if they serve to preserve the capitalist order. But even so, there is a clearly a gap in the theory when it comes to coordination. And as ever when we are faced with a collective action problem, it makes sense to look at the role of government.

Tiratelli sees an avenue of coordination in the welfare state. "The growth of education and health care as an employer of last resort is intimately bound up with the decline of manufacturing ... the social power that industrial workers once had allowed them to win substantial concessions from the state and from capital, concessions that often took the form of expanded welfare provision. While those manufacturing jobs have been automated and offshored, the welfare states they created have lingered on, often under attack but generally accounting for a growing share of GDP and of working-class employment." There is something to be said for this, not least that the conservative political desire to "shrink the state" never actually manages to reduce it in any meaningful way, even as it shifts resources from the needy to favoured groups (consider the cross-party consensus to preserve the two-child benefit cap versus the acceptance that public money should be spent on the private school fees of diplomats' children).

But Tiratelli's theory is also unsatisfactory because of his focus on the working class. What we actually see in the welfare state is increasing labour exploitation and proletarianisation. As he notes himself, "They are increasingly underfunded when compared with the demands placed on them. They are poorly paid, insecure, and casualized. Professional autonomy has been decimated. And the prestige attached to these vital roles has been systematically eroded". This description shares many of the characteristics of the "precariat", but that concept obviously extends beyond the working class to the middle class. Indeed, the emergence of the idea reflected the extension of traditional practices from working class jobs to middle class ones, such as casualisation and piece-work. What were once accepted as necessary features of the market became a social "problem" only after this shift. But precarity extends well beyond the public sector to encompass the private, and arguably is more rife in the latter because the former has retained greater labour rights. The problem of coordination in the private sector remains.

When I first addressed this issue a decade ago, in response to Graeber's original essay, I suggested that the solution to the conundrum lay in the work of Ronald Coase, specifically his theory of transaction costs for firms. In a nutshell, firms will keep certain skills inhouse to meet intermittent need because this is ultimately cheaper than outsourcing, however this leads to the creation of unnecessary administration tasks to fill the downtime. As the firm grows, this work is gradually consolidated into distinct roles: bullshit jobs. However, there remains the countervailing tendency for technology to reduce transaction costs, so making intermittent outsourcing more attractive (this is the essence of the "gig economy"). Combined with the suspicion that recovery from recession would see a higher turnover in firms and an end to what appeared to be job-hoarding, my conclusion was that "In the face of this pincer movement, the decline in bullshit jobs seems likely and thus Graeber's essay takes on the air of a lament for a soon-to-disappear world, not unlike the typing-pools and reprographic offices of yore."

That prediction (though only semi-serious) has proved wrong. Recovery has been weak and the long-tail of low productivity firms stubbornly persistent: the great shakeout hasn't happened. The statistical decline in bullshit jobs that Tiratelli finds depends on his assumption that such jobs are predominantly working class, but that in turn rests on a subjectivity about how society values work (e.g. cleaners, labourers, sales staff) and the consequent lack of self-worth this gives rise to. The subject is bedevilled by the methodological issue that worth is reported by the worker, not established by any external, objective means. Thus the bullshit jobs that infest the corporate world can be defended by their occupants simply adopting a belief that they "add value" to a business. The key insight implicit in Graeber's essay is that, however they are defined, there was a noticeable increase in bullshit jobs during the 1990s and 2000s, yet this occured at precisely the time that many firms were outsourcing peripheral functions and even offshoring core operations.

If this is not simple coincidence, it suggests that bullshit jobs are a characteristic of globalisation, but this would lead us to expect them to decline as globalisation has itself cooled after 2008 and even gone into reverse with onshoring and inhousing. This does not appear to have happened, at least not in the corporate sector. The pandemic and ensuing lockdown led many people to question the value of their work. This was both in the sense of putting their careers in perspective as people around them died and in discovering that they could accomplish a week's tasks in a couple of days if they worked from home and thus avoided the "frictions" inherent in an office job, though the greatest friction, poorly-managed meetings, got worse for many with the shift online. That some companies have now insisted that workers return to the office, ironically including Zoom, suggests that the disciplinary role posited by both Graeber and Tiratelli is real, though that clearly covers both useful and useless roles. What we still don't have is any greater clarity on why firms continue to indulge the latter. 

The simplest explanation is probably that firms do not know how to properly evaluate cognitive roles (consider the story of Elon Musk assessing programmers by the quantity of code they produced). They know there is waste and inefficiency, but it cannot be isolated as easily as on a production line. As no one firm has an advantage over any other in this respect, the overhead can be accepted simply as the cost of doing business, much as the inefficiency inherent in any bureacratic system has long been tolerated. The great promise of information technology was that it would improve bureaucracy by eliminating the human factor. The great promise of the Internet was that it would transfer the burden of administration onto customers. Both have only been partial successes. The next great hope is that AI will somehow do away with the need for many cognitive roles, though it should be obvious that, as with previous technologies, this is likely to simply generate novel bullshit jobs in its train. It appears that bullshit is simply a feature of any cognitive work, and as that type of work expands as a share of the labour force under the pressure of continuing automation, we can expect such jobs to proliferate.

Almost Medieval

The publication of Matthew Goodwin's book, Values, Voice and Virtue, has revived the debate about the "two nations" of Britain. Whereas the term was originally coined by a future Conservative Prime Minister to describe the gulf between the working class and their betters in Victorian England, the contemporary intepretation is that society is divided by culture and values, a division made politically concrete by Brexit. This is not to say that material factors have no bearing (the proletarianisation of educated professionals is obviously a factor in current industrial disputes), or that demographic dimensions such as age don't highly correlate. But what is striking about Goodwin's rather unoriginal thesis is the focus on the lack of sympathy between the groups, which echoes Disraeli's words: "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners".

This emphasis on the alienness of the "new elite" has led Goodwin to employ the tropes of antisemitism, which is one reason why he has been accused of giving off a Fascist vibe. This has in turn resulted in demands for left media outlets like Novara to de-platform him, though you can guarantee that this would only lead to another article in the Times or Sun in which he bemoaned his cancellation at the hands of the elite. My own view is that Goodwin isn't a Fascist, though his claims will obviously be congenial to the far right. In terms of his politics, insofar as they can be deduced from his work, he is closer to the right-of-centre thinkers in Starmer's Labour Party with their obsession over socially conservative "hero voters" in small towns and their barely concealed contempt for the urban young. What stands out in Goodwin's thesis is his narrow-mindedness, which leads him to cram the variety of society into two simplistic definitions: them and us. This goes beyond an unwillingness to let go of the clarifying moment of the 2016 EU referendum to a more profound belief that everyone must pick a side, which finds its parallel in the cynical instrumentality of the current Labour leadership's refusal to regret the playground insults of its "attack ads".

I've not read Goodwin's book, but to judge from snippets posted online (e.g. by Mic Wright) I'm not missing much. What I think his critics may be missing however is the nature of the ideal society that sits behind his analysis. For example, he describes the new elite thus: "Consistently, they feel much less attached than others to the group-based identities which have long held the country together, including a strong sense of commitment to the majority group and attachment to their national identity". There's much to wonder at here, such as the insistence of that "consistently", which refuses to brook the idea that people might be varied intra-group, and the vagueness of "others", which is similarly flattening, but what stands out for me is the plural "group-based identities". Goodwin isn't advocating a uniform national identity - the Fascist national idea - but something more parochial. While "majority group" has obvious racists overtones, national identity is presented as the organic, encompassing product of multiple group identities, and it is paradoxically the absence of a group identity that defines the new elite, rather than their supposedly uniform values.

Goodwin's focus on the new elite's individualism is expressed as deracination (echoing the "anywheres" critique of David Goodhart). This has an obvious Fascist interpretation: the rejection of the organic community, rootless cosmopolitanism, and so on. But it also points towards a nostalgia for corporatism, both in the Italian Fascist sense and the Medieval sense. In other words, the idea that people should be fixed within the otherwise unchanging structures of society. This is not simply a reactionary, traditionalist impulse that seeks to revive the good old days of "natural" hierarchy but a programmatic rejection of the dynamism and mutability of capitalism ("All that is solid melts into air"). Where Goodwin takes leave of Fascist corporatism is that he clearly has no real views on the economy. His worldview is self-absorbed, hence the focus on academia and the media: the milieus with which he is most familiar. And hence too the obvious resentment he displays towards graduates of more prestigious universities than the ones he went to and now works in.

Which leaves the Medieval angle. That is perhaps fitting for someone whose persona is so intimately bound up with study and publication that he even went so far as to eat a page of one of his earlier books on live TV. In other words, it would be better to interpret Goodwin as a scholastic rather than as a critic of modernity. He has the air of a monastic scold decrying the wickedness of the world, which isn't helped by his prickly defensiveness when challenged and his habitual blocking of critics on Twitter. As a consequence, he over-estimates the importance of tertiary education: "For the new elite, their very identity as high-flying, highly accomplished graduates of elite institutions not only gives them a profoundly important and highly collective sense of unity but also shapes their values and political loyalties". The idea that a person's values and politics are fixed for life at 21 is obviously wrong, but so too is the implication that those values and politics will lean in a liberal direction, as if university Conservative societies did not exist or law schools only produced human rights lawyers. 

This highlights a general tendency in Goodwin's writing which is to avoid explaining the mechanics of social change, or to explain them in highly superficial and partial ways. For example, in placing the evolution of the new elite in a historical context, he imagines a past in which "the country was run by upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists who were united by their hereditary titles, their wealth and, importantly, their instinctively conservative values. Those people still exist. They can be found in the House of Lords, the Sunday Times Rich List, the private members clubs on London's Pall Mall and holding positions of influence in the Conservative Party. But in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the axis of power in Britain and many other democracies has been tilting away from them and towards a new ruling class". This is a naive history that occludes the Edwardian Liberal Party, the postwar welfare state and the actual source of contemporary wealth in the service of a supposed unity. You'd be embarrassed to read that in an undergraduate history essay.

It gets worse: "The new elite are the product of two seismic changes which transformed the country over the last seventy years. The first was the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy; the second was the rapid rise of the universities, which expanded to supply this economy with a new, highly-educated, highly skilled and culturally distinctive professional class." The idea that the UK was not already a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy in 1950 is fatuous, as is the implied rapidity of this change. The education system had been expanding at all levels since the 1870s to meet the growing demands of the economy for higher skilled labour. Goodwin clearly intends to lead his audience back to the 1960s as part of the origin story of "where it all went wrong". This will reliably secure him column inches in newspapers and future book deals, but the political utility of a reaction to the 60s was exhausted by the Tories over the course of the 1980s. Assuming Goodwin can read the polls as well as the next person, my guess is that he sees his future prospects being tied to a Labour government, as a critic of "elite values" and as a conscience of the "somewheres". 

We've actually been here before. The communitarianism that was en vogue in the 1990s was an attempt to supersede the individualism of the 1960s, as much as that of the 1970s and 80s, hence there was always a sepia-tinged nostalgia at its heart. But it was also motivated by a desire to not return to the class politics of the 1940s and 50s, hence it imaginatively projected itself back even further, making nods to intellectual dead-ends such as guild socialism and early twentieth century liberalism. What was notable in this was the refusal to learn anything from the 20s and 30s, tainted as they were by Marxism. Thus the Frankfurt School was ignored and more recent thinkers who abjured collective action, such as Rawls and Giddens, were promoted. George Orwell was of emblematic importance to New Labour because he provided an escape route both backwards into a nostalgic Englishness and forwards into a post-Marxist ameliorative progressivism. Goodwin seems to be positioning himself for the return of this communitarianism and a revival of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that will undoubtedly accompany it. As Oliver Eagleton astutely put it, Goodwin hasn't drifted to the Fascist extreme. Rather his trajectory shows how "establishment centrism can comfortably accommodate the ideology of the hard right".

What's Eating Our Kids?

The belief that the young need to toughen up has been around since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. In every generation we find society's elders bemoaning how the kids have got it easy. There are a number of reasons for this, from evolutionary psychology (the desire to see your offspring overcome obstacles and thrive) to the nostalgia of childhood, but the dominant factor, in terms of how it colours the narrative, is material. The steady improvement in standards of living over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has provided both the anecdotal frame and a ready explanation: the decadence of civilisation. The latter has an obviously reactionary timbre, hence youth is associated with a declining respect for both religious and secular authority and a general disregard for hierarchies of esteem (they even killed off Top of the Pops). But there is also a progressive variant of this that admonishes youth for its easy attraction to fashionable radicalism and utopian solutions (the Pied Piper of Islington North), insisting that the young must be properly educated before they can assume their civic responsibilities (i.e. moulded into ideological conformity).

In recent decades, this relational structure between the generations has started to break down, largely because the material basis has been eroded. The young can no longer expect to be better off than their parents at a similar age so the traditional deal - put up with the sermonising now for independence and bragging rights later - no longer seems acceptable. Interestingly, the response hasn't been open revolt by the young (yet) but anxiety among the older generations that a reckoning is coming. This is exhibited not only in the usual moral panics over antisocial behaviour, from loitering in parks to smoking weed in a built-up area, but in the historically unusual desire to infantilise young adults (there was an earlier vogue for this in late Victorian Britain that reflected the impact of early modernity). I reckon the reason why smashed avocado became a metonym for irresponsible youth is because it looks like baby food (and not just baby food but food that will toughen you up). Tropes such as the snowflake and boomerang kids suggest a regression to the hyper-emotionalism and physical security of childhood, but these are the product of a parental sensibility, not that of the child.

"Boomers don't want you to grow up because they fear payback" is a pretty useful thumbnail sketch for the present moment that in turn helps to explain the assumption of politicians that older voters want more crackdowns directed at the young. It also explains the liberal commentariat's belief that the political "youthquake" that raised its head in 2017 has been successfully sealed in its tomb by Labour's "adults". Obviously there's a class and race dimension to the nonsense over cannabis aromas, but the dominant theme is a creeping fear that the young may finally turn on their elders for robbing them of a future. So, who ya gonna call? Certainly not the Metropolitan Police. It might seem odd that at a time when policing has once more been shown to be a welcoming environment for racists, misogynists and murderous thugs that the rightwing press are concerned that it is becoming too "woke", but this is understandable if you look at the members of the force and think they appear to be getting younger.

Faced with this looming generational friction there is a ready appetite for morality tales that pin the blame not on political economy or selfish voters but on external factors. One particularly popular culprit is social media. After early panics about polarisation and filter bubbles, the focus has now shifted to the mental health of teenagers and the continuing perils of radicalisation (these days more about violent misogyny than Islamism, though you can never say that Michael Gove is not tenacious in his prejudices). If in the early days of social media the archetypal victim was a senior citizen sucked down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory by Facebook, the current icon is a teenage girl driven to self-harm by Instagram or TikTok. Just as that elderly relative had probably been listenting to shock-jocks and watching Fox News for years beforehand, so that teenage girl is probably a lot more savvy than you give her credit for.

There's something slightly weird in the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt obsessing about the mental health of teenage girls, particularly when he doubles down in the face of extensive critique of his method and interpretations. My point is not that he's being creepy, but that you wouldn't expect someone who made his name with a theory of moral foundations that was definitionally cross-generational to think social media should be assessed and judged purely through this one, narrow demographic. But Haidt's latest sally should be seen in the context of his last major work, 2018's The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which was a much broader attack on what "wokeness" has subsequently become shorthand for, from safe spaces and trigger warnings to a general disregard for the wisdom of the ancients. In the view of Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff, American campuses are producing ill-formed young adults. 

The liberal critique of infantilism might appear at odds with the conservative critique of feral youth, but what they share is a belief that the young have been insufficiently socialised. What neither is willing to acknowledge is that this apparent malfunctioning of a process that is as old as humanity can only be blamed on the older generation, given that it is they who do the socialising. Either parents have failed in their duties (and you will get this in a minor key from conservatives, though heavily class-inflected), or the state, as the agent that we collectively depute to manage that socialisation, has failed in its functions (again, another conservative minor key). But what isn't credible is the claim that the young themselves have an intrinsic deficiency that has either seen them balk at graduation to adulthood or made them particularly vulnerable to malign actors such as social media companies. If anything, the evidence points the other way. The young are frustrated that they can't get well-paid jobs or mortgages and they generally manage their use of new technology better than those who came to it late in life.

The idea that the young have gone bad also colours the current (very stupid) debates over so-called "artifical intelligence" (AI). On the one hand, large language models (LLMs) mean that anyone can now generate a high-quality essay or dissertation, so undermining the whole purpose of education as a selection mechanism. On the other hand, AI is going to automate all of those cognitive and service jobs that the young were being trained for. Even if both were true (they're not), it would simply shift further education to a reliance on in-person tutorials and oral exams, if only to reflect that the jobs of the future would necessarily be based on in-person interactions rather than writing. As ever, the anxiety here has two layers: the worry that the youth of tomorrow are going to be economically disempowered in a tech-driven dystopia, which might prompt a future revolution; and the suspicion that they might have it easy once all the boring jobs have been automated in a tech-driven utopia, which prompts a present resentment. 

What's eating our kids is capitalism. The good news is that capitalism's dynamism and volatility means that the current arrangements will not persist for long. The bad news is that our politics is geared to maintaining those arrangements, notably in respect of the rights of property and the privileging of business as a guide to the state. The tension between the two is obvious, and where that tension is most visible is not among the younger generation but among the older cohorts whose material self-interest is in maintenance but who see the effects on their children and grandchildren only too clearly. The natural response is for older people to try and secure their own children's futures, whether through inheritance or nepotism, though clearly both of these simply exacerbate generational inequality at the level of society. We have, in other words, a classic collective action problem: how do we reset our political economy? But just as the green transition is characterised by excessive talk and insufficient action, so addressing the social failings of capitalism is diverted into the distractions of social media and wokery.