The Sabisky Affair

Eugenics is in the news again, following the departure of the hitherto-unknown Andrew Sabisky from the fever-basement of Number 10. Though this looks like a victory for the bien-pensants, it's worth noting in passing that the Prime Minister clearly sees no reason to apologise, let alone purge his chief advisor who supposedly employed the "weirdo". I suspect all this has done is further lower the bar for "acceptable opinion". Eugenics is an odd topic in public discourse because there is a tendency to avoid actually spelling out what it means, either in theory or practice. You might protest that we already hear far too much on the subject, and that there is no lack of pseudo-intellectual justifications or madcap schemes, not to mention thorough debunkings informed by both science and moral philosophy, but I think a lot of this is just meaningless theatre that neither gets to the heart of the eugenicist case nor adequately explains why eugenicism is both objectionable and pernicious.

The philosophical basis of eugenics is essentialism: the idea that qualities are biologically intrinsic. What follows from this is a belief that function follows form: that certain types of person are more suited to particular purposes and roles. In the pre-modern world, where social relations were largely unchanging, rank was believed to reflect virtue. In the modern world, "breeding" has been replaced by talent as the expression of intrinsic value and the arbiter of rank in a notional meritocracy, but in reality we have barely left the old forms of thought behind, merely translated them from an aristocratic to a democratic vocabulary. This, as much as the Boer War, is why the 1900s saw so much concern over the calibre of the "national stock" in tandem with the debate over universal suffrage. What did change over the course of the twentieth century was the language of eugenic advocacy, with a shift away from the metaphorical farmyard to the abstract of the good society in phrases such as a "healthy people".

Making an essentialist claim in respect of race or class is clearly offensive, and easily disproven, but the truth is that polite society is tacitly supportive of the idea in its wider application. It consciously rejects racism and bigotry, but it subsconciously divides society into the better and the worse. This obsession with rank frequently breaks cover in issues around social virtue & competing rights, where the charge of prejudice can be more easily avoided and discrimination given a veener of respectability through an appeal to just deserts or equality of treatment. It has become a mainstay of media commentary in recent years, from the notions of the "undeserving poor" and "problem families" to the indulgence of gender-critical feminists in their scepticism about trans rights. On the one hand a section of society is congenitally deficient and "not pulling its weight", on the other a minority is disruptive of a natural order and destabilising to a wider good.

The practicalities of eugenics are also elided unless addressed in their strong form of selective breeding, sterilisation or euthanasia. In other words, Nazis. This is because in their soft form they have long been central to the liberal state in the forms of natalist policies. While selective breeding for heritable characteristics gets the headlines, eugenic practice has largely been about encouraging the birth of healthy native sons and daughters, their biopolitical optimisation and more recently genetic correction. For all its investment in meritocracy, postwar social democracy was selective and essentialist, hence the slow progress towards gender equality, the segregation of the disabled and the treatment of immigrants as temporary "stock". One reason why eugenics is popular among a strand of the British right is that it would require the ruthless exercise of the levers of the state (I suspect this, rather than an obsession with phrenology, explains the attraction for Dominic Cummings). These "nationalists" are quite different to the free-market libertarians who would shrink the state and divest government of all concern for population growth and personal health.

The philosophical objection to eugenics is not that qualities of social value aren't intrinsic or heritable (though they're mostly not) but that we cannot know, let alone collectively agree, what a "better" population would be. We can debate what a better society would be, and we can exercise choice in the matter through elections and other mechanisms, but we reserve the right to change our mind. This is why we have historically supported soft eugenics, from free school milk to a woman's right to abortion, but balked at anything that smacked of coercion or irreversibility. Rejecting the harder form of eugenics is partly an argument against utilitarianism and the treating of people as means rather than ends, but it's also a recognition that the future is simply unknowable (Hayek was sceptical of eugenics for this reason, as much as because of his aversion to planning). The history of public policy tells us that we will inevitably make errors of judgement when it comes to future social value.

The recognition of the "waste" of women's abilities in the immediate postwar years is an example of how that value changes. Initially, the belief was that women could best contribute to society by making homes and raising children. Changes in the economy gradually led to the recognition that their social value would be greater if they worked too. Both views were utilitarian - more concerned with social contribution that personal flourishing - so neither is necessarily admirable, but what matters is the change. A eugenicist policy would have to eschew any such change or risk becoming arbitrary. It also presumes a fixed template not only of social but of human value. In its hard form, "Life not worthy of life". The precautionary principle suggests that even if we adopt a rigorously utilitarian approach, we should be tolerant of variety because its value is not immutable. To take a more recent example, consider the growing awareness of the talent of the autistic in the digital economy.

Eugenics is not about designing a better future but about restoring a mythical past. It is extreme conservatism, hence it is ultimately indistinguishable from ancestor-worship. The inherent contradiction is that it presents as radical and transformative (or at least as edgy and inconoclastic) but it is driven by a vision that obsesses over rank and elitist cultural capital (eugencists are invariably snobs). The intellectual wandering of eugenics, from the Fabians through the Nazis to contemporary national-populists, is a clue to its fundamental dynamic: revolution in the service of reaction. It is the adoption of utilitarian principles and the pragmatic of state power to preserve a traditional hierarchy of privilege. The departure of Sabisky for saying the quiet part out loud does not suggest that this underlying project is about to hit the buffers. Meanwhile his critics see no irony in amplifying this mini-drama of natural selection into a debate about Dominic Cummings' status.

Rabbiting On

Taika Waititi's JoJo Rabbit tells the story of a ten year old Hitler Youth member, a loyal if naïve Nazi ("massively into swastikas"), who compensates for his unpopularity as a squeamish nerd by imagining that Hitler is his friend. Naturally, this imaginary Adolf, played with relish by Waititi himself, is also a squeamish nerd, though one increasingly given to petulant rages that mirror the young Johannes "JoJo" Betzler's dawning realisation that Jews don't have horns and that the Fatherland may be heading for defeat. The trigger for JoJo's rapid maturing is the discovery that his mother is a member of the resistance and secretly harbouring Elsa, a teenage Jewish girl. When not interrogating Elsa for the book on Jews that he is writing, JoJo spends his time on Hitler Youth duties amid a collection of misfits, pyschopaths and his sole friend, the indestructible Yorki. It's a coming of age story, but it's also a commentary on the need for a measure of fantasy to maintain psychological health.

The film has been criticised as tonally clumsy and even flippant in its attitude towards the Nazis, with the implication that a lack of seriousness towards the subject is typical of a jaded liberal intelligentsia. In contrast, the film's champions have seen it as a story of hope and empathy in the face of the recent normalisation of the far-right in politics. In other words, the film is being read as a contemporary satire that either fails because it isn't vicious enough or succeeds because it is humane. It is insufficiently intolerant on the one hand, and "we go high" on the other. Margaret Hodge vs Michelle Obama. My own reading is different, you'll be pleased to hear. I think the key to the film, and the reason why it should be regarded as a sophisticated work, is that it isn't about the Second World War so much as the postwar reaction to it, and specifically how literature dealt with the proximity of horror and humour, from Joseph Heller's Catch 22 to Spike Milligan's Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.

For most of the critics, the reference points are films that attempted to satirise the Nazis, such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, or more recent works that sentimentalised the Holocaust, such as Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and Mark Herman's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. But JoJo Rabbit isn't really a satire of Nazism, any more than Mel Brooks's The Producers was. Just as that film was a satire of showbusiness, so Waititi's slapstick and verbal wit is concerned with the role of contemporary cinema. The better comparison would be with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. What the two films share is a more-is-better attitude to irony and a soundtrack that nods to David Bowie (the theme from Cat People and Heroes respectively). When Captain Klenzendorf prepares for his own Gotterdamerung at the film's climax, it is pure glam. In fact, Bowie might have been good casting for the part, though Sam Rockwell in eye-shadow is certainly enjoyable.

This Nazi world seen through the eyes of a child is absurd, but not simply in terms of its mad ideology or the moral evasions of its people. It doesn't make sense, or no more sense than the parallel universe conjured-up by Tarantino. Everyone in the picture-postcard small town appears well-fed and smartly-dressed despite it being the final weeks of the war, with armies approaching from every direction - "Even the Canadians". There is no shortage of weaponry and Hitler Youth camping trips are still being organised. The death of JoJo's sister is never explained, nor are the circumstances of his mother's capture and execution. Yorki finally decides he has had enough of being a child soldier in a paper uniform and should return to his mother ("I need a cuddle"). This is a landscape straight out of a fairy tale, not an exercise in cinema verité. As a study in delusion, it owes more to Harvey than A Beautiful Mind.

The film is also not engaged in a sentimental celebration of the human spirit, or the survival of decency amid the horrors of war, despite the humanising narrative arc of JoJo's relationship with Elsa. There are moments of heroism, such as when Klenzendorf covers up for Elsa during a visit by a faintly Pythonesque Gestapo squad, and Yorki remains a beacon of innocence throughout, like a diminutive Good Soldier Svejk, but these reflect a live-and-let-live attitude rather than any adherence to principle. Many of the characters have something to hide: JoJo his imaginary friend, his mother her resistance activities, Elsa herself, Klenzendorf his homosexuality. The only one who seems unburdened is Yorki, though his worldview is not without pathos. JoJo's final rejection of Hitler is a moment of self-acceptance, but Yorki got there before him: "I guess I'm just a fat kid in a fat kid's body".

Rather than other films, what JoJo Rabbit reminded me of were two books: Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Both were made into films but neither fully captured the feel of the novels. I've not read the original story, Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, but I understand Waititi's screenplay is radically different both in plot (there is no imaginary Hitler in the book) and tone. What I think Waititi takes from Grass is the self-absorption of the child who believes he can influence the world around him. What I think he takes from Vonnegut is the idea that only the fantastic can allow us to conquer the terrible. It's hardly an original thought that we must leave behind childish fancies in order to face the terror of existence, but JoJo Rabbit makes the further point that adults can never fully escape the desire to recover that childishness and that sometimes surrendering to it is the only fit psychological response. In a round about way, he's mounting a defence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

On Paradoxes and Indecision

The irony of Brexit Day is that nothing significant will actually change at 11 o'clock tonight. The departure of MEPs from Strasbourg won't alter the complexion of the European Parliament, not least because there are plenty of others willing to inherit Farage & co's mantle as class clowns, while the lowering of the EU flag (or even its retention at Holyrood) isn't going to be noticeable in a country that never really got into the habit of raising it. The various plaques and signs dotting the regions to record the investment of EU structural funds will largely remain in place, if only because it would be too much trouble to remove them. This may prove to be symbolic of the damp squib nature of Brexit. I don't mean that the great adventure will fail miserably, but that a United Kingdom outside of the European Union will look and act pretty much like a continuing member. Of course, the end of the 12-month transition period may well bring more substantive changes, such as blue passports and eye-watering mobile roaming charges, but even then I suspect that the chief emotion will be along the lines of Peggy Lee's famous song, "Is That All There Is?" We live in paradoxical times.

It is a paradox that the decision to leave the complex EU will probably prove to be less significant than the decision to join the then limited Common Market in 1973. That marked a watershed in British history: the final turning away from empire, the commitment to Europe as our chief export market, and the first tentative steps towards deindustrialisation and a service economy. In reality, all three were well-established directions of travel. 1973 was simply the moment that the long-held preference of the British establishment became public policy. If it hadn't been for De Gaulle, it would have happened sooner. What the 1975 referendum indicated was not that the British public was convinced by the technocratic case for membership of the Common Market but that it recognised the futility of trying to hold on to the past. A similar clear-sightedness is lacking today. There is no coherent vision of the future, but I feel confident in predicting that we're not going to become Singapore-on-Thames or the 51st state. Our future will be much less remarkable and (ironic given that it's the consequence of a binary referendum) fundamentally indecisive.

That looming indecision can be seen in the consequences of last month's general election. A result of the Tory inroads into Labour's so-called "red wall" is that the Conservative party now has less of an interest in pushing forward with boundary changes and the associated reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600. Whereas post-industrial and semi-rural constituencies with ageing and declining populations tended to be disproportionately represented by Labour MPs, a larger number are now held by the Tories. As a cheap gesture towards the North and Midlands, preserving the "voice" of these areas will prove attractive, particularly as future boundary reviews are likely to increase the number of metropolitan seats, despite the Boundary Commission basing constituencies on registered electors rather than population (i.e. excluding the poor and domestic migrants), which would be to Labour's advantage. We won't see a return to "rotten boroughs", but the inequity in representation between the big cities and small towns is likely to become a counterpoint to the inequality in economic growth and infrastructure investment.

The Conservatives have tried over the last decade to informally rebrand themselves as "the workers' party". This was an attempt both to revive the popularity they enjoyed among aspirational blue collar workers in the Thatcher years and to emphasise their commitment to "alarm-clock Britain" in the era of austerity. Over the same period they have also done a volte-face on the minimum wage, responding both to the evidence that it does not inhibit growth and to the political opportunity of neutralising a Labour attack-line. However, this positioning has failed to take root because the Tory electorate has increasingly aged, leaving it the party of pensioners and older workers (as well as the well-off) more interested in defending their fragile gains than broadening opportunity. In contrast, the demographic shift of Labour's support away from declining small towns to the cities, which reflects the migration of younger workers, has made it the party of aspiration: to a decent home, higher wages and job security. This electoral sorting will increasingly drive policy. In the case of the Tories, it will lead them to question one of their shibboleths.

Stephen Bush asked recently, "Are we heading to a situation where Labour becomes the party for the majority of not just working class people but all people who are actively in work?" The significance of such a shift is that the Conservative commitment to lighten the tax burden on the working population is coming under strain. With little meat left on the bone of the welfare state after a decade of cuts, increased investment in the services and benefits that the old depend on, such as the NHS and the state pension, can only come from higher taxation. The Tories aren't going to reject their prime directive and start taxing capital income and wealth, and they will want to deliver eye-catching gains at the bottom of the wage scale in order to stymie Labour, so the burden of increased tax is likely to fall on middle-income earners. This won't come in the form of an increase in the base rate of income tax, as that would be electorally toxic, so we can expect the government to steal Labour's clothes on the taxation of higher earners and to also increase indirect taxes.

The indecision over HS2 and the third runway at Heathrow look like the continuing saga of the British state's fraught relationship with infrastructure, but we should remember that the postwar period was actually marked by confidence. The creation of new towns, the Beeching rationalisation of the railways and prioritising of motorways, the building of the M25 and the Channel Tunnel were all evidence of a willingness to think big, despite the various flaws and disappointments of each. What's different about a high-speed line from London to Birmingham and the expansion of Heathrow is that these relatively modest (if bizarrely expensive) decisions have become a test of political virility rather than strategic capability. The chief arguments in their favour are negatives: "What sort of nation would we be if we didn't proceed?" Those postwar achievements were decisions that were inevitable but had been delayed (the new towns and rail rationalisation should have started in the interwar years, the M25 in the 40s, the Chunnel in the 60s). Though we can't predict the future with accuracy, the current decisions look anything but inevitable. This is why indecision reigns.

It's early days, but my guess is that the Johnson government will go down in history not as the point of departure for a new direction in the country's history, let alone the start of a new golden age, but as a reversion to an older style of mismanagement familiar from the Macmillan years. This doesn't mean a rejection of Thatcherism and a return to "One Nation Toryism", outside of media-pleasing rhetoric, nor a revival of aristocratic restraint. The Thatcherite legacy is too deeply-embedded among MPs, party members and the Tories' electoral coalition for the one, while the media will not tolerate the other. Rather it means the return of dither and delay. Johnson's performance since becoming party leader and Prime Minister might suggest otherwise, particularly the cutting of the Gordian Knot of the Irish border and the determination to force a general election, but the consequence of the one has been a continuing refusal to admit the reality (Irish Sea border checks and a tipping of the scales against unionism) while the other was an inevitability given the impasse in Parliament (and delivered not by Johnson's persuasion but by Jo Swinson's opportunism).

As his time as London Mayor showed, Johnson isn't an effective manager and his desire to avoid conflict leads to his regular disappearance. While he will have plenty of photo-ops to fill his time, the suspicion is that most of his grands projets will, like the estuarine airport and the garden bridge, fail to leave the drawing board. The paradox of Brexit is summed up in that infamously mangled line from Lampedusa's The Leopard, that everything must change so that everything can stay the same. The 2016 referendum was a cry of rage and nostalgia from Northern and Midlands towns that had never recovered from the blows of the 1980s, but it was also a demand by comfortable Southern market towns and suburbs for the restoration of a settled order that connected the complacent 1950s and 60s of their childhood with the triumphalism of the 80s. The Tories cannot satisfy both constituencies, no matter how many culture wars they launch, but they also cannot risk alienating either of them. The result is likely to be indecision, dither and delay. The final irony is that Brexit may be the only thing that Boris Johnson manages to get done.

Was New Labour a Failure?

The new Labour MP Zarah Sultana's condemnation of "40 years of Thatcherism" has hit a nerve. I suspect this has more to do with her age, 26, and her reference to the views of future teenagers, than it does to an otherwise uncontroversial reading of recent British history. For the defenders of New Labour, this intervention suggests that they have lost the argument over legacy and that no amount of praise for Sure Start and NHS investment, let alone revisionist tomes by the likes of John Rentoul, will alter the popular assessment. That the retort is "What about X?" when the charge is "You didn't do Y" is evidence enough that they are batting on a sticky wicket. New Labour accepted the Thatcherite dispensation, even going so far as to fetishise it in the guise of "prudence". While it ameliorated the worst social effects, its intervention in the economy and society was characteristically neoliberal, promoting markets and consumer choice and bullying the marginalised and non-compliant. This isn't really in dispute. And nor, outside a fringe, is the calamity of Iraq.

However, to judge New Labour chiefly on that particular mistake would be to give too much significance to contingency and personality. Had 9/11 not happened, there is a good chance that the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq might never have followed, despite the neoconservative dreams of glory in Washington, and there are also grounds to believe that another Labour Prime Minister (say, Gordon Brown, for argument's sake) would have been more cautious, lining up with the rest of the EU on a policy of non-intervention rather than committing to military action. If we are to judge New Labour as more than the preferences and foibles of one man, then we should probably get out of the habit of talking about "Blairism" or "Blairites". After all, there is little that distinguishes the latter from the "Brownites" at the level of political theory, and the differences in terms of policy (enthusiasm versus scepticism about the euro, for example) were usually much shallower than presented by a gossipy media.

New Labour was a failure in its own terms. It didn't remake the Labour party and even the election of Keir Starmer as leader will not represent a revival of its fortunes internally. What killed it off was not Iraq, or even the steady growth of disillusion among the electorate after the millennium, but the 2008 financial crisis. New Labour's fundamental premise, that light-touch regulation of the economy could be combined with mild redistribution and decent public services, was shown to be inadequate in the face of capitalism's internal contradictions. With the climate crisis further accentuating those contradictions, and with the public's appetite for a more interventionist state whetted by Brexit, Labour is unlikely to change the direction of travel towards economic justice pursued under Corbyn. It may well revive the liberal managerialism of the New Labour years, but this is likely to be softer in tone and more sincerely committed to devolution and participative democracy, whoever becomes party leader.

New Labour didn't make Britain a "young country". We are clearly now a nation in which the interests of the young are marginalised and the interests of the old, from house prices to pensions, have a grip on politics. Nor did New Labour raise Britain's status in the eyes of the world after the initial high of the Good Friday Agreement and the fluff of "Cool Britannia". The country's reputation took a hit with the Iraq War, however the willing acceptance of the Washington Consensus and the emphasis placed on liberal interventionism were just as important in cultivating the image of "America's poodle". Of course, the UK has experienced declining global status for over a century now. In this context, New Labour could simply be said to have been on-trend - it failed to arrest this secular decline - however a case can be made that its behaviour over Iraq was the first example of a new recklessness in British politics that was all too evident over the last decade, from the stupidity of austerity to the casual gamble of the EU referendum and now the fantasy of Brexit's sunlit uplands.

While New Labour clearly achieved much in terms of better public services and reduced poverty, it did so in a manner that was always likely to prove impermanent. Its insistence on market efficiency and the virtue of fiscal prudence left the public sector vulnerable to parasitism and welfare subject to the "common sense" of austerity. While the latter was unquestionably a choice of the Conservatives under Cameron, it was already conventional wisdom precisely because of New Labour's record in government. This included its failure to adequately address the structural causes of growing inequality - famously exemplified in its belief that it could be tolerated so long as the winners paid their taxes - and its focus of the narrative of rights and responsibilities on welfare claimants rather than the rich or the financial sector. As Stuart Hall put it in 2003: "Marketisation is now installed in every sphere of government. This silent revolution in "governance" seamlessly connects Thatcherism to New Labour."

Hall was an early critic of New Labour and also of the ameliorative argument that would subsequently be presented in its defence: "It combines economic neo-liberalism with a commitment to 'active government'. More significantly, its grim alignment with corporate capital and power is paralleled by another, subaltern programme, of a more social-democratic kind, running alongside. This is what people invoke when they insist, defensively, that New Labour is not, after all, neo-liberal. The fact is that New Labour is a hybrid regime, composed of two strands. However, one strand - the neo-liberal - is in the dominant position. The other strand - the social democratic - is subordinate." It is this point about dominance that underpins Sultana's reasonable opinion. It is also no accident that many of New Labour's staunchest defenders have also questioned whether neoliberalism even exists, let alone whether it was influential. Remove that from the equation and you can better defend the record, albeit by reducing government to mere administrative tinkering.

New Labour clearly failed to undo or substantially alter the economic and social dispensation of Thatcherism, and went so far as to make this a selling-point in the mid-90s. It even reneged on promises to reverse some of the emblematic achievements of Tory rule, such as anti-union laws and NHS marketisation. By accepting the Thatcherite analysis, both in its diagnosis (that the country was being held back by unions and welfarism) and in its prognosis (that entrepreneurial spirit would drive prosperity), New Labour ensured that Thatcherism remained hegemonic and paved the way for a Tory revival. For all the differences in style and rhetoric, Cameron, May and now Johnson are all recognisably Thatcher's children. It wasn't mischief or levity when Thatcher claimed that her chief legacy was Tony Blair. As Phil McDuff recently put it, "In 1997, to say that Blair built on the economic foundations of Thatcher’s economic reforms would have been neither a radical statement nor something with which either Thatcher or Blair would have disagreed."

It is easy to forget how much Ed Miliband was attacked after 2010 for his minor divergence from New Labour orthodoxy, largely because this was eclipsed by the hysterical vituperation of Jeremy Corbyn. Any deviation from the script was seen as heresy, which in part explains the continued indulgence of Blair by sympathetic media. He isn't an elder statesman dispensing wisdom but a protagonist obsessively curating his reputation. For Blair and his epigones Labour has become rotten and essentially illegitimate. While this takes a variety of forms, from a critique of its supposed middle-class indulgence to the "scourge of antisemitism", there is a common theme of decay and corruption in the rhetoric, which sounds suspiciously like projection. The party has been "taken over", it has "lost its mind", it has "forgotten its history" (a charge that requires rejecting most of its pre-90s history). This is not a rational analysis but a psychotic episode.

New Labour was a failure because it didn't alter the political landscape in any substantial or lasting way. It steadily lost popular support through its economic caution, social authoritarianism and foreign policy misjudgements, but was unable to point to any major positives to offset the accumulating negatives. There was no equivalent to the foundation of the NHS or the introduction of Right-to-Buy, let alone the Falklands victory. In many ways Jeremy Corbyn, both in his politics and his age, was a godsend to Blair and his supporters, allowing them to create a more convincing strawman of antiquated leftism than was possible with Ed Miliband. The problem of Labour could then be presented as one of regression to self-indulgence, so reviving memories of the 1980s and the eventual arrival of the saviour. The truth is that Corbyn's popularity showed how superficial the impact of New Labour had ultimately been on the party. Having failed to change Britain, Blair also failed to change Labour.

Surveying the Wreckage

Jeremy Gilbert's post mortem on the 2019 general election at Open Democracy has been one of the more intelligent contributions to date, but it suffers from his habitual determination to squeeze the result into the frame of electoral reform. To this end, he insists that "the single most significant shift between 2017 and 2019 was the desertion of the ‘centrist Dads’" (it's unfortunately gendered, but not inaccurate as a thumbnail). This leads him to reject the idea that pushing Labour towards backing a second referendum was damaging: "there is good evidence that the largest distinctive cohort of votes that Labour actually lost between 2017 and 2019 wasn’t any one group of leave-voters, but middle-aged liberal centrists. The only good reason for any such voters to abandon Labour between those two elections was they had come to believe the relentless propaganda to the effect that Corbyn was an enemy of cosmopolitan liberalism. It wasn’t in pushing Labour to adopt a less ‘Leave’ position that the centrist-Remain camp did their damage. It was in convincing a large section of their own audience to vote against Labour."

I'm sure the relentless anti-Corbyn propaganda turned off many liberal centrists, by which we can assume Gilbert means largely middle-class voters across the whole of the UK, but to suggest that Labour's loss of working class leavers in Northern and Midlands constituencies wasn't decisive flies in the face of the evidence. The reality is that Labour faced a perfect storm and consequently lost votes in every direction: remainers to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, leavers to the Conservatives and the Brexit Party, and crucially both to abstention (it was the last of these that appears to have tipped the balance in key marginals). Where I think Gilbert is more on the money is in his assessment of politics since the 1970s: "The end of the post-war consensus gave way to a period in which neoliberalism was implemented by a professional political class in allegiance with powerful sections of capital; but their project never commanded widespread public support, and anger and frustration at its long-term implications now inform every shade of political opinion in the country." The irony, of course, is that this project did command the support of the (now) middle-aged liberal centrists.

Gilbert has focused on this particular constituency because he believes it is key to building an anti-Tory alliance. Despite the commitment to mass mobilisation and the Popular Front gestures with which he concludes his argument, he is essentially advocating a technical solution to the problem of parliamentary democracy: ditch first-past-the-post in favour of proportional representation. The rationale for this is that the electoral system, as much as the media, has an in-built Tory bias that can only be overcome by a unified anti-Tory bloc. The problem with this argument is that we cannot assume that the disposition of parliamentary forces in a PR system would always produce such an outcome. Indeed, there are good reasons, notably the 2010-15 coalition government, to believe that PR might simply entrench the Conservative Party in power, making it the equivalent of the Italian Christian Democrats in the postwar era. In our contemporary context, as John Gray puts it: "More likely, parties of the far right would set the political agenda, as they do throughout much of the continent. If you want a European-style voting system, you get a European style of politics."

Gilbert concedes that PR would cause the Labour Party to split: "if we had had proportional representation for any significant portion of the past century, then neither the Labour party nor the Conservative party would still exist in anything like their present forms. Both would have fragmented into a number of smaller, more ideologically coherent units." However, I am less convinced by his claim that the Tories would have split in the same way, if at all. The ideological division within Labour - between a socialist left and a managerialist liberalism - is far more profound than any division within Conservatism. Michael Heseltine and Nigel Farage may appear to be poles apart, but they share a unity of vision when it comes to the sanctity of property and the defence of capitalism. Their differences are ultimately tactical, notably in their view on whether close integration into European markets was in British capital's long-term interest. In contrast, what divides a socialist and a liberal is a strategic disagreement over the value of capitalism itself.

For this reason, I am also not convinced by Gilbert's claim that had PR been adopted in the past, "whatever such outcomes may have ensued, they could hardly have been worse than the ones that we’ve endured." Had Attlee adopted PR in the late-40s, it is likely that the shift to neoliberalism would have happened much earlier, probably at the start of the 1960s. The crisis of the late-70s was in large measure due to the resilience and resistance of the welfare state during that decade - for many people the era of actually-existing socialism and advancing living standards, rather than the hellscape of subsequent media caricature. Had the "revisionism" of Hugh Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland come to power in the 1950s, as it possibly would have under a PR system that biased towards a managerialist liberal centre, then the erosion of the welfare state would have started earlier and simply been more gradual. The introduction of prescription charges would have been the first, small step, not a crisis that prompted a violent reaction and revealed the fundamental division with the Labour Party.

Gilbert isn't advocating "one simple fix". He fully acknowledges the importance of hegemony and his analysis is worth quoting at length: "I’d suggest that there are three principal domains in which working-class power and democratic efficacy have been deliberately and systematically undermined by 40 years of neoliberal hegemony. These are: labour organisation, local democracy and the media. In each of these fields, institutions that were sympathetic or conducive to the democratic, self-organised power of working people have been suppressed, diminished and defeated during the whole period since the 1960s. As I remarked already, I believe that it is the failure to intervene in these domains for which the New Labour administration will eventually be remembered most critically. Had they done more to regulate the press and support independent media, to actively encourage trade-union membership, and to restore power and autonomy to local government, then the Tory austerity assault could never have been as successful as it was."

In my view this confuses hegemony, in the sense of its ideological grip (which certainly explains New Labour's inertia), with actual material conditions. The trade unions have been undermined by globalisation, specifically offshoring and the disaggregation of production, more than by anti-union legislation. Rebalancing the power dynamic between capital and labour is going to take more than a membership drive. Similarly, local government has been weakened by privatisation, not just in the narrow sense of outsourcing services but in the wider sense of provision being transferred from the public sector to the private, as in the case of housebuilding, and the reduction of council responsibility to a "safety net" for a residuum of the poor and vulnerable. Redressing this would require not only the re-establishment and expansion of democratically-controlled public services ("broadband communism" wouldn't even be the half of it), but a sea-change in the managerialist attitude of local government itself (bear in mind that councils remain the powerbase of the Labour right).

The media has become more rightwing because the expansion of channels due to technological change (digital TV, the Internet, smartphones) has made private interests more dominant. Basically, money talks and so dominates the conversation. This has also fed-back into the increasingly constrained public sector, particularly the BBC, where a rightwing agenda is now routinely accepted. Meanwhile, though new media has lowered the cost of entry for the left, it has also allowed it to become ghettoised and thus marginalised. Left voices are given airtime and column inches, but this is intended to provide an antagonist for more "sensible" analysis, hence the preference for gobby lefties who can reliably wind up conservative viewers and liberal readers. One result of this has been that while the liberal media still provides room for left voices in order to perform its own tolerance and inclusivity, its actual editorial line is increasingly anti-left and unforgiving of dissent towards the house rules.

Gilbert's conclusion is that the forces arrayed against the left are so powerful that only an anti-Tory coalition stands a chance: "We inhabit a political system that is not only designed to prevent the socialist left of the Labour party from taking power. It is now clearly biased against every force other than nativist ‘platform nationalism’: ‘disaster nationalism’ in the age of ‘platform politics’. Under such circumstances, it makes no sense not to try to build as broad a coalition of anti-Tory forces as possible – from anarcho-communists to liberals – to try to challenge it and change it." But if you change the political system to try and facilitate such a coalition, say by introducing proportional representation to Parliament, you should expect the Tories to adapt accordingly. As last year's point-blank refusal of the Liberal Democrats to consider a Corbyn-led administration indicates, coalition tends to be a tool of political discipline more than a joint endeavour. In the 2010-15 coalition, the Tories disciplined the Liberal Democrats, not the other way round.

I think Jeremy Gilbert is too pessimistic. He is right in his analysis of the structural constraints that make a Labour government difficult, and a left-leaning one even more so, but I think he is also too intimidated by the success of the forces of reaction and too inclined to believe that this is structural ("platform nationalism") rather than contingent on the failure of the centre since 2008. His insistence that "Labour has never come from opposition to win a convincing parliamentary majority and then gone on to implement a radical programme" is correct on a technicality but ignores that Labour in 1945 was very much the opposition to Churchill, even if Attlee and others had been in the wartime government, that the two elections of 1964 and 1966 should really be seen in tandem, and that while New Labour's 1997 manifesto had the approval of Rupert Murdoch, the public version on which the electorate voted included rolling back anti-union laws and reversing NHS marketisation, both of which the party reneged on in office as Murdoch no doubt confidently expected.

I don't have a principled objection to proportional representation, I merely believe that it presents a different set of structural constraints and that ultimately the shift between left and right is driven by material interests, not the electoral system itself. The choice appears to be between occasional periods of socialist government - the British model - and a more persistent progressive alliance - the Scandinavian model: hare versus tortoise. But this ignores the secular shifts of the postwar age. The dominance of social democracy was a product not only of ideological hegemony but of a realisation by the political centre that the state needed to be more active both to address urgent social problems and to provide security for private capital. Once globalisation made the national economy model redundant, and once improved living standards reduced much of the electorate's dependence on the welfare state, the political centre moved firmly back towards support for a larger private realm and a more punitive approach to welfare. And it has stayed there ever since, despite 2008 showing up the limitations of the post-national economic model and austerity proving to be self-defeating.

We are now in a new phase in which much of the electorate has shifted left on material issues (popular support for Labour's policies has become almost a cliché). The right has managed to deflect this through a focus on manufactured issues of patriotic identity, notably Brexit, and by a generalised culture war in which the condescension and authoritarianism of actually-existing neoliberalism, notably the New Labour years, is held up as evidence of an anti-democratic elitism. But the reason the right has managed to prosper is not because of the vagaries of the electoral system but because the political centre remains unwilling to support a return even to the mild social democracy offered by the likes of Corbyn and McDonnell. Gilbert's analysis is correct in its initial observation, that the problem is the "centrist dads", but the idea that proportional representation would lead to the formation of a progressive anti-Tory coalition is simply not proven. The problem is that the political centre has been decidedly centre-right since the early 90s and shows little desire as yet to change.