Beyond the Horizon

Most English Premier League football clubs have now introduced digital passes for ticket-holders. There have been teething problems, but the technology is clearly here to stay: a bit like VAR. There are a number of reasons for this, from clamping down on ticket-touting (though the touts are still to be seen - I have no idea how they do it now) to better crowd safety (the long legacy of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report), but another driver for clubs' investment in ticketing technology since the 1980s was fraud at the margin - i.e. gate operators letting people under or over the turnstile, so the counter ratchet didn't click, and pocketing the money. To an extent this had always been tolerated as the cost of prevention was high and the loss to the club marginal, but it became a much bigger issue as entrance prices went up and clubs became more dependent on their matchday income. While wealthy foreign owners have driven inflation in the game since the millennium, financial fair play rules have simply reinforced the need to squeeze every last penny from the gate.

The reason I raise this is that it provides a useful entry-point for discussing what has come to be known as the Post Office scandal. There are two parts to this: the bug-ridden Horizon IT system and the response of the Post Office management to the unfolding debacle. Both were informed by a suspicion that the organisation was being defrauded at the margin, though it's central to the sorry tale that this started out as a belief that benefit claimants were defrauding the state, not just sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses defrauding Post Office Limited. It's also worth emphasising at this point that, with the exception of a handful of Crown Post Offices, those sub-postmasters are independent franchisees - i.e. small business people. This is important because it highlights a discrepancy between the positive rhetoric around self-employment and sub-contractors and the harsh reality of asymmetric commercial relations (it's also worth noting in passing that there are a lot of pseudo-SME arrangements in the public sector, e.g. doctors, as well as in the grey areas of public corporations, e.g. the BBC, and state owned commercial entities such as the Post Office).

While the now-famous (and likely to be awards-laden) ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, focused on the human interest of the present, and while much of the subsequent outrage has focused on the perversity of the law and the recent underfunding of the courts, necessitating an act of Parliament to unpick the mess, to do the story justice (sic) you really need to look at the longer history. It might appear unnecessary to start with the origins of the General Post Office in 1635, but we should certainly go back as far as 1838 and the introduction of money orders, which is when the opportunities for fraud at the margin start to proliferate. The need for strict financial controls was reinforced by the creation of the Post Office Savings Bank in 1861 and the gradual expansion of state financial services culminating in the payment of old age pensions in 1909. The GPO has been investigating fraud at the margin for over 300 years, but this has been reported in the context of the scandal as evidence that it had become a law unto itself: that it shouldn't have been pursuing private prosecutions outside the purview of the Crown Prosecution Service. 

But this misses the crucial point that the Post Office has a long data series - a corporate memory, if you will - on fraud at the margin. Why did no one notice the statistical anomaly of a significant rise in fraud prosecutions, estimated to be from an average of 5 a year to 55, after the introduction of the Horizon system? The likely answer is that Post Office management suspected the higher level of fraud was always there but that only now, with the benefit of computer-based accounting, were they able to uncover it. It's also worth noting here the downward secular trend in Post Office revenues and the pressure this exerted on management to reduce losses and thus reliance on state subsidies. What's less understandable is why government ministers weren't (as far as I can tell) asking the obvious question, i.e. is this increase in cases statistically credible?, particularly when you consider how wedded both New Labour and the subsequent coalition were to targets and metrics as part of the culture of New Public Management (NPM). The suspicion must be that politicians who spout about "business rigour" and "evidence-based policy" are mostly clueless when it comes to basic data analysis.

The second historical strand worth looking at is the origin and development of ICL. The business was created under the second Wilson government in 1968 and overseen by Tony Benn, the then Minister for Technology. It was an example of an industry "champion" (what would later be derided as "picking winners") formed by the merger of three UK computer fims. The state would have a 10% stake and would provide funding for research and development. The aim was to build a domestic competitor to IBM that could service both the UK public and private sectors and also develop an export market. Unfortunately, it started out with a 6-bit architecture instead of the by then standard 8-bit byte, as used by IBM and others, making its products a technological dead-end. It ended up marketing Fujitsu mainframes and minis, which were IBM clones. That gave the Japanese a route into the UK public sector, which they consolidated by buying a majority stake in ICL in 1990. The point to note here is that unlike IBM, which reinvented itself around software and services, ICL and Fujitsu were always chiefly hardware businesses. 

The primary political driver for the creation of the Horizon system was the plan, developed under the Major administration, to introduce magnetic swipe-cards for the payment of benefits, which it was thought would reduce fraud. The conversion of other Post Office counter business from a largely paper-based system to an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system was a secondary political consideration, though clearly from the perspective of the Post Office itself this was the commercial priority. The project was an early example of a private finance initiative (PFI), with the developer to recoup their costs and profit via transaction fees. ICL Pathway Limited was set up with the explicit purpose of winning the bid for Fujitsu, which it did in 1996. By 1999, with Labour now in government, the project was already a mess, not least because of doubts about the long-term viability of swipe-cards (chip-and-pin, common in Europe in the 1990s, arrived in the UK in 2003). As a result, the benefits element was ditched and the project scope reduced to the counter business.

Instead of going back to the drawing board, ICL Pathway decided to simply build on top of the already flaky prototype. It is clear from evidence already presented in public inquiries (here, here and here) that Horizon was a badly-run project, with a poor architectural design, that tried to integrate with new third-party technology as it went (e.g. Windows, Oracle, SAP and wide-area networking). There appears to have been no consistent development methodology, no automated test framework, and poor bug management and version control. The smell it gives off is of a second-rate mainframe-centric business circa the mid-80s, which isn't surprising. What this in turn highlights is that there was inadequate IT competence at a senior level within the Post Office, which could have independently assessed ICL Pathway, and equally little technical nous within govenment, despite the public technophilia of the likes of Tony Blair. What is also clear is that the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson, was pushing ICL Pathway to meet deadlines when the correct course of action would have been to abort the project, re-specify the requirements, and start a fresh tender process on a fixed-cost plus margin basis.

There have been multiple TV dramas about Hillsborough and Grenfell, and yet justice has not been delivered in either case and the prospect of special acts of parliament to deliver it are negligible (though it should be said that the proposed Post Office act may never see light of day given the issues of principle it raises). The difference between those tragedies and the Post Office scandal is that they highlighted the negligence of the state towards ordinary people: the contempt of South Yorkshire police towards football fans in the one, and the disdain of a Conservative borough council towards poorer residents in the other. At Hillsborough, there was no appetite in government to criticise a force that had been central to the defeat of the miners five years earlier. As Thatcher herself said in response to the Taylor report, "The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?" Likewise, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower there was little desire to criticise a borough for cheeseparing when that had been the order of the day in local government for decades and when building safety had been presented as a contraint on enterprise ripe for deregulation. 

Ironically, had the Post Office remained fully in the public sector - i.e. as a public corporation rather than as a state-owned private company - the scandal could have dragged on even longer as there might have been greater political ramifications, but equally it might not have happened in the first place as the imperatives - that combination of a bad technology choice and government pressure to be a PFI success - could have been lacking. I don't imagine post offices would still be run on paper records, but a more thoughtful project might have decided to simply adopt a proven, off-the-shelf EPOS system with standard back-end ERP integration (post offices are just retail outlets, after all). The root problem was that initial demand to handle benefit payments, which in turn arose from the delusion that fraud at the margin could be reduced by a large enough figure to satisfy the critics of welfare. The compounding factor was the insistence of ministers that Post Office Limited should operate at arms-length from the state while being put under pressure by its owner (those same ministers) to be a commercial success.

The foot-dragging by the Post Office after the initial evidence that sub-postmasters were being wrongly convicted was not just the usual arse-covering or desire to minimise costs, it also reflected the history of petty fraud within the business and the fear that a general amnesty and blanket compensation might benefit the guilty as well as the innocent. Over-and-above bad management and poor IT practice, the scandal highlights the gulf that exists between the theory of the small business (incentivised, hard-working, responsible) and the reality (muddling through, sometimes incompetent, dodgy at the margins). What's depressing about the otherwise laudable TV drama and the public response to it is the idea that these people must have been innocent precisely because they were small business operators: that cuddly Toby Jones. In other words, they have been given the benefit of the doubt (albeit there are limits) in a way that the victims of Hillsborough and Grenfell never were.

The Rise of the Far-right

The current era of "populism" dates to the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent turn to austerity. Though some historians have tried to trace it back to 9/11, Islamophobia was already well-established in the late twentieth century and the pushback against "radical Islam" was pioneered by the centre-right (and not a few on the centre-left), even as it provided ammunition for the far-right. The root of the trouble in the socio-economic travails of neoliberalism led to a centrist vogue for claiming that populism was to be found equally on the left as on the right, which provided useful cover for the hysterical rejection of mild social democracy pursued by parliamentary means, just as the charge of antisemitism was wielded against those who questioned US hegemony and suggested that the Western powers were not being even-handed in their treatment of Israel and Palestine. In recent years the populist lens has switched exclusively to "the rise of the far-right", with the advances of the PVV in The Netherlands and the election of Javier Milei to the presidency in Argentina being held up as recent evidence. But the PVV is intent on a conservative coalition and Milei is just a manic retread of Southern Cone neoliberalism, so in what sense is this categorically different? One way of answering this question is to look at the role of youth.

Corbynism, like other leftist eruptions, was distinguished by two challenges to centrist orthodoxy: that there is an alternative to neoliberalism; and that the young matter politically. It's worth noting that the latter is not something instinctively resisted by conservatives. They are more than happy to present themselves as the youthful, vigorous option if faced with a tired and ageing government, as happened in the UK both in 1979 and 2010. At Margaret Thatcher's first general election victory, the Tories even won a narrow majority among 18-24 year-olds and wouldn't lose that lead till 1987. While liberals pay lip-service to youth as the motor of progressive history, the reality is that they rarely want to hear from them unless they are prepared to fully endorse the ruling, middle-aged orthodoxy. Consider the reception accorded President Macron's appointment of the youthful Gabriel Attal as France's Prime Minister: "Sylvain Maillard, head of Macron’s Renaissance party in parliament, said Attal could be relied on to “faithfully” carry Macron’s project for the country".

This marginalisation of youth on the left isn't surprising, and nor is the tendency of centre-left parties to drift to the right in search of more mature voters who are assumed to hold conservative views on both economics and welfare. What has attracted less attention among academics and the media is the way that youth has also been marginalised on the right, specifically the far-right or "national populists" beyond the traditional conservative parties. For all the panics over torch-lit marches and crowds giving Fascist salutes, the reality is that the political far-right is tame. There are no squadristi and few street fighting men. As the far-right has become electorally respectable so the skinheads have retreated into the shadows. The contemporary far-right looks notably bourgeois, and thus indistinguishable from the conservatives. And in its current incarnation it is actually haute bourgeois, if not oligarchic. The lower middle class ressentiment seen in the 1930s, which was directed against the larger capitals as much as organised labour and found fertile soil among youth denied opportunities by the Great Depression, is barely audible behind the blustering of rich men like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage.

In Europe today, the political far-right not only accommodates itself to centre-right orthodoxy (truculently pro-EU, "fiscally responsible" etc) but positively pleads with the centre-right to adopt its policies, for example on immigration, rather than simply insisting that the established parties are incapable of delivering the goods and must be swept away. The strategy has been one of absorption rather than displacement, and that absorption has been bi-directional. For example, Fidesz in Hungary, which started out as a conventional liberal party (founded under the name Alliance of Young Democrats), steadily moved rightwards to consolidate its electoral position and now promotes what it describes as "Christian illiberal democracy". What's important here is not just the historic shift to the right but the evolution from an urban student party to one dependent on older voters and rural values. In contrast, both the Rassemblement National (RN) and the Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) have moved inwards from the right, pursuing strategies of "de-demonisation" and republican respectability to attract centre-right voters. These moves have involved distancing from more radical, and more youthful, groups on the right, such as Generation Identitaire.

One obvious difference between old-style Fascism and today's far-right is the role of the party. For all the centrality of Das Führerprinzip, the Nazi revolution was effected through the NSDAP which provided a parallel "state" infrastructure before it came to power. This was not only in the sense of its corporatist rhetoric and performative welfare (e.g. soup kitchens) but in its deliberate policy of entryism into employer, farm and whitecollar organisations after 1928. It was this that provided the foundation for its seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent process of Gleichshaltung (the coordination of society). With the exception of the RN in France, which retains signficant organisational heft in local government and the police, the present parties of the far-right are relatively weak socially, dependent on passive "respectable" supporters rather than the activist young and required to make common cause with conservatives when they achieve office. In Eastern Europe, parties of the far-right are largely indistinguishable from traditional conservatives, their capture of the state and civil organisations being essentially clientelistic. To find a social infrastructure comparable to the 1930s today, in which the party hegemonises the state, you'd have to look to the BJP in India or the AKP in Turkey.

One reason for this difference in Europe and America is the greater dependence of politics on the media as traditional routes to social engagement, such as trade unions and universities, have been politically disempowered or disciplined by the market. This has boosted the far-right electorally. Ironically, this is not just down to rightwing media owners preference for the authoritarian and intolerant, it also appears in part to have been helped by liberals sanitising the far-right by using the term "populist", which most voters don't blanch at. But this media-dependence has also led to its organisational weakness, not least because the discourse is dominated by independent media personalities (think Nigel Farage or Éric Zemmour) rather than party apparatchiks, few of whom are able to convert their positions, dependent on media owners, into political power (think Tucker Carlson). The translation from articulated resentment to coherent policy has proven difficult not only for conservative parties attempting to absorb the far-right's demands (e.g. the Tories troubles with immigration) but for far-right parties when they achieve office (e.g. the Brothers of Italy's wholesale adoption of conservative orthodoxy). But the impetus for absorption remains strong. For all the worries about the electoral rise of the AfD in Germany and its "rightwing extremism" the reality is that its strategy is to eventually form a coalition with the CDU or FDP.

In short, the rise of the far-right will remain merely an artefact of centrist media coverage until such time as the insurgent parties prioritise youth over entry into the establishment. If they don't, and there are strong reasons why they won't, then youth will increasingly be sacrificed to secure middle-aged and elderly conservative voters. Those reasons include demography (an ageing population means the young will be electorally less decisive), the leftwards bent of younger cohorts on both social and economic issues (which makes them less likely to succumb to the far-right), and the tendency towards disengagement caused by the professional and managerial turn of political culture. As the far-right competes with the centre-right it will attract some younger voters, but these are the ones who would always have voted right: every polity has it young conservatives. Though there are genuine Fascists and even Nazis out there, the truth is that most of what we call the far-right today are simply the proudly illiberal end of the conservative spectrum. That is not to downplay the dangers. It was, after all, such conservatives that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power. But the far-right today cannot boast such single-minded megalomaniacs, let alone a committed revolutionary vanguard. Far-right politicians are careerists. A bit more American Psycho than the political norm, but still cut from much the same cloth.

Starmer and the State

At its heart, the Starmer project aims to restore the authority and gravitas of the UK state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. You could add Scottish independence to that list, though more in the sense of keeping the lid on an issue that is unlikely to return to the political foreground any time soon. As a reactionary and conservative exercise, focused on curtailing popular democracy and restoring the party cartel to the centre of politics, the project contains within it a fundamental tension between the desire to strengthen the state while preserving an economic system that has consistently undermined the state in the eyes of the electorate. Thus we have popular support for nationalisation and a rejection of the further encroachment of the private sector on the NHS at the same time that Labour rejects the former and supports the latter. The party's emphasis on the national interest and public service is intended not to reconcile these irreconcilable positions but to divert attention: to insist that the capture of the state machinery is a precondition for improvement, but without explaining how that improvment will be brought about, or even what it might look like. 

One result of this is the constant lowering of expectations about the likelihood of change combined with the hint that the inevitable disappointment will be the fault of recalcitrant public sector workers, not the government. It has become fashionable to point out the parallels between the rhetoric of the shadow cabinet and 90s-era Blairites, but this actually sounds more like 80s-era Thatcherities shorn of their revolutionary optimism. Where the rhetoric of the 1990s lives on is among the policy entrepreneurs of the think-tanks. A notable example of this is the recent report from the IPPR, Great Government: Public Service Reform in the 2020s, which provided ammunition for those newspaper articles on how little we could expect. The report starts with the bad news, "in many ways the inheritance facing the next government is even more challenging than that in 1997", but then offers hope in the form of the management consultancy pabulum that was sounding tired long before that annus mirabilis: "To fix public services we must move beyond arguments about a smaller or larger state and instead focus on creating a smarter state". 

Central to the IPPR report's worldview is the myth of leadership: the dynamic CEO who found political expression in the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The idea that one person's intervention can make all the difference (even Blair wasn't solely responsible for the Iraq misadventure) is premised on the idea that organisations are static, rather than organic and constantly evolving. Exogenous rather than endogenous reform is therefore necessary. This supports bringing in "outside expertise", or applying "industry best practice", which has an obvious ideological connotation in the context of the public sector. It also plays to the liberal media's narrative of Starmer's "success" at the Crown Prosecution Service. Consider this example of the report's emphasis on contemporary leadership: "There are already a host of inspirational and talented public service leaders who are demonstrating that delivering great public services is possible." You'll note that the people who actually deliver the services don't even merit mention as spear-carriers.

So what does a "smarter state" look like? According to the report's authors, "The smarter state means delivering the three p’s of public service reform: prevention, personalisation and productivity. Prevention means intervening earlier – before people hit crisis point – and can result in better outcomes and reduced costs; personalisation seeks to put strong relationships between citizens and staff in public services at the heart of delivering better outcomes, and empowers citizens to take control of their own lives; and productivity means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible." There is no obvious departure here from the ideas of the 90s. The trouble with prevention is that it is conflated with early intervention, which means treating people as suspect (e.g. "problem families"). In practice, the most useful early intervention is to prevent services collapsing, which usually means more funding. But that will clearly be anathema to a government fully subscribed to the Treasury View on public spending.

Personalisation may be a softer term for 90s-era consumer choice but it implies the same shift away from the collective negotiation of service through politics to a model of atomised consumption with the state acting as a referee, only nominally answerable to the people, to ensure service providers observe the rules of the game. Empowering citizens does not hint at a reduction in the state's ambit, despite the usual waffle about devolution (the relevant section, on page 7, has 10 actions, 9 of which start with "Goverment should ..."). The idea that productivity "means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible" is close to meaningless, though you can reasonably infer that it's our old friend "doing more with less". The key action appears to be: "Government should invest in ‘employment friendly’ technology – including infrastructure, training and data – to speed automation and free up the frontline, while introducing a ‘right to retrain’ for impacted staff." Underneath the verbiage is the idea that public services are burdened by too many backoffice functions, thereby denying resources to the "frontline", which can be alleviated by automation and outsourcing. History suggest this is wrong on both counts.

Where the IPPR does diverge from the orthodoxy is the observation that during the New Labour years "NPM overemphasised extrinsic motivators and undervalued the need to unlock intrinsic motivation in staff and citizens." Of course, that critique of New Public Management was already available back in the 1980s, and most academic observers would agree that NPM went into decline in the late-90s as digital became the panacea du jour. What is significant in the IPPR critique is the emphasis on trust and autonomy, and how this in turn correlates with skill: "We argue that to fix public services a future government should invest in building a new public service playbook. We argue that this will mean shifting from a low trust, low skill, low autonomy public service model to a high trust, high skill, high autonomy one." The use of terminology like "playbook" isn't encouraging (pure West Wing), and "high-skill" is too often cover for outsourcing "low-skill" jobs, but the appearance of "autonomy", even if lacking the revolutionary implications of the 1970s, is none the less interesting.

There are two points to flag here. First is the implication that public services can only (or mostly) be fixed by addressing the organisation and culture of the public sector. In other words, it's the people: the service delivery rather than the service. But that begs the question as to what is fundamentally wrong. Most experts in the field agree that the root issue really is just a lack of money, and that most of the observable cultural and organisational deficiencies arise from that. The second point is that the emphasis on "high autonomy" runs up against the problem that the autonomy of public sector managers and that of workers may conflict. The report is vague on this distinction, but it is clear from comments by the Labour leadership (e.g. Wes Streeting on the NHS) that the preference will be to empower management rather than labour. In addition, it's fair to say that even the autonomy of management will likely prove more limited in practice than the IPPR imagines, not least because of Starmer's instinctive authoritarianism.

What the IPPR report suggests is that the policy hinterland of Labour has reverted to the managerial nostrums of the 1990s after an all-too-brief dalliance with more unusual ideas such as the foundational economy and universal basic income. This is understandable not only because of the innate conservatism of the Starmer regime but because of the attraction of a system of governance in which the state plays the leading role in the public performance of the satisfaction of wants and needs: the emphasis on financial prudence, the mania for targets and metrics, and the treatment of education and crime as disciplinary challenges. That the IPPR report focused its analysis of the public service inheritance of the next government on healthcare, schools and justice was no accident. These are the areas where the state can most easily display its power, even as it prepares the ground for relative failure and public disappointment (compare and contrast with the Tory government's foolish focus on asylum-seekers: a challenge it can never win and where the performance of goverment is increasingly absurd). The purpose of the Starmer administration will not be to improve public services but to re-establish ownership of the state.

A Low, Dishonest Decade

I don't know who first came up with the phrase "The Great Noticing" in the context of UK politics, but the definition appears to be widely understood: ingenuous press commentators noticing things that had been in plain sight for years, even decades. We are now in a meta phase, where journalists themselves notice The Great Noticing, though largely in order to pursue industry beef. Thus centrists appalled at Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour Party leadership in 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket now criticise the rightwing press for its failure to appreciate the damage done by austerity, notably in its contribution to Brexit and the undermining of the constitution at home and international standing abroad during the Johnson years (and Truss weeks). This tendency to reimagine what everyone who really matters knew has now rippled outwards to the point that commentators are genuinely suprised if you didn't realise all along that Tony Blair was faithfully carrying out Margaret Thatcher's great work of economic and social reform, or that the role of the UK in international affairs is simply to hold the US's coat. 

As The Great Noticing has become ever more embedded in the discourse, there has been a rise in cynicism: not simply in the negative sense of people assuming that there will be no penalty for lying and cheating (the removal of Corbyn raised the bar and the installation of Starmer has raised it higher still) but in the positive sense that the lies and cheats are more promptly seen through and more vocally called out. In this context, the Michelle Mone case is interesting less for the evidence of cronyism or backhand donations (it's estimated that some 8 million of the public money spent on PPE contracts found its way back into Conservative Party coffers), important as those are, than for the assumption on her Ladyship's part that lying to the press is a legitimate tactic to protect one's family from intrusion. This claim is presumably on the advice of her media handlers who have spotted the coincidental utility of the recent legal judgement against the Daily Mirror. Mone's argument is not simply that lying is justified to avoid public scrutiny, but that this is what any reasonable person would do. She is asking us to notice that this is how the world works: that virtue is little more than fancy dress.

Phone-hacking is a journalistic cheat-code. Instead of doing the hard yards of investigative reporting, interviewing and cross-referencing statements, you can simply bypass the normal rules of the game. The idea of a cheat-code isn't new, even if the metaphor is. Paying for tips from hotel staff or corrupt police officers has been going on since the popular press emerged in the late nineteenth century, while chequebook journalism is by its very nature the equivalent of a loot-box. We should therefore be cautious in assuming that there is anything particularly novel in such behaviour, but we can more confidently suggest that the response to phone-hacking and other press abuses has been categorically different this century, hence the disappearance of the News of the World, the Leveson Inquiry (however prematurely terminated), and the promising signs that Piers Morgan might end up if not in jail at least in the media wilderness. 

While the Oxford word of the year might be "rizz", I suggest the phrase The Great Noticing would be a better choice, precisely because it seems to have both accelerated and graduated to a higher plane over the last 12 months, indeed over the last 12 weeks. The biggest illustration of this has been the apparently startled realisation of experienced reporters and respected foreign affairs commentators that Israel is actually trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. It would be easy to sneer at the media's inability to spot the accumulating signs since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, but what we should really notice (sic) is that this moment of clarity has inevitably caused a number of other lightbulbs to flicker on: that the two-state solution is long dead, that the US is not an even-handed broker in the Middle East, and that the problem with Israel is not that nasty man Netanyahu with his boorish ways but a society overwhelmingly committed to a system of apartheid. Who knows, maybe some might start to notice that not all charges of antisemitism are made in good faith, though I very much doubt we'll get a Panorama special on the issue.

Another example of this has been the recent moves by the US and EU to encourage Ukraine to reassess its strategy in the war with Russia. Accoding to Politico, "the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war ... [which] would likely mean giving up parts of Ukraine to Russia." The commentators who loudly denounced realists like John Mearsheimer last year for arguing that negotiation and territorial concessions were inevitable are now sagely stroking their chins at the same thought. What most of them appear to have finally noticed is that for all its lack of advanced weaponry and its operational deficiencies, Russia has a lot of manpower that it can call on. Conversely, Ukraine may have the material support of the West, if increasingly grudging, but it simply doesn't have the manpower to force Russia out of its eastern oblasts. While Russia can fight an offensive war against Ukraine, Ukraine cannot fight an offensive war against Russia. The best Zelenskyy can now realistically hope for is joining NATO and the EU as recompense for the loss of Crimea and the East.

At home, the masters of noticing are invariably centrists, not conservatives trying to understand how Britain can have been broken under continuous Tory government. The latter are simply preparing the ground for a Labour administration, both by constructing a Dolchstoßlegende, in which they were thwarted in office by a liberal establishment, and by rehearsing a litany of failures that by their nature a Labour government will struggle to address within a single parliament. Centrists are the great noticers because their essential purpose is to resist the critiques of the left. Not every leftwing analysis will turn out to be correct, and not every prescription emerging from the left effective, but enough will be such that the passage of time will oblige centrists to accommodate and absorb many of those analyses and prescriptions. Noticing is therefore a delaying tactic, so it should come as no surprise that 2023, when Labour took an apparently unassailable lead in the polls over the Tories and Keir Starmer proceeded to junk almost every even vaguely progressive policy, should have seen a flurry of noticing about the last decade.

Likewise the upsurge in noticing in the realm of international affairs isn't about the chickens of the 2000-16 period coming home to roost, or even those of the post-1989 era (the expansion of NATO, the enfeeblement of Russia etc). Rather it reflects the cynicism of the present moment. On Ukraine, there is now an acknowledgment that the country cannot win back its lost lands and that they in turn are a paltry gain for a Russia that has lost standing globally. In the Middle East, there is now a recognition that there isn't even significant minority support for a two-state solution in Israel: the idea remains a figment of global diplomacy. Given the impossibility of a single-state solution - a nuclear-armed theocracy isn't going to dissolve itself into a secular democracy where it will quickly become a confessional minority - this means that the Palestinians must disappear. The calculation of the US and European powers is that they can sit on their hands long enough for this to happen in Gaza, and in subsequent phases in the West Bank, with Israel bearing the lion's share of the blame.

What The Great Noticing presages for British politics in 2024 is not regret over the errors of the last decade, from the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories in 2010 to the media doing its level best to boost Boris Johnson into office in 2019, but a doubling-down on the commitment to restore the authority and gravitas of the state through performative centrism: tough choices, NHS reform, anodyne virtue. The relative decline of the UK over the period - in GDP growth, in productivity growth, in international standing - will be seen not as a wrong-turn to be corrected by significantly different policies but as the new reality to which we must accommodate ourselves by maintaining the same policies, only more competently. In foreign affairs, realism will make a strong comeback, but largely as justification for accepting facts on the ground, whether in Ukraine, the West Bank or Taiwan. While The Great Noticing will see many commentators wake up to the follies of the recent past, few will have the nerve to suggest that we are already 4 years into a low, dishonest decade to stand comparison with the 1930s.

Tory Sovereignty

You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's Napoleon has been criticised for playing fast and loose with the facts, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many French critics. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, The Duellists, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.

The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in The Taste of Things).

The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.

The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as Blade Runner and Alien, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the core issue of Brexit, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.

Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of liberals - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.

The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like Rafel Behr to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. 

The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.