The Decade The Rich Won

I watched this two-part BBC documentary and thought it was very good. Never thought I would see Jeremy Corbyn, Steve Bannon and Nick Clegg in the same documentary. It’s a talking heads format with little or no narration, which I think works well here. Even with its ostensibly neutral format, it feels so anti-wealth that it could almost come from Channel 4 or the Guardian. And thank goodness for that. Of course, the problems of the rich getting richer go back much further than the last ten years, but the specificity is useful here.

My vague take on the financial crisis is that bailing out the banks was necessary. But it should have come with much, much harsher penalties for the bankers. Instead of giving them massive bonuses for taking absurd risks, the price of bailouts should have been removal of the upper echelons. Paying them ludicrous salaries “in order to attract the best people” was a complete fallacy; these were the people who caused the crisis and rewarding them makes no sense at all. It would have been far better for everyone had the likes of Fred Goodwin et al. sodded off. We should have agreed that banks were indeed (unfortunately) too big to fail, protected customer’s money, but as the price of this broken up the largest banks and made the sector boring and stable again.

I disagree with George Osbourne when he says that people make the case for investing regardless of the state of the economy, as though it necessarily means you shouldn't always invest. Yes, “austerity” works in some cases, when you’re going to take a predictable, short-term hit, and/or you do have some genuinely avoidable inefficiencies. But as a long-term political strategy it was shite. It’s self-evident that when things are going well you should invest in public resources. However, when things go badly, you still need to invest - it’s just a question of what you invest in. Obviously you can’t stimulate an economy by investing everything in, say, marmalade. That’s just never going to do much at all. But if you invest it in things people need : health, education, workplace training, infrastructure, you’ll get a trickle-up effect of a rising tide lifting all mixed metaphors. Trickle down doesn’t work because that’s not primarily where wealth is generated. Give a million to a millionaire and they’ll hoard it, give it to someone poor and they’ll spend it back into the economy. Keeping the money tied up in stocks or assets is bad.

(Look, this doesn't in any way mean that people can't have nice things. They can, in fact, have lots and lots of very nice things, and there's nothing wrong with wanting lots of stuff - sustainability notwithstanding. It's just that wanting to have literal or figurative piles of money for the sake of it, when there are people struggling to eat, for god's sake, is unarguably wrong.)

Likewise I disagree with Phil Hammond that there was no choice apart from quantitative easing. The documentary's main point is that QE caused the value of assets to increase, meaning the rich got richer without having to lift a finger. Yes, this did save the banks, but as the documentary graphically illustrates, it exacerbated the already difficult problems of social and financial inequality. And as it came with no real penalty for the banks, it didn't do anything to change the culture that led to the problem in the first place. The point made repeatedly is that enormous - staggering, horrifying - sums of money were found to fix the banks, while nothing much at all was done for ordinary people. I don't accept that that can possibly be necessary or unavoidable.

(It was also quite interesting to here how Theresa May did actually have policies to put a stop to much of this, though it's totally unclear if this would have worked. Needless to say, her marketing was useless, as nobody had a clue... mind you, for a Tory to say, "let's get a grip on the banks" would have been disbelieved by literally everyone.)

My working hypothesis is that above some threshold, the primary means of increased wealth is your existing wealth. You can't easily make £1 million starting from £10. But you can easily make another £1 million by investing some portion of an existing £10 million - the main thing you need to get super-rich is money itself. Not talent, and not even luck, but pure resources. You can't make sound investments if you haven't got anything to invest. And this certainly seems to be the case writ large here, as the rich got richer by doing exactly nothing.

All this sounds very left-wing, and I suppose it is. But I realised when they covered the Panama papers that I don’t actually care about rich people being rich much at all. To be honest I’d completely forgotten Cameron’s dodgy dealings, as per the recent post on corruption, someone doing underhand dealings isn’t really what bothers me (also, lesson for Boris, Cameron swiftly apologised and the story ended pretty quickly, but I digress). I care much more about when the rich get richer through injustice, as especially so in this case. Making assets artificially more valuable is manifestly unfair. They didn’t do anything to earn the extra wealth, it was just magically gifted them. And again, far worse was that nothing much at all was done for the poorest people who actually needed extra money.

Surely, we would have been better off if we’d either/both : (a) employed a heavy wealth tax on the richest people who were enriched further thanks to QE, (b) just directly given all these hundreds of billions of pounds to the poorest people and let them go on a wild spending spree. I am only half-joking on point (b) - this was basically what was done to rejuvenate post-war America, and it worked marvellously. I wish they had asked that to the interviewees : why wouldn't giving money to poor people have helped the economy ?

Will you please kindly fall under a bloody bus already

Over at Physicists of the Caribbean, I'm writing a lovely philosophy post about shrimp. Here, I feel compelled to write yet another rant about the disastrous state of the Tory party.

I watched yesterday's parliamentary discussion on the update from Sue Gray in its entirety. You can read the report itself here, it's a very short and easy read. If you want, you can watch the discussion here (it starts at 15:30). 

Certainly the first 30 minutes or so are well worth watching. Johnson began with a pathetic apology which did at least momentarily set the correct tone. Starmer responded with a brilliant speech - one of his best and most emotional - after which Johnson immediately returned to thuggish form. Having said that an apology wasn't enough, and that he "got it", and at least trying to appear serious, he instantly dismissed Starmer's concerns for the pain of the British public as "a tissue of nonsense". He reverted to his stupid whataboutism of saying how great Brexit is and how - outrageously - they'd got the country through covid.

I spend a good deal of the two hours actually yelling at the TV because I just don't understand the thought processes at work here. Brexit isn't a done deal, covid isn't over, and oh yes, by the way, 155,000 people and counting have died as a result. To say they "got through it" was viscerally disgusting. To nonsensically accuse Starmer of somehow having anything to do with Jimmy Saville was contemptible.

Starmer's speech was meticulous but also hard-hitting. His face after Boris' verbal diarrhoea was one of quiet fury. Sadly this wasn't a debate featuring any back-and-forth, however, so it was up to Ian Blackford to deliver an outstanding moment of political theatre. Blackford is a pompous thunderer, but a righteous and principled one, and yesterday he was on outstanding form. Refusing to back down on his statement that Prime Minister knowingly lied, he was ejected from the chamber.

This is a huge problem in British politics right now. I understand the need for rules during a debate to keep things respectful, but it isn't working. Johnson is a liar. That he is allowed to tell lies without any sort of fact-checking, and to also fat-shame Blackford the previous week, while Blackford must leave as a result of telling the truth, is extremely dangerous. It's an absurdity which desperately needs to be closed. Yes, the system has worked in the past for a remarkably long time. But it isn't working now.

This doesn't and shouldn't mean a free-for-all on accusations of lying, which would lead to instant stalemate since telling lies is considered grounds for resignation. But if you make such a claim, and are prepared to back it up, you ought to have some procedure, some kind of independent process you can instigate, which can judge your accusation. Boris is on record multiple times saying things very very clearly that he later directly contradicts. How is there any ambiguity in saying that no rules were broken in his own house and then apologising for the rules being broken ? How is there any difficulty in removing such a creature ? It's absurd. 

The remainder of the debate followed a useless pattern. There were many other fine statements and questions made from the opposition, and a few from the Tories. But Boris quickly degenerated into pure evasion, referring every question to wait for the police findings. Because again, he couldn't possibly tell you himself if he was in his own house on a certain date. After all, this is a man who claims he can't tell the difference between a work meeting and a party. Who is happy to lead a culture of boozing and partying while tens of thousands of people were dying. And he repeatedly claimed that MPs should read the report more carefully, which is ludicrous because it's not at all a difficult or complicated read. It's simple, short, and damning.

Although the mood from the Tory benches was hardly one of full-throated support, it wasn't quite as dire condemnation as you might get the impression from the BBC's live summary feed. Only a handful of Tories had any vocal criticism; the majority, sad to say, were actually trying to excuse or defend this idiot against what should be obviously fatal facts. "The Prime Minister set the rules which got us through this", one even said. Yes, but he fucking broke them, didn't he ? Don't you get it ? What's wrong with you ? And claiming that his other (dubious) achievements somehow offset the rule-breaking... don't you understand how dangerous this is ? Don't you understand that a man who feels compelled to lie, lie and lie some more about a piece of cake is an absurd choice for leader even during the most stable of political periods ?

Starmer was bang on when he said that the Tories always knew something like this could happen. What's disappointing in the extreme is that Tories are apparently prepared to put up with this. To tolerate a leader who is manifestly untrustworthy. To tie their fortunes to a man who won't hesitate to stab them in the back. To accept that a man who did indeed nearly die from covid but then persisted in breaking his own rules is likely to change his behaviour because some people are being mean to him. To accept as a serious leader someone who claims to understand the pain and anguish and then a few minutes later dismiss those very concerns as nonsense.

To put it politely, fuck the whole damn lot of you.

This isn't normal, and it's important to remember that. It's not an inevitable degeneration of politics. It's not even a failure of the system. This one is, ironically, about something the Tories claim to hold dear : individual responsibility for bad choices. Even Theresa May, wrong-headed horrible person though she was, at least in her tenureship as PM she tried to do what she thought was right. You couldn't accuse her of anything like this. You couldn't accuse her of naked power-mongering. And yet when push comes to shove, the Tories at large (not May herself, who was one of the few who spoke against Boris) have shown themselves to prefer power over principle. 

The Tories are riding a tiger. They say he's "on notice", but they've said that at least three times already, suggesting they either don't know what the phrase means, don't recognise when an an infraction has been committed, or don't really care. Just what in the world it will take for them to end this sham of a leader, I don't know. The man is a buffoon yes, but he's also a dangerous thug. He shouldn't be in charge of a paper round, let alone the country.

Saved By The Bigots ?

I saw a Guardian article appear on my phone's news feed, "No, America is not on the brink of civil war". Googling this to provide the link for this post, I immediately found another article, also in the Guardian, "The next US civil war is already here". I suppose if we follow the usual guidance that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, we could only say the next American civil war will happen at some point. Which isn't very helpful.

The article saying the war is already here is nothing special, it assumes all the standard narratives of polarisation, a descent into fascism, etc. The article saying it's not going to happen is much more interesting. It has some valuable points, but I think ultimately it's far too optimistic.

Let's start with the good points :

In general, behaviours are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.

This links back to the idea of armchair bigots : people who won't lift a finger to prevent fascist atrocities, who will vote for despots and might even attend the odd rally, but won't actually instigate anything themselves. Some of them might volunteer to join the despot's militia, but very few indeed will actually pro-actively go around setting up said militias. At some deep level, for all that they profess otherwise, the vast majority of people like being told what to do. They like having a framework in which to operate, a step-by-step system to follow. Few indeed want to be involved with setting up that system in the first place. Hardly anyone likes writing instruction manuals.

In a sense, people are a lot like wildebeest - once one jumps into the crocodile-infested river, off they all go, but it's very rare to want to be the first one in.

With this in mind the author's other points can be interpreted with far less rose-tinted glasses. I strongly agree that people do profess different views in polls than they actually hold. But this means they're perfectly comfortable with being perceived as holding those views. And, crucially, the big ugly elephant in the room is the guy they voted for. The classic quote, "I know he lies, but I believe him anyway"* would seem to apply. They were quite happy to vote for someone who endorses all manner of actually incoherent, self-contradictory lunacy. 

* I heard something similar on the radio the other day regarding Boris breaking lockdown rules : "he shouldn't do that, but it won't change my vote." I cannot understand people who want people in charge of them who repeatedly demonstrate themselves to be untrustworthy. I just don't get it.

So while perhaps the following may well be true :

In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.

Indeed, had even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt, with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as “needed” to achieve their goals – things would have gone much, much differently.

...we probably shouldn't read too much into it. Recall Trump's speech afterwards where he gave a speech almost as if he were held at gunpoint asking the coup attempt (for that is what it was) to end. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that if the election had, somehow, been overturned, then vast numbers of Republican voters would have assembled for a counter-coup ? Is there anyone who could envisage Trump himself standing down ?

Of course not. The majority of voters may or may not really believe in a stolen election, but that hardly matters. They are quite clearly willing to go along with the claim to get what they want. They do behave as if the beliefs were true when other people act on them. So I am not in the least persuaded by the author's other claims :

We are not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

A consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and surveys that America is facing an epidemic of “fake news”, which was leading people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavoury political candidates...   

It turned out that, contrary to the initial hysteria, “fake news” stories were viewed by a relatively small number of voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or anti-Clinton “fake news” by social media sites already seemed firmly committed to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is, “fake news” is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump’s support more broadly.

Two words : Fox News. Labelling "fake news" as only the online Alex Jones stuff is a catastrophic mistake. That's even leaving aside the claim that fake news didn't reach many people, which I'm anyway wary of.

Contrary to narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect participants’ genuine views. 

Back across the pond, there are huge numbers of people convinced that Brexit is somehow a good thing despite this being in manifest, glaring contradiction to the facts. Likewise there are still people convinced that Trump was a good president. It doesn't matter which specific claims they believe and which they reject - that's irrelevant. The problem is they believe in some aspect, some sufficient element of the grand narrative. They believe in it enough to vote for a man whose words are literally less intelligent than predictive text messaging. The specific beliefs are nowhere near as important as the overall feeling.

All you need to overturn a democracy is enough people willing to do nothing. It doesn't matter how many card-carrying fascists you have provided everyone else is willing to tolerate the hardcore being in charge. Pushing into the details, really trying to tease out of people that actually yeah, Trump's inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's, is pointless folly. We're in a post-truth world precisely because even when you can get these people to admit they're wrong, it doesn't change anything. They still want things even when shown they're in contradiction to the facts. Strangely, the author does seem to understand this, but reaches entirely the wrong conclusion :

It should not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually no effect on political preferences or voting behaviour; misperceptions are generally not driving political alignments to begin with – nor are they driving political polarization.

Correcting any individual belief won't help because this doesn't change the sentiment. But it is absolutely necessary to stem the tide of lies because they are what provoke the all-important feelings in the first place. It is not any individual misconception that drives political beliefs - that's a crazy prospect - it's the overall flow. So I agree that America probably isn't on the verge of a civil war, but I think it's foolhardy in the extreme to say that it's democracy isn't in real peril. 

The author is right to point out that polling data may not reflect real beliefs, but I think he may have fallen into a behaviouristic fallacy that people will act in neat accordance with their perceived truths. The problem is that people are part rational, part irrational, and also part just plain lazy. And I for one wouldn't recommend relying on laziness to save democracy.

Corruption and the social contract

So many parties at Downing Street now one wonders if Boris had misunderstood the entire concept of a political party... 

Some level of corruption in government is, alas, inevitable. There is simply no way to get hundreds of people into a high-pressure, high-stakes situation for protracted periods without some of them doing something underhand. Can't be done. A lot of idealists cling to the idea that with total transparency and accountability, everyone would behave like saints. They won't. Human beings just aren't like that. There is a fundamental need for privacy even in politics; sometimes it's necessary to say things - unpleasant things - privately that could not possibly be said publicly. If you don't have a degree of privacy, you won't have a functional political system, and it's enormously naïve to think otherwise.

To put it another way : politicians are just like everyone you've ever met. How many of them are totally innocent, incorruptible under any and all circumstances ? How many can resist all temptation and follow every rule ?

None of them. Not one.

But...

That's not a justification. It's not even an excuse. When you get found out, you pay the penalty. A real, tangible, direct consequence, not something as ephemeral as a change in the mood of public opinion. You lose your job. You pay a fine. You might even be imprisoned. You may well recover afterwards, but you take a hit. You don't carry on as normal.

Not all corruption is equal. Greasing the wheels when negotiating with foreign dignitaries is wholly different from enriching yourself from the public purse. If in a crisis you negotiate a contract, for, say, PPE, and you speed things up by going directly to your friend, then as long as you get a reasonable deal then most people will probably forgive you. Your penalty might, in such a case, be nothing more than an apology. 

(But even then, you do apologise. You don't avoid the fact that this was not the ideal course of action.)

Of course, if you don't get a good deal - if, say, you have to throw all the PPE away because it doesn't meet the required standards - that's different. In that case the deal has been good for exactly no-one but yourself.

If some corruption might be excusable by necessity, some definitely isn't. Breaking the rules because you lack even the rudimentary self-control to avoid a piece of cake - frickin' cake ! - and then feel the need to cover this up afterwards is inexcusable. The fact that people thought you deserved a surprise birthday party in the midst of your own lockdown speaks volumes about how seriously they don't take you.

In some ways it's the sheer pettiness of the lockdown parties that I find most offensive. Birthday parties, Christmas quizzes, leaving dos... these serve no purpose at all apart from gratification. They've not corrupt for a higher purpose. They're not even corrupt for anything special at all. At least if someone had been found in bed with a cocaine-snorting hooker you could understand why they felt the need to lie about it, even if the act itself was far more morally dubious. But lying and obfuscating because they had cake ?

If you're going to lie about something that petty, if you don't even have the courage to admit that really rather minor misdemeanour, what the hell else are you hiding ? You ask people to do far, far more than avoid birthday parties, but if you as leader can't even avoid that... you are contemptible. It doesn't matter if you were there for only ten minutes - if you can't bear to avoid even something that petty, how can you expect people to avoid the things that really matter ?

The privilege of being the ones who get to set the rules has obvious, tangible benefits besides the power itself. As such a prominent figure, you can reap enormous financial rewards through lectures, books, interviews etc. This is easy enough so long as you have the competency to actually run the high office to which you were elected. And that's absolutely fine, your perspective in that case is valuable.

But if you aren't... if you're only there because of corruption rather than in spite of it, then resorting to underhand practises for your own enrichment becomes all the more probable. That's why the current scandals engulfing Westminster speak so much to what we all knew from the start : that the current administration is rotten to the core. This is not normal. This is a case, I think, in which it's the individuals who are to blame more than the system.

If you have to have corruption, it can't be like this. It can't be egregious. It can't be over petty personal issues like cake. It's can't amount to admitting the rules were broken but then sticking two fingers up to the public and then ignoring them.

The price paid for the responsibility of high office is twofold. First, you have to do the job competently. The rules you set must make sense and serve a clear purpose. Second, at least for the duration of your term, you have to set a higher standard than you might expect of the general public - if you expect the majority to meet your requirements, you yourself must exceed them. This Tory government has played fast and loose with the first, especially lately as it flagrantly lifts restrictions as a distraction, and consistently failed miserably on the second.

We should not expect perfection. Some minor breaches can be forgiven, if they are admitted swiftly and with an apology. We can't expect divine perfection from anyone. But - blimey ! - we can expect better than a government that actively tries to justify breaking its own rules rather than apologising, who continuously lie and deceive and conspire. Who want others to avoid funerals but themselves can't even avoid birthday cake. Quite simply, they have to go.

Don't Look Up At Munich

The other day I happened to watch a seemingly odd pairing of new movies : Munich : The Edge of War followed by Don't Look Up. Both are excellent on their own merits, but I think the combination, strange though it may seem, is even better. I will give some brief description of each but it's the linked theme of forgiveness that I most want to explore, which will necessitate some minor spoilers.

First, a reminder that I don't believe the message intended by an artist is necessarily all that important to the merits of their work. I have become quite convinced that it's the message the audience takes away that's more important and often more interesting. Whether a character's actions can be construed as good or evil is - almost - entirely in the eye of the beholder, regardless of whether the author intended any particular moral lesson or not.

Yet that's no reason to discount what the author was trying to argue either, particularly so in these cases. Munich is a conscious attempt to rehabilitate Chamberlain, often viewed by the modern British as cowardly and ineffectual. Without digging into the accuracies of the movie, as it stands, I think it largely succeeds in its goal. The pressures of movie-Chamberlain to avoid war at all costs come through very clearly, his earnest intent to save millions of lives understandable, and the viewer feels for themselves the tension, the difficulty of the choices he had to make in the face of extreme consequences.

In particular, towards the end of the film movie-Chamberlain is presented with an offer. He can either continue with the peace talks he's been working on carefully for many months, or he can accept a radically different plan, with 12 hours notice, from a complete stranger. The viewer is given the distinct impression that this plan might indeed be the better choice, but he refuses - and the film is skilled enough that you can appreciate why. Thinking it over afterward, there is no guarantee this plan would have worked anyway. The peace talks were all but guaranteed, the intervention of a stranger is a wild stab in the dark. While the viewer could certainly conclude that the movie-Chamberlain is naïve, it would be rather harder to describe him as cowardly.

Was Chamberlain right to negotiate peace with Hitler ? The movie ends by saying it bought the British time to re-arm, but equally, it must have allowed Hitler even more time to prepare. From movie-Chamberlain's perspective, it seems clear that Hitler is contemptible. But it was not at all clear that Hitler was truly monstrous. Horrible, certainly. A dangerous, fanatic absolutely, who shouldn't have been anywhere near political office. But actually evil ? There was not much at all to suggest what was going to happen next; from the movie version, at least, Chamberlain's approach is, arguably, neither cowardly nor stupid. It was a sensible approach, given the ignorance of the nature of the beast across the negotiating table.

In Don't Look Up, the twofold threats are a bit different. The main one comes from a gigantic comet that's going to cause a mass extinction six months from its discovery. This, in movie science land, is a difficult but not quite unsolvable problem. The second problem is vastly more challenging : politics. An inept US administration that's deep in the pocket of big tech, that cares more about polling than reality, a society that obsesses over happiness and washes over all unpleasantness with platitudes, a group of truth-talking scientists coming up against a crowd bent on avoiding "division" and a wider public who barely believe in the asteroid at all... remind you of anything ?

Personally I think the movie's a great piece of satire, hilarious and horrifying all at the same time. It's a very thinly-veiled attack on climate/covid/inset-crisis-here deniers, but you can also read a lot more into it than that. It's enormously pro-science and anti-fake news. You could also view it as anti-woke, determined as it is that facts are facts and that denial of them is just fucking stupid. This is a sentiment that I largely share - despite philosophical misgivings there are cases where observational reality can smack you in the face like, well, a colossal asteroid. At which point any doubt about the nature of truth is rendered pointless. Not every viewpoint has merit.

(This is not to say that how we define knowledge isn't hugely important, difficult, and interesting. It is all of those. Nevertheless, there exists a regime in which trying to avoid, rather than analyse, observational findings is a very clear sign of delusion and insanity.)

The movie gives us an all-too-accurate satire on how the various media and political organisations respond to the crisis, with a fantastically believable stream of bullshit from various quarters. As well as being frequently hilarious, it's not afraid to give numerous impassioned and deadly serious speeches, especially on the need for a common framework of knowledge. In my opinion it's a marvellous blend of emotions that's executed brilliantly. It's a shame that the people this movie is really aimed at are never going to learn anything from it, because as it quite correctly points out, these people are largely just very very stupid (and/or, more charitably led astray).

At the end of the movie the approaching comet becomes visible to the naked eye. Finally at this point the doubts begin to pass away, but by this point it's already too late.

The unifying theme between these two movies - at least the one that was triggered for me - is how we deal with monsters and idiots. As the old saying goes, the powerful and the stupid have in common that they don't alter their views to fit the facts, but alter the facts to fit their views. Chamberlain tried to appease a monster. Some of the protagonists in Don't Look Up try and avoid stoking division, even when there is only one possible outcome from the impact of a 9 km comet. Chamberlain, it could be argued, couldn't have known that appeasement wouldn't work*, but the fictional protagonists of Don't Look Up don't have that excuse.

* At least not as a long-term strategy. As a temporary, diversionary tactic it might have some success.

This is a dilemma I've raised before. Treating people like idiots is probably the surest way to drive them away, yet trying to placate them runs the risk of legitimising their stupidity. I like very much the emphasis in Don't Look Up that not everything needs to be a platitude, it's okay to disagree and have arguments. We don't all have to agree on everything. We can yell at each other and make peace afterwards.

Perhaps that's a message that hasn't been clear enough in all the discussions of filter bubbles. Perhaps they're more like blankets - when someone says a mean thing, it's all too easy to dive back under the warm snuggly covers. If you're used to everyone always telling you you're right, you won't be able to deal with a proper argument. It's not just that filter bubbles (mainstream media as well as the online kind) cause you to lack or even reject information, it's that they diminish the emotional fortitude needed to deal with disagreement. In short, you become a thin-skinned ninny, resorting to ever more desperate bullshit in attempts to avoid dealing with the real issues.

This seems a bit of a catch 22. If you tell the idiots the honest truth, they'll scurry back under their filter blankets. If you try and be nice to them, they'll think you're endorsing their stupidity. Their exists no solution, so far as I can see, besides tearing up the filter blankets, and that's easier said than done precisely because everything must be deemed to always be acceptable to everyone. 

I say no. As with vaccine mandates, it should be fine to tell people they have to do some things and can't do others. If they're don't like it, that's tough. I agree with H.G. Wells that the law should strive to avoid compulsion, but there are times when the consequences are so obvious that there really shouldn't be any need for a debate. If you refuse to wear a mask, you're saying it's fine for you to risk the health of other people - and that is contrary to the most basic principles of liberalism.

I can already hear the objections about who-gets-to-decide, and to that I say simply : sod off. Not all mandates are the same and you well know it.

I've never much believed in the old maxim that if you want peace you must prepare for war. But if people are already antagonising you, if they're talking shit to your face, sometimes the carry-a-big-stick approach is necessary. Likewise, the west's approach to Russia seems to be to completely ignore the lessons from Afghanistan - or indeed a very much longer swathe of history - and just hope that nothing much happens. Like appeasement in general, this may work for a little while, but sooner or later we're going to run out of salami. I don't know what the practical answer is to dealing with the folly of the west, but Russia is a bully, and the answer here seems an awful lot clearer.

The party of law and order

... does not actually care a damn about law and order. An obligatory rant on the current state of Westminster.

We've seen how rank-and-file Tory members can be stark raving mad before. Like how they were willing to implement some form of Brexit even at the cost of the destruction of their own political party, a bonkers but at least perversely principled stance*.

*Whether they would actually follow through on their professed stance is another matter, but personally I highly doubt it.

Now we're seeing a desperate attempt to cling to power purely for its own sake, with no higher calling or motivation whatsoever. The Prime Minister broke the rules ? Perhaps the rules were too harsh, says Jacob Rees Mogg. He's apologised, so we need to move on, says Liz Truss. Right, so breaking the law is irrelevant then. Taking responsibility now means nothing more than that you have to apologise for your offences and not actually suffer any real consequences at all. That kind of responsibility is for the little people, not, ironically, the people who have to make the rules themselves.

I do not believe in the absolute nature of the law. That is not to say that it should be applied arbitrarily, and it especially doesn't mean it should apply differently to someone based on their major demographics : ethnicity, age, gender, religion, wealth etc. should have no bearing on punishment... except wherein any such features are actually pertinent to the law being broken. A rich criminal could, perhaps, expect a judge to deliver them a harsher sentence for the repeated theft of money than a very poor one stealing for the first time out of desperation. But refining and generalising on this is a task for another day.

For now, it is enough to realise that there is no inconsistency or hypocrisy in saying that those who are setting the rules should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. It's not about their wealth or class, but about their unique level of power. Proportionately, those with the most power of all should be held the highest standards possible. This is not to say that all mitigating circumstances should be ignored completely, just that they count for less. If you make the rules, you should make a special effort to adhere to them and lead by example.

What beggars belief to me is not so much that the Tories broke the lockdown rules - lots of people did that, and were rightly fined for it. Even for this they should suffer harsher penalties than the man in the street, but what really gets me is the storm of lies and gaslighting by which they seek to escape the fate of the little people. It's a bad thing to break laws designed to protect public health, but in some ways I find it far, far worse that those holding high office would choose to lie about their behaviour afterwards. How can you be said to be "taking responsibility" if you first put forth a series of lies, evasions and denials before being compelled to offer a paltry non-apology and declare that that's the end of it ?

What I do not understand is how anyone could actively want a known serial liar to be at the heart of government. To me this just makes no sense at all, but plenty of Tories - even if Boris is indeed eventually forced out - are willing to declare this openly. I don't get it. If someone has proven themselves untrustworthy, how can you possibly trust them ? And if you can't trust them, how can you possibly think them worthy to decide rules which affect your own life ? Do the rules just not matter at all to you ? What in the hell is it about Boris that you like so much ? Is his piss-poor tendency to deceive (because he is not at all good at it) actually somehow an asset ? Do you admire his strength of character in putting himself before the truth ?

This is bordering on a fascist level of elitism. The Tory party has always been a lot more morally flexible and more concerned about winning than ethical principles, but Boris is taking this to new levels. At least previously when they were found out, most of them had the decency to resign. Most of them realised that you can't be seen as a party of law and order if you yourselves do not obey the law. That's not to say that things were any better behind closed doors than they are now, but at least they had the modicum of decency not to openly flout the law in full view of the public and brazenly try to excuse the inexcusable. And least they didn't rub their elitism in people's faces. At least they tried to pretend that there was a line that was not to be crossed. There was a social contract of sorts, even if it was very one-sided.

If the Tory party suffers from a total lack of moral backbone, Labour if anything is beset by too much. It is straightforwardly absurd to compare Keir Starmer's drink with his evening meal in a protracted meeting with the multitude of pre-planned Tory socials. It was never about the fact that Tory MPs had alcohol, but the explicitly and exclusively social nature of the gatherings - be they after work or entirely separate from it. Nobody ever said, "no alcohol in private meetings". Nobody ever said, "no food during work meetings". Nobody said, "you must split up for every moment you're not discussing work."

Tory attempts to deflect here are gaslighting and whataboutism, which are somewhat bizarrely trying to paint their opponent as being far more interesting than even his most ardent supporters would ever suspect. They know their own behaviour did not merely bend the rules but abjectly and repeatedly broke them, so they're trying to distract. This is ridiculous. Labour didn't even come close to breaking the rules, and anyway it's the government who are in charge, not the opposition - so the importance of establishing what the Tories were up to is much, much more important. And yes, if it did come to light that Labour had behaved similarly, I would want similar consequences. As it is, this looks a bit like saying, "Yes, I'm a murderer, but that man said a rude word, so we're basically just as bad as each other". Even if we lived in a bizarre word where that was true, it wouldn't excuse the murder.

What's worrying is where this goes next. Will the Tory party clean itself off and at least try and get back its veneer of respectability, or will it go into Trumpian levels of populism ?

Right now, it's screaming towards the latter. And yes, actually there are respectable Tory MPs, but that the self-proclaimed party of law and order doesn't immediately eject its lying, gaslighting, evasive, cowardly, scumbag of a leader is damning. For all that the law can't be absolute, there are clear examples of black and white in amongst all the shades of grey. A party that does not realise that breaches of the law this egregious, this frequent, and this callous, are unacceptable in a functioning democracy is not a political party at all. It's a mob.

Review : Power and Thrones

Dan Jones seems best known as a TV historian, but he's a damn fine writer : far more purposeful and analytical than his TV shows might suggest. Of what I've read, his The Plantagenets is a clear winner, describing in gripping detail the life and times of and English dynasty that's shedloads more interesting that the poxy old Tudors (sorry Lucy Worsely, but it's true). There he covers how medieval kings won loyalty by divulging political power in exchange for military and/or financial support, and why King John's efforts to retake France were doomed by much more than battlefield prowess or lack thereof. He balances carefully between letting the text speak for itself and outlining the broad conclusions. And he's not afraid to pronounce judgement, without coming across as hopelessly biased either.

Power and Thrones is his latest offering, a weighty tome covering the whole of medieval Europe - from the fall of Rome to the birth of Protestantism. Jones' approach is to select a variety of specific events that are representative of the general trends, so rather than getting a breakneck speed account of a thousand years of history (which would average out to about two years per page), we actually get some considerable detail. It's an excellent, very well-balanced approach that never lacks for readability. Never before have I encountered the revenge of sacred chickens, or heard how St Martin exorcised demons from cows and set fire to the Emperor Valentinian's buttocks.

My favourite aspect is the analogies. If Jones has a goal here, it's to show that both the circumstances of the past and the very people living through them were remarkably similar to those of today - not in detail, of course, but nevertheless in general. We might think that the myriad of social institutions in which we participate have an instrumental role in shaping our behaviour, and they do... but the parallel responses to ostensibly very different situations are interesting.

For example, offsetting. In the modern era this is synonymous with climate change : it's pretty unavoidable for all of us to have to burn at least some carbon, but we try and atone for our sins by paying other people to plant trees on our behalf. In the medieval era, the unavoidable activity was sin itself, especially of the hack-thy-neighbour-and-steal-his-land variety. Instead of a fearsome planetary response, they feared divine wrath. Hence the evolution of monasteries to offset the sin of the wider world, quite literally by praying it all away. Monasteries, in some ways, are not so very different from the aviation industry. Or perhaps, as Jones suggests, to multi-national tech corporations, having power and influence far beyond their physical locations.

Political parallels are of course ten-a-penny : from the "build back better" approach of the Emperor Justinian, to concerns over mass migration or the fragmentation of Europe into a plethora of petty kingdoms; censorship in universities*; or crusades against heretics as foolish as any "war against abstractions... see, in our times, the War on Terror, War on Drugs, etc." But in popular culture too, with Arthur and Roland being the superheroes of their day, and sports : with jousting described as a cross between polo, gambling, rugby and cage fighting. Jones does a commendable job, perhaps better than anyone else, of making the people of the past feel just like us were it not for their different conditions. Despite concentrating heavily on the great and the good, it's a marvellously de-romanticised tale of basically normal people. The ineptitude of modern politicians begins to seem a lot more understandable when set against the idiots of the past, who have plagued us since time immemorial.

* Jones is quite clearly not one of the libertarian "free speech" ilk, and the comparison is interesting. The importance of actually having good-faith discussions and speaking truth to power, and not just saying things because you want to offend people, is sometimes overlooked. 

Possibly the most interesting comparison is the invention of the printing press. Suddenly information could be distributed at massively larger rates at low cost. As with social media today, the effects were complex and unpredictable. While initially the sale of indulgences were a boon for the Church, when Luther's theses went viral, the result was just the opposite. And it was this, Jones argues, that brought about the end of medieval Europe and instigated the transition to the modern world.

Jones is careful not to push his analogies too far. If I have a critique, it's that if anything he's too cautious about this. A bit more development on this underlying themes would have been most welcome : I would have liked for him to venture a thesis on what defines the similarities and differences to our ancestors. It feels a bit like there's something deeper under the surface that Jones never quite reaches for, which is a shame. But should he ever decide to do something a bit more explicitly about drawing parallels and lessons from the past, I would be all over it.

Not that this really spoils anything. As an introductory overview to medieval European history - and it's pretty well exclusively European - this feels as good as anything you'll find anywhere. I'm going to give this one a solid 8, maybe 9/10 - excellent stuff, does exactly what it says on the tin, but just a bit too limited in intent.

More money, less problems ?

Although I think it falls flat at the end, I do think there's value in this economic narrative about post-WWII America. It's long, but an easy read, worth reading its entirety.

To summarise into a ludicrously short form : America regenerated itself after the war by fostering a culture of credit and consumerism. Credit allowed returning soldiers to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, making and selling the things to each other that they suddenly wanted. Essentially, giving them a bunch of money meant they were heavily inclined to spend that money back into the economy, fuelling jobs and economic growth, in a sort of virtuous cycle. Inflation spiked, but temporarily. Cultural biases against debt heavily declined, because debt could and did pay for itself. Equality was an implicit and readily achievable goal. This first part of the piece is, I think, very nicely done.

Later - and I think here this lacks any explanation as to why or how - the economy mutated into something that was still booming, but less and less for the average man in the street and more for an elite. Exactly what economic choices were made that facilitated this are unfortunately lacking (Niall Ferguson gives a interesting but limited look at this in relation to the big tech companies, however). But the valuable point made is that Americans still had an expectation of equality even though it was now essentially impossible to achieve. Consequently, coupled with a culture of debt being quite acceptable as a path to prosperity, this helped fuel the credit crunch, with consumer spending on things they couldn't possibly afford running rampant. It should probably be noted that many things they now couldn't possibly afford were things they had every damn right to expect that they could afford, like healthcare and education. It's hardly all a burning desire for avocado smoothies and designer handbags.

(I do wonder about a possibly cultural difference between Europe and America on this point. We make fun of people trying to get above their station, because peasants know full well they can't possibly compete with the aristocrats, so to speak. Trying to keep up with the Jones' is an individual phenomenon, not a widespread lifestyle choice. But this is probably drawing the narrative too far : again, I suspect the bulk of the burden lies in a desire to rightfully expect the essentials to be affordable, not the luxuries.)

This rise in inequality is undeniably a problem, and a whopping big one. But I think the conclusion here that this is a large part in the rise of right-wing populism falls flat. It's easy and tempting to say that income equality => unjust treatment => desire to fix things by desperate measures. But that just doesn't seem to be what the numbers are saying, yet we keep insisting on saying it. In 2016, Trump won the election thanks more to higher earners than poorer ones (though, if I recall correctly, this may not be true in every state, but for big-picture narratives this doesn't matter so much). Although Brexit was won primarily from poorer voters, those switching from Labour to Conservative were actually happier about the decline of industrial Britain than those who stuck with Labour. Paradoxically, perhaps those remaining Labour actually did so out of a sense of small-c conservatism, but clearly, those switching to Tory weren't trying to rebel against the changed reality.

My suspicion is that an integral part of the rise of right wing populism is information driven, not economics driven. It is far too simplistic to suggest that just having more money would fix this. This is not to say that we shouldn't have greater income equality (we emphatically should), just that that would fix different problems. Nigel Farage is very, very rich, yet the King of Brexit is a racist buffoon : resources are important, but they are hardly the whole story in political morality. And nor is this to say that there might not be something to this link between equality and politics - there probably is. But the connection, I suspect, is more complex than this article portrays. Grand narrative pieces like this are valuable, but should be treated with caution.

More research is needed.

A different shade of red

Whenever I encounter people on social media who describe themselves as "traditional leftists", I often come away confused. They tend to bang on really quite a lot about how much they're traditional leftists but spend most of their time disparaging women, which is rather strange. They might espouse concern for worker's rights, but don't seem to have much a problem with attacking minorities - a trick not all that dissimilar to fascism.

So there is certainly plenty of diversity among those who self-identify as the left*. An excellent summary piece of a specific type of disagreement among lefties can be found here, which I think provides a good basis for understanding what's going on (though others disagree). In brief, I think there is a particular subset of the so-called "woke" who are not really determined to fight oppression and intolerance, but just to hurt people : when someone repents for their moral shortcomings, they still go on attacking them. It's one thing to find views abhorrent, but quite another to utterly dismiss anything someone says about any topic because you disagree with them on one particular subject.

*It's worth mentioning also that left and liberal do not automatically go together : in the Czech Republic, left tends to mean full-blown Communism, whereas in the UK it tends to mean vegan hipster students.

This, though, is a big topic, and I shall largely leave it for now. Such a subset is, I think, anyway rather small, and its importance massively overblown by the right. Today I turn instead to this very long, detailed study examining how the views of the traditional British Labour voter have shifted over the decades. While day-to-day politics and individual characters is and are important, it's easy to avoid seeing the forest for the trees. This study attempts to zoom out and see what are the large factors at work driving the changes, and, because it's from Tony Blair's institute, to work out a strategy for Labour to get back in the game.

It must be said that some of this is obvious. Labour needs clear policies ? That's nothing that literally everyone hasn't been saying for months. People don't like Corbyn ? It's only a wonder that the disaster of the 2019 general election didn't happen in 2017.

But much of it isn't obvious at all. While the decline of the working class is pretty apparent, the changing social attitudes of what remains of that demographic are rather surprising.

1) The working class isn't what it used to be

Trade unions, along with other local organisations, represented Parkin’s “institutionalised forms of deviance” that played such a large part in the local communities of Labour’s industrialised heartlands, dominated by specific industries with large workforces. In these heartlands, the disappearance of so many big industries has undermined the culture of working-class solidarity, and so diminished the appetite for challenging the status quo and the establishment... today’s working-class voters are :less likely than middle-class voters to join a trade union; less likely to have jobs in workplaces with more than 100 employees; less likely to be left-of-centre.

In so far as there are class differences, there are slightly more middle- than working-class voters who fit the traditional stereotype of unionised, left-wing voters with jobs in large workplaces. That said, the differences are small. Now that Parkin’s “institutionalised forms of deviance” have disappeared, so too have gaps in these traditional measures of class difference closed.

Not only has the working class severely shrunk, but those who are left don't hold the traditional views anyway. So Labour going back to its roots isn't going to work, because the roots have gone. Similarly, the decline of the Red Wall, far from being a recent development, has been ongoing for decades - it only looks like a sudden collapse because of the electoral system. The regions had atypically high Labour support decades ago, but have since undergone regression to the mean :

Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership accelerated the process towards the end of the 32-year period, but the red-wall bonus had been shrinking for 20 years; indeed, most of it happened before either the Brexit referendum or Corbyn’s election as party leader. In fact, the long-term political trajectory of the red-wall towns has been towards parity with England overall, not away from it.

The losses of the red-wall seats need to be considered in a wider context. They reflect Labour’s national failure to respond effectively to the economic and social changes of the past 50 years. This failure looks greatest in the red-wall towns simply because the changes there have been the greatest...  Our findings suggest that Labour will fail, and probably fail badly, if it tries to regain power simply by seeking to revive its working-class appeal. The reason is not just that the number of working-class voters is now too small, but that their lives today are far less like those of their (usually) working-class parents, and far more like their middle-class contemporaries.

In other words, it's the voters that have shifted, not that Labour is going in a different direction.

A small caveat is that some class differences do remain :

Despite these figures, it is wrong to say there are no significant class differences. Two do persist: in housing and education. Tenure is still linked to party choice and social attitudes. Working-class homeowners are far more likely than those who rent their homes to vote Conservative and to say that our welfare system has created a culture of dependence.

2) Where have the voters gone ?

Perhaps a more serious problem is that there has been a failure of confidence in social policies :

Far more people in almost every group think they pay more in taxes than they receive from public services and benefits. This applies to full-time workers, both blue- and white-collar, to the over-65s (despite NHS care and pension payments), and to families with children (despite the NHS and education benefits). Only among those whose household income is less than £14,000 are the two figures similar. Social class makes virtually no difference... These figures feed into the right-wing narrative that for the provision of everyday needs, government is more of a problem than a solution. This means that Labour’s task is to revive trust in not just the party, but in politics.

Unfortunately there isn't past data for this question because this would be fascinating to trace. After a decade of savage Tory austerity, with ambulance waiting times routinely in the hours during a pandemic, and tens of billions thrown recklessly at an dysfunctional track-and-trace system, is it any wonder the public don't feel they're getting value for money ? The reason they think so might well be very simple : they're not. So this does not necessarily represent a failure of belief in strategy, only a failure resulting from a corrupt, incompetent implementation.

But where have voters gone ? Largely, but by no means exclusively, to the Tories :

Of the 11.5 million lost voters, just half switched to the Conservatives in 2019. Put another way, four in ten people who voted for Boris Johnson had, at some point, wanted a Labour government. Labour also lost 2.5 million votes to pro-European parties: the Liberal Democrats, Green Party, SNP and Plaid Cymru. These voters should not be ignored in the attempt to win votes back from the Conservatives.

Why have they left ? The switch to the left-leaning parties is readily understandable (but for subtleties, consult the original article), that to the Tories more surprising :

There is no consensus about the impact of long-term changes either on the country as a whole or on specific areas. These changes were defined as a decline in old industries, factories and jobs, and growth of new jobs, businesses, goods and services. Voters who switched to the Conservatives are actually more positive about the changes than voters who stuck with Labour.

Somewhat encouragingly, there has not been a widespread public move away from socialist policies - if anything it's gone the other way :

In 1989, after a decade of Thatcher’s economic reforms, the public divided 47 per cent to 39 per cent in favour of a socialist rather than capitalist society. Today, voters as a whole prefer socialism by 48 per cent to 29 per cent, with the number of don’t knows climbing from 14 per cent to 23 per cent.

Which would again suggest that socialism isn't really the problem. The answer seems to lie in marketing.

3) What do voters think of Labour ?

Voters have some rather definite perceptions of Labour that are at odds with what they want :

While only 8 per cent of those switching to the Conservatives describe themselves as “very” or “fairly” left wing, as many as 48 per cent apply that label to the Keir Starmer-led Labour Party... Former Labour voters tend to support capitalism and reject collective welfare in larger numbers than those who have stayed loyal to Labour, but a) socialism and collective welfare remain fairly popular, and b) age makes little difference. The explanation for Labour’s problems with voters aged over 45 does not lie here. The party itself is the problem: it has haemorrhaged these votes, especially in the past few years, because it is seen by many of the voters it needs to win back as incompetent, out of touch and obsessed with what right-of-centre commentators describe as “woke” causes.

Many of those voters who switched to the Conservatives believe that Labour fails to share their concern for ordinary working people and pensioners. There is a 40-point gulf between the 52 per cent who are keen to help pensioners and the 12 per cent who believe this group is a priority for the Labour Party. Instead, these voters think the party cares far more than they do for immigrants and non-white Britons as well as the LGBTQ+ community.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with caring for minorities : quite the opposite. And I'm not quite sure where the image of Labour as "wokeist" comes up, except perhaps from the profoundly dysfunctional Corbyn era. Regardless, Labour need hardly resort to Tory racism or misogyny to win votes : it's rather a matter of prioritising and messaging. Labour can and should institute reforms to help minorities... but at a time when the entire country is suffering, those groups should not be put front and centre of its campaign message*. In support of this, of voters who returned to Labour, mostly their priorities and their perceived priorities of the party are in close alignment.

* Prioritising them might be morally laudable, but it would also be useless. Without actually getting into power, you can't do anything for them.

But the report stresses that we shouldn't read too much into this. Policy and perceived priority do matter. But even more important than this is perception of confidence :

It is clear that Labour’s perceived incompetence was a major cause of its loss in 2019, especially among those who voted for the Conservatives. Among those who voted Labour in 2017 but not in 2019, only 25 per cent say that Labour is competent these days, while 60 per cent say it continues to be incompetent. This is arguably the most important single indicator of Labour’s continuing failure to overtake the Conservatives when it comes to voting intentions.

It should come as no surprise that Labour voters who have maintained their support for the party have a reasonably good view of its competence, but a negative view of the Conservatives on this issue. (It should worry Labour, however, just how many of its loyalists still say the party is incompetent 18 months into Starmer’s leadership.)

Though I have reversed this section of the narrative from the report. It argues that Labour is perceived as incompetent due to its flawed policies and priorities, so these have an indirect but more damaging effect on its electability than the policies themselves.

My guess is that there's a lot of residual baggage from the Corbyn era : not just because of Corbyn himself, but also his entire team of idiotic ideologues. Starmer has made a lot of progress, but the lack of clear policies has hampered this - in particular, a simple, basic policy with an obvious vision behind it. And an additional difficulty is the need to present that vision without sounding like a loony, which was Corbyn's utter failure.

(It's probably worth remembering Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, who is going for a very left-wing agenda indeed, but has crucially managed to sound extremely boring. You can't really accuse someone of being a Communist dictator when they look like a hamster and have all the charisma normally associated with a piece of toast. Mind you, just being boring isn't enough, and there are genuine cultural differences between England and Wales.)

We also do seem to be seeing more of the shadow cabinet lately, which is very welcome. I think Starmer's overall strategy of prioritising getting the Labour house in order is probably a good one - yes, there's some messy in-fighting along the way, but the previous incarnation was effectively opposition by committee. It needs clearer direction and greater unity than that, which certainly means kicking out the hard left. Doesn't really matter if you or I agree on the previous policies or not - that group were catastrophically unelectable. Change is necessary - there's no point being in politics if you're perpetually out of power. None whatsoever.

5) Where do Labour go from here ?

Uphill, obviously. While Labour at the time of writing are slightly ahead, to get a majority they require a rather thumping lead over the Tories which they're as yet nowhere near. And getting that will be difficult. But there are grounds for optimism : though their traditional voter base has gone, a new one has arisen that presents opportunities :

Asked which two or three groups from a list of nine that the government should help the most, voters across what used to be the class divide selected “ordinary working people” as the top choice followed by the poor and pensioners – some distance ahead of all others.

Importantly, it doesn't really matter how you slice the data - those three groups still come out as top priority. 

Voters of all stripes want a government that helps ordinary workers, pensioners and the poor, but too many think Labour prefers to defend minorities instead of tackling Britain’s everyday economic and social problems. It’s not so much that these target voters are obsessed by the cultural battles that Labour is doomed to lose. Rather, it is that Labour has gained the reputation of fighting the wrong battles by choice. It risks the most damning of political verdicts: irrelevance to people’s daily lives.

Being a left-leaning liberal does not mean having a fanatical obsession with minorities, which is what "woke", rightly or wrongly, has come to mean in the minds of many. Nor does it mean abandoning progressive policies, still less liberalism itself. There is scope for Labour to climb the still daunting mountain to electoral victory, but it's got to do a lot better than the schoolyard politics of Corbyn's day. 

As in decades gone by, Labour does not need to dilute its liberal values, even when they are opposed by the voters it seeks to attract. Such values become a liability only when they are seen to override Labour’s economic and social priorities... if Labour can reframe these issues as economic and social challenges, in which current government policies damage people’s everyday lives, then Labour has the opportunity to develop policies that are both progressive and popular.

Review : The Last Duel

Ridley Scott is either going very grumpy old man, or very cleverly calculating old man. See, the only reason I saw The Last Duel is because I read an interview where he was bitching about how his movie was failing in the cinemas because of millennials being glued to their smartphones. He also said that Disney did a fantastic promotional job, and this had me rather... puzzled. I'm a millennial, and this movie, it turns out, is right up my alley - and I wasn't previously aware of anything other than the title.

So the only reason I watched even the trailer was because of Ridley Scott complaining. And far from some 18th-century swordfight as the title would suggest, it's about a medieval joust. With knights in shining armour charging into rivers and beating the crap out of each other. While I might watch the former on TV, the latter has definite cinematic potential for me. Throw in that it's all about the search for truth, and this ticks a lot of boxes for me, so much so that Disney's promotional campaign clearly messed up somewhere... but anyway, off to the cinema I went !

And of course : lots of millennials are not unruly teenagers but are now approaching 40. Also, feckless old people, get this : moronic teenagers tend to grow up. So just sod off with the anti-millennial bullshit already - your generation wrecked the planet, idiots.

And... it's a great film ! For some reason medieval France looks gloomier and wetter than Wales, but that's not a bad thing. The more epic battle shots shown in the trailer are, though very impressive, also very short, so don't go in expecting a war story because it isn't. This is a smaller-scale story that happens to feature soldiers, so it doesn't skimp on the battles where necessary, but it also doesn't try and force them in unnecessarily. Every single scene serves a clear purpose.

The story is based on real-life events told from three different perspectives. In each retelling, the differences are subtle - as in reality, most disagreements are relatively minor. Characters exaggerate themselves and each other, but the major events generally still happen. Some things all three of them agree on completely. Very satisfyingly, it's not a heavy-handed approach where everyone views themselves as flawless and each other as hopeless, but much more nuanced. No character emerges smelling of roses even according to their own story. Especially noteworthy are the scenes that are omitted in each version, making it deliberately impossible to corroborate certain events. The viewer has to think for themselves, but is never overwhelmed or confused.

While I normally try and avoid major spoilers in reviews, in this case I don't think I can. So if you don't want to know anything crucial, stop here. I'll leave you with my summary rating of 8 or possibly 9 out of 10. Thoroughly excellent. Scroll down if you want more.

Right then. If you don't mind spoilers, the story concerns the rape of a young French noblewoman. First, we get the story from the perspective of her husband, then the rapist, and then finally herself - which the film alleges is the truth, as the author of the original book asserts.

The husband views himself as a model of chivalry : bold, daring, impetuous, yet devoted to his wife and attentive to her needs. While he does make mistakes (sometimes big ones) he always tries to admit his wrongdoing and recovers swiftly. He feels ill-treated by his social betters, yet tries to do right by them - only standing his ground when he feels his honour demands it. When his wife tells him she was raped by his onetime friend while he was away, he does ask her quite angrily if she was telling the truth, but very quickly comes to her defence, prepared to risk everything (as it turns out) on a noble cause.

The rapist's perspective is somewhat different. He views the husband as kindof a silly figure : brave, and a good fighter, but not very bright and quick to anger. The most notable scene present in this section, not featured in the other retellings, is that the wife was essentially flirtatious with him once, even hinting at an actual affair, so there is something of a tendency to suggest he might really be in love with her. But the rape scene itself is brutal, and could not, under any circumstances, in any way whatsoever by anyone at all, be mistaken for anything other than the detestable assault that it is.

The wife, it turns out, views her husband as an oaf. He's not exactly cruel (at least by the admittedly lousy standards of the day), but shows her very little affection - in marked contrast to his own perspective, while she is essentially the one holding his household together. When "they" decide the best course of action is a trial by combat, he says, "I have a plan", whereas in her version it's "we have a plan".

Her perspective is much the most interesting since it covers the initial trial and the final duel. There are a lot of nods to.... certain modern demographics, who think that a woman can't get pregnant if they experience orgasm ("it's just science !" says a lawyer). And it's in her perspective that the awful consequences of failure are revealed : if her husband dies in combat, she will be burned alive for slander. She wants justice for herself, but has to face the appalling choice of this risking the life of her unborn child. This makes her husband's initially skeptical reaction somewhat more understandable, since the consequences of failure are truly extreme - yet in her version, he reacts not by merely becoming angry, but actually throttling her. It's a brilliant blend of conflicting tensions and interpretations.

I won't state the film's conclusion, but it does have one. It rounds off in a satisfying way, while still leaving the viewer with plenty of difficult questions. It's not at all your traditional historical epic, but presents the past in quite a different light (and with tip-top cinematography, especially during the climatic duel itself). The characters feel much more real and believable than in most historical movies. I mean, Gladiator is undeniably stonkingly good, but Maximus is hardly your average solider. The Last Duel takes the historical genre in a very unusual, very topical, and very welcome direction. It's almost enough to make me forgive Ridley Scott for that terrible Robin Hood movie.

So yes, Scott is right to be angry that this movie isn't doing well. It's a great film which will no doubt benefit from a re-watch, since I've almost certainly misremembered the details. I'm also adding the original book to my reading list.

All the same, the real reason for cinematic failure is surely because it came out at the time of No Time To Die and Dune, both of which were much more heavily anticipated. Not feckin' smartphones, for heaven's sake. Which just goes to show that even directors making brilliant films about the truth can also, on occasion, also just be Bloody Stupid.