The Bothersome Bias Of The BBC

Accusing the BBC of bias is a classic knee-jerk response that generally indicates the commenter is either a) a moron or b) politically extreme. At least, those saying that the BBC is hugely right-wing because it does or doesn't cover story X, Y, Z, are basically equalled by those saying that the BBC is hugely left-wing because it does or doesn't cover story X, Y, Z. It's not at all unusual to see people both claiming that the BBC is a horde of raging anti-Semites and that it's enabling Palestinian genocide. 

Spoiler alert : it isn't. 

I don't believe that the BBC has this sort of straightforward bias on any political position. I don't think it's even, as is sometimes more credibly claimed, especially pro-establishment, given the amount of airtime it's given to Nigel Fuckface over the years.

And I hope don't need to spell out that any attempt to be politically neutral will never be 100% perfect because that's literally impossible; detecting any slightly lean one way or another on any individual position demonstrates exactly nothing and is just a waste of energy. I'm not going on a more general rant here. If you're fervently convinced the BBC does have some massive political preference, then this isn't the post for you.

Instead, I want to point out three other specific areas where I think the BBC is genuinely biased. The first is one I've not seen much discussed elsewhere, the other two are mentioned more frequently but I hope to give an angle on these that's at least presented less often.

This post is strictly anecdotal and I make no claim to empirical verification whatever. I'm only posting this because the effects seem so strong that while the magnitude is certainly open to debate, I think there's very little chance indeed that the effects themselves aren't real.

The first is a victim bias. That is, on BBC Breakfast at least, it seems to me that victims of crimes are put front and centre. Their responses are overwhelmingly the ones which are aired first and given far longer coverage than any other involved parties (except politicians) or any discussion of wider context. Little is said about the cause of crime, and the morning session, deliberately touchy-feely though it is, becomes barely more than a victim campaign group that tends to want to punish the criminals and nothing else – even without ever saying so explicitly.

Two examples : with the murders committed by Valdo Calocane (and similarly for the Southport murders), the prospect that the criminal is mentally ill is mentioned, but the coverage given to the victims and their desired response not to treat him as such is far, far greater. The result is that the idea that the man needs medical intervention more than punishment is never seriously considered. Second, the current obsession is with the possible release of two men who murdered a police officer. Again, discussions of the context of the early release scheme aren't zero, but they're very much on the back foot compared to hearing from what the victims think.

Of course, I'm not saying that the victims don't deserve a voice. But it seem ludicrous to me to essentially only give the victims a voice and not that of independent experts. For the criminally insane, we deserve to hear from mental health professionals. For the prospect of early release, we need to hear from prison officers. And yes, technically we do, but only a very little bit. Any sort of complexity is drowned out by emotion of the people who are understandably distraught.

It isn't the job of journalists to stand for victims. Campaign groups are certainly entitled to do this, but independent journalism should present the different sides more equally. There are other factors involved besides the victim's emotions and the viewer needs to know what these are. They can't make an informed judgement if the only thing they hear clearly is how upset people are.

I'm not claiming that this is by any means unique to the BBC or even that the BBC does this more strongly than other media outlets; it's also entirely possible that BBC Breakfast is worse than other BBC programs for this by its very nature. It may well be that if you watch the news later in the day, or specialist programs, you get a much more multi-faceted view of an issue. But for serious and violent crimes, BBC Breakfast is little better than a tub-thumping call to "lock 'em all up and throw away the key". The problem is that if this is your main news-watching time, as it is for me, then it doesn't matter if other programs have more sophisticated commentary : you'll come away having heard from those who are most closely involved with the case at the huge expense of more objective professional evaluators.

The second issue is the more well-known "both sidesism", expressed brilliantly in this classic webcomic. I won't go into this at any length, but I just want to mention one especially frustrating aspect of this : absolutely everything is presented as awful. By interrogating all people as though they were equally (in)competent, treating all positions as though they were equally respectable – or more to the point, disrespecting everything equally – nothing is ever allowed to be seen as good. Everything must have some downsides. Everything must cause problems for someone. Everyone must be cynical. It feeds this "grumpy old man" habit compulsive addiction to expect everything to be awful and therefore to interpret everything as awful. The result is perpetual misery.

Look, there's enough which is self-evidently horrible in the world as it is. "Manufactured misery" is simply not a thing that needs to exist. All news outlets do this, but my point is that even if you're relentlessly centrist/neutral, the result is the same. At least if you're avowedly pro-some position or other, you're allowed to enjoy it when your side gets a win. The centrist BBC just appears to hate everything.

The third, final issue, is topic fixation. Topic priorities are a more obvious and related issue, but refusing to let go of a story long after what as initially breaking news has well and truly broken, seems to me to be less discussed. This tendency comes and goes and at the moment it's on a bit of a low, though they are absolutely obsessed with this whole "early release" thing as though there was nothing else worth talking about. Even when nothing new of any substance has occurred, still they must repeat the same story day after day.

The reason I say this is currently on a low is because this was much, much worse when they were obsessed with medial problems and charities. They mentioned Rob Burrow and his motor neurone disease to the point where it started getting downright creepy and weird, and the same for Deborah James and bowel cancer : these are both important topics, but the focus on these individuals began to feel like the behaviour of a stalker, not someone genuinely concerned. All other conditions and individuals were excluded because these were apparently Special People, and nobody else experiencing any suffering seemed to count.

There comes a point where raising awareness is just no longer possible because awareness levels are now saturated : BBC Breakfast did this to the nth degree, continuing to report as though their deaths were a recent event months and even years later. This is the Matthew Effect of cumulative advantage of the most perverse sort. Shall we seek out other causes and activists and give them a boost by giving them TV time ? Nah, let's stick with the ones we already know about. Nobody else is important enough.

Look, I love the BBC, and I get dismayed when people call it biased in the usual ways; it is, hands down, one of the best news sources in the world and one of Britain's greatest institutions. It isn't perfect, but that's not a realistic standard for criticism. But not expecting perfection does not eliminate the need for constructive suggestions. These three areas, at least, are surely areas where things can be improved without needing massive systemic overhaul. The underlying structure is sound, but like everything else, it needs a good sweep and a lick of paint from time to time.

The Enshittification Of The State

We've all seen that services tend to get worse over time. You sign up to a new streaming service and it tends to get more and more expensive and content gets worse, or good content gets rarer. Or you try out a restaurant and it's great at first but becomes more and more mundane.

Some of this is almost certainly due to rising expectations and flawed memory. When you find something wonderful and new, you expect it to continue raising standards in a similar way to your initial experience, and when it doesn't, it feels like it's getting worse. But some of this so-called "enshittification" is definitely real. Amazon adding charges to removes ads from Prime isn't a false memory, and neither is shrinkflation. The rise of reality TV shows isn't, unfortunately, the result of an overactive imagination : some idiotic network executive had to actually choose to make it happen. 

I despise the term "enshittification" because it's fucking lazy, boring, and just a god-awful word. I prefer asymptotic degradation, because this is much more descriptive. Done correctly, from a purely business perspective, it would go like this. First, you set up a service which is really good so you attract new customers. You might even run it at a loss for a while, but no matter, you're getting people interested and enthusiastic. You're building loyalty. Then, you make cost savings by reducing quality or upping prices, or both. But the crucial bit is that you shouldn't do this linearly : if you do, eventually you'll reach a threshold when you start losing customers at such a rate that you become unprofitable and fail. The trick is to do this asymptotically, such that you get ever-closer to (but never actually reach) that failure point. Your service doesn't have to be as good as it was in the good old days, but it has to maintain a minimum standard to remain viable.

Or in other words, you try and cut back as much as you can get away with, but no more than that.

This Mother Jones essay looks at this from the perspective of the failing democratic state. The central claim is that would-be dictators in modern democracies don't go straight to usurping power and replacing themselves as strongmen, but instead undermine things little by little, as much as they can get away with. If that eventually means "everything", then so be it, but this is not likely to be how things start out.

It's a bit more sophisticated than that though. First, there's the concept literally of a dual state, or perhaps more accurately, state machinery applied in very different ways to different citizens. The two halves of this are the prerogative state, which means the ruler acts on a whim without reference to law or due process*, and the normative state in which law and order are – apparently – respected. 

* And nothing to do with Britney Spears, unfortunately.

The normative state might be genuine, or it might be a fig leaf. The dictator (or oligarchy) may simply not care about the majority of people and by and large simply leave them to get on with their lives; indeed, if they try to control too much too soon, people are not likely to tolerate that. But the masses will turn a blind eye to abuses of power – the prerogative state – being deployed against minorities. The existence of the rump normative state gives the leaders a clear advantage of plausible deniability, of having enough apparently intact institutions remaining to be able to pretend that everything is normal.

The problem is that the erosion of power in institutions makes the remaining adherence to law and state machinery ever more of an illusion, a convenience that can be reversed whenever the rulers require it. A true dual state is approaching not just when norms are disregarded – when penalties that should be enacted aren't – but when no explanation is given for the change : when the courts "forego with the business of law entirely".

A difficulty for such a dual state is its instability. 

Fraenkel thought of the prerogative state as something like a black hole: “It’s this void, but it’s a void that exerts a gravitational pull on everything around it. So there’s this constant distortion of what he calls the normative state. And there are these moments where some piece of the normative state just gets collapsed and blown away.”

The Republican appointed justices, to the extent the United States has become a dual state, would rather stave off such a collapse, not least because their legitimacy and power relies on such a mirage. Thus, they prefer a hidden authoritarianism to one that is out in the open. And more than anyone else, the justices are in the position to paper over Trump’s lawlessness or expose it. But this is precisely why the dual state is so dangerous: It allows the would-be autocrat to consolidate power under the cloak of democracy and norms.

An American president with authoritarian ambitions would be more likely to realize them if people thought their lives wouldn’t be affected. The Republican wing of the Supreme Court has a self-interest in a dual state as well; without the illusion of the normative state, the justices’ are revealed to be pawns, not power brokers. Their authority would evaporate because it is based on the perception of the rule of law. But maintaining a stable dual state means that the prerogative state must hold itself back, particularly in when it comes to the economy — the black hole cannot grow too large.

The difficult part is extrapolating how things proceed. Is it inevitable that such a state eventually collapses into full authoritarianism, or can this asymptotic degradation be maintained indefinitely ? 

One thing the article doesn't consider is that actually, it can even be reversed. Decline, even a limited one, is not inevitable. We've seen this in Britain and more dramatically in Hungary, which was as close to an authoritarian state as might be imagined. Sometimes, perhaps, maintaining a fig leaf – even when it's done for many years in the case of Hungary – is enough to allow authoritarianism to be undone. The popular claim that fascism is never removed peacefully is simply not correct, and in the case of authoritarian regimes more generally, this appears even more dubious. The tub-thumping rhetoric of pitchforks and torches is a classic appeal to the uncompromising simplicity of overthrowing the monster, the blood-pumping appeal of violence, whereas in fact it's peaceful protests that usually win the day.

But I would add that history never fully repeats. We can't take any previous patterns for granted because the situation is never quite the same; useful guidelines should be examined closely, but not taken as roadmaps to how things will definitely pan out. In America, as the article concentrates on, it would be democratically suicidal to ignore the abundant warning signs of the dual state; it would also be a self-fulfilling prophecy to pretend that nothing can be done about it. It is that belief, and only that belief, that decline and fall are inevitable that make them so. Hope needs must spring eternal. 

Single Female Autarky

Sorry. The headline is purely contrived based on the Bender's little parody song in Futurama :

Single female lawyer !
Fighting for her client
Wearing sexy miniskirts and
Being self-reliant !

What in the world am I on about ?

Xenophobia.

Ooo...kaaay....

Right. There was another piece I read recently on Aeon that's entitled : The allure of autarky : Liberal thinkers are shocked that nations are once again isolating from the world. The real surprise would be if they didn’t. 

Hopefully things are starting to make a bit more sense now. If not, they will soon.

The title is certainly interesting enough. The perceived decline in liberalism is a definite cause for concern, although I stress "perceived" : certain electoral results would strongly dispute the notion that the West is doomed to fall into authoritarianism. We can't allow ourselves to think that way, and we shouldn't, because it isn't true. Nevertheless, the return of authoritarian, anti-liberal ideologies is worrying. 

But to me it's also deeply surprising. Why would anyone object to a social system that allows people to live their own lives how they choose, insofar as they don't interfere with anyone else ? Who actually wants other people sticking their noses in and meddling in their own lifestyle choices ? Not me !

That, though, is a very big topic indeed, and best left for another time. Still, one of the main aspects is that covered in the essay of isolationism, or to give it its tactful window-dressing... self-reliance.

I want to start with a quote from near the end of the article. Without this, it would be all too easy to conclude that the author has a very different take on the matter than what they actually do.

Rousseau was mistaken to believe that primitive man was a self-sufficient loner. And the evidence is unambiguous that globalisation – greater trading links, the transmission of know-how and technology, more cross-border investment, the migration of people – has delivered spectacular material benefits for humankind and higher living standards over recent centuries, and especially in the era since the Second World War... Trade and interconnection, whether or not we realise it or like it, is part of who we are – and always has been.

Right, good. We've established that we're in the same moral ballpark and can proceed accordingly. Unfortunately, I still don't think it's a very good essay. You'll get little argument from me that isolationist tendencies, a.k.a. the desire to live in a self-sufficient, self-reliant "autarky", are very old ways of thinking indeed. The problem is that the author seems to try quite hard at excusing this as something more respectable than xenophobia, but doesn't really present any convincing argument for why this should be. They also state several times that this "autarky" has been widely touted as a goal of the progressive left. This I don't get at all : it seems neither progressive nor left, but reactionary and conservative through and through.

From those earliest days of Western civilisation, the moral virtue of autarky was not just a goal for an individual, but an aspiration for the collective too. According to Aristotle, a contemporary of Diogenes, the ideal city state in the ancient world was also self-sufficient, and those inside the polity would have everything they needed to pursue a good philosophical life – unlike those outside it.

Yes, but in Plato at least, everyone would be dependent on each other. The point was very much to live in a harmonious community, which could and would interact with outsiders. The boundaries of Magnesia and Republic feel more to me simply a way of intellectual self-control than anything else, a way to mark the limits of the thought experiment and stop it getting our of hand. They're not a key feature of these early world-building efforts, so far as I can tell.

Aquinas was an advocate for economic, not just spiritual, autarky. He noted that there are two ways a city can feed itself: by growing food on its own surrounding fields, or through trade. ‘It is quite clear that the first means is better,’ Aquinas concluded in De Regno (1265), his book on kingship. ‘The more dignified a thing is, the more self-sufficient it is, since whatever needs another’s help is by that fact proven to be deficient.’ Aquinas also proffered a moral case for autarky when he noted that ‘greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade.’

Yikes ! That sounds... ghastly ? I think the idea we can all coexist in glorious isolation is utterly wrong-headed. We're all interdependent whether we like or realise it or not; we might try and minimise our interactions with others (I generally do) but pretending we can all manage by ourselves is the utmost folly.

A more extreme version is a classic from Japan :

The policy of sakoku or ‘closed country’ was imposed on the islands of Japan in the 17th century by the Tokugawa shogunate, a form of feudal military dictatorship. Western Christian missionaries were banned and those that were already in the country were persecuted. Emigration was forbidden and foreign trade was reduced almost to nothing. ‘The Christians have come to Japan … to propagate an evil creed and subvert the true doctrine,’ proclaimed an edict from the shogunate in 1614.

That's just simple xenophobia though. "Our culture is better and special, but cannot withstand interaction with others" is an age-old attitude that points to a deep-seated psychosis in human nature : our way of life is the best, but everyone will abandon it the moment any of those pesky foreigners show up. Righto then, if people are abandoning your ideal out of their own free will, then how the blazes is your approach better ? If your way is so good, why don't people want to keep to it ?

(That's a problem for liberalism, too of course.)

I should probably add that I don't think self-reliance is a bad thing in itself. It's good to be able to do what you can without bothering others. It's especially good to be able to think for oneself. But not every cry for help points to subservience, and interactions with foreign parts are good for broadening the mind, not for corrupting the soul.

Rousseau conjectured in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it. ‘No one who depends on others, and lacks resources of his own, can ever be free,’ he warned the Corsicans in 1765. ‘[P]ay little attention to foreign countries, give little heed to commerce; but multiply as far as possible your domestic production and consumption of foodstuffs,’ was Rousseau’s advice to the Poles in 1772.

This just sounds like he didn't like people at all, really. I can sympathise – many of them are awful. But the thing about interdependency is that it's supposed to be a two-way street : if you're dependent on them then they're also dependent on you. E.g. Europe is dependent on cheap Chinese goods, but China is dependent on Europe buying said goods. 

And the ever-unspoken question here is just how far are we supposed to take this ? Should each man be an island unto himself ? Impossible, unless he scrapes a living from rocks*. For virtually everyone that would be a profound level of suffering and I don't see that as "freedom" in any meaningful sense. A hamlet, then ? A village, city, nation ? A continent ? No, no, this is all wrong-headed. Cooperation affords us more opportunities, not less, and so long as we can opt out of them (e.g. we don't all have to buy the latest fashionable goods if we don't want to) then we can fairly be called free. 

* On a related point, this article discusses a possible organism that might be sort of "half alive" in that it depends on others to sustain some of its basic biological processes. This implies the weirdness of the ultimate extreme implication of this kind of reasoning. Viruses, say some, aren't alive because they can't reproduce without a host, but plenty of macroscopic parasites can't even survive at all without a host. We need our external environment to survive (and we ourselves host our own microbiome), but clearly we're alive. I think this points to a terrible flaw in the whole thing : interdependency is part of our nature even at the biological level, and the only real escape from this is death. There are strict limits as to how far self-reliancy is even possible.

Incidentally, this all reminds me of Private Eye's regular agricultural column, which insists that Britain must make as much of its own food as possible and any environmental consequences be damned. I'm continuously wondering why, but despite many letters from other readers asking similar questions, answers have come there none.

‘In a nation which has closed in this way, whose members live only among themselves and very little with foreigners … a higher degree of national honour and a sharply determined national character will develop very quickly,’ claimed Fichte.

Yeah, right. It's just simple and barely-disguised xenophobia. Living in a self-contained country won't lead to a sense of "national honour". Instead it will just foster closed-minded stupidity.

Jerry Mander, an ecologist... believed that one of the problems with globalisation was that it encouraged ‘voracious consumerism’... Like Fichte before them, today’s Left-wing anti-globalisation activists often argue that free trade disproportionately benefits wealthy nations while harming poorer ones. In this view, autarky becomes the natural path to both domestic and international social justice.... Progressive thought has long carried a current of economic isolationism. Yet, as recent history makes clear, the drive toward self-sufficiency is by no means confined to the Left or to environmentalist movements.

These sound like crazy people, more than anyone I'd normally associate with left-wing activists (excepting the possible "let's all go and live in the trees" types of loonies), let alone progressives. Saying it's "by no means confined to the left" is a mad statement, like claiming that empire-building is by no means confined to the British. Which segues nicely to the next segments.

Then there are some examples of when autarky is at least understandable, but there are heavily extenuating circumstances :

Swadeshi was Gandhi’s antidote to what he saw as the predatory imperial capitalism of the British. And that mindset of India needing self-sufficiency remained long after independence was achieved. 

‘Independence means self-reliance,’ stated Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha declaration. For him, autarky and his distinctive vision of African socialism were inseparable. 

In January 1790, George Washington, the first president of the United States, rose to deliver his first message to the US Congress: ‘A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined,’ he declared, ‘and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.’

Okay, yes, the British have a lot to answer for. Fair enough. Absolutely fair enough. But these seem like such specific examples that they're of no help in understanding the present mood at all. Sure, if you're just thrown off an oppressor, of course you're going to want to be self-reliant ! That's obvious. The problem is that this is happening in countries which have not been subject to any sort of oppression whatsoever, yet the right have, for example, managed to somewhat successfully paint the European Union as some sort of modern-day German (read : Nazi) hegemony. And this difference between true oppression, the legitimate need for freedom, and manufactured oppression – that's what really matters.

To return to the empire-builder's own perspective :

The road to national self-preservation for the former lance-corporal would have to run through a radical programme of building national self-sufficiency. And he believed that Germany’s salvation lay in conquering and exploiting the rural bounty of lands to the east, thus gaining the notorious Lebensraum (‘living space’).

I mean, come on. In what world does "self reliancy" mean "conquest and enslavement of others" ? That's crazy, and I have a very hard time seeing why the author included it. All it does is reinforce the message that it's no more than a presentable version of xenophobia. No noble desire for self-control, just a paranoid dislike of foreigners. It's that simple.

Here, though, is a stranger puzzle :

Mencius Moldbug, the blogging alias of the US computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, is a prominent tech-authoritarian theorist whose influence extends to some Trump-aligned politicians and wealthy backers. Yarvin advocates dismantling US democracy in favour of a monarchy or a national ‘CEO’-like figure. As international travel collapsed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Yarvin saw his moment, not just tolerating isolationism ‘but promoting it’. 

The right-wing tech CEO is something I don't get. Technological breakthroughs require scientific advancements, which are based on cooperation at all scales of society. So just why so many techbros fall prey to this cognitive dissonance is something I struggle with. To me, cool new tech gadgets are the easy selling point for scientific research. That anyone would seek to pervert this into the goal of dismantling democracy and soliciting isolationism is both absolutely bonkers and at the same time viscerally disgusting.

So what makes the autarkic urge so persistent? That protean ability to be moulded and affixed to a seemingly endless host of ideologies is surely key. But perhaps it’s also that umbilical link in autarky – evident since the days of ancient Greece – between personal morality and the question of how we should relate to each other within communities and between communities. To be successful, political movements have to appeal to something fundamental in everyone’s nature. Our innate sense of the virtue of self-reliance is often the foundation stone on which they build.

Nah mate, it's xenophobia. Self-reliance as meaning self-improvement is something everyone endorses (especially if of the sexy miniskirt variety*), but I'm not convinced that the author has at all demonstrated that this is really what's appealing about modern authoritarians. Nor am I convinced that autarky isn't (by far) dominated by the conservative economic right, with any appeal to the progressive left being firmly limited to a few tail-end-of-the-Gaussian weirdos. The author has, I think, both over-thought and under-sold their case.

* Do they count as self-improvement ? Shut up, they do.

This is a shame. It remains a difficulty to explain how the right has succeeded in the face of a liberal society that is/was generally prosperous (however imperfect); we can venture xenophobia, media manipulation, unrealistic expectations, and various others that seem more plausible than an appeal to "self reliance". Still, something unsatisfying remains about the situation in which people keep voting for options which are so, so obviously against their own interests.

 I prefer to end with a much-used and much-needed quote from Tolkien. :

The wide world is all about you. You can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Or possibly, to bring this back to the somewhat anarchic introduction with which this post began, a quote instead from Marge Simpson :

There's no shame in being pariahs.

Autarky is a daft notion. Just look at North Korea.

Liberalism And The Sealt Belt Probelm

Every once in a while, I come across a meme that's more provocative than the usual self-righteous bullshit that pervades my social media feed. Now, this one certainly does feel like the typical holier-than-thou variety...

... but that last one got me thinking. The others are straightforwardly due to self-interest. But it's maybe less obvious why the media should be uninterested in providing the truth. 

One answer comes from the underrated Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, in which a newspaper editor tries to instigate World War III (through careful misinformation and manipulation) to drum up sales. It's very silly, but good lord has its main theme aged well. Still, surely in reality plenty of interesting stuff actually happens which ought to sell copy easily enough. "Lack of interesting stories" doesn't seem like a credible motivation for lying, still less in starting a war.

A key component of the meme, though, is "a world run by". This is different from the real-world situation in which the various components of society are roughly in some sort of balance. It suggests instead a weird, top-heavy power structure in which one group has become uniquely privileged. This is a big difference to reality. If the media is not unduly powerful (and is independent of other power groups), it's in their own interest to provide the truth because there's more than enough corruption for them to report on anyway.

Or at least, we might naively assume so, at least for the purposes of what I want to explore here.

Clearly if the media themselves were in charge, or more pertinently if they had undue influence, it would not be in their own interests to report on the truth (not the whole of it, any rate). As the movers and shakers, reporting on their own corruption would do them little good – it would commit the cardinal sin of harming sales and ruining their bottom line.

So a media-heavy power structure would indeed "never know the truth", in a sense. I think it would be more accurately be described as being drenched in perpetual bullshit : a media-ocracy would have no problem reporting the truth when it served the journalist's interests, but would equally have no scruples about barefaced lying when that was more to their advantage.

The optimal structure of society is much too big an ask for this post, but I would also briefly refer to this meme as well :

True, the specific economic realities aren't really directly comparable, but the point of the meme is surely the moral intention rather than fiscal policy...

STOP ! I don't want to go down that road. Instead, what the first meme mainly got me thinking about was.... seatbelts.

Yeah, seatbelts. See, this to me has always seemed like a possible weakness in classical liberal theory. If the idea is that we should allow everyone to behave as they wish so long as it doesn't interfere with others*, doesn't that mean we should allow people to ignore their own seatbelts ? How can we fine people or take away their driving licenses for only putting themselves at risk ?

*Excepting that we're allowed to discuss with them and to try and persuade them of right action when we disagree with their choices.

Well, if they really do only put themselves at risk, maybe we can't. Similarly, we don't generally suggest outright bans on smoking, only on smoking in public areas where others are affected. The restraint afforded by a seatbelt, on the other hand, can also help drivers maintain control of their vehicles and thus make their own driving safer, thus helping protect other people as well.

That's were the media comes back in. Here the consumer has to bear a measure of responsibility as well as the producer. Sure, we can rant and rave about the manufacture (and it often is manufacture, not reporting) of clickbait and ragebait, but we can also choose not to consume it. The problem is that we don't. Lots of people actually enjoy this kind of content : if they didn't, the market would have self-corrected by now. Markets are far from perfect at this, but it does happen.

Excessive consumption of garbage media by a lone individual does little direct harm to anyone except themselves. If they want to be an idiotic dumbass, one might think, then that's on them. The problem is that true hermits are nearly non-existent, and one stupid person has to interact with everyone else. The old adage that bullshit takes more than an order of magnitude more effort to refute than to produce is correct, so one person sinking into the addictive clickswarm of useless prattling articles is doing more than just harming themselves. Like a virus, they afflict everyone they come into contact with : to bring them back to sanity requires a protracted effort of their community, if it's even possible.

The tragedy is that the media production of these articles is not entirely the result of cynical profiteering. It's because we really do enjoy them. It's not all corruption and exploitation – it's also just human nature.

So, maybe, what we have to do is treat this deleterious effect on mental health in the same way we treat physically harmful activities. Suppose that someone is in a situation where removing the seat belt really would only risk themselves and no other. There, we would still protest that allowing rare exceptions does more good than harm. It's easier, and better overall, to make wearing seatbelts a blanket rule : it inflicts only the most minor of inconveniences on a tiny minority for the sake of the (much more valuable) effect of protecting a large number of lives.

And we might even go further. We might allow ourselves to say, "this is for your own good -– we don't want you to die, so we won't allow you to take this pointless risk". People simply don't always know what's best for themselves; we might also take the angle that an injury suffered as a result of ill judgement requires resources we aren't prepared to utilise when we could have prevented it instead.

Managing the media as component of mental health would also allow us to control a public health crisis. A few smokers are something we can handle; an epidemic of lung cancer is clearly something we want to avoid. A few stupid people are entertaining; a horde of them are one of the most dangerous forces on the planet.

This is perhaps an illiberal position. The problem is that relatively few people are interested in, or have the time to, consider detailed reports and the full context of a story. Bad journalism thrives in part because people don't want good journalism : they want the emotion-inducing nonsense instead. And just as the odd cigarette or two won't do anyone much harm, but the risk of addiction may be deemed too great (certainly we accept this for some drugs, at any rate), so too may it be for crappy journalism. There's a sort-of "tragedy of the commons" about the whole thing, in the sense that one person reading one bit of celebrity gossip causes zero harm, but the cumulative effect can be seriously hazardous to community health. 

If we are prepared to ever say, "we can't allow you to do this enjoyable thing – we've found the consequences for society outweigh the benefits for the individual", then surely the ability to think clearly and rationally is something to which we should apply this reasoning. 

Obviously, we cannot regulate intelligence, nor prevent stupidity. But we can take action to make it becoming worse than it otherwise could be. And following another liberal principle, we can also minimise these interventions, making the smallest restrictions for the greatest gain. So this doesn't mean running wild with regulations or banning everything left right and centre, which would just replace one problem with another. We proceed on a case-by-case basis : this is problematic, apply what regulations are required to restrict it (using outright bans only as a last resort, the goal should more be a realistic minimising of bad behaviour than utter prevention); this is truly harmless, let everyone go nuts.

Finally, in order to improve any ability it must be operated at its limits. Consuming and analysing every piece of media clickbait, or more to the point, every bit of verbal effluence that spews from Trump's anus – sorry, mouth – is unhealthy. It is, I suggest, literally weaponised incompetence, designed to keep people stupid by having them exercise their brainpower in utterly unproductive engagement. Even if it doesn't actually degrade critical thinking skills, at the very least it becomes a pointless distraction. Endlessly proving that the latest thing that Trump said is wrong is counterproductive. We know he's a moron ! Saying it a thousand times for a thousand different reasons is unnecessary, fucking exhausting, and worse – every moment spent analysing the latest bit of garbage is a wasted opportunity from working out how to overthrow this deplorable fascist monster.

Rant over. I do not believe in maintaining a liberal society through illiberal means, but I trust that this is not what I'm suggesting. Rather, if we know that an activity leads away from our goal, we have to take steps to avoid it. If an activity is seemingly harmless and only affects an individual, but actually turns out to have provably harmful effects on the whole of society, then we don't ignore it. We rarely ban but frequently regulate to keep things from spiralling out of control. Sometimes, we surrender our own judgement as being inferior to that of experts, and allow them – under proper accountability -– to save us from ourselves.

An Astonishing Level of Humanisation

I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before and I can't really think of much to add to that post. In brief, there are plenty of cases where the kind of language I'd use about certain people in ordinary conversation wouldn't be appropriate online, where the differences between rhetoric and genuine advocacy are often easily misunderstood. There are, of course, cases where I believe violent action should happen (violence is sometimes necessary and even actively desirable), but often "should" is in a highly abstract moral sense : that is, it would be right if this thing happened, as opposed to, "I want to join/start/support an actual mob". Likewise there are things I would endorse after the fact, wouldn't lose any sleep over if they occurred, but wouldn't ever actively instigate.

But I'm in danger of just re-running that whole post. I might do that at some point, given recent degenerations of major social media outlets into fascist safe spaces. Not today though.

Instead, what I want to mention is this bizarre piece in The Atlantic about the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, and how this is being outright celebrated across the internet. The Atlantic, I have to say, is a truly strange publication. Sometimes it offers highly intelligent, comprehensive reviews that provide in-depth context to a story, and sometimes it goes off on bizarre rants about how subtitles are basically worse than the Holocaust. This piece is much closer to the latter.

For some context of my own, I got really quite disgusted by some of the reaction to the deaths of those aboard the Titan submersible a couple of years ago. Sure, the company who designed and operated the Titan seem shady as hell, but I saw no evidence that this was true of the passengers. Rejoicing because some people died simply because they were rich ? What's wrong with you ?

This time my sympathies lie elsewhere. Two particular quotes do often come to mind :

For the corrupt man it's better not to be alive, for he necessarily lives badly. – Plato

No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. – Nye Bevan (founder of the NHS)

Obviously, some violence is justifiable in some conditions. Only the most diehard pacifist would argue otherwise; pretty much everyone else would agree that you're allowed to fight back against oppression. The Atlantic piece does not seem to understand that at all. It seems to actively confuse simply "being a person" with "being a good person". The title, "An Astonishing Level of Dehumanisation" aptly sets the tone, and as the piece elaborates :

At Jewell’s South Hamilton High School, the Times reported, Thompson was valedictorian, a star athlete, homecoming king, and class president. A teacher described Thompson as an excellent student, a model person, “a super kid.” As a corporate leader, he kept a low profile; friends and colleagues remembered him as mild-mannered and humble, down-to-earth and self-deprecating. He was a passionate advocate for the Special Olympics and a devoted father to his sons, Bryce and Dane. His obituary described his love for his sons as “limitless.”

“Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives,” his wife, Paulette Thompson, told Fox News.

Err, hang on. All murderers are human. Very few indeed are truly monstrous, moustache-twirling pantomime villains cackling with delight as they torture kittens. All of them are somebody's son or daughter. Few indeed (though I think not none, despite the claims of various ancient philosophers) are malevolent purely for the sake of being malicious. Most people believe they're acting correctly most of the time – and that's precisely what makes the worse sort of villains so dangerous. 

Which means that just because it's absurd to equate "being a billionaire" with "being evil", it doesn't follow that the two are mutually exclusive either. No demographic – none at all, be it race, creed, religious affiliation, wealth, anything – has a monopoly on evil. When it comes to judging whether someone is good or bad, you have to fully consider the individual. You can't reduce it to demographics.

So the mere fact of Thompson's humanity simply isn't relevant to the case here. I don't have a hard time believing he loved his family or had perfectly ordinary, harmless interests outside his career. Without ever having heard of the guy before his death, I'm not the least bit surprised that other people loved him. I don't doubt it. Instead I claim it doesn't matter. Not at all.

Why ? Because that doesn't negate his actions as a CEO. Being loved, taking care of one's pets and/or elderly relatives, helping the disabled... none of that would give anyone pause for thought in condemning someone for, say, stabbing a stranger in the street. So it seems awfully strange to me to use any of this to mourn the passing of someone who seems to be a straightforward, clear-cut, self-serving villain. As AOC said :

For anyone who is confused or shocking or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.

I mean... yeah ? When you hear about the kind of claims Thompson's company denied people, when you hear how many they denied compared to other companies, it's hard to see them acting as anything other than a force of oppression, nakedly profiting from the misery and suffering of the masses. It's very hard indeed to see it as anything other than a black-and-white case of this guy being the villain and the other side... not. 

Should he have been murdered ? No, of course not ! I mean it. What should have happened is that America realised it had a phenomenally stupid, ludicrously inegalitarian society and healthcare system and restructured itself accordingly; what should have happened is that Thompson spent his billions on providing healthcare to those less fortunate on the grounds that that would be patently the right thing to do. None of that happened or showed any indication of happening. And if you cut off all legal avenues of change to people, or, worse, make it so that they technically have legal possibilities but make them de facto impossible to actually exploit... well, look at history. Look at how democracy started. It wasn't because the tyrants generously decided to stop being oppressive one fine Greek morning.

The Atlantic nutjob raises another line of argument :

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand — or don’t seem to want to understand — is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care... if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Reality of scarcity, eh ? Doesn't seem very plausible when some have basically enough money to live in a solid gold house and others, err, don't. Doesn't seem very plausible when plenty of countries are able to provide free or affordable healthcare to their whole population and the US chooses not to. And it certainly doesn't seem very plausible given the obscene levels of wealth at work in the health industry itself, let alone that UnitedHealthcare denies claims at a rate twice the industry average. Or when you hear the horror stories about denying payments for anaesthetic and the like. And if even in the US, with its jaw-droppingly awful insurance system, most companies manage to do so much better than this, then you can't give UnitedHealthcare the excuse that everyone does it by necessity. That's an absurd claim to make. 

There’s legitimacy in the frustration and anger many people feel. Nevertheless, turning to lethal violence is horrifying and ominous. So, too, is applauding and justifying assassinations...  consider what happens when the logic of those who are celebrating Mangione is applied to a different issue.  

The list of organizations and individuals who could be targeted because their critics on the left or on the right believe they support policies that lead to suffering or death is endless: gun-rights lobbies; those who want to defund the police; individuals opposing childhood vaccinations, and those who administer them; groups that want to cut funding for the global AIDS initiative; those that want the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accords; those that oppose a higher minimum wage. So who decides which Americans are guilty of “social murder”?

This is a (somewhat) better point. It's a perfectly fine to note that the rule of law is important. Nobody wants anarchy or the tyranny of the mob; again, changing the system so that people wouldn't have felt oppressed would be, by far, the better outcome. It's also fair to point out that those in charge have to think differently and more statistically than the rest of us. That's why we have them, to make the difficult choices we can't make ourselves. Somebody has to be the one to make the unpopular choices; that we disagree with them is not as problematic as when we get mad at them for simply making the choice at all.

On that note : it isn't really fair to equate the actions of a madman with a shotgun who goes on a killing spree with those of a CEO, or political leader, whose (in)actions cause far greater causalities. The one voluntarily chooses evil, the other often has no choice but to decide between the lesser of two evils. The idea that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil is wrong-headed, because some level of "social murder" is unavoidable. But... and it's a big but... this doesn't mean that some CEOs and executives aren't straightforward villains either. Just because some unpleasant choices are unavoidable doesn't mean that all of them are. It certainly doesn't mean that some CEOs and leaders aren't criminally awful people. "Social murder" may not be morally equivalent to regular murder, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be stopped or its consequences are less real.

And I think there's also a fair helping of whataboutism at work here. Again, being rich hardly by itself equates with being a villain; likewise, each issue that polarises people is something to be dealt with on an individual basis, not something that can be readily generalised. Nor is it fair to equate "those who support policies" with "those who actively implement or profit monetarily from those policies". 

Crucially, while it may be indeed "horrifying and ominous" to resort to violence, certain aspects of American life are already horrifying and ominous. Pointing out that the horrible nature of the situation and the potential for further violence only ducks the question of how else the oppressed people, exactly, are supposed to change their lot; why are they supposed to suffer oppression and corporate violence routinely but are forbidden to retaliate ? This is cowering from the root cause of the problem. Again, nobody wants anarchy and violence, but you won't avoid it merely by declaring that such an outcome is bad. You have to tackle the issues that led here, and not all of those are at all equal. Crying, "slippery slope !" is nowhere near adequate to the task at hand.

This is not, I hasten to add, advocating for holding the rich and powerful literally hostage. Far from it. We are not, by nature, in a "war against all" in which peaceful coexistence is only maintained by continuous threats – that is cynical dystopian nonsense, of which more in the links. No, what I'm saying is that class wars only arise when the social contract fails, when unreasonable and unbearable demands are brought with no possibility of changing or avoiding them. Treat people fairly and reasonably and most of them will respond in kind. Treat people kindly and they won't have any grievances to address, still less any need or inclination to resort to pointless violence.

The thing is, in the end it doesn't really matter if you think this is "right" or not. What really matters is that if you push people too far for long enough, they will fight back. Whether or not they "should" is absolutely irrelevant. If you don't want them to, you have to either address their concerns or change their minds. Doing nothing is a recipe for disaster.

Finally :

The American health-care system certainly has its flaws, but those are hardly the fault of UnitedHealthcare alone. Nations such as the United Kingdom, which offer the sort of single-payer public health care that Tolentino extolls, have long wait lists for treatment, significant staff shortages, and outdated hospital infrastructure. Public satisfaction with the U.K.’s National Health Service is at a 40-year low; only 29 percent of the British public is “quite satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the NHS.

Srsly ? Sure, the NHS is in trouble, but that might have had something to do with, oh, I don't know, 14 years of Tory austerity, perhaps. During the Blair era it was routinely cited as one of the best in the world. Just as the author omits to mention how bad UnitedHealthcare is in comparison with other health insurance companies, not providing context for the UK's difficulties is disingenuous in the extreme. The author's following quote about how bad the service is I find to be downright misleading, and utterly missing the fact that we have free healthcare for all while the Americans don't.

I'm not sure I've succeeded in managing the fine line I've tried to walk. My point really is that the Atlantic arguments don't make a lot of sense. Just because someone isn't entirely evil doesn't mean they don't commit awful acts. Just because they aren't of the same moral category as someone who derives sadistic pleasure from torturing their victims doesn't mean they aren't committing oppressive, immoral acts. I find it unfair to simply say that "violence is bad" without acknowledging that a violent response was undertaken only in retaliation to acts of violent oppression. And equating different healthcare systems which are demonstrably unequal is outright misinformation. Finally, being appalled by one particular kind of violence should not be an excuse to avoid dealing with the other. Granted, they're not the same. But the consequences are, and you can't avoid dealing with the one merely by saying that the other is bad. It doesn't matter how you think people should behave – push them far enough, and eventually they will snap.

The Real Manufacturing Crisis

 "We need to get Britain building again" is a routine cry of any British politician wishing to stoke populist sentiment in the least offensive way possible. Perhaps it's even true. Maybe we do need a bigger manufacturing sector, though our days as the world’s industrial superpower are, quite definitely, long dead.

What we remain very good at indeed, however, is manufacturing a political crisis. Because there's all the current political situation is : manufactured. Almost all of the so-called problems are of no significance whatever, and with a single potential exception, the rest are so routine that expecting their removal is hopelessly naïve. I put it to you, dear reader, that if you can't be satisfied with the current government then your standards are so ludicrously high you should give up following politics altogether. With demands like this, you'll always be wallowing in the self-loathing of extreme cynicism.

This may all seem like a very bold claim in itself. It shouldn't be. It should be bloody obvious, and sometimes I despair that the Great British Public are a feckin' gormless bunch of twats. This I will return to at the end.

First I should justify what I'm talking about. I've covered my stance on the current Labour Party, now the party of government, many times before, but particularly here and here. That last one, covering the moment of the major longed-for election, you might wonder if it was now tainted by the realisations – according to the press – that Labour are in fact no better than the rest of the political class. To which my answer is a provisional but nonetheless emphatic NO.

Consider how the current situation started : with the shocking "revelation" that Starmer had declared some donations a bit late. There it could and should have ended, but because there was nothing else on TV, the press decided to run with it and dig deeper. Now the major outlets began running stories Private Eye has covered for months already; that Starmer and some members of Labour have – allegedly – taken donations (!)*. All this was known, public knowledge for months – a sure sign of a manufactured rather than genuine "scandal". These donations have rarely been directly financial but usually in kind; use of accommodations here, concert tickets there, and yes, some fancy clothes as well, along with the hiring of staff.

* I'm presuming that the bracketed exclamation mark is the universal symbol for feigned surprise.

I do not, I should say, think it's right and proper for politicians to receive ALL this stuff, even if they declare it. But I absolutely expect them to, and look with dismayed amazement at those who are apparently surprised by it. You seriously didn't think that politicians don't get a measure of special treatment? REALLY? Come off it. Of course you did.

Those donations which I do see as improper – come on, you can buy your own clothes, and Lammy's claim that "leaders need to look their best" was laughably weak – can easily be redressed by returning them and apologizing. That's it. No further action needed. For the rest, the media have blown things way out of proportion. You can't buy the box Starmer was granted to watch the football any more than you can rent a room in Lord Ali's flat – it's not available for sale, but a private facility made available at the owner's discretion. Monetary values have to be entered in the records, but they're by no means real. Nor is there anything wrong, intrinsically, in private institutions and individuals making these facilities available on their own choice.

(Incidentally, I'd bet heavily that Boris and his cronies would have had a lot more donations like this and simply not declared them at all.)

Claims that this was somehow improper in Private Eye were never very convincing. Often the monetary value estimated was so low that it simply beggars belief that it had any chance of influencing government policy. Right, so gambling regulations are going to change because one minister once had a free coupon for the races, are they ? Yeah, right. As for Lord Ali – he's a Labour peer ! What exactly is supposed to be the problem with Labour peers giving aid to the, err, Labour Party? Are they bribing themselves, somehow? It doesn't make much sense to me at all. And claiming that Starmer just shouldn't go to the football... for goodness sake ! All this time spent denouncing that politicians are out of touch, then we finally get one who genuinely loves the nation's favourite sport... and you want him to stop ? Because he had access to a special area the public can't reach ? What in God's name is wrong with you ?

The Eye made an obviously erroneous declaration that ministers should make charitable donations in lieu of services rendered. Right, because if you stay at your friend's house and they won't accept payment, you should give it to charity instead, because... what ? And HIGNFY claimed that Labour were no better than the Tories in terms of sleazy corruption, something I think may be one of Ian Hislop's (a fine man and a national treasure to be sure*) silliest claims. Not to mention the melodramatic, exasperating hypocrisy of a media outlet trying to tell politicians that they shouldn’t accept the hospitality they themselves provide !

* I renewed my subscription to the Eye, but more on that in a future post.

In other words : "Here, have a delicious cookie. OH MY GOD THIS MAN IS A MONSTER HE ATE THE COOKIE !"

Sure, whatever dude.

The real story here is, man who makes the rules follows the rules. Okay, some of the donations, even though properly declared, should be returned. But that should be the end of it. At most, some questions need to be asked about how influential donors might be in relation to policy, but this is hardly the bombshell the media think it is. Return goods, apologize, move on. This isn’t anything like the expense scandal or the shifty Russian connections under BoJo.

‘But’, one might object, ‘what about the poor pensioners freezing to death naked and alone while Starmer’s banging Taylor Swift?’. This, too, my friends, is complete bollocks. Fuel payments should ALWAYS have been means tested – given that many even give the money away anyway, this is a good thing to implement ! Rising pensions this year and next more than offset the loss, so no, of course there was no need for the government to do an impact assessment. That itself would have been a complete waste of time. Complainants never give any numbers on this; it’s all emotional rhetoric and nothing else. And, newsflash, politicians make a lot of money, so yes, they’re going to get to do things that most of us don’t. That's just reality.

Everything here has been properly declared and is fully transparent. That the media have just now decided to bother looking doesn’t magically make it worse. Nor do claims that just because not everyone will get exactly what they want, there will be a return to austerity, have any merit to them. Similarly, Rosie Duffield’s claim that Starmer has a problem with women seems ludicrously hollow after a 30-second glance at the Cabinet. Like Dianne Abbot's relentless obsessions with claiming special status as a permanent victim, it all looks rather childish and silly.

I despair of this country, I really do. What really set me off was an especially entitled pensioner moaning that they weren’t getting a 22% pay rise. Come on. Junior doctors are paid an absolute pittance for an incredibly demanding and important job. Don’t you want the guy in charge of your prostate to have the money they deserve ? God knows pensioners need doctors most of all.

I shall pass over the complete non-story that Sue Gray earns more than the PM; God alone knows why anyone would care. As for the wild accusations that climate protestors get harsher sentences than racist actions, that is little better than far-right propaganda. It’s amusingly stupid claim. Unless I missed something monumental, we have an independent judiciary, so this thinly-veiled accusation that Starmer personally decides on sentencing is just dumb. There are and always will be judges who make bad choices. Blaming the government for this is moronic.

I want to end on a more general point. We've been sold Tory fantasies for years that we can have our cake and eat everyone else's too, that a magical unicorn will build us 40 new hospitals and kick out all those pesky immigrants. The result is enormously unrealistic expectations of what can be accomplished. And now at last the cold wet flannel of reality is slapping us full in the face. The government, by taking serious, credible actions to remedy the last 14 years of stupidity, is the wake-up call we so desperately need. True, the one thing they haven't got right, where they've genuinely failed, is messaging, in not fighting back against newspaper nonsense. They've lost control of the narrative, and that, unavoidably, is a serious problem that they'll need to remedy.

In terms of actually running the country though, I say bravo ! We've already had substantial and much-needed pay rises for public sector workers (even if I might not agree train drivers needed this), the end of Tory anti-strike laws and anti-onshore wind power, the beginning of nationalising energy and rail, the end of the deplorable and inhuman Rwanda "policy", the creation of a national wealth fund, a commitment to green energy that, however flawed it may be, is leaps ahead of anything from the Tories, reform of renting that (among other things) stops no-fault evictions... in three months. Three months ! And people are worried because of freebies that cost them the taxpayer nothing. Good grief.

This is stupid. Fantasy politics perhaps played a role in the idea that politicians should, would, or could ever be moral saints; this is an illusion we desperately need to snap out of. The hypocrisy of pretending that Labour are in any way comparable to the last Tory governments is truly exasperating; to hear Starmer labelled as a "liar" for both telling hard truths – we're in a mess – and for properly declaring donations is a reminder of just how gullible the Great British Public can be, as well as how effective the media can be at making mountains from molehills. Enough of this. Time to awaken from our damn-fool Utopian fantasies and make politics serious again.

Starmer, Starmer, Starmer

As the UK general election enters the endgame, a few quick thoughts on the overwhelmingly-probable next Prime Minister and his New-New-Labour party.

First, much has been made of the so-called U-turns despite Labour not being in actual power yet. I set this out here so I won't go through it again, but I do want to add just how unclear some of the positions are, yet how feverently people insist on believing them as being one thing or another. For example, back in April the Financial Times reported how Gordon Brown had been actively working with Keir Starmer on reorganising the Cabinet, only for Sky News to report that Brown hated the new idea. The two reports were so at odds it was hard to know what to think; one had Brown as being instrumental to the process, the other only as a reactionary commentator.

(If anyone really wants me to I will try and dig up the exact links, but this is irksome)

It's the same with some of the current Labour policies. And to be fair, some of the missteps have been of Labour's own making. Putting down a solid number of £28 billion per year for investment in green jobs, stating in no uncertain terms that the House of Lords would be replaced in the first term and then appearing to row back on this... the problem is not the change of policies, but the marketing around them. It's fine to realise you need to change direction, the problem is how confidently you express that you can deliver them initially. On the other hand, people hate politicians being non-committal, so to quite a large degree, this is a no-win situation.

Yet the divide between Labour and the Tories is sharp in the extreme. My alignment with the parties based purely on their policies is 89% Labour, 36% Tory. So why people are making mountains out of molehills out of every Labour move to appeal to the centre / centre-right... I don't know. Allusion to the Nazis... FFS ! This kind of ultra-cynicism will be the death of us; truly, the perfect is the bitterest enemy of the good. I mean, it's completely fine to say, "I don't agree with this particular policy", but this inference that there's some kind of lurch to the right (let alone to appeasing racists !) is to literally fall off a slippery slope. There just doesn't exist anywhere near the level of clarity needed to make that assertion. A report one day is routinely contradicted by another the next, almost always because the journalists read far too deeply into the most marginal of evidence.

As I see it, the political calculus here is complicated. Labour could go all-in ideological, fire up their base, go for a high turnout... but this risks losing the centrists, and unifying the right against them. Or, as they've chosen, they go for an uninspiring (with caveats I'll return to) but unthreatening approach that lets the right tear itself to bits. Turnout might be lower but the right goes into free-fall and meltdown at the same time. 

The evidence that this is the correct approach appears obvious. They tried the hardline tactic under Corbyn and collapsed, whereas the safely-safely approach appears to be reaping a bountiful harvest. Yes, they probably could be a bit more left, but FPTP delivers highly non-linear results, so why give the right any ammunition ? Far better, as Zelensky did in his own election campaign, to say absolutely bugger-all about anything controversial, especially culture wars. The downside is that I guess people read in whatever they want to read about whatever breadcrumb of information does happen to issue forth. Much is made of "they haven't ruled out X" even when they've said nothing much at all about X.

Nazi analogies though. Srsly. That takes some nerve.

Politics, unfortunately, is an art not a science, and more unfortunately still requires a degree of... wait for it... faith. There's no getting around this : you need ideology for the process to work. 

Let me explain with an example. Starmer did himself no favours at all by saying he was certain Labour would lose the 2019 election, despite having been involved with the manifesto and saying that Corbyn would make a great Prime Minister. The problem is that this exposes the naked lie of political reality, that sometimes you have to say things you don't believe. There was no way at all he could have been in Corbyn's shadow cabinet and not sung his praises, even though it was very clear at the time they disagreed strongly on Brexit. And equally, he can hardly turn around now and say, "I didn't really believe it at the time". 

The act of faith required is that politics and policies can be differentiated. That politicians will make rhetorical claims to advance their own interests (as they must), but that actual policies will be formulated and enacted in accordance with the evidence. That if specific details change (again, as they usually must), then the overall direction of travel remains broadly similar. 

While Starmer was foolish to bring up the 2019 election, journalists are also being extremely silly in pretending that there aren't some areas where politicians literally cannot avoid lying. But lies about what you plan to do in office and lies about what you think of your colleagues are scarcely the same thing, as I suspect we've all found out at some point or other.

The idea that Labour are a sort of "Tory Lite" is nevertheless palpable nonsense. Since 2019 we've had them call for a federal system of government, greatly expanded powers for local councils (radical de-centrism), replacing the Lords with a Council of Nations, nationalisation of rail and energy, enormous investment into the green sector, calls for greater protection of workers, a commitment (albeit a weak one) to look into proportional representation, and recently a similar consideration for lowering the voting age. Now I'm somewhat against that last one personally, but nothing seems like a starker contrast : the Tories want young people to do national service and make them work for free, while Labour would prefer to give them greater choices.

Tory Lite, my foot. Sod off.

Not all of these proposals have made it thus far. I'm not sure what happened to the call for federalisation or what's going on with the Lords (I would rather they reformed it than replaced it). But nationalisation of rail and energy are very much alive and kicking (we can only hope water will go the same way), as is a commitment to net zero by 2030 (the specific investment sum being a distraction). Along with a program of house-building and increases in hospital and dental appointments, this might not be a revolutionary proposal, but it certainly seems like a dramatic one nonetheless. Consider also that Labour are accused by some of being too boring and under-ambitious and by others of aiming for the unachievable, and this strongly suggests they've got the balance right.

And this brings me back to those caveats about the campaign being uninspiring. I rather disagree. In terms of actual policies, I concede the point. I'd rather promises of a four-day work-week, UBI, re-joining the EU, cracking down on the big banks rather than supporting them, wealth taxes, and a commitment to send Nigel Garbage to Rwanda. But I also accept that this wouldn't get them into power, and without power, all the ideals in the world won't do you a whit of good. 

Moreover, there's something about the political campaign I do find genuinely inspiring, something that Starmer did almost immediately : agreeing with the government when necessary. Labour didn't oppose lockdowns, it even wanted to go further. At a stroke, the whole "you're just opposing us because you're the Opposition" mentality died; credibility skyrockets when you're seen to genuinely disagree and not just because you're fulfilling a perfunctory role. Quite honestly I've been waiting all my adult life to see politics done like this; if imperfectly, then at least with a measure of good sense.

This has gone on longer than I intended but I'd like to direct your attention to three long-piece interviews with Starmer : one from the Sunday Times, one from the Financial Times, and one from the Guardian. They're all character pieces, but a few things might be of note :

• He's actually funny. All three interviews say this, with some of his closet aides not understanding his political persona or why he can't be himself in front of the cameras. 
• He's not introspective and doesn't give a damn about some of the more personal stuff – no phobias, no favourite novel. He really is very grey and bland in that sense.
• He loves football and beer, but doesn't see any need to connect this with politics. He genuinely sees politics as a time to be serious, not for small-talk and jokes. 
• He's extremely competitive, but wants respect from colleagues but not deference. He's extremely focused on winning power, and will ruthlessly cut down colleagues and policies alike in pursuit of this. As perhaps he should, given Labour's longer track record of dismal electoral failure. He certainly understands a basic lesson of British politics : win the centre, win the game. And equally importantly, be seen to be winning the centre.

Starmer may in some ways be incredibly boring as a politician, but largely this is to the good : he isn't proposing bridges over munitions dumps or any of the other fantasy politics of the Johnson era. He isn't necessarily conventional either, just constrained by circumstance. When Biden was elected I was wondering what "radical centrism" would look like for the UK : in just under a fortnight, barring a truly monumental upset, we'll begin to find out.

And to those who are still skeptical, that's okay. But look me in the eye and tell me Labour are no better than the Tories. Go on, I dare you. 

This mood among some that no change is either possible or desirable without an outright revolution... to my mind, this kind of fantasy "both sidesism" deserves an ugly death. Actual change, so long as overall positive, is worth any amount of impossibly utopian dreams of a magical wonderland that has no chance whatever of being realised.

More than one way to skin a Lord

This article from The Independent asks the obvious question of what, if anything, should replace the House of Lords if it were scrapped. It starts off a bit odd, noting that the Lords is "almost impossible to justify on any grounds other than their utility". Come again ? You can only justify its existence because it is in fact very useful ? I should have thought that would be more than enough to justify pretty much anything, really.

Anyway I'm just going to very briefly set down my own proposal here as a go-to reference. I will also note that Labour's plan isn't quite non-existent, but the idea of an elected "council of nations" is so vague as to be meaningless. Scrapping the upper House altogether would be ridiculous : it would make Parliament into a tyranny, as Oliver Cromwell already discovered. There's absolutely no point going down that road.

But I don't believe it's that difficult to come up with an alternative. What I would do would be :

• Restrict the number of voting peers to the same as the number of MPs.
• Immediately following each general election, peers eligible to sit and vote in the Lords would be chosen by lot from all existing peers, whose numbers would be drawn in accordance with proportional representation based on the election.
• Peers would be in some way affiliated with the major political parties but much more loosely than in the Commons, with no whipping system instructing them which way to vote on any issue whatsoever.
• Peers would not necessarily be appointed by political parties directly. Their total number would be unlimited (honours being handed out on some general merit-based principle each year), only the number allowed to sit and vote would be restricted.
• Nominations would be subject to an independent panel and not just at the behest of any one party. It would be possible to nominate for political service, but not for political donations alone : would-be peers would have to some sort of relevant experience of actually doing something.
• Powers for the Lords to delay or even block legislation might be increased, with the Commons only able to override with a two-thirds majority free vote and possibly requiring MPs from multiple parties.

This would give us a political system that uses representation and appointment, sortition and proportional representation all at once. It also utterly avoids any attempt by any government to pack the Lords in its favour.

A big problem with any alternative elected chamber is of course, "why wouldn't it just be the same as the Commons", and thus not acting as any sort of check at all. So let's just not bother with that. No, it's a good thing to have the proposed laws checked by a body formed on a different basis. As I noted at some length previously, democracy is best protected by non-democratic processes. As a general principle, I consider diversity key here. The more people of different ideologies in different backgrounds in bodies formed from different processes agree on something, the more likely this is to be correct. Hence a deliberate blending of democracy with other selection mechanisms.

Of course I haven't fleshed out any details because that's not the point. I'm not wedded to this either; it just seems like the most obvious solution to me. I'm perfectly open to alternatives. Show me a system of choosing an upper chamber that will at least given some degree of tension with the Commons and I'm listening.

Review : Civil Wars of the Three Kingdoms

My quest to fill in the huge gap in my history knowledge concerning the Civil War has taken a enormous stride with the completion of Trevor Royle's mighty tome, Civil War : The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This 800+ page epic is about as comprehensive as any popular reader like myself is ever going to want.

Previously, I've looked at the war tangentially with Witchfinders and The Ruin of All Witches, as well as more directly at the social side of things in The English Civil War, and in some detail to its aftermath in Providence Lost. But none of these much cover the military stuff, and trying to understand the impact of the war while neglecting the whole bit about tens of thousands of solider lining up to shoot each other feels like something of a rookie mistake.

Civil War makes amends for this in abundance. As both a military and political history it's almost outrageously thorough, to the point where I decided I needed a bit of a break and treated myself to the hardback illustrated version of The Hobbit by way of diversion. Not because I was bored, just because I needed to read something else for a bit. Then I plunged right back in. Civil War is a book which demands your immersion and requires a great deal of time, but it is, I think, well worth it.

The Review Bit 

It's almost impossible to write 800 pages of perfection so let me start with the negatives. There aren't many of these and they're all really quite minor : there's the occasional apparent contradiction*, especially near the start but this seems to fade as the book progresses; though very possibly I just needed time to get used to Royle's writing style. Conversely, there are two stock phrases he repeats, "the times were out of joint" and "would not have been human" which get used ever more frequently towards the end.

* E.g. why should Charles' marriage be considered to be lacking in passion because he didn't have a mistress ? I would have thought the exact opposite ! Likewise someone being described as both "young" and "in middle" life; various other minor things like this.

There are two somewhat more substantial difficulties. First, he doesn't give much in the way of physical descriptions of anything, be that persons or landscapes (at least nothing beyond the most superficial, e.g. the hill was tall and steep), or indeed the capabilities of the military hardware used at the time. This isn't a big deal but it would have enhanced the book to have more of this. Second, a more problematic omission is the lack of a list of cast of characters. With such a necessarily enormous number of protagonists, it's inevitable that it becomes difficult to remember who everyone is, regardless of the quality of the writing*.

* Though it's still not anywhere near the complexity of the Wars of the Roses.

Like many authors, Royle makes the mistake of naming people who really don't need to be named, which makes me try and keep them all in my head when honestly most of them aren't worth it since they only make an appearance for a page or two. Similarly, because the narrative is generally large-scale and political, sometimes individual characters become extremely important but only for a little while, and then the focus moves elsewhere and by the time they re-emerge I've completely forgotten who they are.

Against this, the major narrative is extremely well-written. Royle is adept at knowing when to divert into interesting anecdotes and never dwells excessively on them, always returning to the main theme promptly. In general the style is as clear as a book like this can ever hope to be, which is praise not to be dealt out casually. Chapters are short and focused so you always have a convenient break point, and there are no stupid "footnotes" at the back of the book you have to keep turning to.

But best of all, the balance between presenting the raw facts (as we know them) and the interpretation as to why events happened in the way they did, e.g. getting into the mindset of the various characters, trying to disentangle the major socio-political forces driving the events themselves, is just about perfect. Royle favours giving the facts and generally trying to let them speak for themselves, but provides in my opinion exactly the right amount of his own analysis to keep this interesting and provocative without forcing the book to support any particular agenda. And while it may not be quite the unputdownable page-turner that Dan Jones comparable-length The Plantagenets is, it's usually lively and interesting, occasionally thrilling, rarely dull, never tedious, and always commendably thorough. Managing this in a topic this complex and important is no small achievement.

All in all, the deficiencies are far outweighed by the positives. I'm going to give this one a very solid 8/10. It is, though, quite the tome, and a bit more descriptive, narrative zeal would have sealed it as an easy 9.

The summary bit

I kept overly-extensive notes on this, so much so that if I try and even summarise those, this post will end up unbearably long. So instead I'm just going to pick out the major themes which have stuck with me from memory, mainly things that were either new to me or which I happened to find particularly interesting for whatever reason. Forgive me, then, if I don't attempt a summary of the enormously complex character of Cromwell, but I think that if I were to begin such an undertaking, this post would never be finished. 

I should also note that Royle focuses on the military and political side of things, with not much said about the social aspect (for that, Purkiss' English Civil War is by design much better). The major exception is that he also gives a commendable coverage of the immediate aftermath, and though it's not of course as detailed as Lay's Providence Lost*, it's broader in scope and better describes the context needed to understand the consequences of the conflict.

* Royle only mentions Providence Island in one brief passing sentence; Lay used this for a whole series of chapters and those were by far his worst.

Reasons for the war

Unlike both Purkiss and Lay, Royle sticks closer to the line oft told to children and tourists : that the war was primarily fought for political reasons, rather than being a religious problem that bled out into politics. Sometimes he's quite explicit about that, though he does always acknowledge the heavy religious dimension which the children and tourists are basically never told at all. 

Rather than ignore it completely, Royle simply reverses the priorities compared to the other authors. In his view, it seems that the political tensions provoked the religious disagreements which in turn eventually got everyone so cross that they just had to have a jolly good fight to sort it all out, instead of being the other way around.

Reading between the lines a little, while Purkiss takes the fact that there were abject religious dimensions to the start of the war, Royle would probably say that this too shallow a reading of events, and that this aspect was just a manifestation of the political tensions that had been festering for years : had Charles had the political acumen to better deal with the problems, the differences of faith could very possibly have been accommodated harmoniously. No, in Royle's view it's very much politics which is the root cause here, not a matter of spiritual ideology.

In my totally unqualified judgement this rings true. The religious disputes were all about such utterly trivial minutiae that anyone with any real political acumen ought to have been able to deal with them without difficulty. Unfortunately Charles had precious little of this; his tendency towards political differences and power struggles was to either suppress or ignore them. Still, the bigger lesson for me remains that religion did play a major role here. It definitely was a factor in itself, if only partly independent of the political disputes in play.

Civil/not civil

Newspapers are wont to proclaim the times as being of ever-increasing political polarisation, but I think it's vital to remember that this has always waxed and waned. Anyone saying that things are better or worse "than ever before" had better be aware that such claims are almost certainly no more than rhetorical hyperbole.

In the movie Cromwell, in one early engagement the two sides line up amicably for battle and refuse to start until the appointed time. Royle makes no mention of this specific event, but it's clear this does reflect a real sentiment of the day. While the two sides did of course go to war and were happy to shoot and stab each other to settle their disagreements, initially... there were rules. Captured leaders would be imprisoned and ransomed, or simply fined and released – or even forgiven entirely. Mercy and clemency were expected and received from both sides. Fleeing enemies were not cut down. Civilians were generally not involved. Reconciliation was possible between individuals who happened to find themselves on opposite sides; friends rent asunder could and did forgive each other, even simply agreeing to disagree while maintaining communication throughout the war. As one commander wrote to his opposing friend :

"Hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... we are both upon the stage, and must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities".

This would seem to support Royle's assertion of a politically-driven conflict. That is, in a very literal sense, the primary disagreement was one of specific policy. It wasn't about an ideological world view, not a fundamental, identity or moral-based dispute. After all, it's much easier to forgive someone when they just disagree on the particulars of governmental structure than whether or not it's wrong to murder kittens. The propaganda may have been filled from the outset with high rhetoric, but the actions and communications of ordinary people caught up in the conflict tell a very different story. At least to begin with, at any rate.

In contrast to Purkiss, Royle's view of the war is one primarily of large-scale battles rather than individual disputes. The two views aren't mutually exclusive, however. Purkiss does seem to have neglected a lot of the set-piece battles*, as is quite proper for a social history. But Royle also makes it clear that the classical view of the war as brother-against-brother, fathers-against-sons, did occur, just not from the outset. Only as the conflict dragged on did all sides lose patience and resort to atrocities. By the end there was no question of chivalry or mercy; it became a violent bloodbath in which only might was right and the law was simply ignored, coming to a head, as it were**, with Charles.

* Royle appears to cover almost every single one of the many dozens of such large-scale actions that took place, of course in varying degrees of detail. Purkiss in my view unfairly downplays the importance of these, giving an impression that they were much less common than they actually were.
** Terrible pun intended.

The other very surprising thing I'd never heard of before, which I would never have guessed at, was that it became routine to sell captured soldiers into slavery. Yes, full-on slavery in the New World colonies. I don't think Royle gives the numbers (they may not even be known) but we're certainly talking thousands or more probably tens of thousands. And yes, of course, this pales in comparison to the later industrial-scale atrocity that was inflicted on non-European countries, but I find it remarkable that this is basically never mentioned at all. You just don't think of Englishmen selling fellow Englishmen into slavery. 

I would also have liked to learn more about "Captain Frances Dalziel, bastard daughter of the Earl or Carnwath, the commander of a troop of horsemen who rode under the banner of a black flag sporting a naked figure hanging from a gibbet". She sounds great.

Charles and Cromwell

Royle generally gives little (but not nothing) in the way of character analysis throughout, with the major exceptions (though there are others) of Cromwell and Charles. These are examined in vivid detail. What I found most surprising about Charles was that though often having the political decisiveness of a suicidal sheep, he was actually a perfectly able military commander. He took direct command of armies on several occasions and won victories in the field. He was also, even more surprisingly, a capable administrator too. In the period just before the war when he was ruling without Parliament. the country was getting along just fine, even being in outright prosperity, for some years. The problems came when he was unable to make a choice when both outcomes were disadvantageous, in which case he'd resort to delay, dissembling and flip-flopping. Basically he'd just fall apart and lie about the whole thing afterwards. He was incompetently duplicitous.

And the Cavaliers as a whole don't seem to have been particularly cavalier in the modern sense of the word. Sure, there was their dashing hero, the bold and decisive Prince Rupert, but apart from him ? Nah, not really. Again, in the main the generals were perfectly sensible, and even Rupert wasn't reckless. Bold and decisive he may have been, but he wasn't at all stupid; this was not an era of charging headlong into battle just because honour demanded it.

The other character I have to mention briefly is the tragic figure of Montrose. A singularly brilliant general who led Royalist forces in Scotland to victory after victory, his whole endeavour ultimately fell apart : with Scotland itself seemingly secure, the Scots simply refused to carry on the fight on English soil. Montrose could understand the military situation both strategically and tactically and bend it to his will, but politically... not so much. He doesn't seem to have grasped why the war was being fought or what the Scots were seeking, ultimately consigning him to the status of a mere footnote in history.

On Cromwell, I'm restricting myself to one specific topic here. For a while I've been wanting to understand just what it is about Cromwell that causes the Irish to hate him so, with many documentaries noting this but failing to mention what it was that Cromwell actually did. Royle at last redresses this. He hardly finds Cromwell to be the demon of Irish folklore, but all the same, he clearly did enough that you can understand how and why this perception has come to be the case.

Royle makes it clear that Ireland was treated differently throughout the whole campaign. As elsewhere, there was more at work than geography, making any maps of Royalist and Parliamentarian territories complicated and misleading, with no simple clear splits between the two. There were, in essence, supporters of both sides more or less everywhere, resulting in highly complex shifting allegiances and radically different Royalist treatment of both the Scots and the Irish depending on the circumstances : now unduly harsh, now bizarrely lenient; now people to be conquered, now a vital recruitment pool. Compounding all of this was that while the Royalists were generally Catholic and the Parliamentarians generally Protestant, there was by no means a perfect alignment here. 

But whereas Scotland was in the aftermath dealt with more or less as a full partner, Ireland was treated with oppression; it got none of the rewards that came from the ultimate political stability after the war but suffered even more harshly than other regions during the conflict. Irish causalities were much higher than in the other nations, and here Royle unfairly omits much discussion as to why this should be. He notes that many of the supposed atrocities committed by Cromwell are little more than provable fabrications... but all the same, the way in which Ireland was oppressed, particularly in how its land was divided, and... yeah, Royle presents more than enough to understand why Cromwell remains a figure of hate. One short passage will suffice :

Catholic families were transplanted from their lands in Ulster, Leinster and Munster because they were to be on the losing side and the winners, the English Protestants, had to be rewarded. In pursuit of that policy many thousands of Catholic Irish were also sold into slavery in the West Indies; some of these were vagrants from the main towns, but because women and children were included in their number it added to the feelings of persecution... Catholic worship was outlawed... up to 40,000 were banished.... The use of Irish Gaelic was also banned under earlier statutes and the net aim was to produce an anglicised Protestant society in which all traces of traditional Irish life would eventually disappear.

The word "brutal" hardly feels unfair here. Purkiss to her shame doesn't mention this at all.

New Worlds

Americans love the Magna Carta for some reason, but the Baron's Revolt is hardly a watershed moment in British political history. Not so the Civil War. Here is something that feels like a fulcrum, a pivotal part of history around which the world turned. Here, set paradoxically against a background of slavery, were ideas of freedom and egalitarianism mingled with monarchy, magic and mysticism all mixed with science and empiricism, ancient despots giving way to the as-yet primitive power of the people. It's an astonishing period, the transition between the medieval and the modern, and we need a lot more dramas set in this period and for everyone to shut up about the bloody fucking boring Tudors*.

* I'm being rhetorical, but there are far too many dramas and documentaries alike about Henry VIII which add exactly nothing to the story; even Elizabeth I has been overdone. Conversely, nothing at all is even said about Henry VII (except in Shakespeare's Richard III play) or Bloody Mary.

Royle makes it clear that the Civil War was only one stage in the process, and that the full transition away from absolute monarchy was not really complete until the Glorious Revolution a few decades later. But it was still of profound importance. None of it happened by design. What began as a "crisis by monthly instalments" of a king profoundly lacking in self-awareness eventually allowed truly revolutionary ideals and ideas to flourish, but it wasn't those ideas themselves that initially drove anyone.

The ideas which did emerge, however, are sometimes strikingly similar to modern positions. Here indeed is the birth of liberalism, with a pursuit of individual freedoms, income-based taxation, an insistence on Parliament to act as a safeguard for the safety and liberties of the people. At the Putney debates we see some hints of American ideals. Thomas Rainsborough :

"I think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under."

Later, the Rump Parliament passed acts which Royle himself describes as "using language that presaged the birth of the United States of America a century later" :

That the people are, under God, the original of all just power : that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the King or House of Peers be not had thereunto.

Other radicals were even more prescient, though distinctly un-American and far more of British liberal sensibilities, calling for the existence of a free health service. In 1649 ! Well, we had to wait a while...

Royle concludes with a brief, direct comparison with the Civil War and the War of Independence, going so far as to compare Washington and Cromwell. Both were real human beings, which means that neither can really be described as a hero or a villain in the truest sense, but people capable of heroics and villainy as the occasion demanded. Royle believes Cromwell was on the verge of accepting the crown when chance intervened to make it impossible; Washington would not have done so. Cromwell espoused liberal ideals (especially religious liberties, see Lay) but had no compunctions about persecuting the Irish or acting with flagrant hypocrisy as a tyrant when the situation turned against him; in America "emancipation did not extent to the black slaves, nor to the native Americans, and there was to be no tolerance for Loyalists... From that vantage point the struggle for freedom loses some of its gloss."

The only brief conclusion I will venture is that all these high-minded ideals were not the driving force of anything. Rather they emerged through bloody struggle and chance. It wasn't that someone decided one day that, "hang on a minute, having a ruler chosen by bloodline is no basis for a system of government" and then set out to overthrow the king. Instead this realisation dawned gradually on the battlefield in a war begun essentially by happenstance. Without a whole series of accidental mistakes, unfair oppression, and leaders at once perfectly able and catastrophically incapable of dealing with the situations put before them, these ideas would never have begun. With an able ruler, the ideas of egalitarianism would have languished in obscurity. 

It took the blood and muck of battle to bring the concept of equality into reality. These ideals were born in a very real world, not the ivory tower, and that means they were from their inception rife with implicit assumptions that some deserved more egalitarianism than others. Hypocrisy and inconsistency were rife. Instead of lamenting this, or cynically viewing these ideals as flawed, I think it speaks very strongly that there must be some fundamental truth behind them. What was found through harsh accident is, after all, still among our most cherished political principles, surviving uncounted upheavals and revolutions for more than three centuries. Like discovering penicillin, the role of accident doesn't mean it isn't true.