Our Island Story

The chief division in British politics is between isolationism and internationalism: our island story. Being fundamental, this cuts across political parties, though the relative waxing and waning of the tendencies within each organisation tells us much about changes in long-term class interests, and short-term political calculation.  Britain has always had to combine the two, essentially because a truly isolationist approach is not feasible unless you are continental scale, like the USA, Russia or China. Being "open to the world" is a boast that British politicians can easily make because the opposite, being closed to the world, is frankly incredible. The ability to straddle these two horses is often the ability most admired in domestic politicians, from Gladstone through Churchill to Nicola Sturgeon.

The British Empire was a form of internationalism that required a strong isolationist stance: we would not get involved in continental entanglements because we were busy on the other side of the globe. Similarly, the transition from empire to the European Union has been marked by an instrumental use of isolationist tropes ("our money", "our demands") while advancing greater integration (Maastricht etc). Even now, advocates of Brexit talk about how "leaving" will allow us to forge closer ties with other parts of the world. Not even UKIP is suggesting that we emulate the Japanese era of Sakoku and quarantine ourselves from foreign influence. British elites are adroit at playing these two chords, advancing sectional interests (most notably the City) by first stressing one and then stressing the other.

The chief problem this gives rise to is not manifest in domestic politics, given that both tendencies are found in varying degrees inside all parties, but in international relations. Though you'd never know it from the British media, the foreign perception of the UK remains heavily influenced by l'Albion perfide. This is most striking in the hyperbolic realm of sport, which is why comically corrupt outfits like FIFA still see mileage in playing the hypocrite/sour-grapes card in response to British (or more often English) criticism, and why we in turn are prone to assume that the English FA's performance is best explained by blazered incompetence rather than cupidity or malice. No doubt Seb Coe's fall from grace, if it comes, will be excused at home as "poor judgement" or "naivety", rather than an over-fondness for money and status perks.

When foreigners, particularly our bezzies in Western Europe, talk about the "British sense of fair play", they are often being ironic. There is a genuine admiration for popular British attitudes, i.e. the habits and values of the people, witness the number of foreign managers and players who rave about our football culture (but, let's be honest, you don't rock up on day one and tell your employers their game is "shit on a stick", as Jorge Valdano memorably did from a distance). But there is also a belief that the UK is unprincipled and unreliable in the sphere of international affairs, hence our sports administrators are treated with suspicion abroad, particularly when they pontificate about ethical standards. In other words, foreign observers are often more acute in distinguishing between the people and national elites than the natives are.

The continental media coverage of the marital infidelities of the British royal family, which we largely ignored until the 1980s, despite the ample evidence, was also emblematic of this perceived unreliability and hypocrisy. So, in reverse, was the longstanding British belief that our public servants and commercial institutions were peculiarly free of the corruption that plagued other countries. The last 30 years have revealed corruption on an industrial scale in the City, not to mention among the police, local government and politicians, yet we still cling to the myth of "bad apples", or slyly suggest that the misbehaviour arose from precipitously advancing the "wrong sort", from working class traders to ethnic-minority council officials, due to misguided "political correctness".

The current friction in the Parliamentary Labour Party can easily be framed as pacifism vs belligerence, and thus shunted into the meaningless siding of "national security", but this is to miss the underlying conflict between isolationism and internationalism, which has traditionally manifested itself in Labour as socialism in one country versus European social democracy. There are very few principled pacifists, just as there are few people who think we should pile into every fight going, so it is misleading to harp on about Jeremy Corbyn's personal preferences. The idea that he might resign "on principle" if the PLP votes to bomb Syria strikes me as far-fetched, not to mention an over-determination of the parallels with George Lansbury.

It is easy to forget that Lansbury's pacifism was part of a wider internationalist strain that arose during the interwar years that actively pursued multilateral solutions, especially through the League of Nations, and which was social democratic in its domestic policies (it's worth remembering that Lansbury's greatest modern admirer is John Cruddas). His departure from the leadership in 1935 was due to the shift in internationalist sympathy within the party in the early 30s away from peace towards resistance against Fascism. One thing we know about Corbyn is that he enjoys strong support among party members and there has been no major shift in their attitudes yet. The key moment in 1935 was Ernest Bevin's denunciation of Lansbury at the annual party conference over the latter's opposition to League sanctions (and potential force) against Italy in respect of Abyssinia.

However, it should not be forgotten that Bevin was also instrumental in ensuring TUC and Labour Party support for non-intervention in Spain, after the outbreak of civil war in 1936, until shopfloor and constituency party pressure prompted a volte-face in 1937. In other words, the process by which the historically isolationist TUC leadership and the right of the Labour Party became actively internationalist took 15 years, following the 1931 split, and was only cemented by the exigencies of war, American pressure and the realisation that the UK's future influence would largely depend on keeping the US onside. Isolationism still lived on, hence the reluctance to get involved in the embryonic moves towards European unity and the continued support for the Sterling area, but multilateral internationalism, in the form of NATO, was the bedrock of postwar foreign policy.

The socialist left went through a comparable transformation, though moving in the opposite direction and over a later period, from roughly 1940 to 1956. The start of this shift was marked by the Battle of Britain ("Very well, alone"), boosted by the achievements of the Attlee administration (often assumed, wrongly, to be unique), and closed with the Russian invasion of Hungary. The left sought to combine this isolationist stance with a continued commitment to multilateral solutions (notably via the UN) and support for the oppressed abroad, reflecting the rank-and-file's instinctive internationalism. It resolved the apparent contradiction by promoting a romantic British exceptionalism (hence the renewed interest in the 17th century and the roots of domestic socialism among Marxist historians) along with a commitment to economic unilateralism that would culminate in the Alternative Economic Strategy and the campaign to quit the EEC.

That the two wings of the party should have swapped clothes like this is not so remarkable. While pacifism may be a point of principle for some, the competing sirens of isolationism and internationalism are treated pragmatically by most. British politics is constantly debating the merits of free trade versus protectionism, and multilateralism versus unilateralism. While the French have a historic bias towards protectionism because of the centralised state, and the Germans a recent abhorrence of unilateralism due to Nazism, the British are happily two-faced. The attraction of unilateral nuclear disarmament for many socialists has always been the unilateralism, not the disarmament (remember that Michael Foot, despite being a supporter of CND, was a vocal advocate of war with Argentina).

Though some historians have claimed that Labour's reconciliation with the EU in the late 80s and early 90s was due to a desire to employ social legislation as a defence against Thatcherism, this ignores both the facts on the ground (the Social Chapter did not prevent the erosion of worker rights and living standards in the UK any more than it did in Germany) and the persistent strength of internationalist feeling among the party membership. As the Tories became more isolationist and fractious over the EU, the Labour Party became more comfortably internationalist simply because this was a pragmatic oppositional manoeuvre. There was an attractive space it could happily move into. However this did not mean that its own isolationism dwindled, merely that it went underground.

It resurfaced when Tony Blair twisted the evidence of Iraqi WMD to fulfil a promise to the Americans. This was an affront to sovereignty: our ability to unilaterally decide what was in the country's best interests (you may recall that Blair's sole unilateral intervention, in Sierra Leone, did not generate significant criticism). Inasmuch as Labour currently has a policy over the absurdity that is "shoot to kill", it is unilateral. Saying "we shouldn't automatically shoot" doesn't mean we won't shoot, merely that we reserve the right to decide for ourselves when and if we shoot. Similarly, refusing to join the posse to bomb Syria is less an expression of pacifism and more an expression of independence (and a reasonable scepticism about military and political utility), even if wrapped in a commitment to multilateral negotiation.

In this light, the PLP's failure to support Corbyn is less about their fear that he is iffy on national security or the summary execution of terrorists and more about the fear that he wishes to pursue a more isolationist and unilateral foreign policy. There are a lot of careers in the Labour Party that started with a stint in the Berlaymont in Brussels and benefited from a trip to Washington. Even though John McDonnell's emerging economic policy is mild social democracy, it represents a shift towards a more unilateral approach in rejecting the prevailing political orthodoxy in Europe (and is thus ironically closer to economic orthodoxy and US policy). What we're witnessing is the latest turn in the dynamic tension between isolationism and internationalism. The moment of crisis will come not over Syria, let alone the operational mandate of armed police units, but over the EU referendum.

The Decline of Scepticism

More than in the January attacks, which focused on sites that were representative of self-identifying minorities (satirists and Jews), the recent Paris assaults featured sites that could be identified with by most people - restaurants, a football ground, a concert hall - as well as a random selection of victims that was an approximation of society at large. This allowed last week to be characterised as an attack on Paris en tout, and by extension on the enlightenment values that the City of Light is held to represent. Not just free speech and the right to be annoying, but personal liberty and cultural diversity: vive la difference. There was little scepticism about whether Paris really can claim to be such an exemplar of tolerance and integration, even when the action moved from the café terraces of the 11th arrondissement beyond the Périphérique to the chicken shops of Saint-Denis.

The celebration of the dead as martyrs to a collective cause, regardless of their personal beliefs or circumstances, is a common response. For example, Ken Livingston's reaction to the July 2005 bombings was to describe London as "our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another", which was a suitably multicultural update on the Blitz Spirit and "London can take it". This is understandable, not least as a way of expressing solidarity - an attack on you is an attack on us - but it quickly turns a set of personal tragedies into a catechism of values, intended to divide "us" from "them". Even the criticism of the terrorists' binary worldview, their rejection of the "greyzone", becomes a dividing line in the hands of a media ever keen to separate sheep from goats.

The claim that the assault on the Bataclan Theatre was an attack on civilisation is not merely patronising to the Middle East, it seeks to conscript the entire French population - the "civilians" who embody this civilisation - into a total war. Just as the hyperbole after the January attack led many to say "Je ne suis pas Charlie", so there will be many now who will question what this "civilisation" is and why they should risk their lives for it. Unsurprisingly, this leads some to seek more eternal values, above the political fray and the pressure to pick sides, hence perhaps the popularity of Antoine Leiris's eulogy to his murdered wife, which evoked the Catholic ideal of the Holy Family: madonna, child and a stoic husband.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo did not lead to a greater respect for free speech or cultural sensitivity, merely a standoff between absolutists and relativists, the vast majority of whom were uninterested in the context of the magazine or the role of gouaille in French history. The attack on the Jewish supermarket prompted Benjamin Netanyahu to opportunistically advocate voluntary repatriation to Israel at a time when French secularists were demanding greater integration by Muslims. In all its dimensions, the "debate" arising around the January attacks was sterile and incoherent. It's early days, but the current debate does not look like it will be much better. France may have "declared war" on Daesh, but its objectives in respect of Syria are no clearer now than they were last month while the objection to random murder hardly needs emphasising.

The state response to last Friday's attacks does not look particularly enlightened, featuring limits on the freedom of movement, demands for greater communications surveillance, and the advocacy of a "shoot to kill policy", despite the lack of evidence that any of these measures would have changed the outcome had they been in place in France, and despite the sorry precedent of shoot-to-kill in Northern Ireland. The desire to find proof of both refugee involvement and the use of encrypted comms shows the extent to which the media agenda is now being driven by government briefings. If migration is once more in the mix in the UK, this is because Number 10 has decided to foreground it, not Nigel Farage. What was notable about the media response, particularly on TV, was not the stupidity or partisan bias but the lack of scepticism. That lack can be traced back to both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the development of the Internet.

The distrust of government that emerged in Western media between 1956 and 1976 (All the President's Men marked the apogee) was a paradoxical product of the Cold War: a realisation that liberal values had to be reflexive and sincere if they were to be preserved and ultimately prevail against Soviet communism. The fall of Richard Nixon was as encouraging to dissident morale in Eastern Europe as the Helsinki Accords. This critical stance meant the erosion of lingering pre-liberal norms, such as deference, and the revival of classical liberal attitudes to personal liberty, hence the renewed popularity of John Stuart Mill. The instrumentality of this in preparing the ground for neoliberalism, and the right-libertarian attack on democratic government, would only become apparent later.

While paying lip-service to classical liberal norms, the conservative reaction under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sought to restore the authority of the state in its dealings with the media. This explains both the pragmatic importance placed on advancing the commercial interests of supporters like Rupert Murdoch, notably in his acquisition of The Times, and the self-conscious attempt to restore a sense of dignity to official pronouncements, which became increasingly absurd as the years rolled by, e.g. Thatcher's "We have become a grandmother". The period also saw the start of the growing stranglehold of journalism and public policy debate by the Oxbridge/LSE elite, which narrowed the emotional distance between government and its frontline critics and normalised a metropolitan and upper middle-class agenda.

Though Reagan and Thatcher's neoliberal inheritors, Clinton and Blair, were often criticised for being overly sensitive to the media, this ignores the real dynamic. Media management did exactly what it said on the tin. Despite the increasing diversity of channels and the falling cost of content-generation, the coverage of politics was increasingly dominated by the fixed agenda of the "grid". Not only did the commentariat happily attack the contingent opponents of government, from the NUM to Brussels, they increasingly preferred to beast marginal social groups rather than risk antagonising powerful interests. Before 2008 it was rare to see any suggestion that business leaders might be incompetent chancers. Today, you are more likely to read a diatribe against the student transsexual enemies of free speech than the corruption of university vice-chancellors.

The commercial strategy for contemporary media is to stimulate a reaction that prompts consumers to cascade the content, and thus the advertising. This goes beyond mere trolling by opinion-mongers to provocatively calling the integrity of a news story into question. Circulating dubious claims (they were Syrian refugees) and government briefings (this is why we need more powers) triggers a crowd-sourced scepticism via the filter of social media, which saves the journalists effort and stimulates engagement. In their desire to generate clicks and retweets, journalists are outsourcing their quality control, but they are thereby losing the habit of scepticism. The problem is that social media are structurally incapable of advancing beyond scepticism to patient investigation. There's no Woodward or Bernstein out there, just evanescent trends.

What passes for investigative journalism these days relies on the heavy lifting of others (e.g. Wikileaks) or the Captain Renault-like archaeology of scandals that were in plain sight all along (Kids Company, TalkTalk etc). As the recently-published report into HBOS shows, this is a golden age for not holding the powerful to account. In the circumstances, the sight of Laura Kuennsberg berating Jeremy Corbyn for his lack of enthusiasm for summary executions is about more than partisan bias. For any journalist to use the phrase "shoot to kill policy" without acknowledging that it might not necessarily be a good thing reflects not only a lack of historical understanding, but a lack of scepticism about the operation of power.

All Your Pop are Belong to Us

The chief interest of Dominic Sandbrook's Let Us Entertain You is in determining who he means by those first and second persons plural. It gradually becomes clear that "us" means the aspirational middle class, while "you" is a patriotic, deferential mass that hankers after a cheerful conservativism. This is a rummage through the cultural second-hand shop that marginalises working class autonomy and the pretensions of intellectuals. It is relentlessly middlebrow, mildly xenophobic, and obsessed with big houses and private education. Give him a Union Jack waistcoat and Sandbrook would make an excellent John Bull, or perhaps a Toby jug. In the spirit of the series, the following sneer is based on only the first two episodes and I have carefully selected the most amusing tropes and misrepresentations for best effect.

The thesis of the Daily Mail's resident social historian is "that our modern cultural success is rooted in the experience of the Victorian period". To illustrate this, we start with Tony Iommi quitting a Birmingham metal-bashing factory, after losing a couple of finger-ends, to help invent Heavy Metal with Black Sabbath. The new music's roots apparently lay in the "forges and foundries of our industrial past", rather than the Mississippi Delta. This autochthonous creation myth neatly sidestepped the debate over the Americanisation of British popular culture and is the first (but not the last) occasion on which Sandbrook passes up the obvious cue to introduce George Orwell. In the circumstances, it is no surprise that the influence of Django Reinhardt on Iommi (working class lad impressed by continental Jazz) is not mentioned.

Sandbrook's theme is the continuity of social values beneath the change in material forms, from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Elton John and Grand Theft Auto. Equating the two eras in terms of creativity and entrepreneurialism allows the cultural economy to be presented as inventive, rather than parasitical, and the industrial revolution to be eulogised without reference to its social costs. The serial structure of this conventional narrative - we used to make steam engines, now we make music - also downplays the longstanding commoditisation of class, from the Gothic Revival to Queen Victoria's Jubilee mugs. Sandbrook sees this continuity as self-evidently a good thing rather than the persistence of unequal social relations and the resilience of ideology.

J Arthur Rank is presented as a bridge between the old and the new: an industrialist who treated British cinema as an industry, British history as a commodity, and Britishness as a brand (though Sandbrook fails to note his contribution to the demotic as a euphemism for masturbation). The reaction to the conservatism of Rank's films, namely the social realism of British cinema and theatre in the late 50s and early 60s, is blithely ignored, presumably because of its problematic focus on working-class aspiration and its criticism of conservative values after Suez. Despite the supposed emphasis on Victorian roots, the lasting legacy of music hall in British culture isn't mentioned. There is no Joan Littlewood, no Shelagh Delaney.

In fact, there are no women outside royalty. This is a great man history in which Sandbrook praises white, middle-class "entrepreneurs", such as Brian Epstein, Chris Blackwell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Charles Saatchi. Their commercial nous is elided with creativity, suggesting that culture should be thought of largely in terms of units shifted. Epstein's genius is dressing the Beatles in tailored suits and wangling OBEs for their contribution to exports; the continuity between the exploitation of sugar and reggae in Blackwell's family history is delicately passed over; Saatchi is praised for creating a market for modern art - the creativity of money; while tales of Lloyd-Webber's first night anxiety fail to elicit sympathy when you remember his recent role in voting for tax credit cuts.

In the second episode, Sandbrook uses a 1960s drug-bust at Keith Richards' Sussex manor to ram home his continuity message: rebel buys posh house at earliest opportunity. This vignette of the louche and the conventional, like Chipping Norton avant la lettre, reveals Sandbrook's fascination with property, which he proceeds to indulge in a tour that takes in Castle Howard (the "star" of Brideshead Revisited) and Highclere (the set for Downton Abbey). This is a view of history that reduces the subtlety of class identifiers to mere possessions. For example, Sandbrook's celebration of the" aristocratic" James Bond confuses Ian Fleming's festishisation of commodities with status. He fails to appreciate that Fleming, as the scion of a banking family, was looked down on by landowning aristos who preferred shabby-chic to an obsession with tailoring and cocktails.

The tour of stately homes allows Sandbrook to transport us back to Edwardian times and imply that gracious living reflected right moral values. TH White's The Sword in the Stone is held up as evidence of a persistent popular appetite for these values into the 20th century, including a sympathy with the travails of monarchy (The King's Speech gets an airing). This reading ignores White's pacifism and misrepresents his ecological concerns (Camelot has echoes of the League of Nations, Wart is repeatedly metamorphosed into animals who find man's cruelty baffling). White's romantic conservativism is closer to Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson. Merlin and Arthur's embodiment of the elderly tutor/young student trope is used to establish a link to the present in the form of Dumbledore and Harry Potter. In fact, White's themes of might versus right and family dysfunction find a better echo in Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Star Wars is excluded because it isn't British and because it doesn't feature an impressive rural pile.

The visit to Hogwarts allows Sandbrook to delve back even further in time to the Victorian roots of public schools. Rugby, Eton, Harrow et al are held up as inculcators of right values. Their historic role in moulding the administrators of empire is finessed with the comic interlude of Harry Flashman: a variation on the now-traditional "absent-minded" defence of exploitation. The public school system's role in moulding the social attitudes that undermined British industry during the interwar years isn't mentioned, nor its baleful influence on postwar grammar schools and today's free schools. Again, Sandbrook misses the obvious cue: Orwell's experience as an ex-public schoolboy enforcing the systemic cruelty of empire in Burma, and his experience of the social and economic waste inflicted on the industrial towns of the North in the 1930s.

In the book that accompanies and expands on the TV series, The Great British Dream Factory, Sandbrook finally engages Orwell, but only to criticise the Old Etonian's antipathy to the schooldays stories of Frank Richards. Despite his modern appropriation by neoliberals and neocons, Orwell remains problematic for the right, both because of his unpicking of the ideology of class and his distaste for Americanisation. Where he can't wholly ignore a subject, Sandbrook belittles it: postwar satire is written off as ineffective, other than in undermining respect for politicians (he ignores pre-Victorian levels of contempt); Punk is dismissed as merely "aesthetic" (i.e. by insisting on its lack of significance, which elsewhere is held up as a virtue for pop commodities, he admits its unsettling force); and the Jam's Eton Rifles is misread as showing a secret admiration for Etonians (it's actually about working class cynicism at middle class posturing).

According to Sandbrook, the period from the death of Princess Diana to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee shows royalty's ability to absorb and appropriate popular culture, which glosses over the near-terminal impact of the former event on the institution. The popularity of Elton John's Candle in the Wind is held to prove this resilience, rather than anything as banal as the British public's mawkish rubber-necking. This not only ignores the significance of a eulogy to an American icon being repurposed for a British one, but means Sandbrook fails to note the title comes from TH White's fourth book in The Once and Future King series, where it reflects the fragility of peace. In its way, the song is a perfect emblem of Sandbrook's cultural history: sentimental and superficial, in denial about the adoption of American social mores, and unwilling to accept the diversity and contradictions of British society.

The Responsible Diaspora

It was unfortunate timing that Jonathan Freedland should publish an article on Friday evening that began with the words: "Diasporas can be trouble". It's too soon to know the identities or backgrounds of the terrorists in Paris, but it's probably a safe bet that they were mostly locals rather than foreign jihadis, even if they had spent time in the Middle East recently. The alacrity with which the French government moved to seal the borders suggests a fear of incursions from abroad, and the more paranoid parts of the media have been only too happy to suggest that Syrian refugees are the conduit, but there is no lack of potential volunteers in the banlieus of Paris. The whole purpose of "radicalisation" is to sow dragon's teeth and thereby divide communities along sectarian lines. The new danger is that these attacks will be used by governments as an excuse to suspend the Schengen Agreement in order to placate national xenophobes.

Freedland's piece is a plea for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to be influenced by Western Jewish liberals. Despairing at the growing intolerance and mendacity of Netanyahu's government, and convinced that there is "no credible Palestinian partner" (there never is, funnily enough), he looks in hope to the Jewish diaspora to exert a positive influence. The precedent he cites is Northern Ireland and specifically how the "responsible diaspora" of Irish-Americans lobbied both republicans and Bill Clinton to pursue a negotiated peace. The adjective "responsible" does not imply consequentiality, i.e being responsible for one's actions, but rather privilege and legitimacy. This discrimination in turn implies illegitimacy, which in the case of the Palestinians appears to extend to pretty much everyone. There is no mention of a responsible Palestinian diaspora.

This dichotomy of the responsible and irresponsible requires Freedland to mangle history: "Whether it was the German-Americans who agitated to keep the United States out of the war against Hitler, the Irish-Americans who bankrolled the IRA’s 'armed struggle', or the Cuban-Americans who lobbied to keep the US shackled to a pointless embargo of the island, émigré communities have a chequered record when it comes to the influencing of foreign policy." The chief opponents of war with Hitler were not German-Americans but Americans, from disappointed Wilsonian liberals to the America First Committee (supporters included Sinclair Lewis, Walt Disney and a young Gerald Ford). Though a significant source of funds, the IRA was not "bankrolled" by Irish-Americans. It raised far more money in the Irish Republic. The US embargo of Cuba was prompted by the nationalisation of US-owned assets, not by the lobbying of Cuban exiles. Its maintenance has been due to the intransigence of capitalists holding out for compensation, not street demos in Miami.

This notion of continuing engagement with "the old country" leads Freedland to claim that "In the US, foreign policy is domestic politics". This obviously flies in the face of the USA's long-standing parochialism, not to mention the more ridiculous examples of politicians who don't know what pyramids were for or who wear their ignorance of world affairs as a badge of honour, but Freedland is engaged in building the image of the irresponsible diaspora, all the better to create a stark contrast with the responsible. The irresponsible diaspora is marked by "a tendency to be more hawkish than those in the old country, to adopt a dogmatic stance unaltered by day-to-day experience on the ground". Right on cue, Mohammed Emwazi (aka "Jihadi John") gets a topical namecheck, suggesting that Muslims are particularly prone to this dogmatic tendency.

The responsible diaspora, for which Freedland turns to research among British Jews, exhibits a more mature and sophisticated understanding: "Jews are eminently capable of holding two views at the same time that are often – wrongly – held to be contradictory. They are capable of supporting Israel’s right to exist, taking pride in its achievements on the one hand – and lambasting Israeli policy on the other". Freedland doesn't stop to note that those who maintain that these positions are mutually exclusive include not only antisemites but philosemites. In recent years, Netanyahu has been at the forefront in claiming that criticism of Israeli government policy is by definition an existential attack on Israel, and that Arab-Israelis are a categorical threat to the state. This latter stance extends the trope of the irresponsible diaspora to those whom the state is reluctant to even acknowledge as native citizens.

Freedland's search for a responsible diaspora is not unlike the old imperial search for the responsible native, whose continued non-appearance inevitably sets back the date of decolonialisation. The desperation of this search can be seen in his willingness to rehabilitate Tony Blair, Mr Good Friday himself, who has apparently decided to go freelance with "a new initiative of his own, predicated on the belief that the way to make Israeli-Palestinian progress is through a wider regional understanding between Israel and its Arab neighbours". It doesn't seem to occur to Freedland that the former PM might be more interested in leveraging the many contacts he made as "Middle East Peace Envoy" for commercial advantage than to advance a wide-ranging political settlement.

Freedland defines the responsible diaspora thus: "They favour compromise, rejecting the suggestion that concessions should wait until the wider region calms down. They are unimpressed by the Palestinian leadership, blaming it for incitement against Israel, and accepting the view that there is 'no credible Palestinian partner', even as majorities still believe in the two-state solution, still maintain that Israel should give up land for peace, and do not shrink from the fact that Israel is 'an occupying power'". The belief that there is no credible Palestinian partner is absolutist: the exact opposite of someone prepared to compromise. Freedland should revisit his own historic parallel. Were Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness noticeably more "credible" than the PLO or Hamas?

That the Palestinian leadership is deemed "unimpressive" is an ironic position to take when you consider the deeply unimpressive behaviour of Netanyahu. And as far as "incitement" is concerned, how do you describe the approval by successive Israeli governments of further settlement building in the West Bank? Of course, this tit-for-tat should be irrelevant if there is a sincere desire to negotiate: you want to focus on the future, not dwell on the past. The belief that there is a narrow range of acceptable interlocutors, like the attempts to bound negotiations by appeals to loaded values or the insistence on particular behaviours, reflects the aristocratic roots of diplomacy. These are matters than gentlemen should discuss without the interventions of the mob or their "unimpressive" leaders.

The persistence of these forms is due to their value in constraining the future by reference to the past, which is why they are always more pronounced on the side that is expected to make the greater concessions. They are structurally conservative. The "Foreign Office" style of the UK was a characteristic of the era of imperial decline, not the years of aggressive expansion. Freedland's construction of a responsible diaspora appears progressive and liberal, but in its refusal to engage with both Israelis and Palestinians as they actually are, it is typical of the aristocratic contempt that still mars British attitudes to international affairs, something that even the notoriously oblivious Americans are sensitive to. The truth is that we should always negotiate, where we can, because talk is cheap and lives shouldn't be. We don't need a responsible diaspora working quietly behind the scenes, we don't need preconditions and qualifications, we just need a table and some chairs.

The End of Education

The unsurprising news that future government spending will shift further away from education and economic development towards pensions and healthcare highlights the growing antagonism between different fractions of capital in the UK. Though this has mainly been discussed in recent decades in terms of the "demographic timebomb" and its effect on the affordability of welfare, the smarter capitalists are waking up to the potential risks for capital itself. According to the neoliberals at the Resolution Foundation, "This relative growth of state spending on health and old age – and withdrawal from areas such as post-16 education, housing and economic development – also raises big questions about the state's role in supporting productivity growth".

Public spending is unlikely to fall as much as is being claimed, not just because large cuts are difficult to realise outside of major capital-intensive programmes such as housebuilding and defence, but because government is the prime site for rent-extraction. If the economy continues to stutter along, public services where demand is guaranteed to grow in advance of GDP, such as health and elderly care, will become ever more attractive to the sort of businesses who make political donations. The number of public bodies and public sector workers may well decline, but the amount of public money spent on services via commercial providers is likely to grow. This means that total public expenditure, as a percentage of GDP, will probably remain closer to 40% than the supposed target of 35%.

The challenge to other industrial sectors is that this compositional shift undermines public investment in economic resources such as infrastructure and human capital (i.e. education and training). This raises costs for UK capitalists who have, over the last century, relied on state subsidies for these "public goods" financed through general taxation (i.e. predominantly paid for by labour in the form of income tax, VAT, council tax etc). Though the current government is ideologically opposed to formal subsidies for strategic industries, such as steel-making, its welfare spending priorities mean that it is now turning away from the much larger informal subsidies to broad industry. This applies not only in terms of money spent on public infrastructure and education, but money spent subsidising labour costs through working tax credits.

This is consistent with its encouragement of business sponsorship of schools and colleges, where it is pursuing a strategy of privatisation in the true sense of that term - i.e. leaving it to private actors to pursue their own interests rather than pool efforts for the common good. In effect, business is being told to "grow your own" because public provision will continue to decay. While New Labour's academy programme was the thin end of the wedge, we should remember that it was driven by the delusion that "beacons of excellence" would drive up average standards to the benefit of capital generally. The Tory policy, with its emphasis on elitism and reductionist assessment, is the pursuit of a pluralism in which failure is a necessary component. Capitalists are being asked to become discriminating and to treat education as a buyer's market.

In contrast, economic development exhibits a hybrid, multilateral approach, due to the need for local government involvement (which cannot be dispensed with as easily as in the case of education) and the preference of foreign state-level investors for UK government guarantees. But even here the idea of state investment for national resources is being eroded. Instead, subsidies are directed to foreign investors (e.g. Hinkley Point), privileged domestic groups (e.g. private builders), or both (e.g. HS2). Eschewing state-led investment not only allows the government to resist subsidising ailing industries, it also allows FDI to be used to impose "market discipline" on local authorities, obliging them to compromise in order to "win" foreign approval. The problem for industry is that this can lead to lopsided investment and regional inconsistencies - i.e. a lack of the central planning that traditionally benefited big capital.

The news on the evolving shape of the public sector comes hard on the heels of the latest episode of "The Rise of the Robots", in which the social scientists of Bank of America Merrill Lynch report that "robots and artificial intelligence ... could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology over the next 20 years". Some of this is just the usual MBA guff. For example, "We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work". No. A small number of robot owners (capitalists), and either wage repression or un/under-employment for much of labour, does not constitute a paradigm shift but a reversion to historical norms. What caught my eye was the standard neoliberal hope: "It’s not meant to be a doom and gloom report: one of the ways we think people could help themselves here is through education".

But the idea of education as a way of positively meeting technological change already seems out of date. Citing recent research showing an above-average rise in mortality for the white working-class in the US (and specifically the middle-aged with limited education), Andrew McAfee speculates that this may be the result of structural unemployment: "The boredom and vice that come up when work goes away are dire problems. They are, in fact, a serious public health problem". This might appear to be a liberal plea to consider the human cost of economic dislocation, but it echoes a conservative presumption that the working-class are unsuited to leisure because their only purpose is labour. McAfee doesn't seem too bothered by the prospect of boredom and vice among the idle rich, but more significantly he doesn't even attempt to claim that more education could be the solution for labour.

The chief argument against technological unemployment, apart from the risible Luddite myth, is that progress opens up new economic sectors and creates more new jobs than are lost. The classic example used to support this is the steep decline of agricultural employment, with the surplus of labour trooping off to the new factories. In fact, while there was a massive movement from the countryside to urban areas, this masked a movement of jobs as much as people. For example, a lot of those classified as agricultural workers in the eighteenth century, at a time when transport was labour-intensive and most markets local, were actually engaged in food distribution and retail, not working the land. Others were small-holders or "cottars" who supplemented their income through casual (non-agricultural) labour or craft-work. A lot of the "industry" that sprang up in the emerging towns was activity that had previously been dispersed in villages, hidden under the blanket of the rural economy.

In other words, a lot of "new" jobs were actually old jobs retooled or relocated rather than the result of new demands satisfied. A blacksmith replaced by a car mechanic is categorically different to a ploughman who becomes a cinema projectionist. This distinction is important because future job prospects will depend more on the degree of retooling and relocation than society's ability to invent new personal services. The fear is that we have reached an inflexion point where the replacement rate is now less than 1, both because technology has become more substitutionary than complementary (more autonomous robots than power tools), and because technology has enabled relocation on a global scale (so disadvantaging historic concentrations of labour that enjoyed higher wages).

One symptom of this evolution is the way that previously skilled or rationed roles are now being dispersed by technology across a larger casual workforce, e.g. the so-called "sharing economy". The challenge that Uber drivers present to London cabbies is globalisation on a metropolitan scale. The ideological groundwork for this was laid over recent decades by the vogue for portfolio careers and freelancing, but that in turn placed a greater emphasis on the importance of human capital. In this current phase, the mood music is about the declining returns to education and the importance of contacts: who you know rather than what you know. Social media reflects this transition from "brand me" and unmediated self-expression to insider networking and the clubhouse, with trolling providing the justification for discrimination and horizontalist initiatives drowned out by the cacophony of the privileged.

As the ideological frame shifts away from human capital, state education policy is increasingly attracted to social regulation. Education has always been first and foremost a matter of discipline, the roots of which lie in religious and moral conformity, so it is easy to redirect it to a system geared to separating and socialising children based on their parent's socio-economic status or aspirations. The recent tale of the primary school requiring its pupils to walk with their hands behind their backs is resonant precisely because the justification, that it will "make sure children arrive in class in the best possible frame of mind for learning", is so obviously specious. If anything, the evidence is that children are likely to benefit more from running around, which is what they instinctively try to do. Forcing small kids to comport themselves as if they were in holy orders is education only in the sense of teaching them in-group behaviour.

Though public debate will focus on the increased share for health and the elderly, the real story emerging from the government's public spending priorities is not one of demography or even tactical cuts to other services. It is that we have no expectation that "new high-wage industries" will finally arrive in numbers to replace those shut down since the early-80s, and that consequently we have given up on education as a public, as opposed to a private, good. We're writing off our human capital and asking business to make the best of whatever it can find. This is a high-risk strategy given that a "no" vote in the EU referendum would lead many large firms to conclude that they would be better-off relocating to the continent, particularly if tighter immigration controls made importing human capital difficult. For all its triumphalism and the obliging media coverage, there's an unmistakable whiff of the closing-down sale about the current administration.