Live at the Colosseum

According to Elon Musk, "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy." Musk is as vague about these principles as he is about his plans to buy Twitter, though as a free-speech "absolutist" he is presumably against lifetime bans of the sort handed out to Donald Trump, if not against blocking people who annoy him. He also doesn't interrogate what free speech means in the context of a democracy where voice reflects wealth and power, perhaps because he cannot see his own privilege. Musk's use of the town square metaphor reflects his status as a public figure who has little trouble being heard above the hubbub of the crowd. But there is another metaphor that has been widely deployed by Twitter's critics, one that sees the platform as a zero-sum combat zone. As Renée DiResta put it in the Atlantic, "Twitter serves less as a town square than as a gladiatorial arena." This doesn't make much sense as a metaphor. A Twitter ratio in which a bluetick is widely derided as a fool is not like two men fighting to the death. But the image of the bloody ampitheatre, rather than the boisterous market square, does tell us something about the liberal commentariat. 

There was a good example of this a couple of weeks ago when the Guardian ran a comment piece by Moya Lothian-McLean decrying the malign influence of Twitter's "gladiatorial arena" (natch). Her specific charge, borrowing from Julia Bell's Radical Attention, is that the platform's divisiveness and promotion of rage is not only distracting but debilitating: that "Consensus politics, or even any kind of politics, becomes impossible, because we are too outraged to actually think". The claim that politics has become more fractious and antagonistic is a commonplace in the liberal media, along with the belief that democracy is being eroded by populism, but actual evidence for this is lacking. In fact, political consensus has steadily increased since the 1980s, with the result that there is often little of substance to choose between the main political parties. This is not simply the product of neoliberal hegemony or the self-replicating nature of modern cartel parties. It reflects a steady shift of the political centre to the right, the defining characteristics of which have been the defence of property and the absorption of Islamophobia into mainstream discourse (consider the current French Presidential campaign).

Attempts to draw dividing lines between the parties tend to reveal that fundamental consensus rather than a gaping divide over political principle. For example, the British government's scheme to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda is intended to pick a fight with "lefty lawyers", but while the Labour Party has loudly denounced Priti Patel's plan as unworkable and extravagantly costly it has otherwise accepted that offshore processing is legitimate. This should hardly surprise us, given that the idea was first considered by David Blunkett as Home Secretary back in 2003. One of the reasons why Labour's attacks on the Conservative government have been weak is that on matters of substance they haven't offered any real alternatives beyond amelioration. Even in areas where they should be able to highlight clear policy differences, such as on climate change, they have been tentative and hesistant, or even  bluntly reactionary as in the demand for injunctions against protestors. Keir Starmer's pitch is that he would be a more competent manager than Boris Johnson, hence the repeated use of the phrase "Get a grip". The problem with our politics is not a lack of consensus.

Lothian-McLean's case against Twitter isn't particularly coherent. She starts by saying that "It silos people off into echo chambers in which their interaction with like-minded individuals can vastly change their perception of reality (For instance, at the 2019 election I truly thought Labour had a chance.)" But she then tells us that "Extensive research shows that disagreement – even the well-evidenced, politely delivered kind – does very little to change someone’s opinion". You could reconcile these two claims by assuming that Twitter simply reinforces predispositions (the classic interpretation of how propaganda works), but then "vastly change" is obviously hyperbole. There's also an inherent contradition in the idea that Twitter creates both echo chambers, in which everyone agrees, and gladiatorial contests, in which everyone very loudly disagrees. Thinking Labour had a chance in 2019 was perfectly reasonable - it did have a chance - but to suggest that Twitter obscured the probability only makes sense if you went through the campaign without being exposed to either FBPE propaganda on the need to vote Liberal Democract or the extensive cast list of right-wing Labour types gagging for defeat. 

Most of these critiques of social media end up being about behaviour, with a strong whiff of sanctimony on the part of individuals granted the privilege of a newspaper column. According to Lothian-McLean, "Dissent on Twitter is rarely ever expressed politely: it is gladiatorial. Twitter communities often show up to back their chosen fighter, furthering the sense of “us” v “them”". But impolite partisanship isn't peculiar to social media: it is the very essence of newspaper comment, after all. The difference between Twitter and a newspaper is simply one of access. The reason why the bird site is so popular with the politico-media caste is precisely that it amplifies their own behaviour: trenchant opinions, contempt, bullying etc. But it doesn't create this, any more than the penny post created the intemperate letter to the editor. One thing Twitter has allowed journalists to do is to offshore their self-disgust: "When I am on Twitter, I find myself hating everything and everyone – especially myself – wasting their lives arguing about nothing. I lose my ability to empathise, to see humanity beyond the avatars. Never am I more disconnected than when I am plugged in."

This reluctance to address the nature of the wider media, and in particular the press, is pathological. Consider this: "Existing in a state of constant fury on Twitter doesn’t equate to full-blown extremism. But the obsessive, feverish, zero-sum nature of Twitter discourse certainly contributes to an environment that breeds, at best, suspicion and hostility to opposing worldviews and, at worst, festering radicalisation. Transphobia is an obvious example; Twitter has seen the spread of anti-trans views beyond the confines of niche forums to become a moral panic." But the current prominence of transphobia has little to do with social media and everything to do with the traditional media, particularly broadsheet newspapers that have sought to demonise trans rights activists as a moral threat and part of a wider "wokery" that imperils national identity. Kathleen Stock did not achieve prominence through Twitter - she was promoted by the Times and the BBC - and "niche forum" isn't exactly an accurate description of Mumsnet. 

Despite insisting that consensus politics is made impossible by Twitter, Lothian-McLean has to concede that the evidence doesn't support such a pessimistic view: "The thing is, the extreme division that characterises Twitter is not widespread in society at large. Research by King’s College London’s (KCL) Policy Institute in 2019 found that while people had become more polarised based on their political identities, for example Brexiters and remainers, differences in opinion on specific policies, such as immigration, were in fact starting to converge." We are living in a age of grudging consensus and are consequently ever more determined to argue that other people are wrong. This might lead you to wonder whether these "political identities" have been deliberately accentuated to give the impression of difference. Indeed, perhaps the defining characteristics of Twitter aren't the trolling and the pile-ons but the declarative bio and flag-adorned names. Are we really arguing passionately, or are we simply performing identity? 

Musk may be a vain fool and his vision of the public square heavily biased in favour of those with the loudest voices, but he does at least recognise that democracy is practised as discourse, even if he remains vague on the details. In contrast, the liberal commentariat's choice of the gladiatorial metaphor points to a rejection of discourse in favour of struggle, which is both a reductive view of democracy and a theory of politics as tactical advantage rather than strategic truth (i.e. my side must win not to achieve a particular goal but because my side must win). Ironically, the metaphor works better as a reflection of the opinion economy of the press and TV in which striking a pose is always more important than establishing truth and you are only one bad performance away from career death. Indeed, the idea of "cancellation", which exists more in the fearful minds of the commentariat than in reality, is perhaps just an expression of this existential anxiety: the ultimate thumbs down. What bothers newspaper columnists who've built a career on the bully-pulpit is not the viciousness of Twitter but the proximity of the crowd.

Benefits Street

Approximately 42% of the UK adult population (23 million out of 54 million) are in receipt of at least one state benefit. Of that number, a little over half (12.6 million) are pensioners, of whom 29% claim at least one additional benefit over-and-above the state pension. 40% of Universal Credit claimants are in at least part-time work. Across the UK, more than half of households are in receipt of one or more benefits in all regions bar London and the South East. While the composition of benefits has changed over time, e.g. the shift from unemployment to incapacity benefits in the 1980s and 90s, their incidence - i.e. who receives them - hasn't changed all that much. Demographic ageing has increased the number of pensioners as a proportion of the total, but among the working age population benefits remain concentrated among the poor (understandably enough) and the more deprived parts of the country. This has given rise to myths about inter-generational dependency, but the more accurate picture is of a national population that routinely moves between paid employment and welfare or that needs to claim benefits to augment low-paid work. 

The social history of the last century, from the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, was marked by the steady expansion of welfare, not just in the broader sense of the provision of public goods such as healthcare, education and housing, but in the narrow sense of cash benefits. While the original pensions were non-contributory, it was the contributory principle that marked the ideological high-point of this expansion in the late-1940s with the reform of National Insurance. Thereafter, the growth of non-contributory schemes, such as National Assistance and Supplementary Benefit, would see the ideological frame of benefits shift towards questions of entitlement and abuse. The welfare reforms initiated by the Conservatives in the 1980s, and rebooted under New Labour after 1997, effectively conceded the end of the contributory principle as the central pillar of welfare, but instead of a frank acknowledgment that people should simply be given money to avoid destitution, in its place was substituted the moralising regime of workfare while welfare more broadly was subject to a culture of means-testing and bureaucratic hindrance.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to many more people finding themselves in receipt of state handouts, such as the furlough scheme, but this probably hasn't changed the total number who will at some point in their life find themselves dependent on welfare payments, because that figure is already very high. What it has done is raise the question as to whether the state should simply respond to need. While there has been plenty of critical coverage of the government's poorly-managed and easily-defrauded business loan schemes, there has been little debate or media fuss about the deservedness of those in receipt of income support during lockdown. Similarly, it's clear that most people were sympathetic to the temporary Universal Credit uplift, and would support it being restored, not least because the proposed 3.1% uprating of benefits is clearly going to be inadequate in a year when inflation may touch 8%. The demand that the state protect consumers from high gas and electricity prices, particularly those already hovering above the poverty line and forced to make choices between heating and eating, is also close to universally popular.

This presents a challenge for a Conservative government committed to the free market. In a choice between direct market intervention and subventions, they will tend towards the latter for ideological reasons. Any gestures towards the former will be designed to maintain commerial relations, thus the proposed £200 discount on energy bills will be paid back through higher charges over the next five years, while the £150 council tax rebate is non-repayable. But this risks undermining another tenet of conservative philosophy, that people should not be dependent on state handouts, so those subventions must in turn be framed as exceptional and geared to virtuous behaviour, such as homeowning. The government's problem, which can also be seen in microcosm in its reaction to the P&O affair, is that the electorate supports direct market intervention, whether that be windfall profit levies or nationalisation of energy supply. It also believes that the government has a moral duty to protect the population from excessive price increases. This is a notable shift from previous decades when questions of morality focused on the legitimacy of benefit claimants.

The negative reaction to the Chancellor's recent budget statement has focused on the immediate increase in taxation (i.e. the previously-announced increase in the NIC rate), but what really distinguishes it is the disappearance of the activist government forced into existence by the pandemic. This is why the statement went down better with Tory backbenchers than the population at large. In terms of interest groups, Rishi Sunak's plan appears to be to get middle-earners back on board though the increase in the NI primary threshold and the cut in fuel duty, with his attention switching to pensioners next year when he presumably hopes to restore the triple-lock, ahead of a promised cut in income tax in 2024 just before the likely general election. What received less coverage were his announcements in respect of business, where increased reliefs on investment and the NI employment allowance for smaller firms were held up as steps towards addressing poor productivity growth, despite these being measures already tried on multiple occasions to little effect. In practice, these were simply reassurances that business is valued, which presumably is intended to head off any competition on that score from Labour's pro-capital turn.

Behind these short-terms tweaks and gestures lies a more significant secular change in the composition of welfare recipients since the 1970s. It's important at this juncture to understand that a welfare recipient is not just a benefit claimant. In a fiscal system centred on income and property taxes, any favoured group that receives a rebate or discount on their tax - for example, reliefs on investment or the employment allowance - is effectively a welfare recipient because they are being subsidised by other tax-payers. The term "corporate welfare" has gained currency over the last 50 years, but it might be better to speak of capital welfare given that one of the persistent features of the period has been lower rates of taxation on dividends and capital gains, which benefits the share-holding classes and homeowners. We can also see this capital welfare quite explicitly in housing benefit, where general tax revenues flow to landlords. Though claimants get the benefit of the housing, the property owner gets the benefit of the one cash welfare that has increased more steeply than incomes. 

This welfare is also extended to favoured groups in the form of employment income. The steady increase in the tax-free allowance on income tax and now national insurance, which higher earners receive the full benefit of, should really be seen as what the hardly-radical Fabian Society have taken to calling "shadow welfare". When these taxes foregone for individual income and housing (i.e. exemptions for CGT and VAT) are taken together at a national level, they amount to four-fifths of the total spending on social security and state pensions. The Fabians' Andrew Harrop correctly identifies what this startling fact points to: "The answer to the question ‘should the UK have a UBI?’ is that we already do, once tax-free allowances are taken into account. The ‘shadow welfare’ of tax-free allowances is a quasi-UBI, but one that excludes people who earn little or nothing: it is means-tested in reverse." But crucially, "When social security and ‘shadow welfare’ are looked at together we have a broadly flat-rate system, with middle and high income households being entitled to only slightly less than low-income households on average."

Where Harrop and the Fabians revert to type is in preserving the role of means-testing for all benefits beyond a "flat-rate universal allowance for each adult (evolving from today's tax-free allowances". In other words, they are arguing to formalise the current situation, in much the same way that they argue that national insurance should be merged with income tax and the myth that it is hypothecated for specific benefits or welfare services dispensed with. As ever with this argument, the unstated premise is that overall levels of taxation will not change, hence "While there is nothing wrong with the principle of universalism, it cannot be justified if it means resources are spread so thinly that those who rely only on state support must face extreme hardship". But this is a disingenuous argument given that the Fabians' own analysis shows that so much of "shadow welfare" is actually related to wealth, rather than income, such as capital gains, dividends and accumulated property. And if there is one stylised fact we know about fiscal policy during the neoliberal era, as detailed analyses by the like of Piketty et al have shown, it is that we have systematically under-taxed wealth.

Basic income is now clearly visible in the Overton Window of legitimate political discourse, but what matters in the UK context is less the idea than its reinterpretation within the history of welfare, hence the Fabians insistence that we have long had a de facto basic income that combines benefits for some and allowances for others. But the acknowledgment of this does not promise an end to the popular culture of beasting benefit claimants, simply because the discretionary benefits that the poor rely on will still be means-tested. In this regard, it's worth noting that the focus on benefit fraud long ago shifted from income to housing, hence the introduction of the "bedroom tax" a decade ago. Behind this is a wider defence of wealth and capital, hence the strong correlation in attitudes between support for the bedroom tax and opposition to inheritance tax. The framing of basic income as the logical evolution of a parsimonious dole merging with tax-free allowances is an essentially conservative reading. It not only occludes the role of wealth in the growing inequality of the last 45 years, it also closes down any discussion of UBI's emancipatory potential, and I suspect it is the latter that most attracts the Fabians.

French Film Blurred

One of the great themes of cinema is the experience of youth. This is partly because the medium lends itself to communicating the physical and emotional thrills of those for whom the body is effortlessly responsive and so much of experience is novel. Consider Alana and Gary running along the street in Licorice Pizza, or Buddy leaping through the air in Belfast, to pick two recent examples. But it also reflects the popularity of cinema among the young, which in turn means the demand for constant rejuvenation in a manner closer to popular music than literary fiction. Older, established directors and screenwriters receive due respect and can (usually) still get films made, but we hunger for new ways of seeing, new ways of telling stories, and that means new ways of encountering youth on the screen. This inevitably fuels the iconoclasm of youth, but that phrase is just a tired cliché. More interesting is the resentment of the old, specifically the generation who came of age in the 1960s - a time when TV was taking over from cinema but for that very reason the straitjacket was being eased off the older medium. Just as they criticised their parent's generation then, and derided the tame fare of the BBC, now they are criticising their children's generation, which came of age after the millennium and social media. 

I'm going to discuss this further by looking at three French films: two recent releases and one classic from 1960. Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades in the original French) is in cinemas now. Gagarine had a limited release at the end of last year but is available online. Breathless (Au Bout de Souffle), Jean-Luc Godard's famous (and infamous) debut, enjoyed its sixtieth anniversary during the first lockdown. That they are all French means they are related sociologically as well as cinematically, but the wider social and political points apply well beyond the boundaries of France. Looking at these issues at one remove from the UK avoids the risk of the parochial, which is something all too evident in films like Licorice Pizza and Belfast: the one an arch comedy about a self-satisfied society in which youth is a commodity, the other a sentimental erasure of the political in which aged wisdom schools the innocent young. While those films compartmentalise youth, the two recent French releases engage it as a problematic, but with very different intentions. One sees the problem as the deficiencies of the young themselves, as if these were somehow independent of society (or even a threat to it), while the other sees the problem as the growing antipathy displayed by society (i.e. the middle-aged and old) towards the young.

In Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makita Samba) are solipsistic and selfish twenty-somethings who come together for economic reasons (flat-sharing), enjoy a physical if catty relationship, change jobs and generally don't get anywhere with their lives while irritating their families. There are moments of grace and humour, and plenty of convincing sex, but neither character is sympathetic, despite subtle performances by the actors. At one point, having dissed his sister's plans to become a stand-up, Camille's father tells him, "No one gives a fuck what you think!" [because you don't care about anyone else]. This feels like the director talking. In the third strand, Nora (Noémie Merlant) is a thirty-something but still naive woman, fleeing provincial life and a coercive relationship, who has become a mature but still aimless student. Her path will cross with Émilie and Camille, the latter sexually, but her chief relationship, and arguably the film's saving grace as a story, is the burgeoning one she enjoys online with Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a cam-girl whom Nora is mistaken for by her younger classmates after donning a blonde wig at a freshers party. 

Though a technically accomplished film, notably in its black and white photography (more reminiscent of Manhattan than anything in the French tradition, unless you count The Battle of Algiers), it is an unfocused story. This is less because it is essentially a portmanteau - knitting together three tales by the American comic book artist Adrian Tomine, now combined in a screenplay with original elements written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius - than because it seems fascinated by the shortcomings of its young protagonists, which I suspect reflects Audiard's interests more than those of his co-writers. That Nora is a more sympathetic character suggests that this is where Sciamma's hand is to be found, a suspicion reinforced by Merlant's previous role in Sciamma's 2019 film, A Portrait of a Woman on Fire. Audiard is no stranger to misanthropy - A Prophet is a Hobbesian parable, Dheepan a French Taxi Driver - but here his target is specifically youth rather than mankind in general, and the chief charge is that they are stupid and unreliable because they are self-absorbed. 

Nora's classmates are presented as little more than a mob that is triggered into slut-shaming by the most trivial prop and the pernicious effects of social media. (As a rule of thumb, anyone who thinks social media is leading to the decline of civilisation does not know what they are talking about.) Though Nora satisfyingly clocks one of her tormentors in the street, there is little realism in this part of the story: none of her classmates appears to doubt the rumour that she is a cam-girl, while they appear to be as familiar with Amber Sweet as with a pop star. The developing romance between Nora and Amber is satisfying (both actresses are excellent) but it's also fantastical, and apparently designed to serve up the banal observation that relationships in meatspace are superior to hyperspace. While Nora's strand works better than Émilie's or Camille's, this is because it is closer to a fairy-tale: an innocent girl suffers a near-magical transformation and is saved from a hostile crowd and various predatory wolves through the intercession of a semi-divine character combining Godmother and Prince Charming. There is even a kiss straight out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In contrast, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's Gagarine is a story about youthful aspiration. The plot centres on the real-world decision to condemn and then demolish a Parisian housing project, the Cité Gagarine, which was named after the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gargarin, who ceremonially opened it in 1963 (we see archive footage, notable for showing an already racially mixed community who have all dressed up for the occasion). Alséni Bathily plays the suitably named Youri, a young man whose mother is absent but who is part of a clearly supportive community that tolerates eccentrics and a peripheral Roma family including Diana, played by Lina Khoudri (recently seen in Wes Anderson's The French Disptach). Youri has taken it upon himself, with assistance by his friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven), to repair as much of the project as possible in the hope, vain as it transpires, of stopping the demolition. As the residents are decanted and their community broken up, Youri retreats into his fantasy of space flight, transforming a hidden area of the project into a spacecraft with hydroponic cultivation. Diana and Dali (Finnegan Oldfield), a petty drug dealer who is also disgusted at the destruction of the community, discover Youri's secret but both are eventually forced out by the authorities and he is left on his own: increasingly ill and withdrawn in depression.

Though it nods towards social issues, such as poverty and racism, Gagarine is really a film about sociability - extended families as well as the compact family (or crew) Youri briefly creates with Diana and Dali. The iconic moment is when Youri organises a community get-together to view a solar eclipse, rigging up screens to shield eyes and pointing his community literally at the nearest star. It is a symbol not of oppression or pessimism but of optimism and common purpose, as was the naming of the housing project, even if it turns out to be as fleeting as the eclipse itself. Gagarine is a film of much lyricism. Some of the photography is gorgeous and stands as a testament to the art and ambition of the novice feature directors, and it is ably supported by a lovely score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, the Russian brothers who provided the music for Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2017 film Loveless. For a French film, there are some notable British echoes, from Charles Crichton's 1947 Hue and Cry (Youri has a loyal following among the local kids) to Ben Wheatley's 2015 High-Rise (in which the protagonist must improvise among the ruins).

What distinguishes Gagarine from Paris, 13th District is that the young are not only varied in their attitudes and clever in multiple ways, but they are well-integrated into their families and wider communities. Houssam and Diana choose their families over Youri but never lose their respect and love for him. Youri's alienation from his mother is clearly atypical and presented as problematic, while in contrast Émilie, Camille and Nora's distance from theirs is presented as all too typical if regrettable (but with the blame mainly on them, Nora being a partial exception). It is also noticeable, by its absence, that social media does not dominate the lives of the young in Gagarine. The local gang, with Dali prominent, sit on plastic chairs in a common area to debate life and mock passersby, as such youth have done since time immemorial (of the two films, Gagarine is much the closer to I Vitelloni). The younger kids are occupied running around, doing what kids do. There's obviously a degree of sentimentalisation here, though thankfully nothing on the scale of Belfast (the feel-good sectarian bigotry film of the year), but there's also a lot of truth. The film orginated in a documentary about the break-up of Cité Gagarine. It didn't invent the community's cohesion or the kids' sociable behaviour, let alone manufacture its regret.

Breathless provides an interesting contrast to both films. The shallowness and self-absorption of the characters in Godard's startling debut - Jean-Paul Belmondo's petty criminal Michel and Jean Seberg's American drifter Patricia - have obvious parallels with Camille and Émilie, even if the latter are better educated and less pliable respectively (that's progress for you). The shock of the film in 1960 had as much to do with the director's use of characters that we struggle to actively sympathise with as the jump cuts, which weren't novel but had never been used so extensively. The latter were attributed to Godard's desire to cut the running time down to 90 minutes without cutting entire scenes, but perhaps by happenstance they also served to emphasise the characters lack of focus and disregard for consequentiality. Another recurrent trope is Patricia's uncertainty over the meaning of French words, which gives her a noticeably affectless air (I suppose that's the disadvantage of not speaking a second language, as Wire sang). It remains an impressive work, despite its rebarbative qualities, that mixes a fascination with American cinema (specfically what would become known in the 1970s as film noir) with the verité of war reportage (the Algerian War was still going on and Raoul Coutard, the director of photography, had been in Indochina) and the influences of Italian neo-realism and Franco-German existentialism.

What links Breathless and Gagarine is what the former occludes, namely the humanism of those others pillars of the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Agnes Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) which bookend Godard's debut. In other words, if Paris, 13th District sits within a tradition of cinematic misanthropy and contempt (Godard would go on to make a film, Le Mepris, on just that subject in 1963), Gagarine sits in the non-Godardian tradition in which sympathy is central both to the main character's engagement with the world and their treatment by the filmmaker. One thing Breathless shares with The 400 Blows is the closing shot, in which Patricia and Antoine Doinel each look directly at the camera. But while both are challenging, Patricia's is a look that settles into disinterest and a reluctance to accept responsibility while Antoine's remains hopeful and engaged. Neither Paris, 13th District nor Gagarine attempt anything so provocative, but their endings are both different and comparable to those earlier works, the one urging compromise and maturation - in other words, surrender - the other that the young should hang on to their dreams and light up the world. Both films are worth the ticket price, but its is Gagarine that will leave you hopeful for humanity.

Sanctions

If Oliver Bullough's recently published Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals has been fortunate in its timing, the same could also be said of Nicholas Mulder's The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. What these works share, apart from explanatory subtitles with a slightly antique air, is a focus on international relations. Though Bullough employs the prism of Britain and provides anecdotes about status-hungry oligarchs and privacy-obsessed money launderers, the economic regime he describes is simply that of globalised capital: deracinated wealth moving through the City of London in search of high returns as much as the avoidance of tax. Likewise, Mulder's concern is with states as the monopolists of violence. But sanctions are also a tool that governments increasingly deploy against their own citizens. Where once this would be seen mainly in the form of financial measures against organised labour, such as the sequestration of trade union funds in the 1980s, today its chief form is that of benefit sanctions: the disciplining of atomised labour through the conditional withholding of welfare. Another form is restrictions and fines based on probability rather than proven guilt, such as criminal behaviour orders (the successors of ASBOs) and fixed penalty notices.

Sanctions can also be deployed against businesses and other economic actors, as we've seen with the freezing of Russian oligarch assets or the threats to penalise social media platforms that don't adequately police content. But generally government is reluctant to sanction business when it is exercising the prerogatives of capital, particularly when it does so in direct conflict with labour, such as P&O firing its UK staff so that it can employ foreign workers on lower wages and worse conditions. The greater willingness to sanction oligarchs arises from changing attitudes towards private property. While proprietarianism remains hegemonic, the galloping wealth inequality of the last forty years, and the tendency for the super-rich to distribute their assets across multiple jurisdictions, has seen tentative steps towards the acceptance of expropriation as a legitimate tool of the liberal state at the margin. But this isn't to suggest that the state has decided to embrace the prescriptions of Piketty et al and tax excessive wealth across the board, any more than it has decided that oligarch mansions can be squatted. Rather it aims to preserve the bulk of wealth by sacrificing those deemed lacking in virtue, such as Roman Abramovich. It's also no coincidence that those singled out happen to be foreigners.

The current exception to the principle that property is sacrosanct is premised on the idea that UK-based property owned by foreigners may be ill-gotten: the product of corruption or looting in other countries. The introduction of unexplained wealth orders in 2017 provided a legal basis for confiscation, but these instruments have rarely been used and are likely to be successful only in the most egregious cases. What UWOs have done however is normalise the idea that the UK-based assets of foreigners are essentially held on licence. Behind this emergent idea lies the xenophobic belief that a foreigner owning British property is inherently questionable. This is part of a wider prejudice that occasionally breaks the surface, for example in the suspicion that immigrants get preferential treatment in the allocation of social housing, or in bigots like Jim Davidson claiming that homeless ex-service people should be prioritised over Ukrainian refugees. Implicit in this is the idea of a national patrimony, which in turn drives the popular distaste for benefit cheats and the consequent acceptance of benefit sanctions: protecting "our" money.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on the concept of ill-gotten gains, given that this is central to the "culture war" over the history and representation of empire. It's also worth noting that the suspicion that great wealth repatriated to the UK was the product of corruption and looting in other countries is not a recent development. Consider the impact of the East India Company's nabobs on eighteenth century aristocratic society or the trial of Warren Hastings. While current debates understandably focus on the great crime of slavery in the Caribbean, we shouldn't forget that wealth was criminally extracted from every corner of the empire and invested in the UK, and in nascent industry as much as stately homes. The excuse offered for the persistence of this money in British society, and the corresponding refusal to consider reparations, is the passage of time. Thus David Cameron's inheritance of wealth built on slavery did not preclude him from becoming Prime Minister, any more than his responsibility for an austerity programme that increased poverty precludes him from volunteering for a food-bank. We can see this process in real-time too as Evgeny Lebedev disassociates himself from his own father and pledges loyalty to a UK that generously ennobled him in return for his opaque wealth being funneled into British journalism. 

The truth is that money-laundering and reputation-laundering were both central to the development of empire, rather than being a new grift that the UK stumbled on after the 1956 Suez crisis in Bullough's telling. Indeed the apogee of this was the formalisation of empire in the mid-nineteenth century as the privateering approach of the merchant companies gave way to imperial government and the self-serving idea that Britain was engaged in a civilising mission. In practice, much of this mission was trade-oriented policing operations against weaker states, particularly in Africa and the Far East, most famously the humiliations suffered by China at the hands of multiple imperial powers. While gunboat diplomacy often meant war, it increasingly meant economic sanctions as well, particularly during the first era of globalisation after 1870. The preference for sanctions in the twentieth century was not simply revulsion over the carnage occasioned by the First World War - blockade and sanctions killed millions, after all - but a recognition that the world was governed by international capital. The UK was the world's policeman because of the City of London as much as the Royal Navy. 

Though the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations in the interwar period were held to be a failure in stopping the rise of Fascism (and Mulder would argue they perhaps encouraged it), there was no let up in their use after the Second World War, particularly by the new global policeman, the USA. What was also notable was the continuation of sanctions that directly affected the mass of the population in the form of basic commodities such as fuel, food and medicine, as seen in the coercive regimes imposed on Cuba, Iran and Iraq. The use of targeted sanctions against a country's social elite was often more controversial, for example in the case of sporting and cultural sanctions against South Africa. The current sanctions being imposed against named Russian oligarchs shouldn't lead us to imagine that there has been a shift in policy towards targeting the rich. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the Russian elite's wealth has been internationalised, much as it has been in other countries (see the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Swiss Leaks etc). What we're looking at is the product of globalisation and the consequent moves by the leading economies to start to rein in the worst abuses of tax havens, from Luxembourg to the Virgin Islands.

The reality is that sanctions are still being imposed on ordinary Russian people and they will suffer more than any oligarchs. While they may not own foreign bank assets, the freezing of these is causing an increase in the cost of imported goods as well as the cost of servicing overdrafts and mortgages. The withdrawal of foreign businesses and capital will also lead to higher unemployment, even allowing for greater import substitution. Many domestic producers are dependent on foreign technology and cannot substitute for imports. It probably won't be as bad as the shock therapy of the 1990s, but just as that was a form of purgative meant to extirpate homo sovieticus, so the new sanctions are intended to encourage regime change in Moscow rather than military withdrawal from Ukraine. But punishing ordinary Russians for the sins of Vladimir Putin is likely to be counter-productive. Russia has moved rapidly from a pro-Western position in the early-90s, hopeful even of joining NATO, to a position of mistrust and antagonistic chauvinism. Putin has been preparing Russian society for Western sanctions since the Georgian War of 2008, hence the growing paranoia and the insistence on a civilisational clash. While he might have optimistically hoped that the invasion of Ukraine would end with a swift victory, he can't have been under any illusions that sanctions, however patchy, would persist for a long time afterwards.

One part of the quickly-assembled consensus on the Ukraine catastrophe is that it had been coming since the Orange Revolution of 2004, and perhaps since the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999. But this geopolitical interpretation serves to obscure the material, specifically the turn against globalisation that began around the millennium and the division of society by age that this has given rise to: on the one hand, those who benefited from the original process in the form of property wealth but who resented the cultural disruption; on the other hand, those with no chance of benefiting to the same degree but for whom the cultural changes reflect their own history. This division is seen in all societies affected by globalisation, but it tends to be more acute in those areas where the old are more fearful of loss, whether because of past economic trauma or rapid social change, and the young more likely to leave due to limited opportunities, whether that be small towns in Northern England or small towns in Eastern Ukraine. 

Despite the emphasis on Zelensky's relative youth, Ukraine, like Russia, is an ageing society, and this is likely to be accelerated by the current movement of refugees into the European Union. In contrast, youth is becoming more politically important in countries like the UK, not least because migration is offsetting declining birth rates, even after Brexit. Resistance to this demographic change has prompted a regressive politics focused on the priorities of the old and the deliberate alienation of the young (Labour's ejection of the "Corbynistas" is largely a generational purge), but this looks like simply delaying the inevitable. One sign of the growing importance of youth is an increasing antipathy to domestic sanctions and the coercive functions of the state (such as the police), which disproportionately impact the young. In contrast, in countries like Russia and Ukraine there will likely be growing support for domestic sanctions as the population ages, which means repression of the young, performative bigotry (anti-gay rights, anti-immigrant etc) and the permanent hunt for internal enemies. This will only be exacerbated by external sanctions. In choosing financial measures and cultural boycotts over more risky intervention in Ukraine, the West is simply reinforcing the conditions that gave rise to the crisis. 

(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea

It's remarkable that the sanctioning of a single Russian oligarch, albeit one who owns a major football club, should have led to a flurry of navel-gazing and breast-beating about the very nature of Britain. In fact, this concern is largely focused on the hermetic economy and elite society of London, or "the capital’s squalid love affair with Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy", as the Daily Telegraph so charmingly put it. Even the more analytical commentary, such as by Larry Elliott in the Guardian, has tended to see "Londongrad" as a symptom of domestic economic weakness, notably the need to suck in foreign capital to achieve a balance of payments: "we love living beyond our means", as he explained in a phrase that could have appeared in a British newspaper at any time over the last 70 years. But it's easy to get this out of proportion. All the billions spent on Central London townhouses and Home Counties mansions by Russian oligarchs are dwarfed by the larger sums flowing through the City of London from investment funds in East Asia and elsewhere into the wider property market, while foreign direct investment by Russia in the UK is little more than a fifth of the level of China. The issue isn't that much of the Premier League is now owned by foreigners, but that much of Britain's industry and capital stock is.

The government's relative slowness in sanctioning Abramovich and other Russian oligarchs was popularly put down to the compromised Conservative Party's reluctance to offend past and future donors, but the fact that it has now proceeded shows that it calculates the economic consequences to be marginal, and certainly a lot less politically painful than the increase in energy prices. Just as it is absurd to imagine that paying for a tennis match with Boris Johnson led to Brexit, so it is foolish to forget that separating rich foreigners from their money in exchange for social status and prestige has long been a British industry. Oliver Bullough's recently published 'Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals' dates this to the 1950s: "We needed a new business model after America took over as the world’s superpower". There's some truth to this, notably the City of London's revival around the Eurodollar market and the growth of tax avoidance through Crown Territories in the face of high marginal rates in North America and Europe, but it ignores that Britain outside the City was pursuing a very different, state-directed economic model based on investment in domestic industry (see David Edgerton's 2018 book 'The Rise and Fall of the British Nation').

Bullough's thesis also ignores that the concierge model was in place even at the height of Britain's global pre-eminence in the 1870s, when argricultural depression led to a wave of rich American heiresses becoming the wives of cash-strapped landed aristocrats (Winston Churchill being one famous consequence of this foreign direct investment). Other titled families sold off Rennaisance and Baroque masterpieces, acquired by forbears on European grand tours in the eighteenth century, to newly-minted American millionaires, a process detailed in David Cannadine's 1990 book, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. This highlights an important fact about British history: that monetising its cultural and symbolic capital, like flogging off the family silver, has been an ever-present feature rather than the recourse of hard times. Britain really is a nation of shop-keepers, which is why "exit through the gift shop" is wholly in keeping with the envrionment of a stately home rather than a category error. Likewise, the marketing of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the late-1980s as "An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached" was a perfect encapsulation of the period and even of the V&A's purpose as a celebration of commerical art and design.

Andy Beckett is one of the better writers still found on the comment pages of the Guardian, but even he succumbs to this false memory in a piece heavily-influenced by Bullough's book. Thus the servicing of the rich is held to have only extended to foreigners "in recent decades", Switzerland has been "doing it for longer" (the Swiss banking industry only really took off after 1848 and was boosted by World War One), and the City of London "used to finance the British empire but now largely works for its successors" (it always worked well beyond the formal empire, notably in South America and the Far East). Beckett does acknowledge Edgerton's counter-narrative, but only to imagine a fork in the road: "Could post-imperial Britain have chosen to provide different, less morally compromised services to the outside world? Arguably for much of the postwar period it did. From the 60s to the 90s, what Britain primarily sold to foreign visitors was the mass culture made possible by social democracy: innovations in pop music, street fashion and television, subsidised by more generous unemployment benefits, a more confident BBC and free university education."

But even this is misleading because it suggests a serial development that simply didn't happen: a democratic and meritocratic society, forged in wartime, that reverted after the 1970s to one of deference and cupidity, fuelled first by Arab oil money and then by the galloping inequality of Russia, China and India from the 90s onwards. 1979 appears in retrospect as a watershed between social democracy and neoliberalism, but the latter was evident in the work of Keynes and Beveridge while the former remains stubbornly rooted in popular attitudes, from support for rail and utility nationalisation to the defence of the NHS and BBC. The reality is that British culture has always been a combination, a dialectic even, between the democratic and the elitist. In the postwar era, we had continuing pretensions to social and geopolitical superiority coexisting with democratic impulses and class antagonism. This was nowhere more evident than in the vogue for spy novels. Consider the contrast of Ian Fleming's exceptional James Bond with Len Deighton's everyman Harry Palmer. Those polar opposites are essentially English characters, not British, but their slipperiness - Bond's Scottish ancestry, Palmer's anonymity - hints at an ambivalence and ambiguity that itself becomes character in the work of John Le Carré. 

English identity has been a mix of the high and low since the days of Chaucer, and it has always been open to foreign money and influence, irrespective of the fortunes of its domestic elites, since at least the emigrés of the 1790s (consider how few monarchs before George III even regarded English as their first language). The expansion of that identity to Britain as a whole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was also marked by the conscious absorption of vulgar forms, such as the sentimentalisation of Gaelic culture by Walter Scott. Parallel to this is the emergence of a genuine proletarian culture, as outlined by EP Thompson in 'The Making of the English Working Class'. Where Thompson breaks off his narrative we encounter the Chartists, who are arguably the first social democrats in the British tradition and would remain radical even in the context of 1945. All of this is happening before the zenith of British power. It's also worth noting that this zenith coincides with the popularisation of professional football and its subsequent expansion to global dominance in the early 20th century. Chelsea FC (a johnny-come-lately in English football terms) was founded in 1905.

The UK wasn't suddenly corrupted in the 1990s, though there's plenty of evidence that this was a period of particularly loose ethical behaviour (see Mandelson et al). That's not to say that there hasn't been an awful lot of corruption since then, but what we've seen isn't out of the ordinary. Viewed over the long term, Russian oligarchs have had negligible political influence in the UK. Evgeny Lebedev (now a British citizen and peer) is probably the most actively influential and he is regarded as a joke figure - a preening snob - by most of the domestic elite (this is, of course, a common attitude to parvenus and wealthy foreigners that can be seen across history and was notably fictionalised by the likes of Trollope and Thackeray). In terms of economic influence they are inconsequential, especially if compared to previous immigrant communities such as the Huguenots or East African Asians, or modern Indian and Chinese industrialists. Even in the field of sport Russian influence has been marginal. It is American billionaires and Middle Eastern petro-monarchies that dominate the Premier League. In imagining that the inscrutable Roman Abramovich tells us something about the state of the nation, we are once more being distracted from what is in front of our noses.