Countering Basic Income

As predicted, basic income is slowly inching into the limelight, with the Finnish government keen to experiment and centrist thinktanks like the RSA pumping out costed "models". The media response to this development has employed a number of traditional techniques, from raising a sceptical eyebrow at the funny ideas of foreigners to outright misrepresentation. In a fine example of the genre, Daniel Boffey in the Observer used a half-hearted Dutch scheme to confuse the basic income concept with the old idea of asset-based egalitarianism: "first proposed by Thomas Paine in his 1797 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, as a system in which at the 'age of majority' everyone would receive an equal capital grant". This is like comparing a 21st birthday present with free school milk, but it serves to distract from the real justification for a basic income, namely that it is a social dividend and therefore a persistent benefit.

While liberals are uncomfortable discussing it in these terms, as that would raise questions about social power that are only partly alleviated by the sophistry of luck egalitarianism, conservatives are happy to discuss a basic income so long as the word "universal" is replaced by the more selective "guarantee" or "safety net" (like Oliver Letwin's 80s view of discos and drugs, the basic income is a characteristic of "the other"). This has produced the amusing sight of liberal sceptics employing the conservative style of argument first anatomised by Albert O Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, namely the triple-whammy of perversity, futility and jeopardy. The perversity argument suggests that any attempt at a positive change will be counter-productive and make matters worse; the futility argument suggests that certain changes are impossible and thus a waste of effort; and the jeopardy argument suggests that change will have unintended and negative consequences.

In the context of a universal basic income (UBI), the three arguments have been combined into the trope of the "welfare trap". The need for discretionary (and thus means-tested) payments over-and-above the basic income, such as for housing or disability support, would exacerbate the current problem (perversity) where the rate at which in-work benefits are withdrawn as wages rise means that recipients have little incentive to increase their hours or improve their skills (futility). With a basic income you'd universalise this problem, thus eroding the work ethic (jeopardy). To add to the irony, conservatives sympathetic to a basic income guarantee (BIG), like Jeremy Warner, happily dismiss the moral dimension: "it scarcely seems to matter" (though it's worth noting he can't resist suggesting that an EU country adopting such as scheme "would be swamped by riff-raff").

Though the liberal sceptics have talked in general terms about the incompatibility of a universal, one-size-fits-all income with a welfare system based on variable needs, some have been honest (or naive) enough to focus predominantly on the problem of housing benefit. Indeed, if you take housing out of the equation, the issues around disability and other discretionary benefits look trivial, not least because many of today's features (work fitness tests, marginal financial support) would disappear with a scheme that was universal and more generous than current benefits. Given that the basic income idea is routinely introduced by reference to experiments or debates in other countries, it is notable that discussion of its feasibility so quickly reduces to what might appear a very UK-centric (and even London-centric) concern.

A good example of this was provided by Tim Blackwell in the New Statesman, specifically critiquing the Citizen's Income Trust scheme that provided the basis for the Green Party's botched proposal earlier this year, and which assumed the continuation of housing benefit and council tax support. The problem is that withdrawal rates for these benefits would be as bad as now, giving rise to perversity: "People with inherited property and modest trust funds would do well from the CIT scheme. Lone parent tenants in need of childcare would do very badly". Though dressed in progressive colours, this image of the conflicting interests of a trustafarian and a single mum is our old friend the trope of the shirker and the striver (inherited wealth versus a parent who wants to work).

Blackwell's admission of the necessary adjustment to make the scheme work reeks of futility: "You would need to pay everybody’s rent and council tax in full. Merely retaining housing and council tax support is insufficient. Alternatively, fix the housing system so that everyone has access to well-maintained, secure and affordable housing". In other words, reverse the last three decades of government policy and local authority practice. Given that it originally took 30 years, from 1945 to 1975, to achieve something close to "decent houses for all", a time when housing doesn't "pervert" a basic income looks remote. Having played this trump card, he reduces the basic income to an incremental campaign to ameliorate the uglier aspects of the benefits system: "significantly reducing conditionality is perhaps the most immediately achievable goal".

The problem with the CIT proposal is that in trying to make the scheme revenue neutral (i.e. no increase in the total welfare bill) it entrenches the existing "dole" of £73.10 a week Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA). This represents a fall from 21% of average wages in 1979 (then Unemployment Benefit) to 11% today. Unless we really believe the unemployed in the late-70s were living the life of Riley, this would suggest a basic income closer to £150 a week might be appropriate. A simple rule of thumb to identify pseudo-basic income schemes is to look at the difference between working-age adults and the retired. The RSA scheme proposes a weekly income of £71 for the former and £142 for the latter. This preserves the fiction that the state pension has been earned through NICs rather than being a subsidy by current tax-payers to former tax-payers. A true basic income scheme would euthanise the contributory principle, and it would also do away with any "reduced rate" nonsense for under-25s or the denial of the benefit to prisoners (as emblematic as the denial of their voting rights).

On the right, the withdrawal of benefits is converted from a problem with the scheme's implementation to a core design principle. Sam Bowman of the Adam Smith Institute thinks that: "basic incomes that are not tapered out are a complete waste of money, redistributing lots of money to people on high and middle incomes unnecessarily. It amazes me that this anti-progressive approach seems to be popular among some on the left". The distaste for universality is covert admission that the basic income is merely a dole. Insisting on the division of society into "givers" and "takers" in this way avoids addressing the significance of the basic income as a social dividend, and thus by definition a universal right, and it also reinforces the reactionary idea that tax-payers should be thought of as having superior rights.

The preference on the right is for a flat-rate payment (or negative income tax, a la Milton Friedman) to replace the welfare state in its entirety. This shrinks "incompetent" government, diverts much of the money to the private sector (in the form of a demand for insurance), and institutionalises the moralism of personal responsibility. What it ends is the role of government as the most efficient buyer (due to economies of scale) of certain public services, its role as the protector of those not suited to "standing on their own two feet", and its potential as a counter-cyclical employer/buyer of last resort (you can forget any idea of a job guarantee in such a scenario). This is the end of solidarity, or as a Hayek put it, "a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born".

The significance of housing costs isn't just an unfortunate coincidence that if absent would allow a basic income to be considered more feasible. The growth of interest in a basic income goes hand-in-hand with the growing "problem" of housing affordability. The era of affordable homes was also the era of social democracy. In other words, state intervention to regulate labour from "cradle to grave" extended to the provision of housing. Once labour started to become marginally redundant, housing was no longer seen as a public good and became a form of individual capital investment: arguably the most important form of capital in the neoliberal era. This was not a coincidence, let alone the result of an economic boom.

The price of housing, like the easier availability of credit, reflects expectations of future income. The cost of housing is therefore primarily an income issue, not a matter of market supply or planning regulations. It has risen because of longer working lives, more dual-income families and larger disposable incomes (due to deflation in food and commodity costs), exacerbated by a growing population and lower household density. High prices in London owe more to the expectation of future London wage growth, relative to the rest of the UK, than they do to oligarchs or foreign investors. It is demand, rather than a builders' strike, which pushes up prices. Constraint on supply exists to support these higher prices, as does NIMBYism. The latter is an anti-market impetus, which is why further market deregulation, such as relaxing planning laws, is doomed to fail. As Steve Randy Waldman puts it, "Homeowners understand their actions not as monopolizing the housing market but as protecting their homes and neighborhoods from the market".

Basic income sceptics think that housing is a killer issue, but it's simply proof that when we talk about "the housing problem" we're talking about the same issue that underlays the basic income: social protection in a post-social democratic world. The polarisation in housing costs - very high in London, very low in Redcar - reflects the polarisation in jobs and wages. If the economy cannot provide enough well-paid jobs to meet demand, then it will also fail to provide sufficient housing as future income expectations polarise. Free-market conservatives increasingly admit the former, which is why they are interested in the basic income in its parsimonious dole form. Some are even admitting the latter, though their preferred solution is to decant the unemployed, freeing-up social housing in the capital for more "productive" use and turning the regions into economic bantustans. The problem with the basic income debate is that it is being dominated by centrist liberals in denial about the structural inadequacies of capitalism and reluctant to engage with the instrumentalism of the right.

Terrorism

The word terrorism originates in the Terror of 1793-4 in France. Despite its modern use in respect of non-state actors, the idea begins with the organised violence of the state. As Robespierre put it, "Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". There was nothing novel in state violence as such, even directed against beliefs rather than social or territorial groups (e.g. the religious wars of the 16th century). What was novel was the assumption that the state, rather than the monarch, embodied the will of the nation and that its internal enemies were therefore traitors by definition (you can trace the lineage of this trope down to the First Order of Stars Wars VII). Though the word "terrorist" would come to be applied to those who violently challenged the state, both in the name of the "people" and "national self-determination", the consistent feature was the claim to legitimacy. One consequence of this is that any struggle over political legitimacy is fought in "terrorist" terms, even if the violence is merely rhetorical.

Natalie Nougayrede espies the terrorist mindset in those, of both right and left, who indulge in conspiracy theories: "Dissenting voices will be expelled, and 'traitors' hounded out – all in the name of 'the people'. The French historian François Furet has written about how the genesis of conspiracy theories in Europe was the French revolution: genuine popular aspirations against absolute monarchy veered into a phase of terror and war because some of the leaders believed they not only led but embodied 'the people' – and so were entitled to physically eliminate any obstacle. This is not to say democratic revolutions are poisoned as such – nor to say today’s democracies have no failings. But it points to the dangers when protest movements come with theories of plots that need to be foiled and critics who need to be squeezed out". It should hardly need saying that she is targeting the left more than the right here, with her equivalence of the Front National and Podemos intended to smear the latter by association. The unspoken subtext (this is the Guardian) is that the tweeting Corbynistas are latter-day tricoteuses.

Nougayrede's slippery "veered" ignores that the war of 1792 was the product of Austrian and Prussian hostility as much as French paranoia, and that the armed revolts against the revolution, notably the Vendée in 1793, were genuine existential threats, even if brutally suppressed. Furet's controversial claim (in 1978's Penser la Révolution Française) was that the revolutionary government's response was less circumstantial than an ideological commitment to "man's regeneration" and thus a proto-totalitarian mode of thought. Though Furet sought to establish a link between the Jacobins and Stalin, his purpose was less to advance a reactionary position (though he inevitably did so) than to recuperate liberalism from its bloody birth and dismiss the terror as a perversion by a sanctimonious "left". For Furet, in Perry Anderson's words, the revolution "had been 'blown off course' (dérapée) in 1792 by a series of tragic accidents, destroying the liberal order at which it had originally aimed, and ushering in Jacobin dictatorship and the Terror instead".

The point is that the belief that a particular political caste can legitimately claim to represent the people in its entirety is a liberal construct, not the preserve of the "extremes" that Nougayrede seeks to isolate. The Montagnards (the hardcore Jacobins) no less than the Girondins were economic and social liberals, even if the two groups were antagonistic in terms of contemporary politics, essentially reflecting a stylistic division between bourgeois representatives of Paris and the provinces that historians have found to be as ideologically vague as the Blair-Brown rivalry. Both groups were pro-free trade and enterprise, unwilling to allow women the vote, and highly sentimental. If he were alive today and a British MP, Maximillien Robespierre would be voting to cut working tax credits and bomb Syria.

Coming from the same stable as Nougayrede, Peter Hyman is the latest to insist that the Labour Party may have to split, essentially to preserve the integrity of the revolution, otherwise known as "the project": "There are two strands, two parties if you like, that will never be happy bedfellows even in the broadest of broad church parties. So either the current Corbyn party will at some point need a home outside the Labour party or the mainstream of the Labour party will need to make common cause with others to forge a new party". It takes chutzpah to suggest that the "mainstream" of the Labour party is not represented by Corbyn, particularly as Hyman's position was implicitly endorsed (in the person of Liz Kendall) by less than 5% of party members. What Hyman really means is that the Labour right represents the wider "people", rather than the party membership, which has become a theme of the PLP since September. It's that legitimacy thing again.

Hyman looks to the future: "Today, there is a need more than ever before for a modern, progressive, values-driven party: a new 'project' that does not try to recreate New Labour, because the world has moved on, but learns from it". Despite that grudging "moved on", his policy prescriptions are Blairism 1.0, proving that Labour's neoliberals remain unreconstructed and are as prone to evangelical language as ever: "At its heart would be a renewed sense of moral purpose – a commitment to social mobility – breaking down all barriers to people getting on in life. It would believe in a leaner, more agile, empowering state that supports social entrepreneurs in the building of strong, diverse and democratic communities. This would be in sharp relief to the cuts of the Tories and the big state solutions of the traditional left".

The invocation of "social entrepreneurs" is no more substantive than Robespierre invoking the Supreme Being, while reform of the economy is once more reduced to banalities and the silver bullet of education: "This project would need to come up with fresh thinking about how to shape a growing, creative, greener economy and schools that prepare young people properly with the knowledge, skills and character to thrive in this economy". This is unreflective posturing that ignores the evidence of the last 35 years (a charge routinely levelled at Corbyn & co), insisting that failure requires us to redouble our efforts: "Instead of just attacking the current reforms to welfare, the project would need to champion the overhaul of the welfare state to provide a more modern contributory system and new institutions such as a National Care Service for the elderly to run alongside the NHS".

The central flaw in Hyman's vision is the belief that social mobility is simply a matter of "commitment" and thus a form of positive thinking. The practicalities are reduced to the implication that a few more academies might cause the economy to automatically rebalance (there's some special pleading here as Hyman is now head of a free school). What he seems determined to ignore, with his calls for a "leaner" state, is that the postwar growth of the public sector was a major contributor to the social mobility of the second half of the century. It was the demand for more teachers and doctors, as much as more whitecollar workers, that provided the opportunity for working-class kids to climb the ladder. A decent education (and a full college grant) was an enabler, but the driver was private and public sector demand. What we're seeing now is the reversion to a historic norm in which opportunity is limited as the private sector reinforces nepotism and bias and the public sector constrains headcount.

A consequence is the increasing marginalisation of the redundant working class, caught between the pincer of fewer skilled jobs and less mobility. According to the sociologist Mike Savage, "Until the 1960s most white working-class boys expected to learn manual skills from their older peers, often through apprenticeships or on-the-job training. There was a strong sense of male pride and self-respect, often exemplified in loyal membership of trade unions. And a degree of respect was also accorded more generally to the 'hardy souls of toil'. Coalminers, engine drivers, shipbuilders and the like had a heroic resonance which was recognised – sometimes grudgingly – throughout British society. This was a world in which young white men could feel self-respect and a sense that they were subordinate to no one. Alan Sillitoe’s classic 1950s novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner perfectly exemplify this image of a rugged, dogged, cussed – but also resilient – masculinity".

This is liberal romanticism (it's been a week marked by maudlin think-pieces on the death of coal) and thus as much an exercise in imagining the national community as the work of Nougayrede and Hyman. Alan Sillitoe's work was less about working class pride and more about young men chafing against the constraints of society at large, which meant parochial working class culture as much as the boss class. Arthur Seaton and the runner Smith were the awkward squad, not the aristocracy of labour. The social upheaval marked by Sillitoe's work reflected the double-edged nature of social mobility in the postwar years. Thatcherism, in the popular sense of selfish ambition and social climbing, was incipient in the work of the 50s Angry Young Men, most obviously the rightwing John Braine (Room at the Top) but also in more "leftish" writers such as Sillitoe and David Storey.

The claim of popular legitimacy assumes a consistency among the people as much as it assumes the integrity of its representatives. Thus "white working-class boys" can be treated as homogeneous, while rightwing Labour MPs can imagine an army of "moderates" in the country as well as a nest of vipers on Twitter. In other words, the mindset that Furet identified is (contra Nougayrede) as present in the political centre as at the extremes. A paradox of liberalism is that its commitment to personal liberty and plurality translates in practice into narrow-mindedness and conformity. Nougayrede's attempt to suggest that anyone who doesn't cleave to a centrist position is prone to paranoia, conspiracy theories and ultimately terrorism is a silly slur, but it is merely the other side of the coin to Peter Hyman's impossibly pure Blairism in which ideological consistency requires purges and splits.

Box Set News

One of the themes of the last ten years in the media has been the over-indulgence in spectacle by TV news, by which I mean the equivalent of dabbing your hanky in a pool of blood. The coverage of the recent Paris attacks, like the earlier shootings in January, saw TV anchors descend upon the city for no apparent reason beyond a desire to heighten the sense of authenticity: a frisson of proximate danger. This marks a change from the traditional response, which was in place as late as the London bombings in 2005, where reporters on the ground would provide factual bulletins, "experts in the studio" would provide analysis, and the broadsheet press would provide long-form essays for months to come (or even years, in the case of Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens).

Many would ascribe this change to the impact of social media, in particular pointing to the way the Arab Spring "democratised" reportage and raised the value of immediacy and presence. However, I think another factor has been the emergence of the box set mentality, which is ultimately a defensive play by traditional media against the dynamics of the Internet, and can be thought of as the elevation of commitment above promiscuity. The chief characteristic of this mentality is bingeing: more is better, we're on a journey, we've got every angle covered (and other clichés). In TV news this means focusing to the point of excess on certain stories and thus neglecting others (i.e. selection bias), but it also means a reliance on emotion over thought, essentially because only emotion can keep us engaged for long periods, providing both narrative drive and identification with the protagonists.

A decade ago, the US presidential nomination process would have only received blanket media coverage once the first primaries were imminent (Iowa and New Hampshire in January). Now, coverage builds 12 months in advance, as "speculation mounts" regarding who will declare their candidacy, and wall-to-wall analysis kicks in with a full 6 months to go. The problem is that many candidates lack a manifesto that is both sufficiently distinct and comprehensive to handle the increased scrutiny, hence the recourse to issues of character or simple trolling. One factor in Donald Trump's rise has been his indefatigability (to use a Gallowayism). The other candidates are intellectually exhausted - not least because the unresolved tension in Republican politics between the authoritarian and the libertarian leaves them often incoherent - but Trump keeps coming up with novel plot twists, even if they are no more credible that Bobby Ewing's shower scene.

In the UK, the eclipse of Nigel Farage can be explained both by his monotonous politics (the same episode every week) and by the sudden popularity of the rival Labour box-set, a new series in which an old favourite is given a 21st century reboot that has fans at each others' throats. Building on the family conflict of the Miliband years, we now have a full-on "clash of civilisations" that looks like Eastenders reimagined as Star Wars. The result is media coverage almost entirely bereft of politics, in the sense of thought about practical policies. Instead we have lurid emotionalism, with much talk of "betrayal" and threats of face-to-face stabbing. I'm beginning to have a smidgen of sympathy for Tony Blair's irritable appeal for head over heart, though naturally I should point out that he was a master of shrouding unreason in emotion long before any dossier was sexed-up.

The rhetorical violence of modern politics is simultaneously blamed on the degrading effect of social media (everyone's a troll) and political correctness (you can't say nuffink nowadays), but this ignores a more fundamental shift in which symbolic and actual violence has become central to the way in which we see the world. The most emblematic example of this is the mass shooting. Though gun ownership in the US is actually in long-term decline, the coverage of "the massacre of the innocents" has become more prominent over recent years, which both encourages nutters who want to go out in a blaze of publicity but also causes interest to overflow to tangential and hitherto ignored crimes, such as the police killing of unarmed blacks.

According to Tom Engelhardt, mass shootings are "guaranteed to eat any screen and recur so regularly, with uniquely gruesome twists, that covering them has become formulaic". Most people acknowledge the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy as the moment that TV graduated from mere reportage to a communal experience of tragedy, but I think Engelhardt is right to point to the 1994 O J Simpson car-chase as an equally significant cultural turning-point: the moment when carnage voyeurism became a commodity (something that was explored well in the film Nightcrawler). Engelhardt is also on the money when he notes the paradigm behind these stories: "what passes for the news is often enough closer to a horror movie in which, just around the next corner, another nightmare is readying itself to leap out and scare you to death".

Starting in the 1980s, the mental dramatisation of our fears moved on from the tropes of the war film to the horror film. The bombing campaigns of the second half of the twentieth century owed much to the collective memory of wartime, the idea that death was random and unannounced. This gave rise to a phlegmatic attitude ("If it's got you number on it ...") that pointed to the attritional resilience of modern societies. In contrast, Daesh's modus operandi - spectacular suicide attacks and ceremonies of gore - is straight out of the Hollywood playbook of slasher movies. The anonymous planting of bombs now appears like a throwback, even an anomaly (e.g. the downing of the Russian airplane in Egypt).

It is the face-to-face attack, whether flying a plane into a building or decapitating an off-duty soldier, that is now preferred, essentially because it appears a more terrifying threat in the mind of the populace than sudden death by a bomb, and is more likely to trigger the anti-Muslim backlash that the perpetrators desire. It is more of a spectacle in terms of imaginative anticipation, and it has become more of a spectacle in actuality as a result of TV coverage. In marked contrast, state violence is increasingly oblique, carried out through drones and air-strikes. We are reluctant to commit "boots on the ground", as if coming face-to-face with the enemy were to be avoided at all costs. We talk of the precision and discrimination of our Brimstone missiles in the same antiseptic way that we discuss the latest cancer drug.

As traditional media have adapted to the challenge of new media, they have become more passive and sensational. Terrorists and TV networks now indirectly collude in staging the most compelling dramas. Against this, only the strongest words seem to get through, hence the hyperbole: "Fascists", "stab", "ban Muslims". Thought is suspect as it might lead to uncertainty or even scepticism. The auto-da-fé, in the form of the "I unreservedly condemn ..." soundbite, becomes the subject rather than the thing that is being condemned (or unreservedly praised). In contrast to this inanity, "The Internet, social media, and gaming offer entertainments that are as easy to slip into as is watching TV, but all are more purposeful and often less isolating. Video games, despite the derision aimed at them, are vehicles for achievement of a sort".

The point of that observation is that television has become less purposeful, which incidentally helps explains why interactive TV never really took off. It has also become less social as the profusion of channels means the common agenda (outside sport) has been eroded. The box set is an attempt to mimic purpose (getting through a season is the equivalent of completing a video-game level), but it is one that requires only endurance, not skill or attention. While there is talk of old and new media combining into a fruitful symbiosis, the reality is that TV news is becoming ever more stupid as scepticism migrates to social media and supposedly neutral reporters adopt a partisan style to stimulate clicks and notoriety. Meanwhile, our appetite for carnage is boundless. Donald Trump and Daesh are both stars of box set news.

Empire of the Celts

The British Museum is currently exhibiting the Celts, while Tate Britain offers an exhibition entitled Artist & Empire. The former is subtitled "art and identity" and imagines an informal empire of soft power extending across both space and time. The latter is subtitled "facing Britain's imperial past" and suggests a reevaluation of the propaganda of empire. The two institutions are of course treasure troves of imperial looting and monuments to exploitation, from the Benin bronzes to sugar, and both embody the notion that identity and social relations can be captured in material objects, which is fundamental to the fetishisation of commodities. Though the exhibitions appear to be quite distinct, with only a slight overlap in the history of Ireland, they are essentially about the same thing: British identity. Of course, that's British identity as seen by the upper middle classes who curate exhibitions.

The Celts, as a people without their own written history, have been manipulated for political ends since classical times. Much of what we know from the "sources" is merely the projection of Roman political and social concerns, from the words put into the mouth of Calgacus by Tacitus in his Agricola ("To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace") to Cassius Dio's ventriloquising of Celtic female desire ("we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest"). In recent years we have interpreted these as anecdotes of native pride and sexual equality, back-projecting a "civic nationalism" that is no less romantic than the imaginings of Walter Scott, when they were actually meant to chide the Roman elite for its cupidity and lack of moral fibre - i.e. the failure to be sufficiently Roman, to the point where you could be lectured by barbarians. Victorian Britons got the intended message: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".

In the nineteenth century, the Celts were recuperated for nationalism, most notably in France. In 1789 the Gauls were the embodiment of ancient rights that predated the Frankish kings, and then a symbol of national defiance during the counter-revolutionary wars. Gauls and impending war became a recurrent French theme: in 1865 a statue of Vercingetorix was built on the site of ancient Alesia as tensions with Prussia mounted (in 1875 the Prussians built a statue to Hermann the German, aka Arminius, in the Teutoberger Wald in part to celebrate the victory of 1871); in 1910 the Gaulloises brand of cigarettes was launched, with its distinctive (and archaeologically unfounded) winged helmet marque; and Asterix first appeared in 1959 at the height of the Algerian War. Yet parallel to this, Celtic identity was also used to advance regionalism in Brittany against the French state, mirroring similar developments in Wales and Cornwall. Thus the national "Gaul" co-existed with the regional "Celt".

After World War Two, the idea of a common Celtic civilisation, stretching from Ireland to Turkey, became popular not just as a precedent for an emerging cooperative Europe, but as an alternative basis for a shared origin that wiped away the nonsense of Aryanism. While genetic research has shown the idea of a Celtic ethnicity to be nonsense too, the idea of a common culture continued to be popular, particularly as archaeology showed the Celtic peoples to be more sophisticated (i.e. luxury-goods fondlers) and bourgeois (oppida becoming mini-cities) than the caricatures of Caesar's Gallic War. Over the course of two centuries we see the employment of the Celts as symbols for regional identity, national identity and a supra-national identity. All three ideas remain current, which explains the contemporary difficulty in pinning down this elusive "people".

By the late-1980s, the Celt was in danger of becoming the prototypical EU citizen. The I Celti show in Venice in 1991 was apparently "conceived with a mind to the great impending process of the unification of Western Europe" with the Celts "being the first historically documented civilisation on a European scale". Though there has since been a turn away from the idea of the Celts as constituting a unitary civilisation, the idea that they were more technologically advanced than classical writers allowed, and that they were also traders on a continental scale, has continued to grow. The recent BBC series (The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice) advanced the fashionable theory that the Atlantic coast was the backbone of Celtic art, a pre-echo of the epochal shift away from the Mediterranean in the 16th century. The British Museum show makes much of this skill in the crafting and trading of luxury goods, to the point that the exhibition occasionally feels more like an upscale jewellers than an academic discourse, a sense heightened by the Clannad-like ambient music.

The idea of the Celts as a loose federation of traders, peripheral yet highly influential, has obvious ideological resonance in Britain, just as the idea of them as the origin of the nation remains strong in France. What the exhibition doesn't do is reconcile the profusion of wealth with the contemporary and later depictions of Celts as half-naked, blue-painted savages, with barely a pot to piss in. In other words, the economic context of Celtic society is largely absent, even though it is central to the historical records of late Celtdom in Early Medieval Ireland (the point about Brehon law is not its sophistication or recognition of women but its obsession with property and financial dues). The explanation for this is that British ethnography from Elizabethan times onwards emphasised the backwardness of the Celtic fringe to justify empire, while the riches that adorn continental museums were the result of nineteenth century state investment in national archaeology.

Where the exhibition is better is in tracking the employment of different images of the Celt to suit a political purpose, which is neatly encapsulated in the competing Protestant and Catholic narratives of Cu Chulainn: a defender of the Irish against the British, and a defender of Ulster against the rest of Ireland. The Tate Britain exhibition also opens in Ireland, with the siege of Enniskillen Castle in the late 16th century, and includes Marcus Gheeraerts's remarkable portrait of Captain Thomas Lee in which his bare (and rather chilly looking) legs are meant to reference both the Irish "style" and Roman heroic models. This is an early example of the British tendency to see empire as an excuse for dressing-up (or down), part of the wider cultural appropriation that links the 44th Regiment making their last stand at Gundamuck in 1842, attired in their recently-acqured Afghan coats, back to Captain Lee in 1594.

The Celts of the nineteenth century Celtic Revival were an invention whose roots lay not only in the search for a distinct Irish (and Scottish) national identity but in the growing British unease with the nature and course of empire. Like the contemporary fascination with the decline and fall of the Roman imperium, the Celtic Twilight was a projection of British fears as much as Irish hopes, which is why so many of its central figures were Anglo-Irish. Though mercantilism had been successfully laundered through the ideology of free-trade, and the naked economic purpose of colonialism had been obscured by Christianity and the "civilising" mission, there was still a sense that Britain's empire was a temporary role, fortuitously acquired and reluctantly assumed (the white man's burden etc), whose ultimate purpose was to oversee the development of native self-rule at some indeterminate future point.

While Anglo-Saxon history was (and still is) framed in terms of kingdoms and their "forging" into a national whole, Celtic history was seen as essentially tribal and wedded to concepts of familial loyalty and blood revenge (a view that runs from from Rob Roy through The Playboy of the Western World to Braveheart). This was used to both justify empire as a historical necessity in the transition from archaic to modern social forms (the example of the Romans in "birthing" West European kingdoms being stressed) while suggesting, through the persistence of atavistic habits (from cattle-rustling to vendettas), that the tribes were not yet ready for self-determination, and quite possibly never would be. The legacy of this way of thinking can be seen in the fascination with tribal or clan loyalty and honour killing in the popular characterisation of Pakistanis (and Afghans, and Albanians, and Africans etc).

The British Museum Celts exhibition suggests that "Celtic" is essentially a style, synthesised from many European influences and still being refined today, embodied in commodities from prehistoric torcs to modern tattoos. While it recognises the role of nationalism in influencing the style, it ultimately prefers to see it as supra-national, a product of the market for fashionable goods (initially European, now global). This same approach is evident at Tate Britain, where the propaganda of empire is rehabilitated as a collection of ironic commodities or recuperated in self-aware commentaries: keep calm and raise a wry smile. As you leave Artist and Empire, some of the exhibits reappear in the gallery shop in the form of tote-bags and prints. From strong-arm "traders" and expropriators justified by native outrages (the Indian Mutiny looms large as ever in the imagination), we arrive at the cliché of a nation of shopkeepers.

Who Are You Calling a Fascist?

Fascism has been in the news lately, from Hilary Benn's tub-thumping via the Front National's success in French local elections to the furore arising from Donald Trump's latest inanity. This is unfortunate as the word is rapidly being devalued. We need to remember what Fascism means politically, before it simply becomes a euphemism for "murderer" or "arsehole". There's no single, agreed definition of the word, largely because of varieties in practice, but there are four common characteristics concerning the "organising principle" of society and the role of the state, all of which need to be present.

1. Fascism is always nationalist. It assumes a distinct, localised identity and a common interest, represented by the "national idea", which is held to be persistent across generations and latent within older state forms. Though this usually takes on an ethnic dimension, it is the idea of exclusivity that is key: we are different and blessed. In some cases the nationalism can overlay ethnic variety and even appeal to trans-national antecedents (e.g. the Italian Fascist employment of Roman symbolism as a way to counter separatism). It's the nationalism that's defining, not the racism or antisemitism.

2. Fascism exhibits resentment against modernity, a belief in recent national decline (even betrayal), and a paranoia about malign forces. It fears decadence within (the product of liberalism) and barbarians at the gate (destabilisation by foreign elements and the jealousy of lesser breeds). It is reactionary, even though it symbolically trades in revolution (it inherits the pre-1793 meaning of the word as the return to a natural order from a debased present). It glorifies the future, but one in which technology and progress serve the national idea, which is unchanging (so it simultaneously annihilates the future).

3. Fascism is totalitarian in its belief that there is an ideal social order that needs to be imposed from above and coordinated in all aspects of life. Though we think of this in the modern guise of technological surveillance and mass regimentation, it is a recuperation of the pre-Enlightenment concept of an omniscient God. Fascism deifies the spirit of the nation, which is why it tends to be tolerant of established religions so long as they are non-competitive. This totalitarian mindset not only rejects diversity and plurality, it obviates the need for democracy and privacy.

4. Fascism treats economics instrumentally, as a means to impose its preferred order and coordinate society. Consequently, it tends towards corporatist regulation, autarky and protectionism, but it also tends to accommodate the larger capitals so long as they are seen to support the national idea. Despite rhetorical sympathy for the little guy, Fascism usually privileges big business. In practice it entrenches oligopolies and is sanguine about monopolies.

Daesh is not Fascist. It satisfies criteria 2, 3 and 4, but that makes it a brand of extreme religious authoritarianism, not Fascism. Though many commentators have tried to fit the idea of the Muslim "Caliphate" into the form of a nation, there is little evidence that the organisation sees itself in national terms (Islam is held to be superior to ethnicity) while its identification with a particular patch of territory is contingent. There has been no attempt to "perform the nation" through theatrical rallies or the celebration of national (as opposed to religious) symbols. The performance of Daesh in its propaganda videos centres on apostasy and apocalypse. Compare and contrast with the more nationally-minded Iranians, who are usually defined as a theocracy. Islamofascism, as the clumsy yoking of the word indicates, is a category error.

In contrast, the French Front National is Fascist. It satisfies all four citeria. Its Islamophobia and (barely hidden) antisemitism springs from a belief in the need to preserve a mythical French ethnic identity and symbolically revenge the defeat in Algeria. It is anti-modern, declinist and prone to paranoia (something it shares with new best friend Russia). Despite Marine Le Pen's toning down of public intolerance in recent years, the FN remains determined to impose petty restrictions to reorder society, hence the obsession with dress codes and diet. It is institutionally corrupt and dependent on rich backers. That its supporters haven't carried out many terrorist acts lately, as the party pushes for electoral respectability, is irrelevant to its political nature.

In terms of the gradual transformation of the social forces that give rise to Fascism, Britain is more "evolved" than France. The real Fascists, i.e. what remains of the BNP et al, are a tiny minority. UKIP is weakly nationalist (its name is a giveaway), nostalgic and bigoted, but no more so than large swathes of the Conservative Party. It is more libertarian than authoritarian, and its economics are best described as eccentric (hence Farage is closer to Trump than Le Pen). The relative strength of the FN reflects the broad persistence of republican nationalism in France, the greater resilience of reactionary attitudes in la France profonde, the instinctive authoritarianism of the French state, and the continued hankering for a neo-corporatist economy among some wealthy business people.

French history since 1871 has been dominated by anxiety over the country's ability to "keep up", from empire through industry to the military. On the international stage, France's symbolic role often appears to be to prevent the UK looking utterly absurd in its pretensions. The domestic right, from Action Francaise onwards, has been fuelled by a rejectionist exasperation at the compromises necessary to modernise while preserving the idea of French exceptionalism. In the current context of the EU, the success of the FN owes as much to worries over growing German hegemony as the fear of the Muslim "other". France has been fretful for decades, oscillating between a "me too" neoliberalism and a desire for a collective duvet-day. This is the legacy of Francois Mitterand.

Donald Trump is not a Fascist. Though he has flirted with all four categories, he has also proven to be consistently incoherent. Basically, he isn't trying hard enough because he doesn't really care ("I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos"). He is a narcissist, but not a sociopath (though he acts as a lighting rod for many who are). He is a nativist bigot rather than an exclusivist racist; his anti-politics schtick is populist rather than reactionary (i.e. kick the bums out rather than fundamentally change the rules); his social prejudices are opportunistic and contradictory (the flip-flops are legion); and beneath the bluster his economics are driven by self-interest rather than social engineering. The most Fascist thing about him is the Mussolini pout.

Trump doesn't believe in anything other than the brand: "Even when his projects fail – his golf course in Aberdeenshire, to take one example, has lost £3.5 million over the last two years – he makes money through letting other people put his name on their projects: no risk, little work, just a licensing fee upfront or a share of the profits. He doesn’t actually own the Trump Taj Mahal or Trump Palace or Trump Place or Trump Plaza or Trump Park Avenue or Trump Soho, or the many Trump buildings throughout South America, Turkey, South Korea and the Caucasus. Developers buy the use of his name because enough customers believe in it: ‘It’s not even a question of ego. It’s just that my name makes everything more successful,’ he says". The problem for the Republican Party is not Trump, but their misguided "project" to promote a simultaneously authoritarian and anti-government politics.

There is some evidence that Fascism particularly prospers in the wake of financial crises, possibly because a fraction of traditional conservative support becomes disillusioned with establishment parties, however this effect normally seems to tail off after 5 years. The persistence of far-right support in Europe today probably owes more to the self-defeating nature of austerity, which has effectively extended the crisis, than it does to the rise of Daesh or immigration (which is actually at historically low levels). However, this does not mean that conditions are propitious for a Fascist political coup, either in Europe or the USA.

Fascism thrives when conservatives fear outright defeat and expropriation from the left, and are consequently prepared to make political alliances with the far-right. But this scenario should not be confused with conservatives adopting populist rhetoric or nationalist policies, as in Hungary. There is a lot of authoritarian practice in Eastern Europe (with pre-1914 roots) that falls short of Fascism. The neoliberal hegemonic recovery since 2009, as much as the modest ambitions of the modern left, means that Western European conservatives do not feel under threat, despite the concerns over stagnation. If anything, they are actively promoting Fascist or nationalist parties as threats to the left, not as allies on the right. In Britain, the mildness of UKIP's nationalism allows it to be advanced by centrist liberals to a similar end.

As part of the long, withdrawing roar of the nineteenth century reaction, Fascism (like programmatic racism) is historically doomed. The current resurgence of nationalism, which clearly flirts with Fascism in some countries, is a reflection of the success of globalisation and economic liberalism, not its weakness. There is no evidence to believe that we will see a return to widespread economic protectionism, or a Hobbesian war of all against all to secure key resources. The unravelling of Schengen, or even a Brexit, will not break the EU, and the substantive advance of the FN beyond local government appears unlikely (unless Sarkozy miscalculates, which is not impossible). The US and China will not be fighting a war any time soon, not least because they are economically co-dependent. The one country that has the necessary ingredients for a Fascist takeover is probably India, however even there the odds remain long.

Fascism promises struggle. The truth, long acknowledged by the broad socialist movement, is that modern societies do not want struggle, they want ease - i.e. not indolence, but what the Greeks called eudaimonia. What natural disasters in Ullswater and terrorist outrages in Paris teach us is not that our civilisation is fragile and vulnerable, but that the gulf between modernity and the privation required to enable a Fascist regime is now too great to be bridged by rhetoric alone. The point is not that we are "soft", but that heroic self-sacrifice in the national cause (or proletarian revolution) has lost its appeal for all but a tiny minority (which may in part explain why such people are attracted to religious extremism instead). In the neoliberal order, blood, sweat and tears have been commoditised into role-playing video games, gym workouts and confessional media.