I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why.

Fractured France, by Andrew Hussey

One of my missions is to read much less about the big American political stories — I will still have interest in issues that affect us — and more about European political developments. The flowering of online writing means it’s never been easier.

Hussey is an excellent writer but the book’s appeal lay elsewhere too — not least in its city-by-city architecture, with each chapter devoted to a different French city. Then, on opening the book, I discovered a chapter on Marseille, a city I find endlessly absorbing and am keen to revisit. On the whole a worthy read, full of corners of France — historical and geographical — I wasn’t familiar with.

‘This is our version of Brexit, I was told by a gilet jaune supporter at one of the weekly demonstrations in Paris in late 2019. He too described himself as ‘neither Right nor Left’ but had come to the demonstration in Paris to express his disgust at being left behind and ignored, mired in debt and poverty no matter how hard he worked (he was a dairy farmer). He explained his support for the cause of the gilets jaunes: ‘We are losing faith in democracy because whichever way we vote, nothing ever changes.’

This is, of course, an echo of the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally or RN), previously the Front National (National Front or FN). This does not mean that France is inexorably on the way to a far-right government. But it does explain why democracy in present-day France isn’t working.

This point has been said so many times that I am honestly afraid to type it, but we lose so much by focussing on American politics instead of European. The conditions of European democracies are far more similar to our own in terms of population, finances, problems etc.

In an interview given in late 2021 for Le Figaro, Christophe Guilluy described how the democratic model perpetuates itself by raising the spectre of a Fascist victory, which so far has never arrived but means that people preserve the likes of Macron or similar technocrats in power. He wrote: ‘There is no loyalty toward Macronism. Only a vote out of fear.”

The motto of every centrist still clinging to power, and a tactic that is already being adopted by Starmer to ward off a potential Reform government.

Astrid Leplat talked about the charisma of Marine Le Pen.

She had only met her once but was obviously flattered and star-struck that Marine had known her name. ‘She is impressive, said Leplat. ‘It’s hard to describe, but she has a kind of star quality.

You can easily see her as a true leader of a new France. Even as a leader of Europe, of France in the world.

Of course, Astrid Leplat was exactly the kind of candidate that the FN wanted to promote in its new post-toxic era. For one thing, she was quite self-effacing, the very opposite of the pushy media-savvy politician. She said modestly that her only ambition as a politician was to help people, in the same way that she tried to help them in her daily life. There was no reason to disbelieve her.

Her husband, who shared her working-class regional back-ground, was indifferent to politics, but he knew, too, that she was a good person trying to do the right thing. Like Pauline in the film Chez Nous, the FN’s Astrid Leplat is a nurse. Jean-Pierre Legrand explained to me that this was why she had been hand-picked by Marine Le Pen to stand as a regional councillor.

The party has adopted a policy of recruiting fonctionnaires (civil servants), especially those who work in the health and support services. This is partly to demonstrate that the FN has left behind its neo-Nazi origins and is now the party of everyday folk, but also to undermine the dominance of public services by the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party).

This may be a strategy Reform look to emulate, as their “rising status as the default party amongst non-left wing provincial voters has opened up to them millions of normal people, who may better suited to fill Reform’s benches than former Tories or their most vociferous — and online — supporters.”

It began with a call to arms. In April 2021, the right-wing Valeurs actuelles published an open letter from military generals addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, twenty retired generals and more than a thousand French soldiers condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating everywhere from Islamism to ‘the hordes from the banlieues, who were all either gangsters, drug dealers or jihadist terrorists.

The letter’s signatories targeted ‘anti-racists’ who ‘speak of racialism, indigenism and decolonial theories. ‘But behind these terms, the letter said, ‘these hate-filled, fanatical partisans seek only racial war. They hate our country, its traditions, its culture, and want to smash it into pieces. The letter concluded that ‘a civil war will bring an end to the growing chaos, and the dead, for which you will be responsible, will be in the thousands!

France obviously has a much more storied history of military interference in civil government so this is unthinkable in Britain; however, given the current political treatment being meted out to veterans, I’m not so sure the silence of military leaders on all issues is a good thing. As ever, a happy medium would be most welcome.

I asked her, in the light of this, whether she thought Brexit had been an act of folly or, as described by Michel Houellebecq, ‘an act of courage’.

‘Brexit was neither an act of madness nor an act of courage,’ she said. ‘It was simply an act of sovereignty, and I am an admirer of sovereignty. I have respect for people who want to have a hand in their own future. After that, they can do what they like with that future.’

She went on to say that the Brexit model would be a good thing for all European nations, including France: ‘In fact, it’s not Brexit which will determine the future of the British people, but the decisions which will be made with this new, reclaimed freedom. What has really struck me has been the insults thrown at the British people and their leaders, simply because these leaders asked the British people what they wanted to do. These insults from the European elites show you what they really think of the people - how they think the people are just obstacles, and that they can get around them, or just go above their heads. If I understand correctly, according to the recent statements by Emmanuel Macron, you have to even take these people on and fight them.’

This did not seem to me to be a softening of Le Pen’s Eurosceptic position; rather, it was the opposite - a straightforward condemnation of the European elite, by which she meant the EU, and its relation to the multiple countries for which it legislates.

I think history will take Le Pen’s view, particularly if Britain continues to fail to diverge from Europe significantly, and Europe fails to diverge from the EU significantly.

In recent times, there have been strange and unpredictable conflicts in this area. The most dramatic and widely reported example was the battle between Chechen and North African immigrants in Les Grésilles in 2020. On 12 June, a sixteen-year-old Chechen was badly beaten up by North African drug dealers as a ‘warning’ to the Chechens to stay out of the local drugs trade.

According to Chechen sources, the police took no action, so the community decided to take the law into its own hands. A call to arms went out on social media and, suddenly, on the night of 13 June, Les Grésilles was packed with Chechens, apparently from all over France and Belgium, some armed with iron bars and baseball bats, some of them flaunting Kalashnikovs for selfies and social media, although you couldn’t tell whether they were real or fake. Cars were set alight, and any young male who looked North African was set upon.

The chaos deepened when a group of a hundred or so Chechens came into central Dijon to smash up a cafe called Le Black Pearl on the boulevard de La Trémouille, near the busy Place de la République. This was a shisha bar known to be the hang-out of the North African gang leaders. Eyewitnesses posted videos of the Chechens storming the cafe. A young Chechen called Lamro, originally from Saint-Etienne, claimed in the pages of Le Bien Public to be a member of the group that attacked Le Black Pearl, and testified that the assault was not on Dijon or its inhabitants but specifically targeted the drug dealers. This did not reassure any of the Dijonnais, who saw only wild destructive forces invade their city that night.

The next few days saw a kind of guerrilla warfare between the Chechens and the North Africans, as the North Africans tried to reclaim their ground around Les Grésilles. At one point, a car was driven at top speed into a group of armed Chechens. The car overturned, and its driver, who was badly injured, was dragged out of the car by hooded men, who cried ‘Allahu Akbar’. The police struggled to contain the violence; there were blockades, fires, smoke and gunshots.

Things are bad here, but by the grace of God they are worse elsewhere.

Yet on leaving Le Guim’s, I felt a simmering sense of unease that deepened as I headed back to central Dijon - a half-hour walk away. There was no logic to this. I had been met by nothing but smiles and friendly banter in Les Grésilles. My disquiet came rather from the feeling that Les Grésilles was technically France but somehow not quite French. This was nothing to do with the ethnic composition of Les Grésilles, but simply the feeling that lives were being lived here which would never connect with mainstream French society. There seemed to me to be a potentially dangerous decalage - a French word which is hard to translate but often means ‘lack of concordance’.

Dijon is one of the major capitals of what is often termed la France profonde (’deep France’). This is a term which has several loaded meanings.

Most often, it has been used in the twentieth century to describe a now-lost France - a traditional, usually rural part of the country whose language, dialects, culture and politics stood apart from the sophisticated ideas and ideologies of Paris.

This was an imaginary version of French history but one that was useful for the ideologues of French fascism, most notably the writers Charles Maurras and Maurice Barres, who in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century developed a vision of France which was quite literally rooted in its soil - a nationalism of land, peasants and the “pays réel’, meaning ‘real'‘ France. It is easy to see how this vision persists in the culture of the far right in France: Marine Le Pen is only the latest and loudest cheerleader for this version of France which resists im-migration, rootlessness, globalization.

Edmund White, an admirer of Giono and an occasional visitor to Manosque, saw in Giono’s depiction of Haute-Provence that human beings are indivisible from what he describes as the beauty and terror of nature in its raw state. Giono wrote that there were two fundamental truths in his work: ‘The first of these truths is that there exist people who are simple and nude; the other is that this earth [is] fleeced with woods... this living earth exists without literature. Giono elaborated on this theme in his late work Le Haut Pays (The High Country), where, echoing Walt Whitman (Giono greatly admired Whitman and called him ‘the American Homer’), he saw the landscape as all alive.

Nothing much to say here, other than I this was a snippet of history I didn’t know much about and found interesting - as I did the clear similarities between la France profonde and Deep England.

Looking back now, the 2013 Year of Culture was a chimera.

Marseille is now tougher than ever. On my most recent visit to the quartiers nord in spring 2024, I was reliably informed that the Price of a Kalashnikov - known as ‘un kala’ - imported from the Balkans was 350 euros, and soo euros ready-loaded with ammunition. The same source - a young lad from the i3th arrondissement who drove me around his home area in his taxi, cheerfully pointing out which gangs control which cité - told me that one reason why the quartiers nord were relatively quiet during the summer riots of 2023, which had convulsed many other parts of France, was because the drug gangs had no interest in stirring up trouble and disturbing business. They were not political in any way. But he went on to say that there were so many weapons in the quartiers nord that if the gangs had wanted to launch a real war against the police, they would have won it.

‘The police are outgunned and they know that.” The gangs also kept the Islamists in line, which also explained why Marseille has seen so little of the Islamist radicalism present elsewhere in France. ‘The intégristes (Islamists) don’t dare fuck with the gangs, he said. ‘They know who is in control.’

This was not the gritty glamour of The French Connection but rather a description of a secular hell, a Hobbesian world of endless conflict, struggle, brutality, disorder, with everyone pitted against everyone else and with no way out other than prison or death. For this reason, Pujol seemed to be a very moral writer describing an amoral world.

He seemed pleased with this. ‘Like George Orwell, I just try and describe the way things are as plainly and as accurately as I can, he said. ‘I am not trying to make a case for social justice.

That is for other people. Anyway, I am not sure that the problems of the quartiers nord can be explained away by a simple lack of resources or money. There are bigger forces here, a globalized drugs trade and so on. There is plenty of money here, of course, but it is all in the hands of the wrong people: the voyous and their bosses.’

Marseille can’t really be compared to another European city in terms of the effects of migration, largely because of its status (historical and current) as the most important port for North African and Middle Eastern illegal trade into Europe. Rotterdam and Antwerp also have a problem with illegal drugs and migration, but they aren’t as intertwined as they are in Marseille, which has always been Europe’s seedy underbelly. The harbour still retains an Ambleresque quality.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Henry Kissinger: An Intimate Portrait of the Master of Realpolitik, by Jérémie Gallon

In the conclusion, Gallon reveals he has written this book partly in the hopes of revitalising European statecraft. As such, it is probably more timely than he expected; Trump’s new National Security Strategy has put Europe on notice. Washington’s policy is now for Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defence, without being dominated by any adversarial power.

Since the Greenland debacle, it has become increasingly clear that an “adversarial power” may, in fact, also America itself. Our leaders ignored the warnings issued by Trump in his first term in the presumption that sanity would soon be restored; they were rewarded with Trump 2. The anguished mewling of our leaders over Trump’s actions in Ukraine owes more to their helplessness than any reckoning with the responsibilities of power or statecraft. To quote the Emperor Justinian;

The conquerors of the Avars solicit our alliance; shall we dread their fugitives and exiles? The bounty of our uncle was granted to your misery, to your humble prayers. From us you shall relieve a more important obligation, the knowledge of your own weakness

de Gaulle was an ally who could not accept his country and Europe becoming an American protectorate. The French president had assigned himself the role, according to Kissinger, of ‘teaching his people and perhaps his Continent attitudes of independence and self-reliance’. A transatlantic relationship or a supranational body that would constrain Europe and France too rigidly was not compatible with the feeling of grandeur that he wished to impart to the French people. It was therefore to reinspire his country and give his fellow citizens ‘a specifically French sense of purpose that de Gaulle pursued the vision of an independent foreign policy.

de Gaulle’s foreign policy has, much like Enoch Powell’s, been largely vindicated. I believe that Trump’s actions in Greenland will see this strain of foreign policy thought re-emerge as the default for the right, but it will of course be subordinate to the more pressing national issues we are focussed on.

Kissinger had already set out a similar analysis in an article headlined ‘Strains on the Alliance’, published in Foreign Affairs in January 1963. ‘We have treated what is essentially a political and psychological problem as if it were primarily technical, he wrote, before going on to say: We have shown little understanding for the concerns of some of our European allies that their survival should depend entirely on decisions made 3,000 miles away.’

We now see the effect in the aforementioned anguished mewling over Trump’s Ukraine schemes. I also think that the expansive, inflexible rhetoric which European leaders have deployed over Ukraine has been a function of this; they were conscious that their capacity to arm Ukraine was limited, and language became a surrogate for concrete military support. Or, perhaps, it is simply that the bravest men are always found the furthest from the battlefield.

Although Kissinger spent very little time with de Gaulle while in office, the man who Nixon dubbed ‘the giant’ left a deep impression on him. In his account of his years at the White House, Kissinger sketches a laudatory portrait of the French president in just a few lines: ‘He had performed the dramatic feats required by the crises that had brought him to power. He had consolidated new political institutions. He had achieved the decolonization of French Africa while maintaining French self-confidence at home and its prestige in the former colonies.

Barely overcoming incipient civil war, he had restored French pride by giving it a central role in the policies of Europe and the Western Alliance. One of the principal purposes of his challenge to the United States was to inspire French self-assurance. The rest of Kissinger’s analysis is as interesting for what it conveys of his own vision of power as it is for his thoughts on the French leader. ‘But the student upheavals of 1968 had shaken de Gaulle. And the challenges facing him thereafter were not of a magnitude he considered relevant to his vision of himself. To ensure a growing economy, to arbitrate contending claims on limited resources, to organize and manage a bureaucratic state - these were tasks for what he half-contemptuously called “ quartermasters” , not for heroic figures.

When de Gaulle is looking back on 1940, whilst talking to the British ambassador in the 1950s, he said he was “frightened that the French would survive as a nation of cooks and hairdressers.”

That is the spirit of Gaullism we must appropriate; the recognition that survival without greatness is still a defeat.

Our current era has seen many young leaders take office. Often in their thirties or forties, they give the impression that the race to reach the highest echelons of power has become a sprint. They relentlessly seek the limelight; products of a culture of immediacy in which public relations is all. But many of them are just shooting stars, destined to fade away as fast as they appeared in the political and media firmament. Such people may be gifted in leveraging the fleeting mood of a nation to attain power, but their lack of intellectual depth or emotional intelligence prevents them from retaining it for very long. Their terms of office are either insignificant or marked by shallow gambles - such as that made by David Cameron with the Brexit referendum - which deal lasting damage to their nations. Few manage to achieve re-election or merit more than a footnote in the history books.

The contrast with Henry Kissinger is striking. He entered the White House a few weeks shy of his forty-sixth birthday but would turn fifty before becoming the leading US diplomat. The man who took the oath of office on 22 September 1973 as the fifty-sixth secretary of state of the United States had already experienced trials and tragedies aplenty.

Certainly, one cannot look at Britain’s recent history of quick-fire Prime Ministers and disagree. Likewise across Europe, it would be a struggle to name a European leader over the last 20 years who has genuinely made as lasting or as sizeable impact on the world as Kissinger (or, indeed, de Gaulle). The aforementioned Cameron will only, probably, be remembered as the engineer of Brexit; he will be, historiographically speaking, downstream of the event. Likewise Merkel and the Syrian migration wave.

In this new environment, Henry devoted himself to his studies, body and soul. He would rise at seven in the morning to study in the library, not returning to his room before late afternoon, whereupon he would ensconce himself in a deep armchair and work his way through borrowed books, griping whenever the authors evinced erroneous reasoning. He read the New York Times and the Boston Globe every day, though not the editorials, considering that he should form his own opinions.

I refer you to this piece I wrote for The Critic some time ago on Viktor Orban, who is also able to spend time reading. It is, obviously, beneficial to our leaders to do so, and we should engineer political systems that allow for it by expanding their political time horizons.

On 15 July 1975, when the two men, speaking 900 miles apart, laid out two irreconcilable visions of American foreign policy.

Standing before Congress, the Soviet dissident made a concerted attack on the policy of Détente in which he saw the creeping ‘spirit of Munich’. In his eyes, the Helsinki conference marked nothing less than ‘the funeral of Eastern Europe.

Employing his metaphorical verve, the Russian poet went on to describe it as ‘an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels ‘that will inter in a common grave bodies that are still breathing’ These words could only find favourable echo on both the Republican and the Democrat benches. In a gesture of defiance to the Ford administration, and Kissinger in particular, the members of Congress rose to their feet and gave Solzhenitsyn a standing ovation.

At the same moment, in Minneapolis, in the heart of the Midwest, Henry Kissinger was preparing to give one of the most important speeches of his career.

On that 15 July, Kissinger knew that his audience feared that Helsinki would be a new Yalta. The American people suspected their leaders of being prepared yet again to sacrifice the citizens of Eastern Europe on the altar of peace with Moscow.

In his speech titled “The moral foundations of foreign policy”, Kissinger recalled the motivations of Détente, empha-sising that, in an age of thermonuclear threat, statesmen had no other choice but ‘to seek a more productive and stable relationship between the Eastern and Western blocs despite the basic antagonism of our values. Moreover, Kissinger in no way denied the Realpolitik that guided his actions: ‘We no longer live in so simple a world (..) Consequently our own choices are more difficult and complex’ On a geopolitical chessboard ‘where power remains the ultimate arbiter’, the policy of Détente was therefore one that allowed the ‘furthering of America’s interests’.

For Kissinger, who had personally suffered so much from the barbaric Nazi regime, the ultimate moral goal was to preserve the stability of the world. In the nuclear age this meant reducing as much as possible the risk of a direct confrontation between the two superpowers while also avoiding the disintegration of the ‘free world’ in the face of the Soviet menace.

Kissinger knew that to achieve this objective, he had no choice but to tread a delicate path as regards both bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow and the various conflicts that might break out across the world.

Kissinger was convinced that the Soviet system would crumble progressively as soon as its leaders were no longer able to extend their sphere of influence or invoke imminent foreign threats to justify the oppression of the peoples under their boot. It was this reasoning that led Kissinger to develop and implement the policy of Détente - a policy that earned him fierce opprobrium, both from hawks calling for direct confrontation with Moscow and from isolationists and doves who wished to cease the political, military and ideological struggle with the Kremlin. But in the long term it was indeed Détente that brought the USSR to its collapse and enabled the United States to win the Cold War.

Can you imagine two such competing intellects at work in the world today? We have the Trigonometry podcast.

Whatever judgement one may make regarding the actions of Henry Kissinger, it is undeniable that he sought constantly to root his diplomacy in a long-term vision that left little room for the diktats of emotion. Like George Kennan before him, Kissinger had understood that, when it comes to the geopolitical chessboard, those who let themselves be guided by their feelings and their emotions always end up in checkmate.

But at a time when the foreign policy of our Western democracies seems to fluctuate according to public opinion, or even the vagaries of social media, Kissinger’s cold and rational realism upsets many sensibilities. As prompt as such people are to criticise and vilify the former secretary of state, they rarely ask themselves a fundamental question: what would have happened otherwise?

I have written before of the biological drivers I suspect were driving bellicosity amongst male commentators of a certain age over Ukraine. Richard Hanania has also written on the increasing feminisation of political participation. For these reasons, amongst others, we are totally unable to deal coldly or rationally with foreign policy developments. This has reached a fever pitch over Gaza and Trump, where even the most rational of people have lapsed into emoting instead of separating national interest from personal sympathies (in the former example), or formulating a coherent British strategy in the face of substantial geopolitical changes (as in the latter).

As we painfully move on from being the agents of history to being mere bystanders to the world as it evolves around us, we no longer wish to make the difficult decisions incumbent on a great power. Our societies demand immediate gains that are often incompatible with long-term strategy. Even more revealing is our tendency to shun statesmen and stateswomen. Their courage and their sense of responsibility endlessly remind us that reality imposes a permanent tension between our moral values and our interests.

Now, more than ever, Europe needs leaders who are also strategists if it wishes to pull itself out of the pit into which it has sunk. Such individuals need to be capable of developing new analytical frameworks to conceive diplomacy over the long term and understand the strengths and weaknesses of their adversaries. They also need to have the character and talent to put this diplomacy into practice and bear the weight of responsibilities that will accompany their actions.

It is time Europe becomes serious about self-defence again, and I have little hope that our leaders are up to it. Whilst Britain would be an excellent place to foster the kind of thinking and leadership it would require, we have domestic problems that are simply too pressing to allow for it. We are also outside the EU, who have proved themselves time and time again to be unserious partners for defence co-operation by holding our participation to ransom over fishing.

Kissinger always struggled more to form relationships with Israeli leaders than with Arab leaders, despite the shared Jewish heritage of the former and anti-demotion of the later.

Many Israelis and American Jews had trouble understanding how the first ever Jewish secretary of state could not at least appear to be a zealous defender of Israel’s interests.

The reasons behind Henry Kissinger’s attitude are twofold.

He explained the first to the leaders of the principal American Jewish organisations just a few days before he left office. After recognising the ‘very complicated relationship’ he had with his fellow Jews, he went on to say: From my point of view, probably no criticism has hurt me more than if it came from this community. And probably from your point of view, it was especially painful if disagreements occurred between the Jewish community and the first Jewish secretary of state in American history’ Nevertheless, he said: ‘I thought it was important for the future of Israel and for the future of the Jewish people, that the actions that the United States Government took were not seen to be the result of a special, personal relationship, but that the support we gave Israel reflected not my personal preferences alone, but the basic national interests of the United States.”

As for the second reason, it is summed up in what Kissinger told Golda Meir one day: ‘Golda, you must remember that first I am an American, second I am secretary of state and third I am a Jew.’

In The Critic, I recently wrote that “British politics has become a venue for proxy foreign policy disputes imported wholesale from elsewhere” driven by migrants who retain primary loyalties to their countries of origin. The result has been a growing habit among some diaspora groups of conflating Britain’s national interest with that of their homeland or sectarian causes.

As with many second order consequences of migration, cases of exemption can be found at the individual level, but never in the aggregate.

Questioned about this split decades later, Kissinger would say: Like the ancient prophets, he [Kraemer] made no concessions to human frailty or to historic evolution; he treated intermediate solutions as derogation from principle. And therein lay the source of our later estrangement... For the prophet, there can be no gap between conception and implementation; the policymaker must build the necessary from the possible... The prophet thinks in terms of crusades; the policymaker hedges against the possibility of human fallibility.”

Not much to say here, I just thought this was a lovely quote and I wanted to share it. Which is the whole point of this series.

As the British historian John Bew reminds us, the term appeared for the first time in 1853, used by the German political activist August Ludwig von Rochau. Rochau defined Realpolitik as a method of action based upon a rational analysis of the factors determining a given situation. This analysis relies upon an understanding of the historical and political circumstances and of the power mindsets at work, as well as a precise evaluation of the strength of ideas and emotions involved. Devoid of any sort of self-delusion, inasmuch as that is possible, it facilitates decision-making to achieve not ideals but a concrete objective.

For Rochau, the objective was none other than the unification of Germany in a Europe jarred by the opposing forces of nationalism and liberalism. It is natural, therefore, that Realpolitik was initially embodied by the father of German unity, Otto von Bismarck. But in personifying it, the Iron Chancellor, whom Kissinger himself described as being ‘unencumbered by moral scruples’, would also imbue this concept with certain characteristics commonly associated with him - namely Mach-iavellianism, immorality and cruelty - thus shifting Realpolitik away from its original definition.

It was only after the First World War that Realpolitik entered the arena of American political and intellectual debate.

The liberal internationalism espoused by President Woodrow Wilson set its own idealism against the supposed ‘cynicism’ of Realpolitik. Later, in the years following the Second World War, the concept became central to American foreign policy, promoted by the writings of German-born academics such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau, and diplomats such as George Kennan. Consequently, in current everyday use, the term is synonymous with power politics stripped of all moral considerations and supported by a pessimistic view of human nature.

With the world that is coming, we must hope that we can engage with realpolitik’s original definition, not as it is incorrectly interpreted. Thanks to the enduring popularity of Bew, it’s more than possible.

Castlereagh had conceived and tirelessly promoted a style of British diplomacy steeped in realism because of his conviction that doing so would best preserve Britain’s interests. But what his detractors saw as a form of Realpolitik earned him the scorn of the liberal British intelligentsia, who reproached his cynicism. Indeed, the romantic poet Lord Byron described Castlereagh brutally as an

“intellectual eunuch’, a ‘cold-blooded, smooth-fac’d, placid mis-creant! (...) Cobbling at manacles for all mankind.

Poor Castlereagh. If anyone today attempted realpolitik with the same morally detached focus on British interests as him, they would be treated even worse than he was. We did not deserve him then, and we do not deserve him now.

In his memoirs, the former secretary of state commented:

From that meeting onward, I knew I was dealing with a great man.’° Then, to emphasise all the respect and admiration he had for the Egyptian leader, he wrote: “The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to put obstacles in perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.”

Again, nothing particular to say (other than this was about Anwar Sadat) other than it’s a lovely quote. I think it’s slightly overwrought given Sadat’s achievements, but it’s interesting that Kissinger seems to have had an instinctive interest in great figures of his own time.

For far too long, the European Union has lost its way in a diplomacy shot through with morals and idealism, but which serves only to isolate and diminish us. Out on the great geopolitical chessboard, we Europeans are no longer writing history. When it comes to the crises unfolding at our door, those that directly affect our stability, we are not even invited to the negotiating table... worse, we are lying to ourselves. With every outraged declaration by European diplomats condemning the human rights violations and crimes committed by other leaders against their own people, our own leaders boast of having fulfilled their moral contract. But the truth is that our foreign policy has become amoral through its own tragic impotence. Isn’t it time to recognise that too few lives have been saved, too few political prisoners released and too few autocrats toppled purely through the magic of our well-intentioned diplomacy?

I agree with this, with two codifiers. To start, it is a very particular view of the effects of European foreign policy failures; “too few political prisoners released, too few autocrats toppled”. More Alaa Abd El-Fattahs, more post-Saddam Iraqs! But it also misplaces the root cause of these problems; it is not a lack of statecraft that causes this marginalisation in our own backyard, but a lack of military power. Military weakness breeds marginalisation, and marginalisation breeds intellectual atrophy: leaders who cannot shape outcomes have little reason to think seriously about how to do so. Only when Europe address its military weakness will it address its own impotence. Unfortunately, it isn’t just a matter of more money; it means addressing huge socio political blockers to building up defence capability. Recruitment crises, expensive energy, competing demands for spending. Don’t hold out hope.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Breakneck, by Dan Wang

Breakneck was a pretty well-noted books of last year. Dan Wang, a technology analyst and writer originally from China, argues a more intuitive way to see the rivalry between the world’s two superpowers is this: China is an engineering state, building vast systems at breakneck speed, while the United States has become a lawyerly society, slowing and blocking almost everything—whether it’s good or bad.

I have already written a piece on this book, which I also recommend you read if you want to understand the book; first how it might affect our future development and methods of social transfer, the second on how we can place Britain within Wang’s model.

Engineers have quite literally ruled modern China. As a corrective to the mayhem of the Mao years, Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee-the apex of the Communist Party-had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron--tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory.

Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries. In the United States, it would be as if the CEO of Boeing became the governor of Alaska, the chief of Lockheed Martin became the secretary of energy, and the head of NASA was governor of a state as large as Georgia.

Chin’s ruling elites have practical experience managing megaproiects, suggesting that China is doubling down on engineers - and prioritizing defense - more than ever.

This is pretty convincing, but one thing Wang misses out of the book is the extent to which China’s domination by engineers is a self-reinforcing loop; because today’s elites are drawn from that pathway, it increasingly becomes the pathway chosen by those who want to be tomorrow’s elites.

The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.

There are reasons to be happy for lawyers to have an outsized presence in American society. They are reliable conversationalists at cocktail parties, for example-much better than engineers or economists.

More seriously, they help to maintain America’s civic-mindedness and its commitment to laws. Many of them do important work: facilitating people’s access to bankruptcy, divorce, or immigration services; they help secure civil rights; and they work to protect wildlife and clean water. And the judiciary has a vital function in restraining the executive.

Here is where the lawyerly society shines. We don’t have to worry about the US government imposing the one-child policy or zero Covid, because it would never with the former and could never with the latter. The United States also wouldn’t have caged so many of its tech companies. Lawyers, as I wrote in my introduction, are excellent servants of the rich. Chinese tech founders (and their investors) are indeed very rich. Given the absence of lawyers and a political culture sympathetic to rights, they could find no protection.

And again for the lawyerly society in the US. However, tackling these two issues would likely need a separate book each.

The United States used to be, like China, an engineering state. But in the 1960s, the priorities of elite lawyers took a sharp turn. As Americans grew alarmed by the unpleasant by-products of growth-environmental destruc-tion, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests-the focus of lawyers turned to litigation and regulation. The mission became to stop as many things as possible.

As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions. Its leaders aren’t only civil or electrical engineers. They are, fundamentally, social engineers.

Emperors didn’t hesitate to entirely restructure a person’s relationship to the land, ordering mass migration into newly opened territories and conscripting the people to build great walls or grand canals.

Modern rulers are here, too, far more ambitious than the emperors of the past. The Soviet Union inspired many of Beijing’s leaders with a love of heavy industry and an enthusiasm to become engineers of the soul—a phrase from Joseph Stalin repeated by Xi Jinping-heaving China’s population into modernity and then some.

China today resembles the United States of a century ago while it was proving itself to be a superpower. But America’s construction boom slowed down after the 1960s. What happened next? The lawyers.

In the 1960s, parts of the United States had grown into a frightful place. Oil platforms discharged petroleum into the sea, a foul smog settled over cities, and factories leaked so many chemicals that seven rivers combusted. Urban planners rammed highways through urban neighborhoods. Legal discrimination segregated people by race and blocked them from exercising the right to vote. The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners (who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials (who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam), and industry regulators (who were cozying up to companies).

Students at elite law schools, especially Yale and Harvard, sprang up to act. Students founded environmental organizations around the rallying cry of “Sue the bastards!” (referring to government agencies).

Through the 1970s, both the American left and the right worked harmoniously to constrain government effectiveness. Liberal activists like Ralph Nader declared themselves to be watchdogs of government, constantly filing lawsuits. Ronald Reagan returned the compliment when he replied, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s. Unfortunately, it has become the cause of many of its present problems.

I find it hard to see China developing anything like the environmental consciousness of America in response to its environmental danger; not just because there are no elections and the brutal repression of the state, but because China has already taken massive strides forward in managing its environmental situation, and because much of the environmental damage has already been offshored, as in the case of Chinese fishing fleets stripping African coasts etc).

The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the problems of the United States in the 1960s. It has also produced two complications that weaken the United States today.

The first is an elevation of process over outcomes, In American government and society, designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.

While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures. In a seminal paper titled “The Procedure Fetish,” University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley outlines how the federal government requires an agency to “conduct every conceivable study, ventilate every option, engage every identifiable stakeholder, and weather the most stringent judicial review before any of its actions, however triv-ial, could take effect.” In the lawyerly society, a more rigorous process is the solution to any number of quandaries. To deal with a new problem, it designs another procedure, which usually entails longer bureaucratic deliberation, greater public discussion, and more intensive judicial review.

Lawyers have much more scope with the law to stop something rather than create something. Before a government agency can build anything-from simple things like a bike lane to more complex projects like California’s high-speed rail—it ties itself down with mountains of procedure. The agency has to check so many boxes because it knows that a lawsuit could derail that bike lane if people are able to convince a judge it didn’t study environmental problems hard enough.

After exhaustive research and review, it is no wonder that little ends up built. Americans are left with decaying infrastructure, little new construction, and a deep sense that nothing is working.

As the physical environment degrades, it’s hard to see how elites break out of this loop - the answer is, likely, that electorates will force a decisive change by refusing to accept the attendant decline in living standards, as we are already starting to see.

It’s not just the government. America’s problem is the lawyerly society. The United States is unusual among Western countries for having so many lawyers: four hundred lawyers per hundred thousand people, which is three times higher than the average in European countries. Since lawyers are everywhere, proceduralism has reached everywhere, including universities and corporations. Anyone working in these today has seen how procedures become an end up themselves, such that people grow obsessed with its logic and forget about the outcome. Because who can keep the goal straight after the seventh monthly committee meeting?

The other problem of the lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off. Lawyers are too often servants of the rich. They help wealthy homeowners block construction projects or get creative with their taxes. It is sometimes puzzling to follow along intellectual property cases, many of which seem to be a thrilling and intellectual game invented for lawyers. American judges have to deal with bewildering disputes, like hedge funds pursuing sovereign governments on debt payments. Litigation offers endlessly tantalizing possibilities for settling scores. And motivated parties are willing to pay top dollar for superstar lawyers. Lawyers aren’t just defenders of the rich; many of them are the rich. “On Wall Street, Lawyers Make More Than Bankers Now” was a headline from the Wall Street Journal in 2023. “Pay for Lawyers Is So High People Are Comparing It to the NBA” claimed the New York Times in 2024.

America’s dysfunctions are not obstacles for the rich. Though New York City has barely been able to extend its system of mass transit, real estate developers have been able to build skinny high-rises for the wealthy. Though California can’t tame wildfires, the rich might be able to afford their own private firefighting services. The poor-those buried under paperwork trying to apply for SNAP benefits, who have to take dilapidated public transit and who would most benefit from new construction—are the ones who suffer most from the lawyerly society’s failures.

The first two paragraphs touch on the fact that the lawyerly society ends itself to the formation of distributional coalitions of those most able to navigate the system, who can then entrench themselves via proceduralism. Wang is right that the Americans are worse than us, but wrong to say by a lot. Britain has the highest number of HR employees in their workforce; that is a similar, albeit not identical, problem.

On the issue of the blockages not being an issue for the rich; this will also likely drive forward popular resentment against eco policies; if people can feel their lives getting relatively worse - not just in comparison to their previous situation, but to others - that resentment offers a ready problem for anyone to offer an easy solution.

The lawyerly society doesn’t have such dramatic shifts. It is made up of democracy, pluralism, vetocracy, and not only these things. The lawyerly society also includes a commitment to proceduralism and protecting wealth. Economically, the United States has experienced strong economic growth relative to other Western countries combined with astonishingly successful corporate value creation. But in political terms, this obsession with process over outcomes has made Americans lose faith that the government can meaningfully improve their lives. I want the US government to earn back that faith. To do so, it will need to recover some of its engineering prowess and make room for nonlawyers among its ruling elites. It will require the United States to build again, creating a momentum and the sense of optimism for the future that many Chinese have felt over the past two decades

Part of the problem with mass democracy is that, as Weber identified, the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups, and the people who rise to the top in that system are primarily (often only ) skilled in communications, who are best able to argue the case for their particular interest group. One of the most pressing problems we face in Britain is to break up this over-reliance on communications and the professional distortion it causes; this is why Reform’s decision to bring in people to the Cabinet via the Lords should be welcomed.

Writing is like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you use it, and if you don’t use it, it withers away. But it’s also possible to overuse it. When you’re overtrained, the answer isn’t to push through because your technique degrades, everything gets sloppy, and that’s when you start doing real damage.

Over the last year I’ve been writing here several times a week, alongside three to five freelance pieces elsewhere. I’ve loved doing it. However, I’m keen to do justice to The Critic. The magazine has been a big part of my writing life for years, and I want to give the people and projects involved - including the new podcast, which I’m leading — the time, focus, and ambition they merit, and see how far we can take them.

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Alongside this, I’ve also been working on a book proposal, which is now entering a more demanding phase and needs proper attention rather than being squeezed into the margins.

For those reasons, I’m going to stop paid subscriptions to the PVI for now. I don’t think it’s fair to charge people when I can’t commit to writing here at the level or frequency I’d want as a paying subscriber. I will keep writing here but it will be highly irregular, and may only be my Footnotes to Myself for a while.

I’m enormously grateful to everyone who’s read, shared, argued with, and supported the Potemkin Village Idiot. I’m not disappearing — my writing will continue at The Critic — but I’ll be putting all my energy in there, and I’m excited about what’s coming next.

Thank you, and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

No More Napoleons, by Andrew Lambert

A new release, which I gratefully received a review copy of from the publishers.

I asked because I had been thinking, inspired in part by the long series on an English First foreign policy by Owen Edwards, what our modern foreign policy should look like. It needs radically reshaping, not only to represent our actual interests, rather than those of our allies, but so that we can match our ends to our means. Without proper thought and careful management we are in for another long century of humiliation on the world stage; though of course we must, first, put our own house in order.

This book examines the underlying continuities of British policy and strategy in the century between the end of the Napoleonic conflicts and the outbreak of the First World War. Although essentially a historical case study, using political, strategic, technological and cultural arguments to analyse policy decisions, the approach has been influenced by concepts drawn from political science, ‘Ordering’ and ‘Offshore Balancing. Although their origins lie in contemporary American debates, they frequently reference British experience as a great power between the early eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.’ While attempts to read across from a British past to the American present and future rarely survive serious historical analysis, these political science models make a significant contribution to the analysis of British choices, suitably recalibrated for a relatively weak insular seapower state with a global maritime empire.

One of the reasons I like doing book reviews in this format is… how could I possibly have provided a better summary of this books

After 1815, Britain used a combination of ‘Ordering’ and ‘Offshore Balancing to secure critical but largely negative interests in Europe, without creating a permanent military commitment, while attempting to address the immense debt burden incurred in unlimited ‘total’ wars between 1793 and 1815 through domestic economic growth and expanding global trade. This was a conscious choice, driven by longtime colleagues Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh and Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington - all protégés of Pitt the Younger. Their primary aim was the permanent removal of France from Antwerp, Vlissingen and the Scheldt estuary, the only location from which a full-scale invasion of England might be attempted. Having no desire for continental territory Britain was able to coordinate pan-European responses to French aggression and shape the security architecture of a post-War settlement.

See above… this is the main contention of the book, a solid an interesting idea that Lambert argues well - although the early stages of it are a little repetitive around establishing, re-establishing and re-re-establishing the central themes he lists here.

This approach was developed by economist MP David Ricardo, who urged reliance on rapid economic growth, unleashed by repealing taxes on consumption and manufacture, to reduce the debt burden in the medium term. These arguments were developed and linked to retrenchment in Irish MP Sir Henry Parnells On Financial Reform of 1828, with revised editions in 1830 and 1831”’ Parnell argued for retrenchment: cutting government expenditure would limit the need to tax economic growth, for example import duties on industrial raw materials, thus stimulating growth, and consumption.

Furthermore, there was a strategic imperative;

Retrenchment is also necessary as a preparation, in order to protect the finances of the country from the destructive effects of the funding system, whenever a new War shall take place; for in proportion as our peace establishment is low, the difficulty of procuring the additional funds which a War will require by War taxes will be less.

Parnell believed that inadequate retrenchment left the Treasury ill-equipped to meet the economic shock of War, when extensive borrowing became necessary. Cutting peacetime defence spending would enhance the credibility of government bonds and was, therefore, an essential preparation for War.

One can argue that retrenchment following World War One merely allowed for part Two, and that retrenchment following World War Two might have been a good idea - had what remained of the finances been protected, instead of rolling the war socialism into the peace socialism of Attlee.

Britain survived almost two decades of unlimited or ‘total’ War by creating a powerful warfare state to mobilise and maintain unprecedented levels of naval and military power, funded by immense loans and extraordinary taxation. Britain also funded and equipped allied powers. It could endure these burdens because it did not create a mass conscript army, the standard instrument of European War, exploiting insularity, limited War and a maritime strategy of sea control, economic warfare and power projection to counter Napoleonic armies and ‘decisive’ land battles. Liverpool recognised that Napoleon’s Russian gamble might create opportunities to re-establish European order, restore balance and restrain potential hegemonic powers. Wellington advised him the invasion would fail.

Was there ever a time when Old Nosey didn’t’ have the best of Boney? I have never understood Brits who find Napoleon a greater figure than Wellington. Perhaps he didn’t have much of the whirlwind about him, but he is the model of Santayana’s steady and sane oracle, who ‘carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes’.

Liverpool favoured a European settlement based on a continental balance of power, without a standing British military presence, cooperating with the other great’ powers, Russia, Prussia and Austria, before admitting a rehabilitated French nation state, purged of republican and Bonapartist aggression, to the Concert of Europe. British diplomacy and economic leverage prevented any discussion of the contentious subject of maritime economic warfare at the Vienna Congress, and the Anglo-American negotiations at Ghent. The British economic blockade broke the economy of Napoleon’s empire, and crushed that of Russia, prompting Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign to force Russia back into the ‘Continental System’ - a counter-blockade of Britain.

Although historians have noted Liverpool’s ability to harmonise the elements of conservatism and conciliate the bedrock of pre-1832 politics - the independent gentlemen who normally voted with the King’s ministers - few recognise the deeper import of his politics.

William Hay’s sophisticated biography stresses Liverpool’s search for security alongside Europe, without binding commitments, or reactionary intervention. He shaped the grand strategy and diplomacy of the post-Napoleonic era, making the Wellington system of 1814-15 durable. Liverpool began the transition from a high-tax warfare state to a low-tax, free trade economy to sustain national credit, reduce the national debt, fund major security upgrades and manage political change. The men he appointed to key defence posts: Wellington, Thomas Byam Martin and George Cockburn, sustained the strategic bases of his system for almost four decades, decades in which British economic development would not be troubled by a continental War. Belgium remained outside France, while France, Russia and the United States never allied against Britain. The system’ endured.

Another biography to add to the ever-expanding list of historical figures I don’t know enough about. If only the world would stop turning, I would have enough time to catch up.

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It is a question that we, and Europe, are still contending with, as mass migration as only ramped up in the 15 years since Caldwell wrote the book.

One things that is making the conversation so difficult to resolve is that so few people are contending with the realities of immigration in terms of the scale of it’s impact. As Lomez tweeted recently;

Many otherwise smart people can’t seem to grasp (or won’t) that certain policies operate at the individual level and therefore demand individual judgment, while others (immigration eg) operate at the population level and must be evaluated at the level of group averages.

The personalization of immigration narratives suits the left because it humanizes the problem. Earlier this year I wrote about the BBC’s “immigration week,” which was composed entirely of human‑interest stories that appeared to recycle decades‑old pro‑immigration arguments. The logic driving this editorial choice is that human stories are designed to displace political framing, encouraging audiences to see immigration less as a contested policy issue and more as a matter of empathy, thereby fostering pro‑immigration sentiment:

By framing migration through people rather than facts, and moving the narrative from policy debates to personal experiences, you engage the reader on an emotional rather than intellectual level. This makes sense in a world where information moves as fast as ours; as Robert Cialdini writes, ’people don’t counter-argue stories... if you want to be successful in a post-fact world, you do it by presenting accounts, narratives, stories and images and metaphors.’

Compelling personal stories like these – stories of hardworking refugee overcoming hardships or a skilled workers contributing to society – are designed to elicit empathy through a phenomenon known as the identifiable victim effect. Simply put, as you scale a problem, our altruistic impulses diminish; people feel more inclined to provide more assistance when faced with a specific, identifiable person in distress, than they do when faced with a large, indistinct group facing the same hardship. Adding a human face can also help shift the debate from one of practical concerns over the economic of security effects of mass immigration to one of moral legitimacy by tapping into the often-abused sense of British fair play, and sense of duty to help those in need.

Cherry-picking these stories also allows immigrants to be more easily framed as ‘deserving’ by highlighting individual arrivals making contributions; countering, as pro-migration activists would put it, the narrative that immigration is a drain on the economy and adds pressure to public services. Pumping out a huge amount of these stories of individual contribution is also intended to change what people see as the norm; if the predominant style of immigration reporting becomes one of individual struggle and success - rather than about the effects of immigration as a whole - it’s reasonable to assume public sentiment will trend more favourably.

As for the right, highlighting individual stories about migration allows for a similarly selective approach to dealing with migration. Whereas the left tends to centre the stories of the migrants themselves, however, the right tends to centre individual stories about the costs of migration to the host population, often elevating individual cases of crime, welfare dependency, or cultural friction.

For both sides, the anecdotal approach serve the same function: to humanize the costs of migration, and make abstract concerns about migrant relatable through a single face or incident.

The problem is that as immigration has increased, so have its aggregate effects. The right is catching up to this much quicker, and has put much effort in in recent years to discovering the costs of the migration system, the additional costs migrants place on the taxpayer, crime statistics etc. But even these only tend to be initial costs; they are accounting for what migration is costing society, rather than how it is changing society.

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As the long-term problems caused by migration shows (there are reports of rape gangs going back to the 1960s), this wasn’t even a tenable situation when migration was running in the tens of thousands. Immigration is now running closer to the millions; the issue is no longer what migration costs, but what kind of society it produces. A nation cannot absorb such a number of people without it materially altering its makeup beyond simple demographics. To treat this only as a matter of budget lines or crime statistics is to miss the deeper reality: mass migration changes the character of nations.

Thanks to the sad increase in sectarianism, increasing public knowledge of the rape gangs, increasing migrant crime and increasingly unsustainable economic and unsuitable cultural profiles of the average migrant, people are beginning to wake up to the fact that migration must be evaluated via group averages.

Many core Western systems - democracy, the justice system, policing, welfare - are not going to survive the presence of large numbers of non-natives. It is already altering the platforms political parties take, the functioning of core state services, and our foreign policy. What does justice look like when members of a jury don’t understand the concept of consent?

Yet still, few are considering second order effects of immigration at a population level. Until the right does this, however, we will be stuck in the trap Lomez sets out;

“What are the likely outcomes of importing hundreds of thousands of randomly selected people from Country X?” Impossible to say, since we cannot evaluate each one of them individually, and also it’s morally bad to ask that question, so I guess we just have to let them come here and find out, and even having let them come here and realizing that the predictions based on group averages were entirely accurate, there’s nothing we can do about it and also don’t even point it out because that’s also morally bad, so I guess we’ll just keep doing this forever.

The only way to resolve Caldwell’s question if can Europe be the same with different people in it, is to shift the conversation away from the individual to the structural. Stories are good for telling us where we are, but they can’t capture the scale of transformation inherent in mass migration.

That is what I have been trying to do in my ‘can X survive migration?’ pieces,2 which I have more of planned. Unfortunately these take a lot of research, which takes a lot of time, which takes a lot of money. If you’d like to read more, please do consider signing up below.

If we are to understand how migration is changing the country, and how to mitigate against those changes, we need to look at the second-order consequences of migration. Hamit Coksun’s story, for instance, isn’t about one man, but about the pressure for Islamic blasphemy law naturally generated by a large population of Muslims. There are so many practical questions that need asking; what happens when language barriers isolate children in schools? How will immigration affect what is said to your daughter on the street? What will justice looks like when a jury doesn’t understand the idea of consent?

In predicting population-level outcomes, group averages work. If we want Britain to survive mass migration, we need to deal in aggregates, not anecdotes.

But both dismissals share a common flaw: they refuse to engage with the practical realities of elite formation, or how the influence and incentives of office & power shape behaviour, and instead demand simple unbending ideological commitment. John Palmer’s comments on Shakespeare’s Brutus are bought to mind; ‘A fastidious contempt of the shameful means necessary to achieve his ends is the constant mark of the political idealist.’

Principled denial soon turns into practical blindness. What we are dealing with is not just bad faith or individual weakness but a structural problem in elite formation, which if we are to rebuild and future-proof right-wing governance requires consideration - and mitigation.

Under the current system, the right-wing elite is formed primarily of Oxbridge graduates, with a smattering from lesser Russel Groups. In the Parliamentary Party, approximately 29% of Conservative MPs had attended Oxbridge – a figure that’s still accurate, with another 40% coming from the Russel Group.

There is no data on the educational backgrounds of SPADs, but anecdotally the career path of Oxbridge to SpAd to MP to Minister has become increasingly common. Given the overrepresentation of both former SPADs and Oxbridge graduates in senior roles, it’s reasonable to assume that it now functions as a self-reinforcing elite pathway into power.

Graduates from elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge are accelerated to staff right-wing governments because it serves as, essentially, a proxy measurement for both competence and intelligence (as well as a significant interpersonal network[1]). This would be fine, if the resulting elite formation had not largely proved themselves largely incapable of delivering right wing policies over the last 14 years. My fundamental assertation is that both the people and the system of selection we have developed leads to an elite formation that is simply too susceptible to the Dinner Party Problem.

The fear of social ostracism from long-standing friendship groups can be a huge deterrent to challenging entrenched norms. Attending an elite university may open doors, but it also raises the social cost of dissent: if your peers are destined to lead the Civil Service, the arts, or other institutions, the social (and possibly professional) cost of enforcing change in those systems is much higher than say, for me, who went to Hull and doesn’t know a single artist. What is the social cost for me to say I think we should defund the Arts Council? There isn’t any. A complete removal of cost means complete freedom of action.

This dynamic is reinforced by psychological factors. Individuals high in agreeableness are predisposed to defer, conform, and avoid confrontation, particularly under social pressure. In Personality and Political Attitudes, Gerber et al demonstrate that agreeableness affects political attitudes depending on the context. We are therefore constructing a highly vulnerable right wing political elite by drawing from social pools that select for high agreeableness – and therefore conformity, as I have previously written;

Personality traits are logically and demonstrably associated with different political leanings; studies have shown that agreeableness was significantly correlated with education, occupation, and childhood intelligence and that people in higher socioeconomic jobs tend to be more agreeable. So we are drawing from a pool of people with high agreeability; but further studies have shown that for high social class, left-wing orientation increased with agreeableness, compounding the problem of scale.[2] The informal talent selection network that exists on the right is therefore drawing on a small number of right-wing people who are predisposed to have high agreeability. Simply put, that makes it very difficult when you have to do disagreeable things.

A study in 2007 found that agreeableness contributes positively to academic success at university, a finding that’s been consistently repeated. Importantly, agreeableness was linked to group-based coursework and cooperative learning outcomes, which I understand are central to Oxbridge-style tutorials. Another study two years ago showed that agreeableness is positively associated with achievement in areas requiring collaboration and interpersonal engagement.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given agreeableness facilitates cooperation, conflict resolution, and peer acceptance. Yet while these traits make right wing governance more difficult, the right is still selecting for them. This is not just by overrepresenting people from elite institutions, but by using informal networks to identify and promote talent which, as former spads told the IfG, rely heavily on recommendations and connections within the party – meaning agreeability carries as much, if not more weight, than ability.

So, how do we solve the Dinner Party Problem?

What we have are private troubles causing public failures, because psychological vulnerabilities are manifesting as systemic problems. What we therefore need are systemic measures that can manifest as psychological solutions.

The diagram below is taken from Bruce Jessen, best known for the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. Imagine the Spad or Minister as a prisoner of the political system. In order to ensure resistance to enemy (the Blob) we need to push them towards ‘resistance to enemy’. It’s relatively simple; we just need to increase/decrease the relevant push/pull factors.

The first thing we need to do is make the process of hiring right wing talent formal. The informal network, as we have seen, is by it’s very nature an entirely counter-productive selection process. Formalizing recruitment means establishing clear criteria and ensuring the pipeline of talent is rigorously assessed.

And by what criteria should we be assessing? Elite education is no longer a sufficient qualification. If Oxford and Cambridge have produced a generation that conforms to progressive norms, we must widen our recruitment pool. Oxbridge graduates are selected because their education serves as a proxy for intelligence and/or aptitude. But why bother using a proxy? Simply design intelligence and aptitude tests that filter for suitable candidates and are blind to their background. It’s not illegal to simply administer an IQ test on applicants.

And what should we be filtering for? Given the content of this piece, it’s clear I think we should be selecting future right wing talent not just on competence, but on traits. One of the easiest ways to increase/decrease the relevant push/pull factors on our political prisoner is to select people who have a profile that is predisposed to Do The Necessary. Part of this profile must be psychological; I suggest, as a beginner, the following – but reserve the right to change these recommendations once I’ve done more research.

• Low agreeableness

• High conscientiousness

• High emotional stability/low neuroticism

• Assertiveness

• Integrity

Further, given the role elite institutions play in forming non-political elites, and the attendant social pressures this adds to political elites, we have to recognise the value of resistant to social punishment as a valuable political resource. Selecting people who have no ‘reward from enemy’ or ‘punishment from enemy’ factor because they have no relevant friends is a very easy win. Solve the Dinner Party Problem with this one neat trick; select people who do not care about being invited to dinner parties.

But where are they being hired to? I have previously written on the need for an institutional level of right-wing politics, and this is a system that must be fleshed out further. As an initial idea, however, you could centralise CCHQ hiring of all Tory staffers, to provide (relatively) safe and secure jobs to nurture future talent. You could do the same for council group political advisors outside of Westminster. In a conversation I had with Chris Bayliss recently, he pointed out one of the things the right does much better in America is find jobs for people when they’re out of power. An organisation that is interested in personnel, as Heritage is – for instance an expressly right-wing Civic Future, could provide that infrastructure, training fellows and then placing them.

There are also, given the social changes around mass participation in political parties, changes to selection that should be contemplated. If an increasingly unrepresentative membership are putting forward increasingly unrepresentative representatives, then this becomes a problem not of internal party democracy, but national; as Lasok observes, ‘a mass membership structure without a mass membership is the least democratic option of all’. There are alternatives. Reform’s model, for instance, is much more in tune with democratic politics as it currently functions; a spectator sport for low-engagement voters. The average voter now spends less than 5 minutes a day thinking about politics, and whilst their former sustained involvement allowed them to consume so much news they could follow political narratives, they now consume it only episodically (and, thanks to social media, increasingly so). Reform has grasped this well, and doesn’t demand anything from members; signing up to the party simply provides emotional satisfaction and identification. It is less a vehicle for mass membership than a stage for mass spectatorship; we can see shades of this in Labour’s surge in members under Jeremy Corbyn, and Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! (now Renaissance), which does not require members to make a monetary donation. Macron has even suggested that members can join while simultaneously retaining membership in another republican party.

Ultimately, there is only one way to end the PPE state; stop selecting PPE graduates.

[1] Which can also be a problem, as there is also a bias favour of in-groups. Following the COVID-19 pandemic for instance, it was revealed that one in five UK government contracts for personal protective equipment (PPE) - worth a combined £4.1 billion - had been awarded to companies with personal ties to members of the Conservative Party, including connections dating back to university and private schooling.

[2] I don’t know why I didn’t reference this study properly at the time. Gerber et al found that high agreeableness correlates with more liberal political orientations.

Sadly, it is not a new development to us. Across most modern industrialised democracies, there has been convergence towards professional or middle class overrepresentation in politics. This began with a shift away from rural and agrarian elites, but a second strengthening has now occurred with the marginalisation of working class representation; in 1945, about a quarter of MPs came from a working-class background, based on their pre-parliament occupations. By 2019, this figure had dropped to just 7%.

Nor is the social class the only shallow pool from which political talent is drawn; recent research from LSE has shown that over the century from 1922 to 2022, Oxford educated 33% and Cambridge 18% of all British cabinet ministers, meaning over half of all cabinet ministers came from Oxbridge. The rest were drawn from a thin smattering of the better Russel Group unis;

Research into small groups with high levels of cohesiveness and conformity – as would be the case for an elite with such a narrow range of formative experiences, and can be evidenced by the relative political & ideological homogeneity of modern politics - often produce decisions that fail to account for the full breadth of information, or properly consider alternative decisions. This isn’t a particular post-Blair problem; when considering the ill-judged decisions made by the British cabinet during the Suez crisis in 1956, Hugh Thomas and Bertjan Verbeek suggested that the homogeneity of the group in terms of background mean the Cabinet suffered a ‘collective abberation’ of decision making;

The British Cabinet which took the decision to prepare this plan had now been led by Eden for fifteen months. It was a more orthodox Government than any of Churchill’s. Apart from Walter Monckton, an eminent lawyer, none of the Cabinet had much position outside politics. Tough old outsiders like Lords Woolton, Waverley, Chandos, or Cherwell played no part in Eden’s Cabinets, unlike Churchill’s. Including Eden himself, eleven out of the eighteen Cabinet Ministers had been in the House of Commons before 1939, nine were Etonians, six (Eden, Macmillan, Gwilym Lloyd George, Monckton, Salisbury, James Stuart) had served in the First World War (three were MCs, including Eden); another four had fought in the Second World War.19 All save two had been at Oxford or Cambridge. Four had been opponents of appeasement before the Second World War (Eden, Salisbury, Macmillan, Sandys), and five (Butler, Lennox-Boyd, Kilmuir, James Stuart and Home) supporters of it. The youngest Minister was Macleod (forty-three), the eldest Monckton (sixty-two); four Ministers (Monckton, Salisbury, Major Lloyd George and Macmillan) were over sixty.

Verbeek’s work tries to find cognitive explanations to explain why the Cabinet decided to resort to force despite the unlikelihood that US support, deemed essential, would be forthcoming. First of all, Verbeek examines Eden himself;

An analysis of public and private statements by Anthony Eden between 1924 and 195522 shows that his cognitive belief system was guided by the idea, or master belief, that, although conflict is a frequent feature of world politics, in the end, any conflict can be accommodated as long as the parties involved are willing to recognize and respect their mutual security interests. A necessary precondition for conflict resolution, however, is the obeyance of certain standards of international conduct. Essentially, international relations should and can be an area of gentlemanly conduct. This belief structured many other of Eden’s beliefs, including his view of the opponent: it remains possible to accommodate international conflict as long as states and their leaders adhere to certain conventions of correct international behaviour.

Eden’s inner circle – himself, Macmillan, Salisbury and Lloyd – employed collective rationalizations around the timing of the US Prediential elections and highly selective interpretation of messages from Dulles and Eisenhower to convince themselves that US support would be forthcoming after all, despite signs to the contrary. That is because, Verbeek argues, all shared collective assumptions about the US based on the fact they;

shared the same image of the nature of Anglo-US relations: first, they recognized that the United States was the world’s first power, but remained nevertheless convinced that Great Britain was its junior partner with global responsibilities of its own. Second, they were convinced that they had an explicit understanding with the USA that the Middle East was an area which was primarily Great Britain’s sphere of influence. Third, this implied that the USA would not resist the defence by Great Britain of what she perceived to be her legitimate interests

As well as collective blind spots, there is also the issue that a political elite that is so narrow will be unrepresentative of the general population. It is not an issue that politicians are unrepresentative of the people per se, but successful government is made far more difficult if the governing elite is unfamiliar with the lived experiences of the governed.

Politicians now almost exclusively rely on polling data and focus groups to keep them in touch with the electorate. It was unkindly once said to me of David Cameron that he ‘wouldn’t fart without consulting a focus group first.’’ In the past, this effect was mitigated by mass participation in party membership.

Membership of political parties peaked in the 1950s, when the Conservative Party boasted approximately 2.8 million members and Labour 1m; this doesn’t include, of course, an incalculable number of adjacent members; people who might have gone to dinner dances the Tories hosted in hopes of meeting partners, or workers who were members of a union and so felt joining Labour unnecessary. Voting patterns indicate their reach across the electorate was immense. In the ’50s, the main two parties regularly captured around 90% of the vote - sometimes even higher.

This was the result of decades of work in building up reach into society via social organisations such as social clubs and reading groups. But through the later stages of the 20th Century, political parties saw a dramatic fall in membership – not just in Britain, but across developed western nations. Party membership in the UK has declined from roughly 12% of the electorate to under 2% today.

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Modern political parties are integral to British democracy; they have a constitutional function to articulating and aggregating the interests of the body politic into a coherent political philosophy and practicable public policy, recruiting and promoting political leaders in the process. But, as Peter Mair argued in Hollowing the Void, the decline of participation in political parties has severed the necessary connection between ruled and rulers; as the range of political backgrounds narrows, our politicians are isolated from broader public sentiment and further embedded in an unreflective peer group with shared assumptions and rationalizations. As in the case of Eden and Suez, this results in cognitive biases that constrains the decision space through collective blind spots.

The increasing homogeneity of both the skillset and background from which politicians are drawn also matters in particular for right wing governance.

The Conservatives are notably sketchy about their membership numbers, but trends can be drawn. By 2005, total party membership of the Conservatives had plummeted by over 65% from its peak, representing just 1.3% of the electorate. At the last leadership election, 95,194 ballots were cast, a turnout of 72.8% - meaning there were 130,760 members. This decline has left Conservatives reliant on an unrepresentative sample of the electorate, with membership predominantly composed of individuals from the ABC1 socioeconomic category.

As Frances Lasok writes, reversing the trend of mass participation in politics will be difficult (if not impossible), and attempts to democratise political parties in the hopes of encouraging a resurgence in membership may in fact be exacerbating the problem, given how narrow the segments of society they now draw their membership from are;

a mass membership structure without a mass membership is the least democratic option of all: it becomes an oligarchy of age or connections. It causes the limited talent pool in all parties, and the instances at Conservative Parliamentary selections where future Members of Parliament were chosen by four or five people.

Meanwhile, the combination of democratisation of Conservative selections, which now gives party members a direct say, and the narrowing of political participation has seen a narrowed membership select a narrowed elite formation.

One of the most persistent - and concerning - issues of the past 14 years of Conservative government was the presence of - and influence wielded by - individuals who were, in truth, not really right wing.

The type is well known; Woolaston, Grieve, Stewart, Soubry, Grieve, Warsi. On key issues - in particular Brexit, immigration, the constant tightening of the liberal ratchet - they consistently aligned with progressive consensus - which is, per David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs Anywheres, Rob Henderson’s work on the ‘Lanyard Class and Matt Goodwin’s on the ‘New Elite’, most prevalent amongst ABC1s, rather than Conservative voters (or public opinion). I have previously called this type ‘The Eternal Centrist’;

It is notable that Eternal Centrists never offer solid policies or positions to “return” to, but abstract values like moderation or realism. That is because theirs is a politics that offers little but a return to mindless managerialism, the slow grinding of politics as process, rather than principle. What values they do hold are generally economically and socially liberal, and largely indistinguishable from those offered by the parties of the left. That is why so many have so warmly welcomed Starmer into government; he will implement few policies they won’t agree with, with his governing strategy of co-opting “experts” offering a thin cloak against allegations of ideology appealing to their desire for “grown-up” politics. Which is to say, their desire to see meaningful political disagreement, founded on ideological differences, eliminated.

The problem with Eternal Centrists is that they are not meaningfully conservative. As we shall see under the reign of Starmer there will be few social or economic policies that they don’t agree with Labour on, as they have no real ideological grounding in conservatism. Bella Wallersteiner, by accident, made this split clear when she argued that “the party should return to its centrist roots.” The Conservative Party has no centrist roots; its roots lie in maintaining “a hegemony over the right-wing vote whilst also being able to poach votes from the centre”, not the other way around.

To be generous, it’s possible they retain a few conservative instincts, but these are quickly overawed by their desire for the left’s applause, or overridden by their willingness to hand over democratic accountability to “experts”.

Rory Stewart deserves credit for at least being introspective enough to realise he was never really a Tory (his biography makes it clear he was attracted to the Conservatives because they offered the greatest chance of personal advancement, or ‘opportunity to serve’). There are few such cases amongst the many Tory wets who are really Lib Dems, and who walk amongst us still. Caroline Nokes has historically progressive-left framing on gender and immigration. Despite her reputation as a Tory rising star (remember the sword?) Penny Mordaunt never found a liberal ratchet she didn’t leave a few notches tighter. Even after the wipeout at the last election, which was the consequence of the public finally catching up with the differences between the stated preferences we campaign on (right wing) and the revealed preferences we governed by (centrist liberal) The Guardian reported that Tories inside the Cabinet were arguing:

“that the Tories should just ignore Nigel Farage’s party, and the campaign had been too frightened to tackle Reform’s arguments head-on for fear of offending voters who sympathised with them.”

These are, of course, only the public-facing examples; behind the scenes, the problem runs even deeper. Many backroom operators, those who put their bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels of the party and government machine, were not really conservatives either. The examples of this are innumerable, but the one I would alight on is former No 10 adviser Samuel Kasumu took to the BBC to argue that ‘Robert Jenrick has the potential to be the most divisive person in our political history’ in response to the Shadow Justice Secretary (and Man Who Should Be King) calling for action on rape gangs.

This is a perfect illustration of the modus operandi of these types; use their position in the Conservative Party to counter-signal anyone to their right by denouncing them - no matter how factually correct or popular with the electorate their position is - in order to please liberals who despise Tories, and only tolerate the Eternal Centrists because they are not really right-wing. Calling for justice for rape gang victims doesn’t make you more divisive than Oswald Mosley, it just makes an association with whomever it is making the calls inconvenient in progressive circles. Or perhaps I am wrong and they are simply called by a far more noble philosophy than I am, to denounce the thing they served in a far more important role than I did.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

This is known as the Dinner Party Problem – the phenomenon by which supposedly right-wing people moderate their views to align with the dominant progressive consensus in order to avoid being disinvited to dinner parties.

This is not just the result of the narrowing of political backgrounds. There are multiple causes, some of which are inherent in politics; in his 1990 paper Groupthink in Government. A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure, Dutch academic Paul ‘t Hart argued that the individual calculations of politicians can also explain groupthink, because politicians often base their decisions on whether supporting a policy will advance their future prospects. If the direction of political travel is perceived to be (as in the last 14 years of Tory government) in a broadly liberal or progressive direction – which is then reinforced by a lack of contact with people with differing views – then this recreates the ‘collective aberration’ in decision making we saw in Eden’s Cabinet.

China has government by engineers; America has government by lawyers; Britain has government by….PPE graduates.

Wang has recently published a book called Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (which I’ll be reviewing here soon). His contention is that, whereas the U.S. has a government “of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers,” engineers have “quite literally ruled modern China”. Wang argues that Deng Xiaoping systematically prioritised and promoted engineers throughout the 1980s and 1990s in reaction to the failures of Mao and the consequences of his less-than-scientific approach to policymaking;

By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee-the apex of the Communist Party-had trained as engineers. General Secretary Hu Jintao studied hydraulic engineering and spent a decade building dams. His eight other colleagues could have run a Soviet heavy-industry conglomerate: with majors in electron--tube engineering and thermal engineering, from schools like the Beijing Steel and Iron Institute and the Harbin Institute of Technology, and work experience at the First Machine-Building Ministry and the Shanghai Artificial Board Machinery Factory.

Wang contends that China’s engineering bias has driven remarkable physical transformation, rapid productivity growth, and levels of wealth that would have been inconceivable at the close of Mao Zedong’s disastrous reign. Yet he also warns that this same technocratic impulse carries grave risks; Wang examines in detail China’s two most sweeping post-Mao social experiments - the one-child policy and the zero-Covid strategy - to illustrate the darker side of the engineering state. This contrasts with the United States, which Wang argues operates under a government shaped, steered, and sustained largely by a legal class that dominates its institutions, procedures, and political culture;

The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats.

This divergence in elite formation helps explain why China, governed by technocrats with hands-on experience in executing vast infrastructure schemes, consistently pushes forward with megaprojects - good or bad – whereas the United States, dominated by a legalistic elite whose procedural caution and litigation culture override momentum, tends to obstruct large-scale initiatives across the board - good and bad.

The interesting claim in Wang’s book is not really about engineering vs lawyerly societies, but that a government dominated by one elite formation will come to reflect that formation’s ways of thinking, its priorities and blind spots - and thus the manner in which policy is conceived, debated and delivered.

Over time, this homogeneity breeds an institutional monoculture in which certain assumptions go unchallenged, certain competencies are over- and under-valued, and alternative models of approaching problems are marginalised. This process is then further entrenched because both the elite themselves and the system itself prioritises and promotes those who fit within the institutional monoculture. As in Wang’s example, which examines both democratic and non-democratic systems of governance, this process occurs regardless of the type of government; an elite formation of engineers creates an engineering state, and an elite formation of lawyers creates a lawyerly state.

But Britain’s governing elite has neither the technical competence of China’s engineers or the legal exactitude of America’s lawyers; what we have is the rhetorical fluency of the PPE graduate.

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So what does a PPE state look like?

The OS of the PPE state prioritises, above all else, communication. In practice, that results in a system that prioritises navigating media cycles, the ability to establish a dominant narrative and the confidence of generalists that breadth of judgement can substitute for expertise.

Britain’s political class (and one must remember this in general terms) in proficient in – and therefore prioritises – debate. Because theirs are tools that that win arguments, headlines – and, crucially, elections – they win out in democratic debate over subject experts, which leads the winners to believe they are better able to manage complex systems and areas of policy than those with experience or technical mastery.

This communicative dominance is not uniquely British; the importance of the contest of words in who governs and how policy is made is a broader Western tendency - noted and described ably, as I wrote in CapX recently, by Weber;

In a lecture titled ‘Politics as Vocation’, the philosopher Max Weber noted that: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word.’ It was true when he said it, in 1918; it is even more true now.

Much of Weber’s speech, given to Munich University, concerned ‘the significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties’. This, he argued, was not random. Since the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups – and the skill of a trained lawyer lies in effectively advocating for the interests of their clients – it follows that lawyers should ascend to dominate. To this list, he added journalists and ‘party officials’, a figure that, to him ‘belongs only to the development of the last decades and, in part, only to recent years’.

British politics is therefore increasingly dominated by those from the ‘communicating professions’ – law, education, journalism and public relations – that Weber would have recognised.

The snag is that the greater priority on narrative and debate, means, of course, there is less on execution and delivery. People skilled in their ability ‘to weigh the effect of the word properly,’ as Weber put it, put an overweighted emphasis on saying rather than doing, which neatly explains why our political class seems able to frame problems so persuasively yet struggles with the technical delivery and sustained oversight required to solve them.

That is why MPs reach for new laws instead of working out how to better enforce the ones we have, why the solution to most of the problems faced by public services is to throw more money at them, why needless regulation is mindlessly added to needless regulation and in particular why, for the last 14 years, Conservatives spent time raging about things they didn’t like on GB News instead of using their power to prevent them.

Nor is the ‘government by commentary’ problem exclusive to the right; an observable response the left is developing to Britain’s rightward turn is that they could ‘combat the far-right narrative’ if only they had ‘leadership’ with a ‘progressive voice’ ‘willing to talk about our values’ and delivering a ‘message of hope’. They cannot see any problem beyond the loss of narrative control; they think the turn is the result of losing narrative control, and can simply be reversed with good enough comms and strategy.

We have a political class that believes framing is equivalent to fixing; Anthony King’s warning that there is ‘always the possibility that those who are adept at the use of words will come to believe that words are enough, the words are just about as good as deeds and are, indeed, all but equivalent to deeds’ has come good.

I’m always keen to post guest pieces, particularly on subjects I don’t know much about. This piece was prompted by the closure of the UK Space Agency, and Fionn O’Connell gives options for rebuilding launch capabilities in the soon-to-be Anglofuture.

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The last and only successful UK-built rocket to place a satellite in orbit was the Black Arrow R3, which launched on 28 October 1971 from Woomera, Australia. Everything since then has used a foreign launch provider or launch vehicle. This leaves the UK with the distinguished title of "only nation to ever develop a successful orbital launch capability and then abandon it".

What would it take to reclaim this capability?

FDI vs Domestic Effort

There are two proposed approaches to this problem:

1. Aggressively invite foreign direct investment by space firms like SpaceX, or Blue Origin.

2. Generate demand for launch capabilities so a domestic space industry crops up.

While I'm personally in favour of (1) I am going to argue for (2) as best I can.

Approach 1 builds on proven methods of achieving industrial development, which is why I favour it. Where nations develop new industrial capabilities they tend to come from one of two sources:

3. Generational companies founded by generational individuals are built in the country developing new industrial capabilities.

4. Foreign firms and executives with experience building these capabilities are brought in.

The UK is actually in a better position than most to hope for (3), but (3) does not constitute an industrial policy, which means if we treat this problem as an industrial development problem the only viable choice is (4).

That, however, comes with some of the issues you sometimes see with FDI based industrial development. For one thing, you might not necessarily find a "buyer" for your tax incentives or planning incentives. For another thing, the "buyer" might not invest sufficiently to actually bootstrap an industrial ecosystem, meaning your policy ends up a tax grift for international corporations. This risk is acute here because technically 2, but realistically 1 "buyer" exists for this program. Blue Origin has successfully launched a satellite into Orbit as of 2025, but the vast vast majority of launches worldwide are conducted by SpaceX. Creating an enormous monetary incentive for SpaceX specifically to invest in the country is great if it works, but embarrassing if the end result is a giant tax handout and corporate welfare binge for the worlds richest man.

Approach (2) borrows from a playbook also advocated by Patrick Collison on carbon capture technology. If you can create sufficient demand for the ecosystem, the ecosystem will organise itself around this source of demand. This demand is actually what we would hope SpaceX can create. The issues with this policy though are twofold.

5. It is not a proven method of industrial development, and so we cannot model the policy after successful policies in Ireland, China, South Korea, or elsewhere.

6. Just like the FDI approach, you may purchase huge amounts of space services but not actually generate enough to create an industrial ecosystem. NASA spending was around 0.7% of US GDP every year from 1965 to 1970. The scale of capital needed may be beyond what's possible with the current government balance sheet.

There are some important reasons to believe the government could in fact achieve this. During Covid, the emergency ventilator program resulted in over 10k ventilators being produced, many of whom were built by companies who had never built a ventilator before. So, if balance sheet constraints were not such a problem and we had 1960s NASA level funding available to us, it is likely the government could create the incentives to reproduce a known technology here in the UK. The problem is, compared to an FDI approach it is not a tried and trusted approach, and it would cost an order of magnitude more.

In the end UKSA was a failure, and in my opinion cutting it did no real harm to our nation, but the motivations for cutting it seem to be a story of losing hope. The abolition did not come with a promise of a renewed space policy, and in the end is indicative of the managed decline we've been living in for 20 years. We need to be a lot bolder if we're going to shake off the malaise and atrophy that, industrially at least, has been at work for 50 years.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

I rarely read fiction, but I adore Waugh - along with Graham Greene. I have a small collection of Penguins of both, which I love picking up from secondhand bookshops etc. This was the latest purchase; I’ve made no effort to read his more famous novels first.

The bells of St Bride’s chimed unheard in the customary afternoon din of the Megalopolitan Building. The country edition had gone to bed; below traffic-level, in grotto-blue light, leagues of paper ran noisily through the machines; overhead, where floor upon floor rose from the dusk of the streets to the clear air of day, ground-glass doors opened and shut; figures in frayed and perished braces popped in and out; on a hundred lines reporters talked at cross purposes; sub-editors busied themselves with their humdrum task of reducing to blank nonsense the sheaves of misinformation which whistling urchins piled before them; beside a hundred typewriters soggy biscuits lay in a hundred tepid saucers. At the hub and still centre of all this animation, Lord Copper sat alone in splendid tranquillity. His massive head, empty of thought, rested in sculptural fashion upon his left fist. He began to draw a little cow on his writing pad.

Waugh really is marvellous at building atmosphere, in particular frantic energy or contemplative silence. This, I thought, was a marvellous combination of both.

Mr Salter was not in fighting form and he knew it. The strength was gone out of him. He was dirty and blistered and aching in every limb, cold sober and unsuitably dressed. He was in a strange country. These people were not his people nor their laws his. He felt like a Roman legionary, heavily armed, weighted with the steel and cast brass of civilization, tramping through forests beyond the Roman pale, harassed by silent, illusive savages, the vanguard of an advance that had pushed too far and lost touch with the base... or was he the abandoned rearguard of a retreat; had the legions sailed?

I also love Greene and Hemingway for the same reason I love Waugh; they capture masculine senses better than any writers I have ever come across. What man has never felt like this?

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It’s funny to me that leftists internationally fantasize about China when inequality there is higher than even in the United States In fact China’s tax and transfer system has virtually no redistributive effect.

In fact, the most redistributive systems - if you use transfers from top 10% to bottom 50% - are the U.S. and Britain. But it doesn’t seem to be impacting inequality; a recent paper in Applied Economics has demonstrate that Europe’s lower inequality levels cannot be explained by more equalizing tax and transfer systems, because (after accounting for indirect taxes and in-kind transfers) the US redistributes a greater share of national income to low-income groups than any European country.

So what is China doing, if not redistribution? As Dan Wang writes in his new book, Breakneck;

China does little by way of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor; rather, it is enacting a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a post-scarcity world.

In Breakneck Wang argues that China is ‘an engineering society’, as opposed to the ‘lawyerly society’ of the US and lays out how engineers have played a dominant role in shaping modern China. In response to the chaos of the Mao era, Deng Xiaoping elevated engineers to leadership positions across the Chinese government during the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, every member of the nine-person Politburo Standing Committee, the highest authority within the Communist Party, had an engineering background. Hu Jintao, then General Secretary, specialized in hydraulic engineering and dedicated ten years to dam construction. Xi Jinping earned a degree in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University, China’s premier institution for science and technology.

Being engineers, Chinese leaders see infrastructure projects as a better form of social transfer. They have no intention, even when those infrastructure projects deliver a higher level of development, from altering from that strategy; in 2021 Xi Jinping said said, “Even when we have reached a higher level of development... we should not go overboard with social transfers. For we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.”

What is unsaid throughout Wang’s book is that Chinese leaders do not have to worry about elections. Their strategy is not just about raising living standards, but a way to ensure legitimacy for their rule without needing to consult their people at the ballot box. The Sino system is to replicate the long-term material benefits of democracy, without replicating the representative elements of democracy that make it so attractive, as David Runciman notes in his 2018 book How Democracy Ends;

In place of personal dignity plus collective benefits, they promise personal benefits plus collective dignity.

This is the essence of what the ruling communist party of China is currently committed to delivering; personal benefits are underwritten by the state, which does what it can to ensure they are widely distributed.

Britain – as do most social democracies – focusses on delivering personal dignity plus collective benefits. The personal dignity is a feature of the democratic system; all voters have the right to have their concerns heard, and their vote counts equally at elections. Collective benefits, meanwhile, are generated by state redistribution of the wealth generated by the society as a whole through progressive taxation and comprehensive public services.

In recent decades non-democratic China has made greater progress in reducing poverty and increasing life expectancy than comparative nations that have adopted Western democracy (in particular India, which provides the most handy comparison). Of the two visions for future governance for developing countries – the continuation of liberal democracy, or Chinese style technocracy – the Sino system looks far more attractive.

Wang argues that the development of ‘the lawyerly society’ has resulted in America being unable to develop the infrastructure necessary to keep up with its own population growth, or sustain sufficient economic growth – something that is replicated in most modern liberal democracies, particularly those in Western Europe, which have developed a dangerous combination of vetocracy and massive immigration-derived population increases.

But there is now an increasing view that we should treat developed Western nations as developing. Breckneck’s conclusion sees Wang argue that in order to compete with China, America must recapture its desire and willingness to build; the abundance and progress movements in America are also, in some way, a rejection of the approach of the lawyerly society and an adoption of the engineering society’s approach to infrastructure. There is a similar desire to see Britain build again too; Anglofuturism.

While Aris Roussinos has offered some intellectual scaffolding, the movement largely lacks rigorous political philosophy. For most of its adherents, Anglofuturism is defined not by theory but simply by a singular focus on grand infrastructure projects. If there is to be an Anglo future, we have to get Britain building again - and that means treating Britain, if not quite as a developing nation, then as a nation that needs to be developed.

If we are to treat ourselves as such then, as the China vs India model proves, in terms of social transfer in developing nations capitalism with Chinese characteristics is preferable to social democracy. The underlying contention of Anglofuturism is that we must change our model of social transfer from prioritising collective to personal benefit. It’s Sinofuturism with Anglo characteristics.

That is not to say we must adopt China’s non-democratic tendency (disregard for personal dignity); simply shifting from a focus on collective benefit to personal benefit would be enough. Is this likely to happen? It’s questionable.

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This article was first published in CapX. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s a few quid a month, such is the price genius is reduced to.

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A year before the election, if you’d have asked Keir Starmer why government wasn’t working, he would doubtless have replied that it was because the Tories were running it.

But a year after the election, he can no longer take solace in such a glib answer; and his actions now suggest he recognises the problem is more than superficial, and there is, in the words of Henry Francis Lyte, ‘change and decay in all around I see’.

Last year, for instance, he gave a speech suggesting that civil servants were partly to blame for blocking reform in public services, and that ‘too many people in Whitehall [were] comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline’. In the face of stiff resistance – the head of the senior civil servants’ union wrote a letter to the Prime Minister condemning his ‘Trumpian’ comments, while one told Robert Peston that ‘there was a mood that we should pull the plug on him’ – he predictably, laughably, issued an apology.

But the dysfunction persists. To that end, Starmer is considering the creation of a ‘Department for Downing Street’ as part of a major organisational shake-up aimed at tackling governmental inertia. The plan would see a senior civil servant appointed as permanent secretary, with dozens of officials brought in to bolster the Prime Minister’s ability to drive reform.

The proposal is being shaped in part by work from the Future Governance Forum, a think tank founded by Nathan Yeowell, a close associate of Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. A key project, led by former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, has gathered insight from hundreds of former officials and is expected to recommend the establishment of a dedicated department for Downing Street. Allies of the Prime Minister say the idea enjoys broad support among those familiar with the workings of No 10, which many see as outdated and underpowered compared to equivalents like the US White House.

While the plan is under active consideration, critics have already accused Starmer of attempting a ‘presidential’ land grab. Comparisons are being drawn to Boris Johnson’s ill-fated attempt to establish an ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ in 2022. These criticisms are true, and all the more reason for welcoming the move.

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The executive branch of the British political system is woefully understaffed. The Prime Minister’s Office in Britain employs less than 500 people and operates within a complex web of loosely connected ‘units’ that have been assembled piecemeal by successive prime ministers, resulting in blurred lines of responsibility and an often incoherent structure. Ministers below this have remarkably few staff – the vast majority of whom are civil servants.

What this results in is a system in which ministers find it increasingly difficult to make meaningful decisions, because institutional capacity places significant limitations on their decision space, both by bureaucratic inertia – the simple physics of turning around a huge ship with one hand at the wheel – and sometimes, an outrightly hostile Civil Service who you do not have enough hands on deck to take the fight to the mutineers.

If British politicians want to expand their decision space – which is the central dysfunction at the heart of Britain’s governance problems – an expansion of the executive function should be welcomed. But if Starmer simply adds more civil servants into the system, he will constrain his decision space even further.

The real solution lies in a radical expansion of the political layer of government: a vast increase in the number of special advisers, not just for the prime minister, but across the cabinet. Ministers should be equipped with teams of politically aligned staff capable of shaping, pushing, and delivering policy, rather than being wholly dependent on a civil service that often sees itself as the senior partner.

In his infamous blog ‘The Hollow Men’, Dominic Cummings recounts that; ‘For at least the period January 2011 – July 2012, it took a huge effort to think seriously about priorities other than after 10pm or at weekends’. Part of Britain’s problem is that ministers are being swamped by the lower levels of strategy. Ministers are being asked to deal with operational and tactical-level decisions, preventing them delivering on strategic-level thinking – all because of a lack of political staff to help shoulder the burden of command. Although the ministerial code stated that cabinet ministers may appoint ‘up to two’ Spads, the majority (in 2021) employed three, while three secretaries of state employed four or five. That’s simply not enough; a genuinely modernised executive would involve a Prime Minister’s Office staffed by several hundred special advisers, with senior cabinet ministers counting staff in their tens.

The reforms to the Prime Minister’s staff should not end there. We cannot run a modern nation from a Georgian townhouse, and it is without question that an office of hundreds of staff could not work there. At the most, No 10 should serve as an official residence, photo backdrop and ceremonial front-of-house. The Prime Minister, and all cabinet ministers, should be moved to County Hall, once the seat of London government, which stands just across the river from the Houses of Parliament. It is a more fitting building, both in terms of scale and style.

Sadly, I believe that change of this radical nature is both entirely necessary, and entirely beyond our current leadership.

Keir Starmer is a man for whom stability equals competence. In his apology to civil servants, he repudiated the idea of democratically elected governments responding to either political events or the shifting interests of the electorate by promising;

We will give you clear direction, take on the vested interests in Westminster and beyond, and put an end to the chopping and changing of political priorities.

Starmer has previously been described to me as ‘an institutionalist who governs with the default impulses of the institutions’; ultimately he is a creature of the Blob, who – like the Blob – thinks policy is best made in a protected sphere in which the policymaking process can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy. He recognises that Whitehall doesn’t work but, as the letter above shows, he believes this is a result of the demands of politics, rather than the institution itself. The dysfunction lies not in the system, but in the interruptions to it – the demands of voters, ministers and events.

As a result, rather than expanding the political capacity needed to govern effectively in the 21st century, he proposes to insulate the system further from democratic energy, reinforcing our paradox of ‘shallow sovereignty’, by which governments appear to rule, but cannot act.

Ruling Britannia requires transformation, not tinkering, and if we are to dramatically rebalance power back toward the people’s elected representatives, we must become comfortable with the idea of politicising government. But unless Starmer can do that, and fill his new department with people prepared to challenge the system rather than preserve it, he will have done little more than rearrange some deck chairs in the face of an iceberg.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, by Mark Roseman

A very short and intensive history of the Wannsee Conference, which I picked up after a We Have Ways of Making You Talk finished their series on Auschwitz. If you haven’t the time to read it, I highly recommend this made-for-TV film from Germany, which tried to stay as true to the historical record as possible.

At Wannsee fifteen men from a variety of different institutions and agencies met to talk about murder. The relationships between them, and their involvement in anti-Jewish action, were decisively formed in the 1930s. More than any specific goals laid down in that decade, it was the emerging 'syndrome' of eager subordination, shared racist values and competitive cooperation in pursuit of those values that provided the most disastrous omen for the future.

As a paragraph laying out the focus of a book, I’ve rarely come across better.

Some historians, as we know, have seen in the competition between Hitler's satraps the driving force that eventually led to genocide.

Anti-Semitic measures, so the argument runs, swept forward with neither a coherent vision nor a master hand to guide them. Hitler, a late riser, slow diner, rambling speaker and political dilettante, did not give Jewish measures particularly close attention. Never a man to create clarity where confusion might keep his subordinates on the hop, he also did not nominate any one person to take charge of Jewish affairs. In Nazi Germany in general, the lack of clear responsibilities and the overlap between inherited state institutions, new Party agencies and the hybrid bodies in between, encouraged competition for power. Jewish policy provided the perfect arena for ambitious men to assert their ideological credentials. It was known to enjoy Hitler's particular regard and there was never going to be serious opposition: there was no Jewish 'bloc' enfranchised within the power-system to counter initiatives. Since the regime also lacked democratic institutions to absorb grievances and demands for change, the Jewish arena was the perfect playpen in which grassroots radicals, frustrated at their lack of influence in the new system, could be allowed to kick and shout.

I have never maintained much interest in Hitler’s exact role as driving force behind the Holocaust; his governing style of competing interests who could then be played against each other until a clear favourite emerged seems as true in this case as in any other. Rose argues that, in this absence of authority, Wannsee was as much about asserting Heydrich and Himmler’s position as planning the Final Solution itself. He does not, however, pretend Hitler was not a guiding hand.

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I ask out of personal concern; as a councillor myself, I have mostly been preoccupied with recent changes to North Yorkshire’s bin collections, an upcoming planning committee and a dispute over an overhanging hedge.

But I’m now worried, following news from Birmingham City Council, that I’m doing it wrong. Recently, Birmingham City Council illuminated the Library of Birmingham — one of the city centre’s most prominent buildings — in green and white on 14 August to mark the eve of Pakistan’s 77th Independence Day.

Not all nations are welcome to such displays of pride, however; following the appearance of England and Union flags across city neighbourhoods — described by those involved as a “patriotic move” — the council issued a warning against displaying flags on public streets. It added that any flags removed during street lighting upgrades would be taken down solely on safety grounds.

But a report from the Birmingham Dispatch calls this into question; in a community WhatsApp group for Northfield — one of the whitest areas of Birmingham, where many of the flags have appeared — Social Justice, Community Safety and Equalities Cabinet Member Jamie Tenant suggests the council has banned the flags on political grounds, saying; “there’s a couple of people spoiling for a fight for political reasons so taking it slow and steady so not giving them what they want.”

Flags are clearly important to Birmingham Councillors; bins, less so. The Birmingham Bin strike has been ongoing for 6 months, and shows no sign of ending. Private bin collections are now common. Rat infestations are widespread, and the stench of rotting, uncollected refuse has been inescapable over the summer.

The pattern of councils failing in their basic functions, and instead preferring to spend time signalling support for sectarian interests wildly outside their remit is not new. Earlier last year, in a move that shook the world of geopolitics, Liverpool City Council officially recognised the Republic of Somaliland; Liverpool is so broken it has been run by central govt for the last 3 years. It has 140,000 on the social housing waiting list, some of the most deprived areas in Britain and the worst GSCE results.

Not all councils are equal, however. The recent Bell Hotel judgement for instance, was secured by Epping Forest District Council. Holly Whitbread, the Cabinet Member for Housing & Community — and local member for the Bell — wrote in ConHome recently about her council’s decision to pursue legal action after the hotel reopened earlier this year as an all-male facility. “We pursued every democratic lever to secure its closure”, she writes, but “the Government treated our community with contempt”.

Once the Conservative-led council found their calls to Labour-controlled national government were falling on deaf ears, they started legal proceedings against the hotel owners for violations of planning regulations. Since, councils led by the Conservatives, the SNP and Labour — and all ten Reform councils — have promised to follow the same path, threatening a major unravelling of the asylum system.

In neocommunal Britain, as I recently wrote in these most august pages, politics will increasingly be driven by demographic influence. This extends to local politics as well as national; the Somali population of Liverpool, presumably largely from the Isaaq clan, want recognition of Somaliland, but cannot secure it from the UK government, and so lobby their local council instead. The residents of Epping, unable to get national government to listen to their concerns about immigration, turned to planning control “as one of the few democratic safeguards still able to impose boundaries.”

As these examples show, the priorities of local government will be shaped more and more by such demographic pressures. Migration and international affairs are of course both outside of the remit of local councils, but it scarcely matters; neocommunal politics will play out less through persuasion and more through confrontation, sometimes by wielding the narrow levers within local — and therefore, more direct — control. As Britain heads further down the road of neocommunalism, many councils will increasingly become vehicles for a simple struggle for dominance between competing interests.

What is to be done? It’s a hard line to walk; the political incentives for using councils as vehicles for sectarian causes are largely baked in. Reform — who can be seen as a neocommunal party for white British communities — have at least announced policies related to the core functions of the councils they now control. The prospects of Your Party or the Gaza Independents taking control of councils, who as yet have scarce policy outside of the Middle East, is more concerning.

Things may have to get a lot worse before they get better. In July’s issue of The Critic, when I wrote about the increasing South Africanisation of Britain, I defined one of the key elements of the process as “collapse of public infrastructure and services — often due to corruption or managerial incompetence.”

The irreducible job of councils is to keep the streets clean, the lights on, the vulnerable housed, the ratepayer’s money spent with measurable return — and, yes, the planning laws enforced. A council that prefers to focus on removing flags instead of the rubbish piled on its streets is the definition of managerial incompetence (or at least it would be, were it not the revealed preference of those governing the city). Birmingham may be the blueprint for many of Britain’s councils; Epping may be the other. Councils will have to choose for themselves.

Paywalled postscript; on the Reform DOGE failure

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What is the first and chief principle of British foreign policy?

It must, surely, be that of British interests; after all, as Palmerston argued, England has no permanent allies, only permanent interests: “if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of his policy.”

The main interest of Britain then was, as has recently been argued by Andrew Lambert in his new book No More Napoleons, was the separation of France from the Scheldt ports, “the only location from which a full-scale invasion of England might be attempted”.

With the threat of invasion a threat long since faded, what is in Britain’s interests now is less clear; particularly in the Middle East. It is now approaching two years since the horrific 7th October attacks. Those attacks — and the resulting war — have left Britain at a crossroads.

Although debates rage about who is doing the counting, what is clear is that thousands have died. Throughout, Israel has been able to count on much support from the British right. As Sam Bidwell has written in these most august pages:

For many Western conservatives, support for Israel is grounded in a “West versus the rest” narrative which sees the democratic Judeo-Christian world as locked into existential conflict with oriental despotism, encapsulated by Islamist terrorism. Israel, we are told, is an outpost of Western culture in the barbarous Middle East, the first line of defence against an ideology ready to land on Europe’s shores. Should this plucky liberal outpost fall to the Mohammedan tide, our own countries will surely be next.

As a result, Israel has received what has all too often amounted to a blank cheque from many on the right including, in May, Kemi Badenoch; when asked on Sky News if she supported Israel’s actions, Kemi Badenoch denied it vociferously, and countered by stating that that Israel was fighting “a proxy war on Britain’s behalf”. Further, she said it was “not for me to police how Israel are doing that [fighting the war in Gaza].”

But perhaps it is time we did. As Rod Liddle has recently written, “If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing.”

Since he wrote that column, a famine has officially been confirmed in Gaza by the UN; “Israel has unequivocal obligations under international law — including the duty of ensuring food and medical supplies of the population”, said UN Secretary General António Guterres. The report finds that by late September, over 640,000 individuals across the Gaza Strip are projected to experience “catastrophic” food insecurity, designated as IPC Phase 5 — the most severe classification. A further 1.14 million people are expected to fall into Phase 4, while an additional 396,000 will face Phase 3 “crisis” conditions. Of course the UN is less than even handed when it comes to Israel and of course Hamas loots aid convoys. But starvation in the Strip “is present and rapidly spreading”, and when a state controls the borders, the airspace, and the flow of humanitarian aid, it cannot plausibly disclaim the consequences of its blockade.

In her interview, Badenoch said that what she really wants to see “is Keir Starmer making sure that he is on the right side of Britain’s national interest.” But if that phrase is to mean anything, it cannot simply be a euphemism for uncritical alignment with Israeli policy.

How long can the right remain comfortable handing Israel a blank cheque to do what it wants? Let us, for the sake of argument, leave aside the sheer inhumanity of what is happening in Gaza for another article and deal with Kemi’s question on its own terms, how does what is happening in Gaza serve Britain’s interests?

Many on the right, in their vociferous and morally blinkered assertion that Israeli actions cannot be criticised, seem not only indifferent to the humanitarian catastrophe but wilfully blind to its consequences for British interests. Chief among them: the destabilisation of neighbouring regions and the potential displacement of millions — refugees who will not be absorbed by Israel, but by Europe. Britain included.

Neighbouring Arab nations have made it clear they will not take Palestinian refugees. Israel is in discussions with Libya, Indonesia, Somaliland, Uganda and South Sudan to resettle Palestinian refugees there, although nothing has been agreed. Such talks are reportedly linked to a broader Israeli push to encourage mass emigration from Gaza during the ongoing war with Hamas.

It’s clear that Israel doesn’t really care where they go. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “All those who are concerned for the Palestinians and say they want to help the Palestinians should open their doors to them. What are you preaching to us for? We’re not pushing them out — we’re enabling them to leave … first of all, [leaving] combat zones, and also the Strip itself, if they want to.”

Others have been more clear; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza following the war, suggesting that such relocation would help Israel reclaim former settlements and permanently eliminate the prospect of a Palestinian state. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed this sentiment, proposing that Israel should “encourage the migration of Gaza residents” to other countries, including European ones, to make way for Israeli resettlement. Defence Minister Israel Katz, meanwhile, has perhaps been the most explicit, saying that; “Countries like Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have levelled accusations and false claims against Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow any Gaza resident to enter their territories.”

What this amounts to is forced replacement of the Palestinian people, which it appears some in the Israeli government are seeking to use as a form of punishment against those who criticise Israel’s actions. Europe is staring down the barrel of a deliberately engineered replication of the Syrian migration crisis. This is not the action of an ally.

We are not, in fact, bound to them by the fact they are the region’s only democracy. Democracy is not a talisman that absolves a state of its actions, nor a shield behind which any behaviour may be justified; it is just a system of government. Nor are we bound to them by “shared Judeo-Christian values’. I invite anyone who believes this argument to name one, and then name one Israel has not violated in its conduct of this war. So, in the right-wing political equivalent of reaching for a policeman’s gun, it’s time to say that Israel’s interests and Britain’s are not the same.

I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.

Without Roots; The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam, by Pope Benedict XVI & Marcello Pera

Bought years ago, I realised I had made extensive notes that would make this perfect for this series.

A foul wind is blowing through Europe. I am referring to the idea that all we have to do is wait and our troubles will disappear by themselves, so that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us, and that in the end, everything will work out for the best. This same wind blew through Munich in 1938. While the wind might sound like a sigh of relief, it is really a shortness of breath. It could turn out to be the death-rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe, and consequently mixes everything together in a rhetorical hodgepodge. A continent whose population is decreasing. A continent whose economy cannot compete. A continent that does not invest in research. That thinks that the protective social state is an institution free of charge. That is unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities attendant upon its history and its role. That seeks to be a counterweight without carrying its own weight. That, when called upon to fight, always replies that fighting is the extrema ratio, as if to say that war is a ratio that should never be used.

But do not misunderstand me, either deliberately or through distraction. I am not advocating a Western declaration of war or state of war. I am advocating something else that to me seems even more important. I am urging people to realize that a war has indeed been declared on the West. I am not pushing for a rejection of dialogue, which we need more than ever with those Islamic countries that wish to live in peaceful coexistence with the West, to our mutual benefit. I am asking for something more fundamental: I am asking for people to realize that dialogue will be a waste of time if one of the two partners to the dialogue states beforehand that one idea is as good as the other.

The self-criticism described by Vargas Llosa is always useful. But why take it to such an extreme, in Europe and in America, with such self-condemnation, self-immolation, and atonement, combined with such scarce recognition of our great merits? I truly do not understand. Perhaps the West today no longer understands what is right. It only knows what is wrong, and it readjusts its notions of right and wrong every time that someone complains about one of its errors. Or maybe it is simply exhausted. As Vargas Llosa has said, “Democracy is an event that provokes yawns in the countries in which rule of law exists.” I hope that he’s wrong, and that the lethargy he describes does not exist. But if, unfortunately, he is right, then we need to start rubbing our eyes and wake up.

Finally, it feels like we are rubbing our eyes and waking up. The question is whether it is to late to seize the day.

Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than as a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today’s situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.

Even when western societies do discuss family policy or formation, they primarily discuss them as an economic measure - a way to get mothers back contributing to the economy. Even when western societies do discuss family policy or formation not as an economic measure, we talk about them as units of production - we never talk about how having children is, or the inherent moral good that comes of a stable family, but about how we have to reach a TFR target. That’s no encouragement to anyone; our vital energy must be restored, and that involves an appreciation of and investment in children on a human level. But as we grow older as a society, it becomes more and more hostile to children.

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At the annual Jackson Hole symposium in Wyoming this week, central bank leaders from Japan, the Eurozone and the UK warned that their economies need further immigration in order to fuel growth.

According to their warning, ageing populations and declining birth rates threaten long-term economic growth and price stability across advanced economies, and without a significant increase in foreign workers, labour shortages will intensify and inflationary pressures may rise.

Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda described labour shortages as one of Japan’s ‘most pressing’ economic issues. Although foreign workers make up just 3% of Japan’s workforce, they accounted for half of recent labour force growth. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said foreign workers will be ‘crucial’ to offset demographic decline. Without increased migration, the euro area could lose 3.4 million working-age people by 2040. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey highlighted the UK’s ‘acute’ demographic and productivity challenges, pointing out that nearly 30% of UK adults will be above working age by 2040.

When the mass migration project began, policymakers told us it was pure economic rocket fuel. As the huge economics benefits failed to materialise, we began to be told that the benefits were primarily cultural. Now we are told our societies will simply collapse without it. Immigration, as noted Christopher Caldwell, is the policy forever scrambling to find a rationale.

But using immigration to prop up the population is as short-sighted as using it to boost the GDP figures was. For a start, this is at best a short-termist solution. Low fertility is not a regional, but a global problem; research indicates that in just 25 years, 75% of nations will have below replacement fertility levels. That rises to 97% by 2100, with only six nations – Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan – escaping this trend. By the same year, one in every two children will be born in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The reality is that the world is heading toward a future defined by persistently low fertility rates, meaning the strategy of relying on immigration to offset domestic demographic decline will become increasingly untenable. Britain will no longer be choosing from a deep reservoir of high-skilled migrants, but competing for a dwindling pool and will be forced, in time, to accept whoever is available rather than who is needed.

Those who advocate for the policy also conveniently ignore, or fail to talk about, the sheer numbers required in order to achieve demographic rebalancing.

In 2000, the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the UN modelled two scenarios in which the UK utilised immigration to address the dependency ratio. Scenario IV, which kept the age group be Even if we succeed in using migration to patch the widening gaps in our population pyramid between 15-64 years constant at its maximum of 38.9 million from 2010 on, required 6.2 million immigrants between 2010-2050, at which date 13.6% of the population would be post-1995 migrants or their descendants. Scenario V, which kept the potential support ratio at its 1995 level of 4.09, required 59.8 million (a little over a million a year) migrants between 1995-2050, at which date 59% of the population would be post-1995 migrants or their descendants.

A more recent assessment, by Lant Pritchett, estimates that for Britain to maintain its working-age population ratios in 2050 through permanent migration, where each worker brings one dependent, it would need to become 40% foreign born.

That is a staggering rate of change, but even this may not be enough.

The argument that immigration is essential to fix our ageing population works on the assumption that immigrants will not only supplement the working age population, but also increase the fertility rate. But the idea that migrant communities will continue the fertility patterns of their country of origin is not borne out by evidence, which shows that when women find themselves in a different fertility context, they adapt their behaviours accordingly – an effect known as fertility convergence. While the total fertility rate (TFR) of non-UK-born women is higher than UK-born women, that is not the full picture; the fertility of non-UK-born women has been in long-term decline and in 2021 stood at 2.03, below the TFR replacement rate of 2.1. In fact, the TFR rate of non-UK-born women has not reached above 2.1 since 2014.

In fact, as I have speculated before, there are perfectly reasonable grounds to suspect that immigration is reducing the domestic birth rate. That’s because the sheer scale of immigration requires massively increases spatial competition for housing. This, naturally, means higher costs, and artificially increased housing costs are causing couples to delay starting families.

Even if we succeed in using migration to fill the widening gaps in our population pyramid, there is no guarantee it will deliver sustained economic growth (indeed, it certainly hasn’t so far). A shift in population that radical will make our society far more complex and, as the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argues, complex societies impose higher per-capita maintenance costs than simpler ones. Although many of his examples focus on complexity in terms of Bataille-esque energy flows, the principle extends more broadly; as societies become more complex, they require more layers of governance, more centralised information systems and more specialised roles that consume resources without directly contributing to essential production. Complexity – in this case demographic – is a diminishing return; each additional increment of complexity delivers proportionally fewer benefits.

The situation is not irretrievable, however. As Tainter writes: ‘When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential – at least temporarily – to raise marginal productivity.’ With recent advances in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, we stand on the cusp of a transformation as profound as the Industrial Revolution. China stands as a counterfactual to western use of immigration; its growth in the last decade has been delivered by productivity improvement rather than population increases.

This article was first published in The Critic. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here for free, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture, become a paid subscriber. It’s a few quid a month, such is the price genius is reduced to.

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Ihave many disagreements with Keir Starmer. They are so numerous and so fundamental that it’s not really worth elucidating them in any great detail; but there is one thing I suspect we would agree on; Britain can’t go on like this.

We are stuck in a high tax, high spend, low growth doom loop that is getting worse every day as more and more burdensome statutory duties of questionable value place more and more unsustainable burdens on businesses, the state and individuals. Meanwhile an ever-increasing number of older people age out of the workforce and are replaced with migrant labour instead of productivity-increasing technology. The generations below them will find achieving the same living standards an almost insurmountable challenge. It feels like the only line going up is our national debt.

But economic challenges may not even be the biggest problem Britain faces. Rather, it might be an increasingly fractious polity. Britain feels like an increasingly febrile place, with riots from both white Britons and ethnic minorities scarring British society last summer. Disillusioned voters are rejecting traditional parties in favour of comically unqualified independent candidates or Nigel Farage’s often less than merry men. Leftist pseudo-intellectuals can wring their hands about those of us who warn of trouble in the future — but the problem isn’t us, it’s the trouble.

To that end a new cross-party body, chaired by former Conservative Home Secretary Sir Sajid Javid and Labour MP Jon Cruddas, has pledged to investigate what Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last year described as the “cracks in our foundation.” In the op-ed launching the project, they warn that Britain is becoming “a tinderbox of disconnection and division. It is no exaggeration to say that unless we find ways to defuse it, the basis of our democracy is at risk.”

The Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion — not Community Cohesion — was launched in the wake of last summer’s riots, which erupted in several areas following the Southport stabbings. Starmer condemned the attacks at the time as “far-right thuggery” after mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers were targeted, following rumours on social media about the identity of the attacker — later confirmed to be 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana.

This autumn, the commission will begin a UK-wide “national conversation” to gather first-hand accounts from the public about their sense of community, connection, and belonging, and the changes they believe are needed. The initiative is being supported by the Together Coalition, founded by Brendan Cox, the widower of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in 2016.

The Commission’s website warns we are “experiencing challenges to our community and local lives, with fresh expressions of old tensions — and new ones — emerging.” And it continues to define those tensions:

In some cases, this includes a decline in trust between neighbours, declining community connections, a growing sense of isolation and loneliness, or a feeling of not belonging either to the UK as a whole – or to England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

In other cases, it includes social exclusion, prejudice, hate crimes, extremism, and the emergence of so-called culture wars – sometimes revealing a society in which a shared understanding of the nation is lacking.

Can we trust the Commission to seek this “understanding”? The particulars of each member could make for an article in itself, and so I don’t want to dedicate too much time to them, but they seem unlikely to be the sort of people who will make a genuine effort to understand British discontent. If a right-leaning Briton is to communicate their concerns about demographic transformation, then Sajid Javid — who responded to a tweet from Nigel Farage following the 2021 census findings that our three largest cities, London, Birmingham and Manchester, all have a minority white population with “So what?” — seems like a poor ear to lend.

The most likely outcome is the most disastrous — a continuation of the belief that multiculturalism is a workable project, rather than a disastrous experiment. The very opening sentence on the website is written with the placid voice of someone whose decision has already been made. “The UK is a thriving, multi-ethnic and multi-faith democracy where most people in towns, cities, and rural areas get on with each other,” it proclaims. If the UK is “thriving” then I’d hate to see what it looks like when it isn’t.

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This fundamental assumption is the thing rotten in the state of Britain. We have progressed beyond the multicultural stage, and are entering an era of Neocommunalism. “The fabric of British society is being strained by the failure of multiculturalism,” as I have written elsewhere, “The idea that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ lends itself not to a shared national identity, but to competing ethnic factions, which are now actively carving out their own political spaces.”

Without challenging the basic presumption that the project begins with, it will come up with the same limp answers that every commission of this type always does: more community hubs, more monitoring of online speech, more funds for third-sector NGOs with names like Harmony UK or Voices Together. It will never say the obvious — that you cannot build a cohesive society without a coherent demos, and that no amount of storytelling workshops or taxpayer-funded pop-up cafés will defuse the tensions created by the most rapid demographic change — and resulting cultural fragmentation — Britain has ever seen.

Instead, the Commission will nod solemnly, write its report, and quietly recommend that we ban anonymity on social media. So yes, by all means, begin the national conversation. Some of us, however, have already pre-ignored it.

This article was first published in The Critic. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture become a paid subscriber. It’s a few quid a month; such is the price genius is reduced to.

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Sometimes, the timing of an article can be fortuitous.

When I first pitched this article, it was based on the fact that Battle of Britain Day and the anniversary of Operation Market Garden were both this week, on the 15th and 17th September respectively. I had long thought of writing an article delving into how the two classic war movies Battle of Britain and A Bridge Too Far complement each other. The calendar gave a compelling command I could no longer refuse; it must be now.

The day my pitch was accepted, however, my father was taken into hospital.

Sometimes, the timing can completely change the piece you’re about to write. For a certain type of man, films like Battle of Britain and A Bridge Too Far — the kind of movie you’d find repeated on Sunday afternoon and settle down to watch with your father — is more than just a way of getting out of your weekend jobs. It a uniquely British phenomenon, and a widely observed one. Rob Hutton, of this parish, has a podcast called War Movie Theatre where he and Duncan Weldon discuss old war films that — as an early episode made clear — you would watch on a Sunday afternoon with your dad. Al Murray’s first book written as himself, rather than as the Pub Landlord, was called Watching War Films with My Dad.

We watch and rewatch, not just because they are great films, but because they are a thread between generations — we watch them side by side, often multiple times, only breaking the silence to repeat favourite quotes.

So it is with me; Battle of Britain is my favourite film, it is my father’s favourite film and it was my grandfather’s favourite film. We have watched it so many times that when I tried to watch it with an ex-girlfriend who was in the RAF, she paused it within the first ten minutes and told me to stop repeating the lines or leave her to watch it in peace.

Why pair it with A Bridge too Far? I have always argued that, tonally, they are wonderfully synchronised, and watched together offer an understanding of what the war did to the British psyche.

Battle of Britain starts with Britain at its lowest ebb — with a haunting shot of the BEF’s equipment abandoned on the deserted beaches of Dunkirk. The Battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain is about to begin. The film then waits around as Hitler holidays in Paris, but really gets going — much like the battle itself — on Eagle Day. As the Luftwaffe strikes relentlessly and the RAF is stretched to breaking point, the film becomes a sobering portrait of brutality, attrition and endurance. Playing Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Laurence Olivier puts the situation with a heavy air:

Gentlemen, you’re missing the essential truth. We’re short of 200 pilots. Those we have are tired, strained, and all overdue for relief. We’re fighting for survival. Losing. We don’t need a big wing or a small wing. We need pilots. And a miracle.

The miracle comes. A lost German bomber accidentally drops its bombs on London, the RAF retaliates by dropping bombs on Berlin, and Hitler orders London razed. The let up takes the pressure off the RAF’s airfields and means German fighters have only enough fuel for ten minutes’ combat. Through a relentless series of dizzying dogfights, most of which were filmed with original Spitfires and Hurricanes (although the German aircraft were mostly later Spanish-built versions), the tide slowly turns, culminating on the 15th September.

The next day, across the Channel, German forces withdraw from the coast and Göring leaves the front. The pilots are shown waiting anxiously, exhaustedly, for another scramble call that never comes. Dowding steps out of his office to look up at a clear blue sky; the strings swell, and so do the tears in my eyes.

The hopeful mood that Battle of Britain ends on has, by the time A Bridge Too Far begins, become one of outright confidence. In the four years since that desperate stand, Britain and her allies have not only held off the Luftwaffe but driven Axis forces out of North Africa, fought up the Italian peninsula, executed the Normandy landings, and now loom on the doorstep of Germany itself. They are, in a word, winning.

The soaring score, the sheer amount of hardware, the acting; all communicate a sense of unstoppable momentum. As Olivier’s Dowding was played with a stern pensiveness, Dirk Bogarde’s Boy Browning strides through scenes with an almost arrogant swagger. Concerns — the distance from landing zones to Arnhem, the presence of German tanks, murky intelligence reports about the quality of troops in the area — are brushed aside breezily, as mere trivialities. Those who do voice concerns find themselves sidelined, their warnings drowned out by the rush of imminent, inevitable, victory.

But those concerns soon prove to be right. The landing zones are too far from Arnhem, there are German tanks, and as well as line of communication troops there are SS formations in the area. One by one things fall apart, and as the gravity of the situation begins to tell, the boyish, almost Bigglesworthian, “cor what a load of japes war is” energy dissipates, and the brutality, attrition and endurance of Battle of Britain returns. But there is no moment of hope as the camera swings towards the sky; the Poles are massacred, the Brits retreat, the Germans move in. Abide With Me starts to swell, and so do the tears in my eyes.

The war would not end for another year. As is regularly pointed out by the aforementioned Al Murray and James Holland on their podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, Britain needed the war to end then and there if it was to maintain a meaningful role in the post-war world. Instead, what happened was another year of relentless grinding into the Third Reich, sapping what little remaining strength the British had, whilst increasing the overlordship of the Americans.

Here, I was going to alight on what these films tell us about how the war affected the British psyche. I was going to tell you how Battle of Britain tells the noble story of heroic self-sacrifice that is the moral crucible in which Britain’s identity is forged. I was going to tell you how A Bridge Too Far prepares us for the monumental costs of that self-sacrifice; the collapse of the Empire and our national pride, the loss of our role in the world, and decades of humiliation as a second-rate nation.

But sometimes, the timing can completely change the piece you’re about to write. What is important to me now is not what these films tell us, but what these films are. They are an opportunity for me to spend a Saturday afternoon with my father, watching our favourite film together; a film I never got the chance to watch with my grandfather, and I pray to God my children will be able to.

But, today, as I finish this piece, he is out of hospital. The piece swells, and so do the tears in my eyes. I’m going to go and put Battle of Britain on.