Editor: a selection of words, phrases, sentences & possibly paragraphs in this diatribe. Note that it takes ‘three reporters’ to cover this news story, with the ‘help’ of the Senior Staff! Nothing stokes the fires of usable political hysteria like ‘The Left’ in any of is iterations, permutations raises the hackles of its Readership!
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populist far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
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Mélenchon — who has long been the left’s standard-bearer but divides leftist colleagues.
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“This is the new generation of the left,” Raphaël Glucksmann, a centre-left EU lawmaker…
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But hours later on Friday, the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, or LFI) party, the largest member of the new alliance, reminded everybody that he remains a force to be reckoned with — and a tyrannical one at that.
“Candidacies for life do not exist,” Mélenchon said later,…
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Friday’s purge was an extraordinarily provocative step, coming on the very day the leftwing parties formally launched the New Popular Front, invoking the unity spirit of the original one under Léon Blum in 1936, when the left came together to thwart a far-right takeover of France. Several of those excluded by Mélenchon had been strong proponents of such an alliance.
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The leadership of France Insoumise, far from rising to the occasion, is stooping to the worst schemes,” François Ruffin, a dissident LFI MP wrote on social media site X. “Let’s not kid ourselves: you cannot, for country, aspire to peace and democracy, and for party, a reign of fear and brutality.”
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It could make it much harder for candidates for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance to qualify for second round run-offs.
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A former Trotskyist who served as a junior education minister in a socialist government from 2000-2 before turning to the Eurosceptic hard left, Mélenchon has long had a reputation as a political bruiser with a volcanic temper.
In one infamous moment in 2018, he angrily confronted an investigator who came to search his offices during a campaign funding probe, screaming into the man’s face: “La République, c’est moi!”, the equivalent of “I am the law!”
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A gifted orator and debater, Mélenchon is the most successful recent vote-winner for the left. He won 22 per cent in the first round of the 2022 presidential election, coming third, just behind Le Pen.
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“He is a key figure, someone who has proved himself in the most challenging election in the French system, the presidential election,” said Bruno Cautrès, researcher at Sciences Po university. “He gave the left a future with the creation of Nupes, but in the end he was not able to manage the different people and temperaments within it.”
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There were also fights over Mélenchon’s lukewarm support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The final breakdown came last year over Mélenchon’s refusal to condemn the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and downplaying of antisemitic incidents, stances that reflected both his revolutionary zeal and strategy of rallying Muslim voters.
Meanwhile, sloppily dressed LFI MPs hurling abuse at opponents have disrupted the National Assembly. Their conduct has lent weight to critics’ claims that Mélenchon, who guides his troops from outside the chamber, is a demagogue not committed to parliamentary democracy.
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The public sees Mélenchon as a more polarising, less professional and less presidential than his far-right rival, according to an Ifop poll last year.
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Under the terms of their new alliance, the centre-left will contest 100 more seats than at elections two years ago, although LFI is still running the most candidates of the NPF members.
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Even Mélenchon’s allies say a more consensual approach is needed to maintain unity.
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Mélenchon himself signalled a partial retreat on Sunday, when his protégé Quatennens withdrew his candidacy. “I don’t want to be a problem. All our efforts must be for the victory of the NPF,” the party leader told France 3 television.
Editor: here is ‘Philippe Marlière, professor of French politics at University College London’
Philippe Marlière, professor of French politics at University College London, said it was “very clear that his party now understands that if the New Popular Front is to be successful and remain united during this campaign, Mélenchon should keep quiet and that’s a complete difference with 2022.”
Editor: The Reader might think that I have engaged in political opportunism, dishonesty and other political maleficence ! Yet I have treated this political intervention by The Financial Times, its Journalists, and its Editors, for what it is political propaganda! Aimed at a Readership that views ‘The Left’, as a clear and present danger to an utterly failed ‘Centrists Politics’ still unable to self-emancipate from the a toxin of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism!
Political Reporter surveys the political territory.
Headline: Will a Labour victory solve the UK’s growth crisis?
Sub-headline; Replacing chaos with ‘dullness’ is intended to boost an economy growing at just 1.1% a year. But Keir Starmer might not be able to follow through on his plan Will a Labour victory solve the UK’s growth crisis?
The collapse of the American financial system that occurred in 2008 has since turned into an economic and political crisis of global dimensions.footnote1 How should this world-shaking event be conceptualized? Mainstream economics has tended to conceive society as governed by a general tendency toward equilibrium, where crises and change are no more than temporary deviations from the steady state of a normally well-integrated system. A sociologist, however, is under no such compunction. Rather than construe our present affliction as a one-off disturbance to a fundamental condition of stability, I will consider the ‘Great Recession’footnote2 and the subsequent near-collapse of public finances as a manifestation of a basic underlying tension in the political-economic configuration of advanced-capitalist societies; a tension which makes disequilibrium and instability the rule rather than the exception, and which has found expression in a historical succession of disturbances within the socio-economic order. More specifically, I will argue that the present crisis can only be fully understood in terms of the ongoing, inherently conflictual transformation of the social formation we call ‘democratic capitalism’.
Democratic capitalism was fully established only after the Second World War and then only in the ‘Western’ parts of the world, North America and Western Europe. There it functioned extraordinarily well for the next two decades—so well, in fact, that this period of uninterrupted economic growth still dominates our ideas and expectations of what modern capitalism is, or could and should be. This is in spite of the fact that, in the light of the turbulence that followed, the quarter century immediately after the war should be recognizable as truly exceptional. Indeed I suggest that it is not the trente glorieuses but the series of crises which followed that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism—a condition ruled by an endemic conflict between capitalist markets and democratic politics, which forcefully reasserted itself when high economic growth came to an end in the 1970s. In what follows I will first discuss the nature of that conflict and then turn to the sequence of political-economic disturbances that it produced, which both preceded and shaped the present global crisis.
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Editor: A collection the sub-headings is instructive:
I. MARKETS VERSUS VOTERS?
2. POST-WAR SETTLEMENTS
3. LOW INFLATION, HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT
4. DEREGULATION AND PRIVATE DEBT:
Editor: Under the rubric of 4. Deregulation and private debt:
This is not to say, however, that the Clinton administration had somehow found a way of pacifying a democratic-capitalist political economy without recourse to additional, yet-to-be-produced economic resources. The Clinton strategy of social-conflict management drew heavily on the deregulation of the financial sector that had already started under Reagan and was now driven further than ever before.11 Rapidly rising income inequality, caused by continuing de-unionization and sharp cuts in social spending, as well as the reduction in aggregate demand caused by fiscal consolidation, were counterbalanced by unprecedented new opportunities for citizens and firms to indebt themselves. The felicitous term, ‘privatized Keynesianism’, was coined to describe what was, in effect, the replacement of public with private debt.12 Instead of the government borrowing money to fund equal access to decent housing, or the formation of marketable work skills, it was now individual citizens who, under a debt regime of extreme generosity, were allowed, and sometimes compelled, to take out loans at their own risk with which to pay for their education or their advancement to a less destitute urban neighbourhood.
The Clinton policy of fiscal consolidation and economic revitalization through financial deregulation had many beneficiaries. The rich were spared higher taxes, while those among them wise enough to move their interests into the financial sector made huge profits on the ever-more complicated ‘financial services’ which they now had an almost unlimited license to sell. But the poor also prospered, at least some of them and for a while. Subprime mortgages became a substitute, however illusory in the end, for the social policy that was simultaneously being scrapped, as well as for the wage increases that were no longer forthcoming at the lower end of a ‘flexibilized’ labour market. For African-Americans in particular, owning a home was not just the ‘American dream’ come true but also a much-needed substitute for the old-age pensions that many were unable to earn in the labour markets of the day and which they had no reason to expect from a government pledged to permanent austerity.
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5. SOVEREIGN INDEBTEDNESS
Editor: under the rubric of Sovereign Indebtedness
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Financial liberalization thus compensated for an era of fiscal consolidation and public austerity. Individual debt replaced public debt, and individual demand, constructed for high fees by a rapidly growing money-making industry, took the place of state-governed collective demand in supporting employment and profits in construction and other sectors (Figure 4). These dynamics accelerated after 2001, when the Federal Reserve switched to very low interest rates to prevent an economic slump and the return of high unemployment this implied. In addition to unprecedented profits in the financial sector, privatized Keynesianism sustained a booming economy that became the envy not least of European labour movements. In fact, Alan Greenspan’s policy of easy money supporting the rapidly growing indebtedness of American society was held up as a model by European trade-union leaders, who noted with great excitement that, unlike the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve was bound by law not just to provide monetary stability but also high levels of employment. All of this, of course, ended in 2008 when the international credit pyramid on which the prosperity of the late 1990s and early 2000s had rested suddenly collapsed.
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In the three years since 2008, distributional conflict under democratic capitalism has turned into a complicated tug-of-war between global financial investors and sovereign nation-states. Where in the past workers struggled with employers, citizens with finance ministers, and private debtors with private banks, it is now financial institutions wrestling with the very states that they had only recently blackmailed into saving them. But the underlying configuration of power and interests is far more complex and still awaits systematic exploration. For example, since the crisis financial markets have returned to charging different states widely varying interest rates, thereby differentiating the pressure they apply on governments to make their citizens acquiesce in unprecedented spending cuts—in line, again, with a basically unmodified market logic of distribution. Given the amount of debt carried by most states today, even minor increases in the rate of interest on government bonds can cause fiscal disaster.15 At the same time, markets must avoid pushing states into declaring sovereign bankruptcy, always an option for governments if market pressures become too strong. This is why other states have to be found that are willing to bail out those most at risk, in order to protect themselves from a general increase in interest rates on government bonds that the first default would cause. A similar type of ‘solidarity’ between states in the interest of investors is fostered where sovereign default would hit banks located outside the defaulting country, which might force the banks’ home countries once again to nationalize huge amounts of bad debt in order to stabilize their economies.
There are still more ways in which the tension in democratic capitalism between demands for social rights and the workings of free markets expresses itself today. Some governments, including the Obama administration, have attempted to generate renewed economic growth through even more debt—in the hope that future consolidation policies will be assisted by a growth dividend. Others may be secretly hoping for a return to inflation, melting down accumulated debt by softly expropriating creditors—which would, like economic growth, mitigate the political tensions to be expected from austerity. At the same time, financial markets may be looking forward to a promising fight against political interference, once and for all reinstating market discipline and putting an end to all political attempts to subvert it.
Further complications arise from the fact that financial markets need government debt for safe investment; pressing too hard for balanced budgets may deprive them of highly desirable investment opportunities. The middle classes of the advanced-capitalist countries have put a good part of their savings into government bonds, while many workers are now heavily invested in supplementary pensions. Balanced budgets would likely involve states having to take from their middle classes, in the form of higher taxes, what these classes now save and invest, among other things in public debt. Not only would citizens no longer collect interest, but they would also cease to be able to pass their savings on to their children. However, while this should make them interested in states being, if not debt-free, then reliably able to fulfil their obligations to their creditors, it may also mean that they have to pay for their government’s liquidity in the form of deep cuts in public benefits and services on which they also in part depend.
However complicated the cross-cutting cleavages in the emerging international politics of public debt, the price for financial stabilization is likely to be paid by those other than the owners of money, or at least of real money. For example, public-pension reform will be accelerated by fiscal pressures; and to the extent that governments default anywhere in the world, private pensions will be hit as well. The average citizen will pay—for the consolidation of public finances, the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of interest on the public debt and, if necessary, for another rescue of national and international banks—with his or her private savings, cuts in public entitlements, reduced public services and higher taxation.
6. SEQUENTIAL DISPLACEMENTS
7. POLITICAL DISORDER
Editor: The final paragraphs of the Streeck essay… does this essay answers some of Mr. David Smiths questions, about the vexing question of ‘low growth’ ?
As we now read almost every day in the papers, ‘the markets’ have begun to dictate in unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do for their citizens and what they must refuse them. The same Manhattan-based ratings agencies that were instrumental in bringing about the disaster of the global money industry are now threatening to downgrade the bonds of states that accepted a previously unimaginable level of new debt to rescue that industry and the capitalist economy as a whole. Politics still contains and distorts markets, but only, it seems, at a level far remote from the daily experience and organizational capacities of normal people: the us, armed to the teeth not just with aircraft carriers but also with an unlimited supply of credit cards, still gets China to buy its mounting debt. All others have to listen to what ‘the markets’ tell them. As a result citizens increasingly perceive their governments, not as their agents, but as those of other states or of international organizations, such as the imf or the European Union, immeasurably more insulated from electoral pressure than was the traditional nation-state. In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens.footnote19
Democracy is not just being pre-empted in those countries that are currently under attack by ‘the markets’. Germany, which is still doing relatively well economically, has committed itself to decades of public-expenditure cuts. In addition, the German government will again have to get its citizens to provide liquidity to countries at risk of defaulting, not just to save German banks but also to stabilize the common European currency and prevent a general increase in the rate of interest on public debt, as is likely to occur in the case of the first country collapsing. The high political cost of this can be measured in the progressive decay of the Merkel government’s electoral capital, resulting in a series of defeats in major regional elections over the past year. Populist rhetoric to the effect that perhaps creditors should also pay a share of the costs, as vented by the Chancellor in early 2010, was quickly abandoned when ‘the markets’ expressed shock by slightly raising the rate of interest on new public debt. Now the talk is about the need to shift, in the words of the German Finance Minister, from old-fashioned ‘government’, which is no longer up to the new challenges of globalization, to ‘governance’, meaning in particular a lasting curtailment of the budgetary authority of the Bundestag.footnote20
The political expectations that democratic states are now facing from their new principals may be impossible to meet. International markets and institutions require that not just governments but also citizens credibly commit themselves to fiscal consolidation. Political parties that oppose austerity must be resoundingly defeated in national elections, and both government and opposition must be publicly pledged to ‘sound finance’, or else the cost of debt service will rise. Elections in which voters have no effective choice, however, may be perceived by them as inauthentic, which may cause all sorts of political disorder, from declining turnout to a rise of populist parties to riots in the streets.
One factor here is that the arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilization and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or the strategic reach of the ‘man in the street’. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own.footnote21 While this may generate apathy at the mass level and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behaviour. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd—at which point the only rational and responsible conduct would be to throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of haute finance. Where democracy as we know it is effectively suspended, as it already is in countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, street riots and popular insurrection may be the last remaining mode of political expression for those devoid of market power. Should we hope in the name of democracy that we will soon have the opportunity to observe a few more examples?
Social science can do little, if anything, to help resolve the structural tensions and contradictions underlying the economic and social disorders of the day. What it can do, however, is bring them to light and identify the historical continuities in which present crises can be fully understood. It also can—and must—point out the drama of democratic states being turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors, compared to which C. Wright Mills’s ‘power elite’ appears a shining example of liberal pluralism.footnote22 More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners. In fact, looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.
Stronger growth is by no means guaranteed, but we should not give up hope. In a presentation to clients, the economic consultancy Fathom asks the question, “The UK’s economic malaise — would a new government help?” It finds some evidence that governments with large majorities, which is what election polls suggest, deliver stronger growth. That was the case after the 1997 Labour landslide, when, admittedly in a friendlier global environment, the UK economy averaged 3.1 per cent growth for ten years. Fathom does not see the UK getting to that level, but in one scenario it has growth topping 2.5 per cent by the second half of 2026.
As the consultancy puts it: “Our initial premise is that there is scope for more and better investment. Greater government support for [research and development] spending could help … and according to recent research, every additional pound of publicly funded R&D may call forth as much as £8 of additional privately funded R&D.
“Our optimism is further boosted by the presence of long-term catalysts, such as the climate transition, as well as economic and national security concerns. These are compelling policymakers to expand their policy horizons and adopt a more strategic approach. Ultimately, creating a dynamic economy is about embracing risks and turning them into opportunities through strategic planning and investment, rather than suppressing risks with short-term, temporary measures.”
We need a bit of optimism. Let us hope it is not misplaced.
My attempt to find an explanatory frame, is to say the least, not exactly on target. Yet the Streeck essay offers what just might be a vital contemporary history of a Capitalism, whose servants like David Smith and The Times, offer a certain kind of faith, in a system that pays their salaries!
Edward Fawcett was ‘formerly chief correspondent of The Economist’ that might lead The Reader to doubt his ability, to be an objective observer of the political scene, in both Britain and America? Because this is The Financial Times, and as such Fawcett’s political beliefs, his inherent prejudices, indeed his Conservatism, make an ideal choice to write a highly attuned propaganda, to a readership that shares in his political enthusiasm? The first two paragraphs takes it’s imperatives from a self-serving outline of the political territory.
These are bad times for conservatism’s self-image as the political tradition of good sense and stability. Britain’s exhausted Conservative party limps to defeat in the coming election under its fifth prime minister in just nine years. Its moderates have mostly fled or been driven out. Hard-right parties vie for primacy in Europe’s conservative mainstream. A convicted felon is on track to head the Republican ticket for president of the United States.
Conservatism’s image always had a strong element of myth. Since the late 19th century, when most conservatives made peace with modern life, they have held out a golden but conflicted promise: flourishing capitalism and social stability. Capitalism harnesses technological progress to generate and — if democratic — to spread wealth. In doing so, it forever turns society upside down. Conservatives, accordingly, must be skilful circus-riders, cantering the ring with one foot on a pony called “Capital” and the other on a pony called “Tradition”
That two-pony conflict was understood by the shrewd, far-sighted American conservative Edward Luttwak when, 30 long years ago, he foresaw the rise of today’s hard right. His article in the London Review of Books was provocatively titled “Why fascism is the wave of the future”.
You can quarrel with the title as overblown or unhistorical, but Luttwak’s point was a good one. The typical conservative after-dinner speech, Luttwak wrote, was “a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one.” The question for today’s conservatives is if that double promise — be it delivered over a pay-for-a-chair dinner or to your phone — is still convincing.
Hard as it looks, it’s worth recalling how well in electoral terms conservatives have turned the trick. Take a small but salient core of big parties. Since the Federal Republic’s founding in 1949, Germany’s Christian Democrats have shared or held office for 52 of those 75 years. France’s presidents have been on the centre-right for 39 of the past 65 years — 46 if you include the ex-Socialist Emmanuel Macron. The right-left balance is more even in the US but in Britain, Conservative dominance is striking: in the past 110 years, the Tory party has held or shared office for 76 of them.
Doing that took skill and balance. Skills wear out, however. Runs come to an end. Some think that British conservatism as a centre-right tradition is already done for. Sir Oliver Letwin, a former Conservative minister and manifesto drafter, is convinced, as he has told me, “The party, as we’ve known it, is dead.” Not all Conservatives will agree with that, but something is happening to conservatism everywhere of which Britain’s Tories are an exemplary case.
Edward Fawcett then resorts to subtitles, as the in-order-too of managing his ‘History Made To Measure’.
A tradition of conflict
Editor: This is what I find of interest:
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In the US and Britain, the first-past-the-post voting system favours two big parties that enjoy wide reach and long life at the price of endemic inner conflict. American Republicans have — or long had — left and right wings. Globalist Dwight D Eisenhower kept Robert Taft Sr’s Americanist Republicans in check. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller fell to anti-liberal Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon held together Northern business and aggrieved white Southerners-turned-Republican. Since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the party has expunged its liberals and moved solidly and illiberally to the right.
For Britain’s Tories, infighting is a second name. The party’s Cain-and-Abel history is biblical: Robert Peel vs Benjamin Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain vs Lord Salisbury, Edward Heath’s “Wets” vs Margaret Thatcher’s “Dries”, Europeans vs anti-Europeans. Its taste for self-slaughter makes its record in office the more remarkable. That continuity alone — and the oddly rare use of the label “conservative” itself — has always encouraged the thought that British conservatism was notably pure and exceptional. It wasn’t and isn’t. The party’s collapse towards the hard right reflects a general weakening of the centre across western democracies
The hard right.
Editor: This is what I find of interest
To nail the type, the hard right is an unstable and uneven alliance of three tribes: free-market globalists, national welfarists and ethico-cultural traditionalists. Globalists want a small, nightwatchman state, with undemocratic freedom for foreign capital to come and go as it pleases. Welfarists want an effective state that cares for the national people and protects them from immigration. Globalists and welfarists disagree with each other on taxes, regulation and trade. They each combine smoothly enough with the traditionalists, whose sermons about moral decay and national decline they mimic or sit through out of tactical courtesy. Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.
Holding the hard right together are two things: one real, the other a fantasy. The first is popular anger and disbelief at liberal democracy’s repeated failures to answer the insecurity and inequities brought about by massive structural changes from globalisation. Those are real enough.
The Day After:
Editor: this is what I find of interest:
By comparison, the Conservatives’ 13 years in the wilderness after defeat in 1997 was fallow time. The party chose to copy Tony Blair and New Labour, above all in its devotion to presentation and style. No compelling picture of conservatism emerged. Borrowing Stanley Baldwin’s all-purpose and under-informative label “one-nation conservatism”, Cameronism was thin on content. Add their 14 years in office, and for more than a quarter of a century Conservatives have left obscure what it is they stand for.
In search of ideas, Conservatives had, it is true, three handicaps. The first was a loss of geopolitical bearings after the end of the cold war, which the right shared with the left. That disadvantage is party-blind. Everyone is baffled. The second two, however, were distinctly Conservative. Thatcherism, love it or not, calcified into dogma, and the collective self-wounding of Brexit sucked time, thought and energy out of everything else in politics.
New Thinking :
Editor: look at this Cast of Characters!
Tory brains, Rupert Harrison, a former banker, George Osborne’s chief of staff, Adrian Wooldridge has called “Notting Hill conservatism”, the Conservative’s future lies in appealing to voters there, Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s ideas person, the radical-turned-Conservative Unionist Joseph Chamberlain), Remaking One Nation (2020), The trouble is the demons. Liberals, for Timothy, are “tone deaf to voters, ignore community and short-change ‘love of Britishness’”. Patrick Deneen is a professor at the distinguished Catholic University of Notre Dame in Indiana and star of the American hard-right. In Regime Change (2023), At others, he came close to calling for an American theocracy, Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony. His Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Hazony is the brains behind National Conservatism, In May 2023, Hazony’s foundation ran a three-day conference in London, which drew stars of the British hard-right, including Suella Braverman and Miriam Cates, as well as much bien pensant mockery from right as well as left.
Space left for liberal conservatives
Editor: These final paragraphs sum up this long meandering essay come to it’s end, yet he offers an almost pleasing, even a near poetic style!
No convincing narrative with rhetorical appeal is on offer either from an equally confused and silent liberal left. Well-identified problems and intelligent offers for their solution abound in a troubled liberal world but defences of that world itself and its values are barely heard. They are spoken for in well-hewn essays, yes, but not crowed and shouted as they ought to be.
Into that silence has burst the seductive, angry music of a hard right. The future health of conservatism in any historically recognisable form will depend a lot on whether or not there remains a strong voice in politics for liberal conservatives — the kind who do not need enemies.
Political Observer wonders where that ‘left wing’ might be? Not at The Economist, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The New Statesman.*
The regular reader has to wince at Janan Ganesh’s latest political commentary, thatnow places him in the company of the other columnists, who have mastered the unimaginative, indeed boring ‘Anti-Leftism’ of British Corporate Media. The head-line and sub-headline tell the story:
Headline: No, Starmer should not be bolder
Sub-headline: ‘Bold’ is media-speak for ‘left wing’, and Britain doesn’t need a left turn
The Patient Reader is ‘rewarded’ in the first three paragraphs:
Just a month now from power, Sir Keir Starmer, that uncomplaining recipient of advice from pundits who never thought he’d get here, is urged to be bolder in his plans for Britain.
Excellent. We all agree, then. Labour should draw up the loosest regulations on artificial intelligence in the G7, to attract AI investment. It should make extra spending on public services conditional on serious reform of them. (The test of seriousness is that trade unions protest on the streets.) It should question the point of a “binding” net zero law in a nation that contributes 1 per cent of global emissions. This party of workers should cut the out-of-work benefits bill to fund lower income tax. After the disgrace of the High Speed 2 rail project — the lost cash, the lost time — Whitehall should be accorded a smaller, not larger, role in economic management.
Editor: That’s settled, then. So nice to have a consensus… in what world!
That’s settled, then. So nice to have a consensus. What? Not that kind of boldness? You know, somehow I didn’t think so.
It reads as rather dubious sarcasm. Its like that once audacious stylist reverts to Ante-Leftism! From David Cameron, Mrs. May, Boris Johnson, to Liz Truss & Kwasi Kwarteng and then Sunak, demonstrates utter governmental incompetence? 14 years of certifiable incompetence doesn’t register with Ganesh. The Left is his target of choice.
“Bold” is a journalistic euphemism for “left wing”. Demanding boldness, like demanding “radicalism” and “vision”, has become a way of saying “tax and spend more”, without having to defend that position square-on.
Editor: Next in line is Potted History:
And no wonder. That defence is hard to mount. The tax burden in the UK is the highest since the 1950s. It is still lower than in much of continental Europe, true, but Britain isn’t continental Europe. It doesn’t have the single market to offer. Even when it did, the nation’s competitive advantage tended to be ease of doing business. (As opposed to French infrastructure or German technical skills.) Now, Labour already proposes to increase the non-wage labour costs on business through regulations. So, if I follow the argument of the “bold” camp, Starmer’s vision for Britain should be European taxes and European labour laws without the compensation of the European market. Might it not be simpler to put a “Closed For Business” sign at Heathrow arrivals?
Editor: When broken down into specificities, the case for boldness becomes unsettling, hence its reliance on euphemism and code. The Reader must wonder at the fact, that like his mentor/guru Tony Blair, Starmer is a Thatcherite/Neo-Liberal. He has purged The Left from the Labour Party, so the Ganesh’s essay is in search of a reason to be! While dragooning that ‘Left’ into the dubiousness of his fictional political reverie! Reader only 434 words to go!
Editor: A selection from that 434 words:
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Given these constraints, Starmer’s plans are, in fact, on the ambitious side.
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If boldness means statism, which it almost always does, Starmer doesn’t lack it.
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Boldness is questionable policy, then. But it is worse politics.
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First, the tired, rote-learned questions. “What is Starmerism?” “Will the real Keir Starmer please stand up?” (It doesn’t help that his name scans so well with the Eminem song.)
Editor: the reference to the Eminem’s song, pure pandering to his ‘hipster’ followers!
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Then the nonsensical comparisons with predecessors. “Say what you will about Tony Blair, but you knew where you stood with him.” No, you didn’t. Blair in 1997 was accused of being foggy and evasive to the point of mendaciousness.
Editor: Starmer is Tony Blair’s political creature! Call it Thatcherism, with a botched face-lift ?
Editor: the last two paragraphs Ganesh makes the claim ‘Governing is like writing a column: you only find out what you believe by doing it for years, responding to real events’: this writer is tempted to opine that Ganesh does not just just write a column of opinion, but writes Anti-Left Propaganda, for a newspaper that shares in the most reactionary kind politics, whose only real competitor is The Economist! The last paragraphs of the Ganesh essay demonstrate his self-regard, that has blossomed into the narcissism of the Pundit Class!
There is a misunderstanding here about politics. Governing is like writing a column: you only find out what you believe by doing it for years, responding to real events. Your -ism, if you have one, becomes clear in retrospect. Even Thatcherism ended up meaning something different, less monetarist, than it did at its inflation-obsessed start. Who would have guessed that the coy Blair of 1997 would flood the public sector with cash and retire a war leader?
It wasn’t that he withheld his true intent from voters. He just couldn’t know the circumstances in which he would govern, or even his own instincts under duress. And that was a stabler world than ours. So how on earth could Starmer? He has given about as clear a sense of what he will do as most leaders of the opposition. It is bold to a fault.
Mr. Ganesh’s ‘politicking’ reaches into the the most unlikely places, and chooses unlikely persons to make his arguments! Wedded to self-congratulation about his imagined victory about ‘low birth rates’ and the underserving retirees: ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ! In its way it echoes Mitt Romney 47 % of 2012, that cost him the election. The perpetual Boulevardier now steps into the quicksand of a variety of exhausted Neo-Liberal cliches, without the rhetorical curlicues, that once set apart his pronouncements.
Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.
And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.
This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?
Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.
Now that the world agrees with me about children, birth rates are low. This means too few workers for too many pensioners. To keep the state solvent, old people will have to remain productive a bit longer. Expect, therefore, ever more eulogies from politicians and bosses about the advantages of age in the workplace. Prudence, caution, restraint. The moderating hand. All will be cited.
And all will miss the point. The most dramatic mental change that comes with age is a loss of interest in what others think. And that allows for more, not less, risk-taking.
This weekend, Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather, stands to win his fifth Champions League title as a coach. Even if Real Madrid lose, his late-career success stands out in an ever-younger profession. (The coach of the German national team is 36.) What explains the resurgence of a man who was sputtering out at Everton in 2021?
Over the past decade or so, football became regimented. A modern coach micromanages the passing sequences, the distances between teammates, the number of seconds a “press” goes on for. Even a casual watcher of the sport might have noticed the extinction of the Number 10, the glamour role, in which a team’s most gifted individual is licensed to roam and improvise. In place of Zidane and Özil: “machine football”.
Establishing with The Reader that he is ‘one of the fellas’ buy way of this enthusiasm for the game, and choosing ‘Carlo Ancelotti, 64, grandfather’ as paradigmatic of those ‘old people will have to remain productive a bit longer’ ?
Editor: But Ganesh can’t seem to self-emancipate from evocative references:
… And now look. I don’t know if another Champions League title with this loose and expressive Madrid team will bring, in some kind of Hegelian antithesis, a turn in the tide against over-coaching.
…
The value of Ancelotti’s age isn’t prudence, then. It is almost the opposite: a defiance of convention, born of being long past caring about one’s reputation. Some of that insouciance was innate, no doubt. But it would have grown, not waned, with time.
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With his tariffs and subsidies, Joe Biden, 81, building on the work of Donald Trump, 77, has changed the world. (For the worse, I think.)
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Editor: Ganesh political reach at high velocity:
America’s pro-trade consensus was paper-thin to begin with. The 2008 financial crash then enhanced the prestige of the state. The speed with which protectionism has become the new common sense in Washington suggests the two men were pushing at an open door.
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Editor: the pejorative ‘old people’ : in sum its reduced to a trans-generational conflict ?
Sometimes, in old people, it manifests as rudeness. But it has a constructive upside in this appetite for heresy.
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It is hard to know the active ingredient that makes people carefree with age. It might be that near-term unpopularity seems trivial next to death.
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Either way, the equation of youth with risk-taking, and age with conformism, needs adjustment.
Editor: In the final paragraphs Ganesh reverts to Cultural Critique, steeped in disingenuousness garnished with the fatuous!
… There is an exhibition at the British Museum now on Michelangelo’s last decades. The drawings show the artist in furious argument with himself. Here he changes the head of a figure beside the crucified Jesus. There he has several goes at an airborne angel on the one page. It is like looking at the scribbled marginalia of Shakespeare.
Well, we are going to need late-life restlessness from more and more citizens. Reducing their potential contribution to that of temperance and caution isn’t just a cliché. It ignores a world that is being turned upside down by those who aren’t long for it.
Pamela Paul closing paragraphs is awash in the ‘scolding’ of dissenting students. Hardly a surprise. History might offer something of value, on the vexing question of ‘student protests’ ? Some of her readership might recall vividly Mario Savio of of 1964:
To put it bluntly Pamela Paul is a Careerist who has found a safe position at The New York Times: examining ‘on the hazards of shifting norms’ where her political conformity is of value: to a newspaper attached to the most toxic expressions of what the New York Times most values, political conformity. The Reader need only look at it’s triad of commentators : Friedman, Brooks, Stephens as evidence of that fact!
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For decades, employers used elite colleges as a kind of human resources proxy to vet potential candidates and make their jobs easier by doing a first cut. Given that those elite schools were hotbeds of activism this year, that calculus may no longer prove as reliable. Forbes reported thatemployers are beginning to sour on the Ivy League. “The perception of what those graduates bring has changed. And I think it’s more related to what they’re actually teaching and what they walk away with,” an architectural firm told Forbes.
The American university has long been seen as a refuge from the real world, a sealed community unto its own. The outsize protests this past year showed that in a social media-infused, cable-news-covered world, the barrier has become more porous. What flies on campus doesn’t necessarily pass in the real world.
The toughest lesson for young people of this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision.
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As a newspaper reader since 1960, Pamela Paul represents what used to be called ‘hard-hitting’, when men were ascendent in newspaper business. Though Paul engages in the ‘shaming’ of students with a certain gusto, once reserved for that cadre of entitled males. In sum, its the same old grift!
Political Observer
P. S. Pamela Paul on Journalistic Ethics
Coming from a decade in the newsroom and two decades as a freelance writer, I apply those same standards and rigor to my work as an Opinion columnist. I always write what I believe to be accurate and true, even if it means presenting facts and opinions that challenge readers rather than reaffirm their preconceptions or preferences. I strive to write about complicated issues with clarity, nuance and sensitivity. I never blurb books. I avoid or disclose potential conflicts. I prefer to express my opinions on platforms other than social media. You can read this to learn more about our ethical guidelines.
Editor: Self-congratulation is no stranger to Pamela Paul!
The Reader confronts the latest of Mr. Ganesh’s essays, with his ability to view the 14 years of Tory rule, that has been shortsighted, across a range of issues. To express it in the blandest terms: which just might be the raison d’etre of this Ganesh intervention? The trivialization serves as the backdrop, for an apologetic that simply muddies the waters, of what an actual critical evaluation of those 14 years might be argued!
Boris Johnson, 2017: “We hear that we’re first in line to do a great trade deal with the US.” Liz Truss, 2019: “My main priority now will be agreeing a free trade deal with the US.” Dominic Raab, a cabinet eminence at around the same time: “President Trump has made clear again that he wants an ambitious trade agreement with the UK.”
Then Rishi Sunak on the same subject last summer. “For a while now, that has not been a priority for either the US or UK.” Oh.
This government’s single greatest disservice to the UK has been to misunderstand the US.
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Mr. Ganesh’s political myopia eventuates, realizes itself , into an expression of a self-serving political refraction, that might capture the The Reader’s attention, in the moment. But on reflection is judged as disingenuous? And or leads The Reader to treat this as propaganda?
Editor: Brexit in the next paragraph becomes the ‘Paradise Lost’ in this narrative. A a huge bet on the economic openness of America is then argued as Derrida might have argued it, as an aporia ?
Brexit was, from the start, a huge bet on the economic openness of America. A bilateral trade deal with Washington was meant to offset the loss of unfettered access to the EU market. That no such deal emerged was bad enough (though as predictable as sunrise). But then Donald Trump and later Joe Biden embraced a wider protectionism. World trade is fragmenting as a result. So for Britain, double jeopardy: no agreement with America, but also less and less prospect of agreements with third countries.
Editor: I’ll select some quotes from the remainder of the essay.
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In essence, the nation staked its future on trade at the exact historical moment that it fell out of favour as an idea. It is the geostrategic equivalent of investing one’s life savings in a DVD manufacturer circa 2009.
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Anyone with a passing knowledge of Washington could have warned them not to confuse the place for a free-market bastion.
In 1992, the trade sceptic Ross Perot won 19 per cent of the national vote as an independent presidential candidate.
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Editor: Potted American History:
Look at the dates here. This was the high summer of “neoliberalism”. Imagine how much stronger the protectionist impulse was in normal times. Or rather than imagine, check the record. It shows the tariff walls of the 1800s. It shows the statism of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t an interwar aberration.
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But protectionist sentiment is a force in American life to an extent that it can’t be in a mid-sized, resource-poor archipelago. It is then transformed into policy via sectoral lobby groups of a scale and sophistication that must be seen up close to be believed.
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If I lived in a continental-scale market with superabundant resources, I’d need a lot of persuading from David Ricardo and The Economist that I am still better off trading. But that is the point. The Tories think the crucial fact about America is that it is made up of Britain’s “cousins”. (It isn’t, unless we are consulting the census of 1810.)
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After that, the next most important fact is its status. America is defending a position as the world’s number one power.
… Editor: Mr. Ganesh must realize that the Hegemon does as it pleases. The very history of Britain is defined by that practice, that claim!
One needn’t admire this about the US. One can suspect it of hysteria, in fact. But the job of a British government is to fathom these things before betting the nation’s entire future on a hunch that America will forever uphold world trade.
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Editor: the final paragraphs of this churlish meandering philippic come to an end!
This mistake came from “Atlanticist” Tories, remember — the ones who read Andrew Roberts and track the exact co-ordinates of the Churchill bust in the White House. (Barack Obama was hated for moving it.) Well, after giving it all that, these people failed on their own terms. They failed to understand US politics. Britain will foot the bill of their error for decades.
“Trade”: even the moral connotation of the word is distinct in each nation. It has had a high-minded ring to it in Britain ever since the abolition of the Corn Laws helped to feed the working poor. In America, where the cotton-exporting Confederates were free-traders, history isn’t quite so clear-cut. It is almost as if these are different countries.
It’s quite surprising that the Newspapers like The Financial Time and The New Statesman sends me daily updates of their latest commentaries on politics. The Financial Times accepts my money, but blocks me from commenting on any of the news reports, or the commentaries of their writers.
Today, May 29, 2024 Stephen Bush Columnist & Associate Editor sent me this:
Title: Lead the way
Are the polls exaggerating Labour’s lead? Matt Singh, the pollster who called the 2015 poll miss, ponders this question in his newsletter. He concludes that there are no “red flags” similar to that in 1992 or 2015, and that at most the Labour lead is only in the lower end of what pollsters are predicting. Still, this points to a landslide defeat, and as James Kanagasooriam explains over on FocalData’s blog, Labour doesn’t need that large a lead to win comfortably, as its coalition is now pretty electorally efficient.
I agree with James and Matt, and have little to add on this topic, other than that if we look at what Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are doing, it is pretty clear that they don’t think the polls are wrong.
Starmer is campaigning like a man who has a large opinion poll lead and whose focus is on reassuring voters and not doing anything to mess it up.
Sunak, meanwhile, is campaigning like someone who doesn’t really believe that he can win the election but just needs to get enough Reform voters back into the Tory fold to avoid a disaster. See, for instance, his latest set of proposals. First, a commitment to keep raising the threshold on which pensioners start paying tax so they will never pay tax on the state pension, a so-called quadruple lock. This will keep the tax base narrower than it needs to be, but the commitment is made safe in the knowledge Sunak won’t actually have to keep it. His policy of bringing back national service is similarly riddled with holes. And today the Tories have pledged that funding towards the degrees that are “not performing well” would be diverted towards apprenticeships (under the promise, about one in eight undergraduate degrees would be shut down, the Tories estimate).
What these all have in common is that they are squarely focused on people who voted Tory in 2019, but are currently saying they will vote Reform, or not at all.
Our polling toy will gradually update to include more assumptions about tactical voting — which we can assume will increase the Liberal Democrat seat total. But for now, it is a good way of gauging the Conservative-Labour battle and a reminder that as it stands, both parties are assuming that the polls suggesting Labour are on course to win are about right.
….
Under the rubric of Top stories today:
Whip restored to Diane Abbott | Veteran MP Diane Abbott was readmitted to the Parliamentary Labour party yesterday following her suspension for remarks about Jewish people. Abbott confirmed today that she has been banned from standing for Labour in July’s election.
Battle pavilions | For Keir Starmer to win a House of Commons Labour majority of just one, he must gain about 125 seats on July 4. Given the party’s record postwar defeat in 2019, that would be a big achievement. In Scotland, Labour is locked in a fight with the Scottish National party, in what will be a pivotal election north of the border. Here are the places where the election will be fought and won.
Neutral tones | Some of the UK’s biggest companies are refusing to back either of the main parties ahead of the country’s general election, as businesses attempt to avoid being drawn into partisan politics.
Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.
This followed with an evocative, full color graph! Yet there are certain lacuna, empty spaces, within the whole of of Mr. Bush’s political commentary e.g. : George Galloway’s win in Rochdale, Jeremy Corbin’s running as an independent, with Diane Abbott to do the same? Mr. Galloway and his The Workers Party of Britain are running other alternative candidates to the Tory/New Labour Political Monochrome! Perhaps that Political Monochrome, and its well paid Propogandists/Technocrats, will confront another kind of Politics , not rooted in Corporatist Imperatives?
The Readers must love Freddie’s Political Chatter? Though this ‘revolt’ by Corbyn shouldn’t surprise an experienced political commentator. The victory of George Galloway might be another missed clue, that escaped Freddie ? Or the fact of Dianne Abbott’s purge. A coy Freddy isn’t convincing!
I’ll just highlight, or more honestly, pick randomly through his ‘chatter’ at 872 words, or so :
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But what of Labour? Keir Starmer has his own problems: Jeremy Corbyn is standing as an independent in Islington North — a few thoughts below.
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Is Starmer’s left flank vulnerable? Jeremy Corbyn has been in exile from Labour since 2021 after he refused to apologise for saying reports of anti-Semitism inside the party were exaggerated.
Editor: What might constitute ‘Starmer’s left flank’ ? The Left has been purged from the Party , all that remain are the New Labour hacks!
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Corbyn’s expulsion from the party he represented in parliament for 40 years was not inevitable. In October 2020 a deal between himself and the leadership was close. Accounts vary, but negotiations were reportedly scuppered because Corbyn was on holiday on the Isle of Wight. The party later reinstated Corbyn’s Labour membership but Starmer refused to restore the parliamentary whip until the former leader apologised, hence he sat as an independent.
Editor: Freddy follows The Party Line on Corbyn, any surprise? The Newspapers like The Guardian and its Johnathan Freedland defamed Corbyn. Even @TheEconomist proclaimed Corbyn as a toxic expression of another time and place!
Editor: Freddy moves on in the same vein as The Economist
Since then, Corbyn has let rumours that he may stand in Islington North or for London mayor as Ken Livingstone did rumble on. The former was always the likely option because Corbyn has a relationship with his constituents that he doesn’t have with London in general. While he ruminated on his next move, Corbyn launched a vehicle to promote his politics: the Peace & Justice Project. While its branding is oddly reminiscent of the Tony Blair Institute’s, its patrons include former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, the filmmaker Ken Loach and former Bolivian president Evo Morales.
Editor: Freddy recites the New Labour Corbyn Party Line :
Corbyn is a member of a political grouping of candidates called the Collective who support the Peace & Justice Project’s five priorities:
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Editor: Freddy deviates from The Party Line via ‘source on the party’s left pointed out’ : again that phantom Left appears.
As one Labour source on the party’s left pointed out, Corbyn has the three qualities that any successful independent candidate needs: local pedigree; high name recognition; and a compelling story. Corbyn is famous for being a “good constituency MP”. He has 40 years of relationships and name recognition to draw on. (One key problem will be that any Labour members that openly support him will face expulsion.)
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Corbyn’s trajectory – going from party leader to independent candidate in one parliament – is unique. The threat, therefore, is contained. And yet, there are signs that Labour could face problems from the left, charged with anger at Labour’s position on Gaza and Starmer’s abandonment or dilution of many of his original 10 leadership pledges.
Editor: The Reader has to wonder at Freddy’s cultivated ignorance of Corbyn and George Galloway’s political alliance, that is running candidates in the coming elections!
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While Starmer’s party has a notional majority of around 17,000 in the new seat, the Greens won every ward in the constituency in the recent local elections.
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After Corbyn’s announcement, Starmer said: “Jeremy Corbyn’s days of influencing Labour Party policy are well and truly over. Jeremy Corbyn’s decision is his decision. What I’m intent on doing is putting first-class Labour candidates in Islington North, which we have now done.”
Editor: Starmer’s whistling in the dark!
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The result in five weeks’ time will depend on whether Corbyn’s 26,188 majority is, in reality, his majority or Labour’s. It will signal whether the threat to Labour from the left is latent or non-existent.
With the party leading so comfortably in the polls, challenges from the left can appear obscure. For now, the priority for Labour’s strategists will be to limit the damage Corbyn can inflict on their campaign for No 10. And at the same time, win Islington North.
Political Cynic’s attempt at ‘Rhetorical Mapping’.
Headline: Historians will look back on 14 years of lost opportunities. Since 2010, five Conservative prime ministers have notched up some modest successes. But measured against four other periods of one-party dominance, the record is distinctly underwhelming, argues Anthony Seldon
Editor : the final paragraphs of this Times assessment of 14 years of Tory rule offer:
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Furious Tories turned their sights on the blob, as it was termed, to blame for the poor performance. Never have the Conservatives attacked in such a consistent way the civil service, the judiciary, the Bank of England, the BBC and universities. Denunciation without reform generates poor morale and confusion, which is what happened. The centre of government was in need of dramatic reform for sure, and grievously missed the departure of cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood who died in 2018, aged 56. The office of the prime minister, and its relations with the Treasury, need attention, and the centre of government needs slimming down and strengthening, as the Institute for Government report Power with Purpose argued this year. It didn’t deserve aimless trashing.
External shocks did not help any of the five prime ministers, including the legacy of the global financial crisis, Covid and the invasion of Ukraine with its devastating impact on fuel prices. But the earlier governments had shocks too, including the Suez crisis of 1956, adroitly calmed by the incoming prime minister Harold Macmillan. Thatcher’s handling of the Falklands conflict and end of the Cold War and Major’s resetting of economic policy with the chancellor Norman Lamont after Black Wednesday in 1992, when Britain was ejected from the European exchange rate mechanism, were confidently handled. The biggest shock of all in 2010-24 was entirely self-imposed: Brexit. The criticism of historians is likely to focus less on the decisions that led to it than on the lack of leadership that followed and the failure to capitalise on the opportunities that Brexit presented. Every disruption, as every great leader knows, creates unprecedented opportunities. The Conservatives had not only Brexit but also Covid, but such moments have to be channelled, and they conspicuously were not.
The 14 years of Conservative rule have not been altogether wasted. There were plenty of examples of effective and high-quality leadership, rarely more so than at the Queen’s funeral, masterminded indicatively not by the nation’s politicians but by its much-criticised civil servants. But with the long lens of history, these 14 years will be seen as a time when opportunities for national renewal, cohesion and purpose were lost. So not wasted, but prodigal. Whether Labour, if they win, will be able to provide the quality of leadership demanded is the question. The country still has not found a settled place domestically or in the world at large this century. Starmer will need to emulate the ambition and achievement of Attlee — or of Wilson, Blair and Brown at their best — if he is to provide the strategic leadership needed.
Editor: The Reader might look to The Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh’s last two essays, that seem to be dislocated from the imperatives of the Times’ hired political experts, Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton!
After this May 17, 2024 opening paragraph:
When I was two or three, I went walkabout and wasn’t found until some time later at a local mall. What a close brush with disaster, readers will think. What a potential loss to English letters and the Clerkenwell restaurant trade. Relax. This happened in one of the safest countries on Earth. I got my infant meanderings out of the way in Singapore.
And it’s successors:
A point gets lost in all the coverage of the island state as it changes leadership this month. Economic enrichment is Singapore’s other achievement. It comes below, and wouldn’t have happened without, the creation of order and cohesion where there had been communal strife. To quote its per capita income, which now tops that of the US, is to understate what has happened in a once-fractious Chinese-Malay-Indian society.
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The press is full of “Whither Singapore?” articles this month, and fair enough. The country has to navigate the US-China rift without the helpful scale of other Asean nations. It flourished in a world order that is decomposing. (LKY’s all-too-prescient speech to Congress urged America to uphold free trade.) But the island’s ultimate advantage, and example to the world, was always inside the head. That rational incoherence isn’t so easily lost.
In Europe, the three signs of spring have arrived: the bright flora, the endless days and the ambient sound of American voices. All are welcome. But the last is also an annual reminder of the spending power of US tourists. That their economy has outperformed the continent’s this past decade or two can be felt, not just measured.
The material success of the US is discussed in all quarters. What isn’t said enough is that it has happened amid political bedlam. America has roared ahead in the era of the Tea Party, Donald Trump, “forever wars” abroad and culture wars at home. There have been more presidential impeachments in the past generation than in the previous two centuries of the republic. At the turn of the millennium, 44 per cent of Americans trusted the federal government. Now 16 per cent do. The US failed to achieve even a peaceful transfer of power at its last election. (Unlike, say, Senegal.) The civic rot is so deep that well-adjusted citizens find themselves taking an interest in the health of Supreme Court justices, lest one die under a president of the opposing side.
So much political turmoil, so little economic consequence. Why?
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In liberal thought, stable political institutions are held to be a precondition for affluence, which in turn increases public support for those institutions, until the circle of logic is closed. In America we are seeing, if not the first ever challenge to this notion, then perhaps the one on the largest historical scale. It is hard to know what to feel: relief at the resilience of America’s wealth creators, or dread that its voters lack a material incentive to fix politics.
Editor: Ganesh favorite guise is that of the boulevardier! How might the regular Reader of Ganesh interpret these essays, and their function illuminating the looming British Election? If at all?
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