Back in the young days of the Blair Ascendency there was this urgent desire to replace all the fuddy-duddy institutions with new, bright and shiny, modern replacements. The Blair government, triumphant in its massive majority, wanted to emulate the previous time when a Labour government was swept to power on a radical manifesto to change the nation. Government would be transformed at every level with devolution to the Scots and Welsh, the conclusion of the Northern Ireland process begun by John Major, the reform of the House of Lords, and having parliament meet in the day time. Old fashioned things like having a Lord Chancellor and having the courts (and local councils) oversee the process of elections were to go, replaced by a prosaic Minister of Justice, a disturbingly American sound Supreme Court and an unaccountable Electoral Commission.

For local councils the intention was clear, Blair’s aim was straight from the Redcliffe-Maud and Michael Heseltine school - elected mayors for councils, reorganisation to clear out those silly districts, and a new tier of grand (and strategic) regional government. Like so much about the Blair Revolution, the local government reforms ended up as a fudge and a compromise - local councillors hated the proposals and back then Labour ran a lot of places that they’d never run before. Local councils were given a choice about whether to have an elected mayor (and near universally rejected the idea) with the alternative being the ‘leader and cabinet’ model where the leader of the controlling group appointed a few councillors to be the cabinet - no more than ten the rules said - leaving the remaining councillors scrabbling about doing little or nothing.

The Blair Revolution’s idea was that local councils would mirror parliament with backbench councillors sitting on scrutiny committees (designed to ape Parliament’s Select Committee system) that would hold the leader and cabinet to account. These committees, the government decided, would be independent - by which they meant not subject to a political party whip - and would be able to call in decisions and propose changes, even send the decision for consideration by the (whipped) full council.

It all sounded really exciting at the time, some councils (Bradford was one) even jumped the legislative gun and introduced scrutiny committees before being required to do so. The old committee system would be swept away. its fat bundles of papers, pre-briefings and meetings that lasted 15 minutes cast into history’s waste paper bin. A national organisation, the Centre for Public Scrutiny, produced a set of guiding principles for scrutiny:

• provide constructive “critical friend” challenge;

• amplify the voice and concerns of the public

• be led by independent people who take responsibility for their role

• drive improvement in public services.

The new system would be fit for the modern age - streamlined, effective, transparent and public-facing. Yet somehow it never seemed that way. I chaired Bradford’s first education scrutiny panel at a time when the Council was introducing a major reorganisation of schools (scrapping a three-tier system for the more commonplace two-tier system of primary and secondary). Officers, right up to the chief executive, told me I wasn’t allowed to require the new education portfolio holder to attend and answer questions (she did eventually come) and nor would the leader and that chief executive come. The relatively junior scrutiny officers were put under huge pressure not to allow me to do a ‘single issue’ meeting just on reorganisation and I was presented with a long list of other topics that simply had to go on my agenda.

The meetings themselves were a strange affair. For much of the time they consisted of me asking officers questions supported by the liberal democrat on the committee while the five Labour members sat there like cartoon Yorkshiremen, “Ear all, see all, say nowt; Eyt all, sup all, pay nowt.“ Matters improved once the torturous process of appointing faith school and teacher members but the Council’s corporate view remained that I should scrutinise the things that the Council wanted me to scrutinise - “it’s all about driving improvement”, I’d be told - rather than the things I felt the public would want me to examine.

Nothing much had changed when a decade later I returned as a scrutiny chair for adult social care - I wanted to look at (how topical) excess winter deaths but was told this wasn’t for me but the health scrutiny committee. There was a constant battle between my desire to look at things that mattered - bed blocking, care home fee structures, continuing care - and the Council’s preference for a long agenda of individual matters going through the authority’s decision-making processes. I still, however, found myself in the position where many of the councillors barely contributed to the meeting (and would start huffling and shuffling if the end of the meeting crept passed the kick-off at Bradford City or the start of some far more important party meeting somewhere else in the City).

The reality, at least in my experience, is that scrutiny is seen as unimportant (the local press only once attended my adult care scrutiny) with the chair roles often used as de facto sinecures - a little paid job in the gift of the party that could reward a supporter or buy off an independent or minor party leader. The financial pressure on local councils has resulted in less and less officer support for scrutiny, in the merging and closing of scrutiny committees, and in the whittling down of membership to a bare minimum. Bradford’s seven committees and now four (soon to be three) meaning that there’s no real time to consider much of substance, especially given the increase in process aspects of these meetings (”full council has said that all procurement decisions over £350,000 should go to scrutiny”).

Bad chairs, poorly managed agendas, reducing officer support - all these make for scrutiny being less effective. There is, however, a more fundamental problem - scrutiny acts to reduce effective opposition by reducing the spaces where the decision-makers on a council are questioned and challenged by their political opponents. Indeed much of scrutiny, especially where a controlling group controls the chairs, never questions the decision-makers but focuses on responding to reports prepared and presented by officers. Add to this the (understandable) reluctance of Council press officers to issue statements or releases from scrutiny chairs that might challenge the political leadership.

As we move to a new era of sub-regional mayors and combined authorities with doubtful levels of accountability (who scrutinises the LEPs, for example), we need to ask what model is best for the vital task of questioning and challenging those decision-makers? The scrutiny chair at the sub-regional level is another appointment brokered between authority leaders and the membership is either unpaid (meaning too often councillors don’t give it due attention - or even turn up) or represents another de facto sinecure used to reward members.

The current system doesn’t enable good scrutiny (which doesn’t mean no good scrutiny takes place, just that it’s rare) and means too many decisions are made poorly, too little time is spent looking at the outcomes of those decisions, and very little attention is given to accountability which should be a central tenet of a democracy. If we are to move towards the direct election of leaders and mayors, this should be matched by an adequate system of accountabiity, something not served by the current structures for scrutiny. Even if we remain with councillors elected as at present, we need to think about how the small number of councillors who make decisions can be held more properly to account for those decisions. For all its faults the old committee system did mean councillors made decisions in a contested environment, in public and open to question. The current system sees decisions made by unchallenged cabinets faced by poorly resourced and badly led scrutiny with the result that too many poor decisions get made.

Reforming local government should start here - with accountability, scrutiny and challenge - rather than with grandiose debates about geography and leadership. We are moving towards a situation where the latter (new boundaries, mayors, unitaries) come ahead of the pipework of democracy - scrutiny and accountability.

“Britain’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first speech as Labour leader Friday to condemn the economic model established in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and promise greater public control of essential services, signaling a shift to the left from outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Burnham, who will formally become prime minister Monday, said that Britain had taken “a series of wrong turns in the 1980s,” when political power was centralized and economic power was transferred to private companies.”

One of the consistent things about GenX left-wingers is the extent to which Margaret Thatcher, or rather a Mythic Maggie quite distinct from the actual person, occupies their mind. I remember, when Margaret Thatcher died, the beer writer and successful ad man, Pete Brown wrote two thousand sad words about how much he hated Thatcher because everyone like him from Barnsley hates Thatcher. This despite the freewheeling legacy of the Thatcher years lying behind the achievements of British advertising agencies, the very thing that gave Brown his early financial success. Less biting the hard that feeds and more chewing its arm off at the elbow.

Andy Burnham is typical of these, middle class (usually but not always with exaggerated claims to being working class) and educated left wing 50-somethings. It’s true that the 1980s miners’ strike, a folk memory of Militant Labour and Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech are factors in the embedding of 1980s mythology in the minds of that decade’s teenagers. But I suspect that a much bigger influence on the politics of those bright teenagers from Labour voting families was ‘Saturday Live’ (and its successor, ‘Friday Night Live’). The show featured popular, and often very funny ‘alternative’ comedy including greats like Harry Enfield, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tracy Ullman. All hosted of course by writer, stand up comedian and full time lefty, Ben Elton. It was Elton’s ‘a little bit of politics’ with its focus on ‘Mrs Thatch’ or later just ‘Thatch’ that created the earliest versions of Margaret Thatcher as an evil hag: a characterisation that dominates less informed left and right wing opinion of her and her policies.

“The Irish death goddess, Morrigan, is usually portrayed either as a hag or else as a glorious queen of battle. This reflects her two domains, albeit that death and battle are inevitably closely entwined. For some Morrigan is beautiful, dangerous and magnificent, the Queen of Battles, while for others she is evil, bitter and hateful, a Night Hag. These two images capture beautifully the responses to the Japanese ambassador. And reminds us that even now, over 35 years since she left office, the mere mention of Margaret Thatcher elicits such strong feelings, often from people too young to have experienced her period as prime minister. It is, however, the Mythic Maggie - either night hag or battle queen - that people address, not the real Margaret Thatcher.”

We listen to these myths when Burnham talks about ‘trickle down economics’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘privatisation’ while painting mythical pictures of working class communities under the domination of trade union bosses. Burnham shares with the populist right a rose-tinted vision of an imaginary past when sturdy men from Lowry paintings walked to work in great factories where we made things. In this fairy story the unions weren’t thuggish men who enforced closed shops and used coercion, violence even, to control the communities of those mills, mines and factories but sainted leaders who held rapacious bosses in check. Burnham shares with people like J D Vance the idea that something called ‘neoliberalism’ and its planned ‘deindustrialisation’ took away this happy world replacing it with a ‘dog eat dog’ world filled with people apeing Harry Enfield’s most famous character by talking about how they’ve ‘loadsamoney’.

This is the world of ‘Other People’s Money’ where uncaring men in broad red braces with big city offices arrived in towns that ‘made things’ to close down and asset strip the traditions of industry. This terrible ‘neoliberalism’ was for Burnham and other 1980s teenagers simply all Thatcher’s fault: she did it, their vibe tells them, out of simple spite and hatred for the traditions of the working class. Burnham’s claim that under Thatcher “economic power was transferred to private companies” isn’t a considered assessment based on economic history but a statement of faith. Men like Burnham ‘remember’ in the way of fourteen and fifteen year olds everywhere, it’s all mixed up with clothes, music, boys and girls but they definitely ‘remember’ how terrible it was and how it was ‘All Thatcher’s Fault’.

Yesterday I stubbed my toe

All because of that so and so

And today some fucking brat

Had the nerve to call me fat

And I’m very inclined to say

I guess you could say

That it’s all Maggie Thatcher’s fault

The average age of a Labour Party member is in their mid-fifties, Burnham speaks directly to their deeply held teenage belief in the Thatcher Myth in a way that Starmer, a child of the 70s couldn’t. The conservative right in Britain has long been accused of living off the ‘Maggie Myth’ but we don’t always appreciate that the reverse of that myth is one of the most powerful forces in the Labour Party too. Ben Elton once refused lunch with Margaret Thatcher because he feared that he might find he quite liked her and this would spoil the vibe of his stand up. That vibe remains with us today and is manifest in the person of our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.

With the terrible and tragic murder of Anne Widdecombe we have been treated, often too publicly and from people who should probably know better, to a choice selection of “I’m glad she’s dead” statements and a veritable torrent of “I hated her and her politics but being murdered is bad” remarks. Most of this, because of Widdecombe’s politics, coming from the political left in its various guises.

Thinking about this, and the tragedy itself, I recalled a book published back in 1976 that tells the story of a wrathful god and his faithful followers. The book, “Deus Irae” by Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny is about the pilgrimage, ‘pilg’ in the book, of Tibor McMasters, a disabled artist commissioned to create a likeness of the God of Wrath himself. His priest, Father Handy, near the start of the story presents us with his idea:

“De mortuis nil nisi malum, he thought, correcting the old saying to make it come out the more wisely: Of the dead only speak evil. Because they were that stupid; it was cretinism carried to the dimension of the satanic.”

When Father Handy corrupts the Latin tag about not speaking evil of the dead, he does so because the choices of those millions now dead led to the destruction he sees around him. Those dead men and women didn’t deserve him indulging the vanity of not mentioning their sin. Like most post-apocalyptic stories, ‘Deus Irae’ sets out to both imagine how a world after cataclysm would appear and to explore how human vanity, our hubris, created the mess in the first place. And in upsetting the old presumption about the dead, one dating back thousands of years, Dick & Zelazny make us think about why we are advised not to speak ill of the dead.

The most obvious answer to this question is that the dead, being dead, cannot defend themselves from accusations and allegations. So speaking ill of the dead becomes unfair since that dead person cannot rise out from their grave to set the record straight. The problem is, however, that we routinely criticise the dead. The entire study of history would be challenging if there weren’t criticisms, attacks and condemnation of people now dead. We also know that, when a revered ancient is condemned there are plenty of others prepared to step up and defend that revered ancestor’s choices, decisions and actions. We may be angry at Daryl Cooper calling Winston Churchill ‘evil’ on a podcast but our response isn’t to deny Cooper the right to make such claims but instead to explain why he is wrong.

The stricture not to speak ill of the dead is, at its heart, a matter of respect. Which is why Father Handy felt able to speak only evil of the millions dead in a human-wrought apocalypse: he could not respect them since they allowed the ‘God of Wrath’ to lead them to destruction. In our world there is no self-appointed god-figure leading people to their doom so we see the dead and ask if they earned our respect. This is not a matter of agreement or approval: when Tony Benn was asked why he went to Enoch Powell’s funeral his simple answer, ‘he was my friend’, wasn’t a statement approving of Powell’s politics but that Benn, having known the deceased for many years, respected him and his memory. There was no endorsement of views or actions, just a recognition that the newly dead person merited a moment of reflection and thanks.

It isn’t that we shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead but rather that we should, at the moment of a person’s death, be reflective and considered. Above all we should remember that the deceased had family, friends, a wife or husband, children and these people are hurt by that person’s passing. The rawness of that moment of loss should, in most circumstances, mean we hold back from criticism. Like many of you, I could write a short list of people whose death I would not mourn: some are public figures, others people I’ve known personally (a few are both). And, should those on this list go before me, there may be a time and context when setting out why I don’t mourn them is possible. But that time isn’t close to the time of the death itself and it isn’t usually a public forum. There’s a world of difference between saying “I really hated so-and-so” privately to your spouse or close friend, and sounding off in print or over the airwaves.

Father Handy was angry. We could say justifiably angry since the choices of millions to endorse the wrathful god resulted in those millions dying. But his anger wasn’t directed at the god himself despite that being the most obvious response. Instead his collapse of respect was in the shallowness, selfishness and hubris of those now dead millions. There will be times when a death seems just, American drones gunning down Osama Bin Laden might be one such an example. But for Father Hardy to opprobrium shouldn’t fall on Bin Laden but on the thousands, millions maybe, who made that terrorist’s actions possible. We can be grateful for the evil person’s demise but also recognise that all of the crimes associated with that person are also the consequence of choices made by others, ideas formulated elsewhere, and support given for reasons of ideology, search for power or just pretending you have the authority of God.

Although there is something of a contradiction in humanity, we are both individually creative and creatures of what has gone before, when someone chooses to attack someone recently deceased, to call them mad or bad or evil, this creates an unanswered cruelty: the critic is the evil one, the person at fault, because despite the object of their criticism (in Father Handy’s case the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel) being individually evil, that is only possible because humanity contains a collective evil. As Professor Heinz Kiosk, Michael Wharton’s crazed psychologist, would put it; “we are all guilty!” This is why we don’t speak ill of the dead, why as someone’s friends and family mourns we keep our thoughts to themselves. There will come a time when criticism is merited but nearly always there is no justification for publicly dancing on the newly dead person’s grave.

Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny’s exploration of faith, doubt and genius finishes with Tibor McMasters, seventeen years dead, celebrated for the great art he created. Tibor is a saint despite us knowing that his commitment was to his art not to the painting of god they had commissioned him to produce. You cannot speak ill of the saint, to do so would be heresy. We are left hoping that the chance to speak ill will come, not for the sake of it but for the sake of humanity.

“It was indeed the visage of the God of Wrath, Carleton Lufteufel. There could be no doubt. Any disputing this was henceforth illegal…This was to insure reverence in an irreverent world, faith in a society which had become faithless, and belief in a world which had already discovered that most of what it believed were in actuality lies.”

“What was once, as my boss put it, “the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world” is now a sorry place where the city centre, those parts of it that aren’t empty and boarded up, provides a shopping offer suited to the poor, old, tired and ill that you see walking that centre’s streets. The council and other bodies have, over the last thirty years or so, poured huge amounts of public money into seeking to turn round the City’s fortunes. Any visitor to the City would be forgiven for assuming that no investment has taken place over those years.”

I wrote this two years ago about Bradford but, if you’ve had your eyes open, you’ll recognise in these comments the sad reality of what we chose to call ‘regeneration’. For nearly 50 years now Britain’s national governments have poured cash into programmes designed to avert, turn round, the decline of places just a bit too remote from the minds of policy-makers in London to benefit directly from that great city’s success. There have been, in broad terms, three types of central government regeneration programme: Shiny Boosterism, Hugging Communities and The Big Party.

Shiny Boosterism is the most recognisable type of regeneration, we see it in Andy Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism’, in the endless obsession with trams, concert halls and shopping centres as the means to transform the lives of Britain’s left behind. The idea is that we use public money to sponsor physical development. Sometimes this takes the form, as for example with Bradford’s excellent City Park, of better public realm but more commonly it involves the underwriting (through direct grants, loans or loss guarantees) of private property development. The rationale for this strategy contains two elements: a ‘field of dreams’ idea that shiny new development will begat more shiny new development that doesn’t need public subsidy to happen, and the concept of agglomeration where the very fact of dense city environments sparks, by some magical process of interaction, economic growth.

For every example of success (and there we talk almost exclusively of Manchester) from this Shiny Boosterism we can find a dozen or more examples where the expensively subsidised new development or extravagant public realm did nothing to change the economic realities of places. Wolverhampton, Stoke, Hull, Bradford, Wakefield, and Liverpool have all had plenty of this boosterism without, if we’re honest, any noticeable boost to these places’ economic performance. Paying the profit margins of developers to attract them to your town seems like a good idea (certainly politically - all those lovely cranes) but if you take a moment the reality is that the beneficiaries here are men like Daren Whitaker rather than the local economy. When I look at the developments in Bradford delivered using this model - a half empty cinema/leisure complex, a pretty but badly built block of ‘luxury’ flats now filled with recent migrants, an uninspiring block of mostly unoccupied ‘Grade A’ offices across from City Hall - I wonder where the developers are now? They certainly aren’t in Bradford and the sloshes of public money used to ‘lever in’ investment are, I fear, mostly paying the rent on Monaco penthouses and the leases on swish supercars.

In the second part of the 1980s some regeneration folk began to question the Shiny Boosterism approach arguing (correctly) that it did nothing to help the most deprived places, the poorest people. We needed to change the emphasis of regeneration to focus on people and communities rather than physical investment. Yes there’d still be physical programmes but they’d be about creating opportunities for the inhabitants of those most deprived places. Programmes like City Challenge and its successor the ‘single regeneration budget’ (or SRB as we lovingly called it) were created that focused on poor communities rather than town and city centres. Funding was directed to social programmes (often supported by EU funding like ERDF and ESF) that spoke of skills, capacity building, ‘breaking down barriers’ and access to employment. Inevitably these schemes became filled with sub-Marxist ideas about the reasons for deprivation and, inevitably, a new collection of middle class expert mouths to feed. It’s not that none of these projects worked but that for every successful training or jobs programme there were three social programmes that amounted to little more than middle class professionals going into poor communities to give them a big hug and say ‘there, there’.

Capacity building and community development created a plethora of community centres, women’s groups, social outreach programmes and health promotion enterprises. Each of these organisations employed community development workers, centre managers and project leaders, nearly all of whom would get in their car at the days end to drive to their home in a place that wasn’t deprived. It wasn’t that no good was done by this Hugging Communities regeneration strategy - parks were improved, community centres did provide much needed social space and kids were helped into work - but more that so much of the cash vanished into ideologically pure projects and, in the end, the money didn’t resolve the reasons for the places being so deprived in the first place.

Some people then argued that a more ‘holistic’ approach was needed, one that combined the politically popular Shiny Boosterism with the regeneration professionals’ preference for Hugging Communities. The idea of focusing on the local economy began to develop as a strategy, promoted by think tanks like the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research (CRESR) - full disclosure, I did my Urban Regeneration MSc at Sheffield Hallam University where CRESR is based - and the Centre for Local Economies (CLES). The core of this strategy is another economic idea, popularised by the New Economics Foundation, the local multiplier. The essential conceit of the multiplier is that the reason for deprivation is that because poor places see a net outflow of money to richer places, the response to regeneration must focus on keeping money circulating within these poorer communities. And public agencies - councils, universities, colleges - need to contribute through their procurement strategies and employment policies. If these ‘anchor organisations’, recipients of money from outside the poor area, spent more of their money locally there’d be more money in the community and the economy would grow.

There are lots of reasons why this approach doesn’t work (which doesn’t stop NEF, CLES and assorted left wing councils and MPs claiming it does) but the actual national strategy, New Deal for Communities, founded on these ideas was no more successful than earlier social regeneration programmes like City Challenge and SRB. We might as well just spend the money on a Big Party.

In the history of regeneration there’s nothing new about the idea of throwing a Big Party. You could argue that various EXPOs across the world represent using the Big Party to get some economic boost. But for urban regeneration the ‘throw a big party’ approach starts with the 1984 International Garden Festival in Liverpool. Great dollops of government cash was thrown at a derelict industrial site to put on the festival, obviously in the hope that this would stimulate a long term transformation. It is safe to say that this long term benefit (other than the remediation of a big landfill site) remains tantalisingly unrealised forty years later.

The questionable success of the International Garden Festival hasn’t stopped governments from believing that throwing a Big Party will transform struggling provincial towns and cities. Most notably there’s the Capital of Culture and City of Culture competitions that, in true Heseltine-style, got places to bid for the accolade of being the chosen city. It would be an excellent pub quiz question to name the four cities that have been UK City of Culture since the scheme was introduced in 2013 (they are Londonderry, Hull, Coventry and Bradford, Liverpool had been European Capital of Culture in 2008). But even being kind to these great cities, it is hard to see what substantive economic benefit they’ve got from their respective year-long cultural celebrations.

Throwing a Big Party does seem like a great strategy, it is certainly popular with the great and good of successful cities who get to dress up a lot and attend big events. And some of those events, magician Dynamo launching Bradford’s year of culture in a freezing cold City Park was brilliant despite the frostbite, are genuinely popular with local people. I’m sure also that there’ll be an expensively procured evaluation pointing to lots of ‘legacy’ from the year of party but has that cultural boost also boosted the economic prospects of the host cities? This is the problem - who remembers Bradford hosting Britain’s first International Markets Festival with traders from 20 different countries filling the streets of the city centre? What economic gain has Gateshead got from its long term strategy of culture-led regeneration? For sure there’s the magnificent Angel of the North but everyone thinks the Glasshouse and other Tyneside wonders are in Newcastle not Gateshead.

These three regeneration strategies haven’t worked, at least if you accept that the objective of regeneration is the long-term economic transformation of a place. England’s Northern and Midland cities have all sorts of shiny buildings, hundreds of community organisations born from SRB or NDC, and fading memories of whatever Big Party the city managed to wangle the cash to put on. But any long-term betterment hasn’t come from these programmes, it has come from the economic fundamentals changing, sometimes at the expense (as we see in Manchester) of other struggling regional towns and cities.

There isn’t a magic wand, a secret formula, for regeneration. This isn’t an argument against government, national or local, spending money on physical, social or cultural projects but one asking for more realism. And when we’ve been honest with ourselves about regeneration we should maybe ask about what makes a place successful. We can’t do much about the weather but we can think seriously about what is realistic (Hull is not going to become San Francisco) and if the regulatory environment attracts inward investment and, as importantly, supports the making of new local businesses. If the North’s (or indeed anywhere else’s) cities want to grow they need control of more taxes, regulations and rules - not so they have more money for the mayor or council leader to spend on getting re-elected but so they can reduce the negatives that those taxes, rules and regulations impose on business, investors and trade.

Bradford didn’t need lashings of cash from Whitehall to build its amazing City Hall, Cartwright Hall Gallery, and Wool Exchange, not to mention thousands of other incredible places. Or to build water works, gas works, railway stations and concert halls. Bradford built these wonders because back then it was the richest city, in the richest county in the richest country in the world. And in the Wool Exchange there stands a clue as to why Bradford got so rich, a statue of Richard Cobden, champion of free trade, free enterprise, free markets and local government. Richard Cobden the father of true Manchesterism.

“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”

The space where I’m nearest to being an expert, partly from study but mostly from experience, is urban regeneration. This began when, despite my asking to be portfolio holder for housing, Margaret Eaton put me in charge, politically at least, of trying to regenerate Bradford. Some people will remember our city’s famous hole in the ground, may recall the hair-tearing efforts to rescue Manningham Mills, and the maniac scheme (in a good way) to reopen the Bradford canal. That was, in small part me:

Secured the restoration of Manningham Mills

Improvements to Manningham Park

The rescuing of Eastbrook Hall

Robert’s Park, Saltaire

Bradford International Markets Festival

City Park

Impressions Gallery & Gallery One

Refurbishment of John Street Market

Airedale greenways project

Airedale Partnership

Broadband enablement of the whole District

Improvements to Keighley market

The problem is that every person who has taken on the task of regenerating Bradford can provide a list of achievements just as long. After I stopped being the regeneration portfolio holder in 2006, I decided that I ought to learn something about regeneration and headed off to do an MSc in urban regeneration. Here I mostly discovered that nobody really knew what they were doing and that regeneration was mostly a game of chasing pots of central government or EU funding so as to give the impression of doing things to make struggling places and people better. At one point I compared the distribution of England’s poorest places in 1968 with the distribution of deprivation in 2008. The depressing discovery was that, with a few exceptions (inner south west London was no longer deprived and once fairly prosperous mining towns were) the same places that were poor in 1968 were still poor in 2008. I’d hazard a guess that the comparison will still hold in 2028.

Since everyone is expecting Andy Burnham to move into Downing Street and that with a northern accent running the country our long forgotten, crumbling northern places will, by force of Andy’s short vowel sounds, leap into life again. Every struggling place, even those struggling places near Manchester, will become boom towns like Manchester filled with shiny towers and trendy bars. We’ll be told it’s all about investment by people like Lord O’Neill from the Northern Powerhouse Partnership as if the simple act of spending money provides the catalyst for economic growth. Advocates of shiny regeneration like Sir Richard Leese and Lord Heseltine will argue that all you need to do is have the government underwrite the profit margins of developers and, bingo, off zooms the economy.

The problem is that we’ve been doing this sort of regeneration for nearly fifty years and Heseltine’s ‘field of dreams’ strategy became economic policy orthodoxy from the early 1990s. “Build it and they will come” cry the regenerators and enthusiasts for state investment. But we built it and they didn’t come. I’m not sure how much has been invested over that time in regenerating Bradford, it could run into billions. Does anyone really think it has worked? Or that similar sums spent in Hull, Sunderland, Blackburn, Barnsley and Doncaster have worked? It isn’t that what we did was bad - there are great public spaces, brilliant stadiums, fabulous concert halls - but that the investment theory has been proven wrong. We were told by the experts that these billions in regeneration funding would ‘lever in’ billions more in private investment, that paying the profit margins of developers was worth it because the next developers won’t need that guarantee. We were told that connecting places with very expensive trams and metros would be transformative and that subsidising bus fares would boost employment and retail spending. We were told that community capacity building, a focus on skills and more social housing would end deprivation.

The people who told us these things - ministers, property developers, academics, council chief executives and public transport enthusiasts - were wrong. Just investing, just spending money doesn’t work. Worse, the most successful regenerations - Manchester, Salford, Leeds and Newcastle city centres - just sucked trade and commerce away from the towns in their periphery. Bradford, Wakefield, Wigan, Oldham, Gateshead watched as the lawyers, accountants, ad men, bankers and consultants all packed up their offices in our towns and moved to Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle. Several of the biggest Leeds law firms were once headquartered in Bradford and this pattern is repeated across every part of the business services ecosystem. The effect of big city success is to strip high added value jobs from smaller towns replacing them with, at best, low value processing (soon to be replaced by AI) and at worst another half empty office block.

Yet if you were to ask for a regeneration strategy for Bradford, Sunderland or Rochdale what would come back would be a plan to invest public money in transformative schemes. Councillors and now elected regional mayors will gobble it up hoping it will bring some national funding and, at last, that scheme to boost the high street will happen. Everywhere - witness the latest round of town funds - will take their bit of investment, will announce how this will change everything and then discover just how far grant or loan funding doesn’t go in stimulating economic growth.

We’ve tried using investment by the state to stimulate economic growth hundreds of times across England. Every struggling town, challenged suburb and crumbling city centre has had millions to spend on getting that growth. And it hasn’t worked. Why on earth do we think that doing the same thing nationally will result in anything other than the same outcome? Britain has conducted a ‘field of dreams’ economic policy since the 1990s, doubled down on this approach after 2008, and now is about to boost it again via Andy Burnham, a man who appears to believe his own political mythos. Every political party in Britain, in as far as there’s any clarity in their economic thinking, has the same economic strategy, a policy approach that starts on Liverpool and London docks in the 1980s where Michael Heseltine announced the first of many schemes based on the idea that investment necessarily begets economic growth. We know now, after 45 years of testing this idea, that it nearly always fails. Quite how an economic approach so manifestly flawed became the policy orthodoxy in Britain is incredible.

21st century Manchesterism is simply a repeat of policies that don’t work. Its birth partly dates back to the aftermath of the 1996 IRA bomb in Manchester city centre but the encapsulation of the policy begins in 2012 with Michael Heseltime’s ‘No Stone Unturned’. When that was published I wrote about how Heseltine was wrong in 1982, wrong in 1992 and still wrong in 2012:

“These tired old policies are accompanied by a familiar litany of how business-style public sector management is needed, how economic development is driven by “innovation strategies” and some ridiculous obsession with “British ownership” as if that is somehow significant in our economy. What Lord Heseltine presents is simply his inevitable dirigiste, managerialist vision of how government should be organised. And it’s presented with panache and conviction.

The problem is that this agenda failed to regenerate the North when Britain was booming. Why on earth does anyone think that this agenda will regenerate the North when Britain isn’t booming? There is nothing at all in Heseltine’s prescription that will take us one inch nearer a more dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Instead we’ll have an economy designed and run by a closed sect of business managers working hand-in-glove with a closed sect of public sector managers.

In the end these are tired old proposals from a delightful and eloquent old millionaire. They are policies that haven’t delivered regeneration when they were tried before – except for some shiny city centres. But ask yourself this. Those city centres – Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds – have they delivered regeneration for the wider community? Travel a few hundred yards to Newton Heath, to Harehills, to Kensington and look around you. That depressing place of high unemployment, poor education, rampant crime and unshiftable poverty wasn’t changed when Heseltine’s policies were tried before. What makes you think it will work this time?”

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And Britain has been, under the guidance of an old property developer turned politician, doing just this in its efforts to transform the struggling economies of northern towns and cities. It is time to put Lord Heseltine out to pasture, admit he was always wrong and do something different. Some thoughts about that are here and here.

In June 1982 a teenager from Richmond, Virginia called Irving “Bink” Pulling killed himself with his mother’s revolver. Another tragic death except that Pulling’s mother Patricia believed that the reason behind her son’s suicide was the role-playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’. Specifically Patricia Pulling said that a curse placed, in game, on Bink’s character was the reason for him shooting himself in the chest that day. Pulling sued her son’s school principal and TSR Ltd, the creators of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’. The lawsuits were dismissed but Pulling remained convinced that the role-playing game was damaging to young people and, to promote this argument, set up B.A.D.D. - “Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons” - to campaign for controls over the game.

Pulling and a collection of enthusiastic Christians including Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore and author of “Raising PG Kids In An X-Rated World”, created something of a moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons with Gore and Pulling appearing on national TV to argue that the game promoted violence, satanism and suicide. Some of the material produced seems bonkers 40 years later but was taken seriously by public authorities, at least for a while. The Escapist, a gamer website, has catalogued much of this panic (there’s a link from this excellent Gizmodo article on the scare):

“Here, a list of suicides are presented, with location, race, sex, and date of death for each. These are the names that were usually the first ones trotted out when the ‘dangers’ of D&D were discussed. Along with them, we get some supplemental data – all were white males between the ages of 12 and 18, three were honor or gifted students, all deaths but one involved a weapon, and – the most curious coincidence of all – half of these deaths occurred on a full moon.”

If we peer a little further back into the history of Dungeons & Dragons we find, from when the game was still wet behind its ears, the case of James Dallas Egbert III:

“Throughout the 1980s, the United States was gripped with what’s been referred to as the “Satanic Panic,” a surge of anxiety that blended such disparate items as reports of cult activity and ritual abuse, Halloween candy tampering, heavy metal music, horror films and novels, and role-playing games. One of the ignition points for this phenomenon occurred in 1979 when a young college student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared. While the reasons for Egbert’s disappearance would become clear later, some observers and media personalities knew exactly what to blame: Dungeons & Dragons.”

We know now that the game had nothing to do with the suicides of Pulling or Egbert (indeed the private investigator in the latter case deliberately withheld information about drug abuse and struggles with sexual identity) but this didn’t prevent influential public figures from demonising D&D, resulting in fear, confusion and purposeless attempts to ban the game. It is this process, the making of moral panics, that leads again and again to adults seeing as bad the odd, occult, geeky and nerdy (or strange and unhealthy to the moral panickers) interests of teenagers. A panic made worse when something terrible and tragic - suicide, murder, madness - occurs.

I don’t know how many people were playing D&D back in the 1970s and 1980s, a few million worldwide at most. Some took it more seriously than others but for most of us it was a slightly geeky game that wasn’t like other games: more immersive, not a win or lose game, creative and original. I guess, however, that most people thought us mad. Today, we are watching another moral panic play out filled with the same tragic stories of death, self-harm and madness. A panic about teenagers and something they do that we sort of understand (Dungeons & Dragons is a game, we understand games, yes?) That panic gives rise to these beliefs:

“Their effects appear to include contributing to declining mental health, collapsing attention spans, bullying and general unhappiness, as well as contributing to broader crises such as falls in literacy, loneliness, fertility collapse and political polarisation. In some cases this is due to direct harms caused by use; in others, it is because the addictive nature crowds out other, healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others.”

These are familiar words to those who recall past moral panics - the Dungeons & Dragons example I describe above but also computer games, song lyrics, films and TV shows. Those who paid attention during the 1970s will remember Mary Whitehouse (for Americans reading she was an English 1970s version of Tipper Gore) and her ‘Viewers and Listeners Association’. And historians will point to 18th century worries about how that terrible new thing, the novel, was corrupting young women, stopping them doing “...healthier activities such as outdoor play or in-person socialising with others.”

The quotation above comes from an article entitled “Social Media Ban: Responses to 10 common objections” which is, once it calms down, a very clear presentation of the case for a ban. The problem, and it is a real one, is that the context for the argument is, quite simply, that the content and availability of media is harming young people. It is exactly the same argument as we read here in a 1974 Spectator article:

“(it) may teach self-interest rather than philanthropy, violence rather than gentleness, a disregard for human dignity rather than a respect for it. It may not always teach the truth but teach it does, and it is more than time that responsible people both within and outside the broadcasting professions said boldly what is so obvious in commonsense terms — we cannot understand what is happening in international, cultural, economic, political and social affairs without coming to grips with the way in which television influences virtually all our behavioural and thought processes.”

Just as there was no evidence linking TV to teenage mental health, no evidence connecting Dungeons & Dragons to suicide, and no evidence showing violent video games spawned more violence, there isn’t evidence connecting social media use to the traumas of modern adolescence. Here’s a meta-analysis from 2025:

“This was investigated in a meta-analysis of 46 studies of youth social media use and mental health. Results indicated that the current pool of research is unable to support claims of harmful effects for social media use on youth internalizing disorders. Some types of methodological weaknesses, such as evident demand characteristics and lack of preregistration, remain common in this area. It is recommended that caution is issued when attributing mental health harm to social media use as the current evidence cannot support this.”

That’s about as blunt as social science research gets yet here we are using anecdote and parental worry to argue for a ban that is wholly unsupported by evidence. All because of these same tired old fears about novel media and its impact on children (and indeed adults). There is an argument for looking at the impact of the smartphone on our lives but that’s a case for setting the terms - as we did with TV (and before that radio and books) - for wider culture to catch up with technology. Bans don’t do this. Bans tell us something is bad. Worse bans don’t work (unless you think putting 30-40% of young people at greater risk is some sort of harm reduction).

I appreciate that I’m shouting at the oncoming storm here by opposing a social media ban for teenagers. But we are about to take away a load of social fun and entertainment from teenagers for the very same reason that Patricia Pulling and B.A.D.D. tried to stop my generation from rolling dice to see if we’ve killed the goblin. It is always terrible when tragedy happens but we should look at individual cases as individual cases not try to find a wider societal reason for bad things happening. A social meda ban really isn’t necessary. Maybe we need some robust public communications about moderating use, better support for parents, and a little bit more guidance on safe use from the companies. But above all let’s remember Anna Karenina’s advice:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The TV series 1883, the origin story for the Yellowstone series, recounts the journey of the Dutton family from Texas to Montana. A journey where most of the travellers don’t survive and those that do are scarred by the experience. The process of migration is fraught with exploitation, robbery, murder and rape. Migration stories, in the end, boil down to survival because they are written by those who survived. But:

“Data from over 100,000 4Mi surveys with refugees and migrants on the move, reveal the risks they face, the lack of protection and the support they need on mixed migration routes. People on the move report widespread dangers, including physical and sexual violence, robbery, detention, exploitation, illness and even death – with abuses committed by both state and non-state actors, including smugglers. At the same time, people highlight needs such as cash, shelter, food, health care, water and access to work or legal aid. These risks and needs are not the same for everyone: they differ by gender, age, sexual identity, nationality and by the route taken.”

All this raises a question about what appears to be a greater tendency to violence among migrants. Are violent men more inclined to migration, are those who survive the ones prepared to be violent, or does the process of migrating lead to people being more willing to use violence? Does the process of migrating suit the mad and bad better than the kind and sane?

Travel may broaden the mind but, unless we are unusual, the process of travelling is stressful. Even something as mundane as taking a package tour to the Costa del Sol contains a host of moments when something can go wrong. Where did you put your passport? Will the taxi arrive on time or even arrive at all? Have you packed everything you need? Will the plane be delayed? Are they going to search your baggage and, worse, is that suitcase you put into the hold going to arrive at the destination with you - in one piece? Mostly none of these things happen and the worst part of travelling is the fat man in the next seat or the crying baby across the aisle.

Imagine now that your journey doesn’t start in a pleasant suburban home but in a makeshift cabin on a refugee camp just across the border from some or other civil war, famine or natural disaster. And that the cost of the journey ahead of you wasn’t paid to an airline or package tour company but to an anonymous network of men you don’t know who promise to get you to your chosen destination in England, Germany or Holland. Plus, of course, the money to pay this anonymous network consists not just of all your savings but the family’s savings, all of the spare cash from your father and mother, brothers and sisters. The hope from this payment is that you’ll reach the destination and obtain the money to repay your family and more. Better still their prayers are that they’ll join you at that destination.

You don’t start the journey in an Uber, at best you’ll be on a bus or crammed with eight others in the back of a twenty year old Toyota Hilux. But you could start off just walking with a bag full of your stuff slung over your shoulder, a cheap mobile phone in your pocket, some documentation and a little cash in your shoe - not much else. You get to stage one in this journey, somewhere by the sea where you expect a contact will get you onto a leaky boat along with a hundred others. There’s a chance that there isn’t a boat, there never was a boat, the anonymous network just swallowed your family’s money. And there’s no ABTA, no airline compensation system, you’re just a thousand miles from home with not much money.

Some give up at this point, perhaps returning, maybe hunkering down in the port looking for menial work, giving up on the chance of reaching the chosen destination. Others continue the journey, perhaps the more persistent, the angriest or the ones prepared to join others using violence or threats of violence to force the men with boats to take you. The camp by the sea is supposed to be supervised by some or other aid or refugee agency but the truth is that, just like the refugee camp where you left your family, the camp is controlled by hard men with clubs, even guns. You can either pay these men or work for these men - or get beaten up, robbed, even killed.

Every step of the journey threat and risk hangs over you. You’ll sleep in the open praying that the men you’re walking with don’t rob you in the night. Sometimes you get a roof over your head: a police cell or hard floor of a barrack room where you’ll be interrogated, slapped and poked with guns. Again money or co-operation - sometimes unpleasant co-operation - gets you away from this. By now you’ve acquired a knife providing a little more protection.

For the luckier travellers this journey might take a few months but for others, where the people smuggling network was broken or never existed in the first place, getting to an HMO in Basingstoke can take over a year. And it isn’t over then because, as you negotiate the reality that your new neighbours don’t want you there, you also find out that the once anonymous ‘travel agent’ is now a violent Albanian gangster. You’re going to pay him back before ever you get to pay your family back.

The story above may be fiction but we know that refugees and asylum seekers are five times more likely to have mental health problems compared to the wider population. King’s College London report data showing that 61% of asylum seekers “experience serious mental distress”. And because most asylum seekers given stability, security and a path to integration will recover their mental health, we can surmise that much of this mental health stress is a consequence of circumstances - why they are here and how they got here. In Britain, while asylum seekers can register with a GP and receive support, we offer no specific screening or psychoanalysis for new arrivals. Public authorities make no attempt to find out who among these recent arrivals are the mad or the bad.

It isn’t racist to make the assumption that nearly all of the people arriving on our shores as asylum seekers or refugees have some form of mental stress and that many have serious mental health problems. Being mentally ill doesn’t, obviously, mean that a person is automatically inclined to violent rage but we know that PTSD is associated with violence. So screening for PTSD might help reduce levels of violence among traumatised refugees and asylum seekers. What this suggests is that the current practice of distributing asylum seeking arrivals across communities is neither fair to those communities or fair to the asylum seekers themselves. Regardless of measures to reduce the flow of new undocumented migrants, it does seem sensible to make provision that secures communities from risks consequential on poor mental health and to provide therapy and medical support to those seeking asylum or refugee status. At present we do neither of these things.

What I’ve written here isn’t intended as an argument for or against migration but rather that, regardless of the numbers involved, we have too few support systems for migrant health and too little regard for community safety in the management of undocumented migration, asylum and refugees. We know, and public authorities know, that the extreme trauma of many migrant journeys raises the risks of violent responses from mentally ill migrants but seem to limit any response to researching migrant health rather than robust interventions of support and protection. What little support is given comes from refugee charities not the system itself. Put simply our system of managing asylum and undocumented migration fails both British communities and also the migrants themselves.

“As I'd seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don't notice when they become oppressors.” Souad Mekhennet

Some while ago somebody, I don’t know who, invented the idea of shared victimhood. That simply being within a given group made you a victim. Your actual lived experience didn’t matter, the fancy car on your drive didn’t matter and the size of your paycheck didn’t matter. All that mattered was that you were of that group, that you could claim victimhood because of your blackness, gayness, disabledness or femaleness. And being in a group entitled to victimhood granted not only protection from criticism but also access to the quota-filling, target-meeting world of corporate and public sector equalities policy. You might be a victim but you were, if you knew which buttons to press, a privileged victim.

But if you’re a multi-millionaire football star or a successful tech innovator or a celebrated actress you aren’t a victim. Nothing in your life tells anyone that you’re a victim. But if you’re black or gay or trans or disabled you can vicariously share the victimhood of others with that characteristic who probably are victims. And everyone wants to join the game, the way to give yourself advantage is to be a victim, to find out (surprisingly) you’re neurodiverse, to fit neatly into the victimhood holes of the company’s diversity plans.

Meanwhile the political world, so attuned to grievance as it is, discovers these victims. Not real people with actual problems (unless they fit a political campaign) but groups of victims - assorted ethnic and religious minorities, the bewildering acronymic world of LGBetc and a veritable forest of disabilities, some almost invisible to all but the most victim-sensitive eyes. Policies, programmes and strategies are formed, whole teams of sensitive officials are appointed, the priorities of group victimhood are embedded in personnel, recruitment, grievance and discipline policies. You must be sensitive to the concerns of these groups, says the policy.

And the people with nice cars on the drive, university degrees and the right victimhood gain preferment. There really are victims out there, poor kids, disabled kids and such. But the gains from victimhood don’t go to them. Instead they go to connected, educated, dare it be said, posh folk who played the right victim card.

I’m not a victim. I’m straight, white, English, and haven’t got a ‘tism or a physical disability. But I understand why people wanting to scrabble up the challenging ladder of life seek out what advantages there are to help that process. And being a victim is one of those advantages. Not an actual victim obviously because being a well educated, university qualified person doesn’t give off the gentle perfume of victimhood. But if you can press a victim button - race, sexual preference, neurodiversity, mental health - then the route to advancement is smoother. It may be annoying watching a multi-millionaire Hollywood star talking about their struggle with ADHD, dyslexia or being gay, but this is what feeds the need for victimhood.

Now, because we have filled people’s minds with the advantages of victimhood, those who can’t lay claim to that victimhood are seeking to broaden the definition. I’m reminded of Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ and his radical psychologist, Heinz Kiosk who, as his peroration proceeded, would build to a crescendo of “we are all guilty” as the audience headed for safety beyond the lecture theatre.

Victims are individual, yet we have created a world where being a victim is collective, institutional and shared. The black drug addict dying on the streets of Minneapolis is a victim, as is the white student stabbed in Southampton. But they are individual victims and don’t make others of their race and culture also victims. Our problem is that people want to make one or other death into a validation of victimhood, into a scream of anger directed at authorities and as an appeal to that victimhood.

You’re not a victim though are you? White people, black people, gay people and disabled people aren’t victims. You may be individually a victim of something - prejudice, dismissal or even worse - but this, even if your group membership is the reason, doesn’t make other people in that group also victims. This doesn’t negate saying prejudging someone on the basis of their characteristics is wrong. Passing laws or having organisational rules that make this prejudice punishable can be justified. Our problem is not the condemnation of racism, sexism or homophobia but the idea that the existence of prejudice merits special treatment for a whole group even if many in that group don’t experience damaging prejudice. We see this in action when the wealthy and successful comedian and actor, Sir Lenny Henry, calls for reparations, literally calling for all black people in Britain to be given a cash payment simply because a distant ancestor was a slave.

Britain has spent nearly 30 years embedding group victimhood into the rules governing institutions. From race relations and equalities legislation and through assorted guidance and ‘good practice’, we have arrived with the institutional norm being to assume that someone not in a particular victim group is prejudiced towards members of that group. And the only protection from these allegations is to be part of a different victim group. This results in a sort of victimhood top trumps and means that a homophobic or antisemitic Asian Muslim gets their prejudice treated differently from a homophobic or antisemitic person not from an identifiable victim group.

For politicians, and especially politicians on the left, these victim groups present excellent marketing opportunities since they all have identifiable leaders and figureheads. Each victim group has (often quite well funded) campaigning organisations and wealthy or powerful people who lay claim to one or other victimhood. In return for political support the victim groups get to shape laws and institutions in the interests of their particular group. Organisations and institutions permit groups to organise within them - black police associations, muslim civil service networks and so forth. This is ostensibly to provide solidarity for victims of the inevitable prejudice but, in reality, uses the threat from equalities rules to privilege the victim group. Organisations are risk averse and will almost always seek to avoid confrontation with somebody, backed by a network the organisation allowed to operate, playing their trump card of being a member of a victim group.

In this mad world of people seeking gain from victimhood it has become logical for people to want to be in a victim group (but preferably not an actual victim). This leads to fakery such as falsely claiming an ethnicity but also to people seeking victimhood for their group. One of the features of the populist and postliberal right is that they, like the left, stress group allegiance. Most usually this is an allegiance based on ethnicity or culture and the right has begun to craft its own grievance, to manufacture a victimhood. In this context we shouldn’t be surprised to hear Nigel Farage stressing the different treatment of white people because he - and others like him - have positioned themselves as leaders of a victim group of white people. The immediate reaction of the left’s pack of victim cards is to shout racism but this is a mistake because all it does is reinforce the sense of victimhood that Farage and the new right want to establish.

What is happening here is that grievance, real or manufactured, has become a significant currency in politics because we institutionalised victimhood as a feature of what became privileged groups. Advocates of this approach will, of course, argue that all this does is rebalance institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic environments. The quieter voices that object point out that the big winners in these systems aren’t people who actually face prejudice but rather those whose membership of a victim group provides advantage in preferment and protection from discipline. Such objectors point to people like Sir Lenny Henry and observe that he has, from being a teenager on New Faces to his role as the face of Red Nose Day, enjoyed nothing but the accolade of Britain and British people. Yet Henry still plays that victim card and media institutions buy the lie.

The murder of Henry Nowak has brought this to a head. Not because his murderer was a sikh but because his murderer (and that man’s family) played his victim card by claiming racism. Worse than this, the police on the scene seemed almost programmed to accept the allegation of racism without question. There is loud talk about ‘two tier policing’ and lots of references to George Floyd but the political exploitation of the tragic killing, rather than focusing on the failures in the police response, seems at times to be simply a search for white grievance, for a new victimhood. It is right to assert that the police will respond differently when a member of a victim group is involved because the guidance to police in England says just that. Whether this amounts to ‘two tier’ policing is open to debate and it is unhelpful for the Prime minister and others to simply dismiss the claim out of hand. But the appalling police response doesn’t turn other young white men in Southampton into victims or members of a victim group. When someone like Farage centres the word “white” in public comments that is what he is doing and it simply acts, for all its political impact for that politician’s supporters, to shore up the edifice of group victimhood that undermines the effectiveness of institutions in Britain.

We have in the noble cause of fairness and equality created a divided and divisive culture. Starmer accusing Farage of stirring up division is a really bad case of there being, as my Mum would say, most shoving where there’s least room. The systems that Sir Keir has had a big part in constructing, that game of equalities top trumps, created the problem we saw in Southampton. If we want things to change we cannot simply review Hampshire Police’s race policies or get the College of Policing to write a new interpretation of how police services should play the equalities game. To change we need to remove the superstructure - the presumptions about institutional racism, the Equalities Act that gave legal status to victim groups as victim groups, and the processes that see racism as a sort of original, overriding sin. I see Kemi Badenoch speaking of being ’colour blind’ but I have yet to see, from her or anyone, an approach to equalities that places this idea in a practical form. We need a route map away from our failed system of equalities top trumps towards a world where people really are judged by the content of their character. We can dream.

There has been a veritable avalanche of proposals for the salvation of Britain. All prompted by Tony Blair who presents what he called the politics of the future in a long-winded argument that because of AI everything must change:

“And is it right that we’re living through the 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution and if so, are we remotely meeting the scale of that challenge? And what are the opportunities in areas like health and education for transformative change consequent on this revolution and the existential dangers of this revolution when, quite soon, someone sitting in their front room could hack into vital national infrastructure and bring it down?”

Some have argued (not without merit) that Tony Blair, having taken a quarter of a billion dollar donation from Larry Ellison the owner of Oracle, is more or less duty bound to make the case for policy changes designed to suit billionaire owners of big tech businesses. But this doesn’t mean that Blair is wrong to make arguments for a refocus on energy abundance and a liberalised planning regime (at least for technology infrastructure, Blair famously has a housing crisis blind spot). If the position for Britain is to embrace the AI revolution with all its warts or else fall behind and risk further relative economic decline, then these policy changes really are necessary. Blair makes an eloquent case for what he calls the “radical centre”, essentially a sort of techno-oligopoly, a more benignly capitalist version of Aaron Bastiani’s ‘fully automated luxury communism’.

Some reading the article tell us about the things that Blair gets right (scrapping net zero, reforming planning, reaffirming the close relationship with the USA, not relitigating Brexit) and use them as a stick to beat the men fighting over the decaying carcass of the Labour Party. But in doing this we miss what Blair gets wrong. Most notably Blair’s argument makes a presumption that the success of his techno-oligopoly depends on what he calls ‘partnership’ between industry, commerce and the government. But Blair insists that this partnership is primarily about AI (see above for his funders) and that it is all about managing the state not boosting the economy:

“Most important of all, reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st-century technological revolution. All governments for the foreseeable future will govern in the age of AI. Those which understand it will see their countries prosper; those which don’t, won’t. This is literally the challenge across all sectors including welfare and health (digital ID is just one, though vital, part of it). It will define the future of the British economy which, ironically, has a powerful position in technology but one we’re in danger of squandering.”

The responses from Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer have been, in different ways, to reject Blair’s arguments. Burnham (and more sotto voce Wes Streeting) says the problem is inequality and the legacy from 40 years of ‘neoliberalism’. Every problem Blair describes (and some he doesn’t such as the 2008 financial crash) was a consequence of failed regulation. And this regulatory failure resulted from us being altogether too soft and laissez faire. Dare I say it, too Blairite. Burnham parades Manchester’s modest, largely property- and services-driven economic success as evidence despite him having little to do with the drivers of this growth. The growth mainly comes from good fortune, enterprising Mancs, liberal planning allowing rapid city centre development, the relocation of the BBC and the consolidation of the North West’s legal, consultancy and accountancy businesses in the city. Burnham just rode this wave.

Sir Keir Starmer’s response turned out to be a pretty robust defence of his choices and leadership in government. As with Burnham, Sir Keir dismisses Blair’s arguments as being out-of-touch and unpopular. There was no engagement with the principle ingredient of Blair’s proposals, the AI ‘revolution’. Probably because, right now, people either see AI as a cutesy internet tool (all those drearily twee cartoons) or else as something that is going to kill their job. For the millions of public sector workers who make up the core of the Labour vote and provide most of its activists, talk of “...reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st-century technological revolution…” isn’t talk of better government but signals a redundancy notice at some point in the near future.

The Labour Party isn’t going to adopt Blair’s radical centrism, especially when it reeks of American tech billionaire interests. Instead, regardless of whether Burnham replaces Starmer as leader and PM, we’ll see another shift leftwards. The Burnham agenda of nationalising water, subsidising buses and borrowing money to build a few council houses will become the strategy as the party hopes that Tory immigration reforms will eventually reduce net migration. And, as the Trump era comes to an end, the world’s economy will breathe a sign of relief and start to grow a little. In Britain a mild uptick in the economy will be presented in triumphal terms as vindication of Labour’s reforms and, echoing a decade of French politics, the Party’s electoral strategy will feature a special fear whipped up about Reform and the ‘far right’.

The most striking thing about Burnham’s reply to Blair’s essay is its parochialism. In his response, Burnham returns to arguments about local protectionism and state investment rather than engaging with the globalism of Blair’s essay. All three men fighting over the somewhat tarnished Labour crown seek (and in doing so reflect what is probably the majority view of Labour Party members) to pull away from engagement with the global economy - except for the diminishing part of that global economy represented by the EU - and prefer to talk about inequality, state control and industrial strategy. What’s most striking about these positions is how close they are to those favoured by national conservatives and, in as much as it has one, Reform UK economic policy.

The outcome of this debate hasn’t been an active discussion of the social and economic choices created by the “21st century technological revolution” but rather a retreat back into trite arguments about “40 years of neoliberalism” and how we can’t allow the markets to dictate the economy. Even Blair’s odd endorsement of multipolarity while arguing for closeness with the USA received little attention except in respect of Britain’s relationship with the EU. Nobody, moreover, hinted that Blair’s obsession with digital ID, biometrics and social media controls might not be conducive to an effective long-term relationship between Britain and the USA, home to the businesses leading this technological revolution. Instead we’re talking again about nationalising water supply, a failed attempt to use state direction to make bus travel economic, and a sort of social model for public procurement that amounts to little more than localised protectionism.

Nobody raised an eyebrow at Blair’s promotion of gulf state and Saudi interests given that these are also important clients of his institute. Or indeed asked questions about the active engagement strategy with China that Blair promotes. Above all the only alternative to Blair’s AI strategy is one of greater control and regulation, a fearful approach that parallels the approach of the EU. Indeed Blair, rather than seeing new technology from a laissez faire perspective, presents the benefits of AI and LLMs as lying in reforming the state and social control rather than in creating new opportunities for commercial and business innovation. Britain has real opportunities in AI application to fields like life sciences, financial technology, leisure, gaming, and health that our sclerotic and often obstructive state makes more difficult. This isn’t simply a matter of letting developers build data centres but of stepping back from the sort of planning driven economic strategy that Blair advocates. Burnham, Streeting and Starmer want to concentrate on distributing the pie while supporting Blair’s essentially statist approach. Streeting posts a video talking about wealth taxes while Burnham and Starmer babble about social justice.

Somewhere out there is a free market response to Blair, one that says yes to his globalism but rejects his big state techno-oligopoly. But so far all we’ve had is Burnham rediscovering the failed policies of 1970s Britain, Starmer proclaiming the merits of his regulatory, lawyer-led state, and Streeting trying to be a less zany version of Zack Polanski. A better plan - ideally a plan to have less planning - would be welcome. This from Kemi Badenoch is a start but I hope she is listening to herself when the arguments for social control are made, often with tears and pain.

Hannah Fry, the maths and science influencer posted an interesting little video about murmurations, those incredible and spectacular aerial displays by flocks of birds (most commonly starlings). Fry asks how it is that during these displays the birds seem almost uncannily connected, almost as if there’s some programming preventing any collisions or crashes. Of course it turns out that the secret to the starlings’ display isn’t some central direction, leadership or planning but a simple set of rules followed by the birds: don’t get too close to the neighbouring bird, steer in roughly the same direction as that bird, and stay close (but not too close) to the group.

“Ultimately, Fry points out a beautiful philosophical and mathematical lesson: gorgeous, cohesive structures do not require a central leader. They emerge naturally when every individual quietly pays attention and adjusts their behavior to the people right next to them.”

Unsurprisingly this simple behavioural discovery helps our understanding of crowds and crowd management, hints at how viral spread (real viruses and information viruses) happens, and contributes to a variety of traffic management activities. When I watched the little clip I was, however, struck by another parallel which Fry doesn’t mention: the operation of free markets. We live in a world where many, including policy-makers and politicians, believe that free markets are an illusion and that there are people (often sinister conspiratorial people) directing markets usually to their benefit and our detriment. You only need to listen to left wing politicians talking about supermarkets or the buying and selling of government debt to hear this presumption of sinister management in full flow.

What the murmuration teaches us is that all these ideas of how markets are guided or directed - as wannabe prime minister Andy Burnham put it, we mustn’t be in ‘hock’ to the bond markets - are mistaken. The behaviour of markets is much more akin to the behaviour of starlings over the Somerset levels: buyers and sellers track what adjacent buyers and sellers do, they tend to track in the same direction, and they stick close to the pack. When we talk about market trading, we tend to mention the show off, willy-wagging world of online economics guru, Gary Stevenson. It is all about big bets and high risk strategies, it is a world of big swinging dicks, cocaine and burning the candle at both ends. And while there’s some of that going on, the reality is that most people trading in markets (including all of us when we go shopping) don’t take risks and, in broad terms, follow the herd. The corporate treasury manager acts more like George Banks and the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank than like an extra from “The Big Short”:

If you invest your tuppence

Wisely in the bank

Safe and sound

Soon that tuppence safely invested in the bank

Will compound

And you’ll achieve that sense of conquest

As your affluence expands

In the hands

Of the directors

Who invest as propriety demands

The second lesson from the murmurations is that the aggregate of individual decisions creates something beautiful and magnificent. So it is with markets, those petty choices and decisions we make seem like nothing much when they’re made but collectively they provide the bedrock for human betterment. The singular genius of Adam Smith was that he saw this truth - it gets called the ‘invisible hand’ - and that managing trade, at any level, limits and restricts that trade, encourages corruption and leads to crashes. It is a tragedy that the case for free markets and free trade has to be remade each generation. There will always be people like Andy Burnham who, either from personal ambition or misplaced conviction, tell a sceptical public that they can manage markets better. And these people are wrong. They were wrong when they argued for mercantile monopolies in the 18th century, wrong when they defended the corn laws in the 19th century, wrong when they claimed government should set prices by fiat, wrong when they claimed markets should be replaced by state direction and planning, and wrong when they claim economic growth comes from tariffs and industrial policy not from the glorious murmuration created by the choices millions of people make about their lives every day.

Today the happiest, healthiest and wealthiest places are, almost without exception, places where governments resist the temptation to interfere, to pretend they can direct the murmuration of the market. These places - Texas, Alberta, Denmark, Singapore to name a few - are not all alike and the patterns their markets make are not the same. But they succeed because they trust that people will not get too close to the next bird, will fly roughly in the same direction, and will accept the good sense of the collective. It is also a reminder that markets are not, have never been, about a sort of wild west individualism but are a reflection of human society.

So next time you see a film of a murmuration, or better still see one live, think about what these birds are doing. Then consider that the most beautiful and beneficial things humanity does - meeting our shared needs through free markets - works in a very similar manner. Your local big supermarket is a thing of beauty: over 35,000 different products brought to you at a convenient location and at affordable prices. This is what markets do, it is impossible to track or model every individual choice, to trace the work going into the most mundane of products but there on the shelf in Tesco is a can of baked beans for 40p. Humanity creates this magic collectively but that isn’t an argument for planning but a recognition that planning is futile and pointless. At best those plans will make no difference but too often they try to make birds change direction, drag them away from the crowd. The result is crash, chaos and the end of the market murmuration’s glorious beauty. Yet every day politicians and so-called activists tell us the beauty of the market is a sin, that they should be allowed to direct and manage the direction and choices of the birds in flight. And beauty dies, we stop getting healthier, wealthier and happier.

“And so it happens that all armed prophets win, and the unarmed are ruined. For…the character of populations varies; and while it is easy to convince them of something, it is difficult to keep them persuaded. And so one should see that once they no longer believe, they should be convinced to do so by force.”

Niccolo Machiavelli is a much more interesting man than our modern caricature of him suggests. The Prince, from which the quote above comes, is both the most famous job application in history and a celebration of Machiavelli’s biggest passion, humanist republican government. Machiavelli’s ‘armed prophets’ were the enemies of his beloved Florence and especially the militant secular power of the Papacy. You could persuade Florentines of republicanism but without arms - a citizens’ militia - those other prophets would destroy the city’s nascent liberty.

When I ran across the quotation, however, the first thing I thought of was Islam and that Mohammed was, literally, an armed prophet. And how force and the threat of force was an important factor in turning places colonised by Arabs into the Muslim ummah. If the west wants to defend itself against militant Islamic supremacy then the starting point is to remove the militancy, to disarm the prophet. This wouldn’t be an attack on Islam or the ideas that surround Islam but an endeavour to prevent the threat of violence and, indeed, actual violence being used to stop criticism of Islam.

In March 2021, a teacher at Batley Grammar School, in a structured discussion with sixth-formers about free speech and blasphemy, showed a picture of Mohammed. What followed was a violent protest targeting the school and the teacher. As a result the teacher, faced with repeated death threats, was forced into hiding and the school cowering behind shallow apologies returned to normal. Or at least a normal where the limits of free speech reach only as far as the discussion of Islam and the symbols of Islam. The ‘armed prophet’ had won. For sure, there was an inquiry but it just said the teacher was let down by the “...council, police and the trust running the school” and that there was a wider cultural problem of “self-appointed community faith leaders aggressively interfering in teaching”.

The aggressive targeting of perceived offence with threats of violence continued - and continues. An autistic boy in Wakefield and his mother were forced into humiliating contortions of public apology. A cinema chain pulled a screening of ‘The Lady of Heaven’, a film about Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, to “ensure the safety of our staff and customers”. We can trace the willingness to use violence back to the mid-1980s in Bradford where headteacher Ray Honeyford was targeted for his, by today’s standards mild, criticisms of religious segregation and multiculturalism. Today the main targets of militant Islamic Supremacists are often what they see as immodesty (it is no accident that they killed girls at Manchester and Southport, and threatened to attack a Taylor Swift concert). The slaughter by Islamic Supremacists at the Nova Festival in Israel connected this violent targeting of perceived immodesty with another ‘armed prophet’ hatred: Jews and Israel.

Over recent weeks there has been a series of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. Each of these attacks has shown that the British state is unwilling to declaw the ‘armed prophet’. After an initial shock there’s a collection of platitudinous statements about there being ‘no place for antisemitism’. These are followed by the revelation that the perpetrator is a lone wolf with a history of mental ill-health and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that this isn’t an organised thing but just a random nutter. But climb into responses to reports of the attacks and a different story emerges of Jew-hate, celebration of violence and shifting the blame from the attackers to the victims. Because, you know, they’re Jews and what about Gaza. Baby killers.

Machiavelli wanted to protect his beloved republican Florence from men who would use violence to crush the idea of liberty. And you get this protection, according to The Prince, by the righteous being prepared to adopt the methods of the enemy, to also be ‘armed prophets’. Today’s militant Islamic Supremacy succeeds and sustains because Western states, entranced by human rights and a 21st century idea of liberty, refuse to use main force to defend free speech and the rule of law from militant Islam’s attacks. People sometimes ask what modern conservatives should want to conserve as if it is an unanswerable question. Yet is it liberty that we want to conserve, that liberty set out in England’s Bill of Rights, baked into the Constitution of the United States, claimed by revolution on the streets of Paris, and restored by two terrible 20th century wars.

To defend liberty, Machiavelli’s passion, requires us to accept the cynical truth of The Prince: if you cede an advantage in arms to the enemies of that liberty, they will win and you will lose your freedoms. To maintain liberty you cannot allow its enemies the freedom to force, through threat of violence, a teacher into hiding, a writer to a life behind a screen of secrecy and security, and a rabbi to leave his university chaplaincy. Yet that is what we have done in Britain. Militant Islamic Supremacy with its Jew-hate, its sexism dressed as modesty and its preparedness to threaten violence and riot is the enemy of liberty. But instead of arming ourselves against this threat, we adopt a mantra of human rights, tolerance and community cohesion to avoid confronting those who would destroy our liberties.

The lesson is that we must stop believing that the mere fact of liberty and human rights will win, that we don’t need armed men operating in the shadows to defend that freedom, and that our enemies are not really our enemies. You don’t protect the liberties of Jews, girls at pop concerts and families at Christmas markets with words about kindness, tolerance and decency. You win, as John Doniphon taught Ranse Stoddard in Shinbone, by being prepared to destroy, if necessary kill, the enemies of freedom and the rule of law. Until we do this, militant Islamic Supremacy will continue to thrive and, swimming in its pool of wider Muslim support, threaten the lives and liberties of our people. Machiavelli, so demonised for his honesty in defence of his beloved republic, was right:

“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.”

“When everyone feels free to tell you the truth, respect for you dwindles… A wise prince should take another course: choose wise men for your advisors, and allow only them the liberty of speaking the truth to the prince, and only on matters about which you ask, and nothing else. But you should question them about everything, listen patiently to their opinions, then form your own conclusions later.” Niccolo Machiavelli

We, probably vaguely, remember the “third way” and the concept of “triangulation” as important features of Tony Blair’s repositioning of the Labour Party. The idea of triangulation is to break the binary nature of political discourse explicit in the contest between socialism and capitalism, left versus right. The principle here is founded on the assumption that most of the public sit in a vaguely defined ‘middle ground’ between left and right and, as Bill Clinton’s advisor (and former Republican) Dick Morris described, cherry pick the good bits from each side’s policies and platforms. While the approach does have merits it suffers from a related syndrome best set out in the joke about the preacher telling his congregants to stick to the narrow path between good and evil.

Today, triangulation is more a feature of retail politics, rhetoric and marketing rather than as a wider political strategy: ‘not X, not Y, but Z’. The politician, knowing his or her audiences, seeks to square the circle between competing expectations from those audiences. So nationalist politicians wise enough to know that free trade works will construct a position that speaks of trade in patriotic terms rather than in its correct liberal usage. And for the left, in the manner of Ken Livingstone’s 1980s ‘rainbow coalition’, policies are crafted to target different ‘progressive’ audiences (LGBT, ethnic minorities, feminists, social housing tenants and so forth) which are then validated by identifying a set of shared enemies (landlords, Tories, bankers, the rich, America). The objective is to sustain your coalition by focusing their anger on the shared enemies so as to gloss over the huge differences in expectations between the groups making up the coalition.

The risk with these strategies, both the broader ‘third way’ programme and the more common approach to political communications is that the politician ends up in the manner of mankind using the babel fish as proof of God’s non-existence: “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.” Desperate to make sure all the audiences are ticked off, the politician ends up sounding ridiculous. Here’s Green Party leader Zack Polanski doing some geopolitical triangulation:

“I was asked over and over again who I thought was worse, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. My answer has always been, I don’t think it’s helpful to compare oppression. All oppression is oppression. I think my answer is even more nuanced. Now, though, as horrendous as Vladimir Putin is and as despicable as his crimes are, I’ve never seen him threaten genocide. I’ve never seen him threaten to wipe out a civilization. I’ve never seen Keir Starmer claim we have a special relationship with Vladimir Putin as we shouldn’t, or that he’s our ally, but we have with Donald Trump. Where is the moral consistency here with a man who is literally threatening genocide? What was Keir Starmer’s reaction to that? On the day Trump threatened genocide, Keir Starmer tweeted or posted about Wireless festival, a music festival in the UK. There was no condemnation whatsoever from Keir Starmer that I saw anyway about what he was threatening to do in Iran, nor what is happening in Lebanon or Gaza. I think that’s despicable. And so I think, at this point, it’s not that Donald Trump is more of a danger than Vladimir Putin but I think Keir Starmer’s commitment to a so-called special relationship with Donald Trump is more of a danger to British people than what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine, which also, by the way, is vile and needs to be stopped. But if we want to get into comparisons, I’m actually more concerned at this point about Keir Starmer’s relationship with Donald Trump”

Polanski has a coalition of support which he feels is motivated more by anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment than it is by concern about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. And Polanski therefore wants to make out that Putin’s endeavour to extinguish the idea of Ukraine and being Ukrainian is less problematic than Donald Trump’s bombast or Israel’s self-defence. In doing so, however, Polanski manages to trap himself in the argument that Britain having a positive relationship with the USA is more problematic than Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine with main force. We can appreciate that Polanski’s main target (and an easy one right now) is Keir Starmer but also see that the Green Party leader has also trapped himself into being seen as an apologist for Russia and Putin.

Polanski performs the same contortions when asked about the overt antisemitism seen from some of his supporters and activists:

“I’m concerned about rising antisemitic attacks. We saw arson attacks on ambulances for instance and we know that increasingly jewish communities are feeling unsafe. There’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety, but neither are acceptable”

As with the Putin comments Polanski provides himself with cover by describing perceptions of ‘unsafety’ as unacceptable but then the Green Party leader explains and the triangulation problem kicks in because he knows that, while he may be a Jew, a big and important audience for his message really doesn’t like Israel and Jews. The audience represented by his deputy leader. So Polanski cavils:

“He also said that although he takes antisemitism allegations against candidates of his party seriously, there have been “increasingly weaponized, cynical political attacks from the Labour Party”.”

Polanski’s argument is that we need to be more ‘nuanced’ about antisemitism, a position that resulted in him, in essence, arguing that, despite the Equalities Commission saying otherwise, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party wasn’t institutionally antisemitic. While Polanski’s personal Jewishness provides him with cover, his need to defend the anti-Jew views of those who are in his party because of his deputy leader creates another communications contortion for the party that probably can’t be resolved by saying ‘as a Jew’.

The Greens have faced the same problems over issues like trans rights and drugs liberalisation but the heart of the party’s challenge is the impossible task of marrying a geopolitical position that garners votes from socially conservative audiences with a domestic position featuring injustice of private renting, the terrible idea of building new houses on Green Belt and the lie that all the money can come from taxing the rich. None of this survives contact with reality but, as we’ve seen with Polanski’s justification for antisemitism and anti-Americanism, this matters little so long as the party can keep the different parts of its coalition from finding out the bits of its policy platform that they won’t like.

The problem for Polanski is that each of these clever - nuanced is a word he likes - positions sets a plate spinning and, because the whole agenda is based on stroking the love buttons of different audiences, at some point one or more of the plates smashes to the ground. The Green Party, once a bunch of lentil-knitting environmentalists, has adopted the left’s game of identity top trumps and relies almost entirely on the extent to which Zack Polanski’s gift of the gab keeps those plates spinning. Polanski’s approach, as we’ve seen several times in media appearances (most notably in an exchange with Ed Balls on Good Morning Britain) is to change the subject, deflect or shoot the messenger. It is great short term politics to tell objectors and critics of Green policies that they are ‘rattled’ but Polanski, as someone from Manchester, should know ‘attack, attack, attack’ is built on a sound defence.

Blair’s ‘third way’ was an authentic attempt to resolve the dilemma of social democracy (free markets work, free markets make people richer, free markets have losers). Zack Polanski’s Green Party isn’t an authentic, intelligent programme to resolve society’s problems but (something it shares with Nigel Farage’s Reform) an endeavour to convert real anger and grievance into votes. So far the rhetorical triangulation is working but its essential contradictions mean that it must fall apart. We see these contradictions again with Green MP, Hannah Spencer coming over all shocked about there being bars in the House of Commons while representing a party with a policy on hard drugs like heroin that says this:

“The Green Party advocates for a public health approach to drug policy, aiming to end prohibition and replace it with a system of legal regulation.

Under the leadership of Zack Polanski (elected September 2025), the party has increasingly pushed for the legalisation of all drugs, including Class A substances like heroin and cocaine, to disrupt illegal markets and prioritize treatment over criminalisation.”

Of course the argument here isn’t that drugs are good but that drug users and many drug dealers are not evil criminals but the exploited victims of red in tooth and claw criminal capitalism. Whereas it is a terrible thing to have a glass of beer or wine while going through the boring task of voting according to the instructions from your parliamentary whip. The problem is that the petty fussbucketry of Spencer’s comments contrast with the libertine nature of wider policy (as well as the misperception that drug users are always victims).

All political parties are coalitions held together by a shared enemy or enemies. The bickering marriage in the Tory Party between national liberals and conservatives was sustained by their shared hatred of socialism and the Labour Party held together a collection of Marxists, social democrats and pragmatists on a shared dislike of Tories and big business. These coalitions required the careful triangulation of policy - some red meat for the far left or the hard right and technocratic fudge for the pragmatic careerists. But when your coalition combines Jew-hating Muslim extremists with anti-capitalist younger people, renters and trans activists, the triangulation gets a little more difficult and, as the Greens are beginning to discover, takes you into problematic areas such as, for example, the equating of anti-capitalism with anti-zionism.

Rhetorical triangulation is the means by which these groups with different (even competing) aims are kept within the coalition. It is why the Greens in my ward don’t mention Gaza, rent controls or indeed any actual policy except stopping new house building, whereas a mile or two away in Heaton the streets are littered with Green Party literature speaking of little else but Israel, Iran and Gaza. All political coalitions have to manufacture third positions but the bigger the contrast between the ends of different groups within a coalition, the harder it becomes to sustain those positions. Zack Polanski finds himself alongside both the far left and the far right in arguing that Putin and the Islamist regime are not as morally bad as Donald Trump and the USA. The coalition is sustained, at the cost of seeming favourable to Putin’s aggression, by playing to the essential anti-Americanism of young graduates and the Jew-hate of many Muslims.

In the end something breaks. Either a different retail political product targets part of the coalition (the Muslim Gaza vote already has such an offer in places like Bradford and Birmingham and we see a comparable impact on Reform from Rupert Lowe’s more overtly white supremacist Restore party) or else the consistent deflection of policy contradictions results in less committed supporters drifting away to other parties. But the cynical inconsistency of political presentation remains and, in doing so, makes it ever more difficult to construct a programme for government that cuts through the aggressive, communications-driven political strategies of triangulated messages targeted to carefully curated audiences and based on identity, prejudice and ignorance.

“A round represents about 6 seconds in the game world. During a round, each participant in a battle takes a turn.”

Six seconds. What can you do in six seconds? Walk thirty feet, hit the bad monster a couple of times with your sword, hide, blow the room up with a fireball or answer a question about a massively complicated area of public policy the aggregation of which will decide whether that policy proceeds. This is the six second rule.

And it is why the use of opinion polling as the front end for policy development is a bad idea. I understand that six seconds is plenty of time for your big paladin with a sword to chop lumps off the ogre. I, just about, appreciate that it’s enough time for the wizard to flip open his book and read some words while rubbing some herbs between his fingers (*kaboom*). And that in six seconds the dodgy guy with the knife can dive into some shadows from where he will jump you. But I really don’t think that six seconds is enough time to decide whether we should allow assisted dying, if we should cap the pay of business leaders and owners, or carry on stopping people from building new houses.

Yet that is increasingly how policy choices are determined. The world of clever people with principles discussing what the right policies are to make people healthier, happier and wealthier is gone. Now we have ‘science’. The analysis of options, any consideration of how a given policy might have second order consequences - these things are gone, replaced with ‘we can’t do the thing that would make everything better because it doesn’t poll well’. We are captured by the six second rule.

Back in the days when I was commissioning market research none of this existed. Quantitative research was expensive. You had to pay people (my Mum did this for a while, I remember sitting in the back of the Ford Anglia arguing with my siblings while Mum interviewed someone about soap powder) and it took a deal of time from the questioning to the results of the survey. Today you can whack out a survey question to your Internet panels and have enough data to post results within 48 hours. All for next to nothing.

Six seconds though. It is a load of time. Plenty of time to remove the head of that goblin over there or to pick the lock of a treasure chest. But is it enough time to choose whether we should allow the state to kill people who, maybe, want to be killed? Is it enough time to decide whether we should cap rents, restrict executive pay, or invade Denmark?

It is no criticism of today’s polling companies to observe that the Internet changed everything. And, for those involved in developing policy ideas, in the world of think-tankery, opinion polling became a lazy way to generate copy and content. You don’t have to do any thinking, you just run a poll about Steve’s crazy idea. This is great news for the polling business but terrible for the, arguably more important, business of getting public policy right. Because, damn it, sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the thing that the public would - in just six seconds - decide is the right thing to do.

The problem is, however, that this isn’t how the policy thing works. People have talked about ‘post to policy’, where the clever kids in a think tank get their crazy twitter idea adopted and there’s probably too little attention given to the now commonplace process of ‘media outrage to law’ (especially with distraught parents getting a law sponsored that, only tangentially, relates to why their child died). When the studious assessment of the problem directs those thinking about policy to ideas that - as with social care, housing policy, and tax - don’t ‘poll well’ we have a problem. And a bigger problem when policies we know are a bad idea - rent controls, maximum wage caps, nationalisation - are popular with these instant polls.

I once got a letter, an actual physical letter, from the finance director of a big client. The finance director was concerned about the veracity of some market research we’d done around a new pension investment product they were launching. To be brief he didn’t think what we’d found was true. Not because what we’d done was bad or wrong or even that it differed from what that finance director wanted. It was about sample size, the balance between qualitative and quantitative research and that the director wanted to be sure about the science of the findings. My response was brief: “what is truth?”.

We’ve been trained in the idea that, if a majority supports a given policy position, then that is true. Even when we know that something isn’t true, we still go along with the policy because it polls well. And when someone mentions that, just maybe, the emperor needs a different tailor the response is, so often, a combination of ‘this is my truth’ and ‘people when polled support the idea of getting sunbeams from cucumbers’.

When the YouGov or More in Common email drops into someone’s email box there isn’t a great deal of attention given. If you’ve a minute or two to spare, what you’ll do is open the email and click on some answers (there’ll be points to get after all). And you won’t give any answer any more time than it takes for that paladin to take the head off a goblin or two: about six seconds. So when the poll results come out - “poll shows public support decapitating goblins” - we don’t ask how much actual attention respondents to the survey gave to the question.

Public opinion is not truth. Yet so much important policy making involves the mistaken belief that things we know are true (see above on truth being often subjective) can’t be allowed to be true because the public - when polled - would rather they weren’t true. We are trapped in a world where everything gets determined by how a bunch of online people who aren’t paying much attention - six seconds of attention - react. YouGov, polling a load of six second pings from their panel, tell us that the public support bosses not being allowed to get paid more than ten times to lowest paid workers. The advocates of this policy aren’t doing so because they think Erling Haarland shouldn’t be paid over ten times what a cleaner at the Etihad Stadium gets paid. No, they’re advocating the policy because of those thoughtless, six second, responses to a YouGov poll from people who also aren’t thinking about Haarland or Phil Foden or Bernardo Silva but an anonymous suited fat cat.

When I was commissioning market research it was an expensive business. Today, for the multitudinous polling companies, it is cheap. You’ve got an Internet panel and sending them an email is almost free, certainly compared to the cost of a survey in the 1990s. As a result policy wonks gradually become polling wonks. We have seen considered reasoning get replaced by the aggregation of responses from people who have no context for a given policy and are going to give that question six seconds of their precious time. Then, when the responses are collated, the policy wonks decide what is the best policy. Not on the basis of understanding what works, not through the assessment of trade offs but because a bunch of not quite random respondents did or didn’t like an idea they’d considered for the length of time it took the barbarian to hit the orc twice with her axe.

I still think market research is useful and important but it is a poor substitute for “test and learn”. We know that, for example, very high tobacco duties and vaping bans result in a violent black market but because polls tell us these prohibitions are popular we carry on with the stupid policy. The same goes for other foolishness like rent controls, salary caps, and price restrictions. If you ask a bunch of people if they think limiting rises in the price of eggs is a good thing they’re going (after six seconds mulling it over) to tell you yes. Which is fine until the cap is introduced and suddenly there aren’t any eggs at the supermarket. Developing better policy doesn’t follow from opinion polling. Indeed the tendency to lean on cheap opinion polls as the foundation for developing policy has bad outcomes. Not only do we get unworkable ideas acted on because they are popular, we also get a set of wicked issues (social care, housing, health) that don’t get the attention they deserve because every substantive proposal for reform turns out to be unpopular.

Next time you see the results of some polling splashed in the newspaper or pinging into your social media feed, take some time (six seconds maybe) to remember that the poll is an aggregate of responses from poorly informed, unengaged people. And also that those people have given their response less time than a single Dungeons and Dragons combat round.

“Our Right Homes, Right Place, Right Price Charter will simultaneously protect valuable green space for communities, reduce climate emissions, tackle fuel poverty and provide genuinely affordable housing.”

This is the opening of the Green Party policy on housing. It is, as you can see, a miracle. Every single vexed circle is happily squared. At the heart of the policy is the building of 150,000 new social homes per year (although if you read the policy the number is met by new build and…”purchase/refurbishment of older housing stock”, so not actual new houses). And, while the Green Party proposals won’t even scratch the surface of Britain’s housing problems, their focus on ‘affordable social housing’ places them firmly in the mainstream of housing opinion. With one or two exceptions, every political solution offered by every political party expects that a large proportion of new housing will be social or council housing.

All local authorities have provision (an expectation of national policy as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework, NPPF) for affordable housing on all developments of more than 10 homes. Changes to the NPPF in 2025 led to a greater emphasis on social housing rather than simply ‘affordable’ housing. For developments on new green belt releases the NPPF now expects 50% of the new-build homes to be social housing where rents will “remain at an affordable price for future eligible households…”. The principle arguments for more social housing are Shelter’s claim that there are 1.3 million households on social housing waiting lists and the more pragmatic observation that more people in social rather than private rented accommodation reduces the cost of housing benefit. The case for council housing, however, rests on one huge presumption and one enormous myth.

The presumption about the need for council housing is that a large part of the population will never be able to afford to buy a house or afford a market rent, so therefore the state must build and/or subsidise housing for these people. Around 17% of English housing is social rented which is down from its peak in 1980 of around 31%. Those making the case for council housing argue that this decline in social rent merely resulted in a bigger private rented sector and, of course, the evil profiteering of landlords. But when we look at the effect of right-to-buy this clearly isn’t the case. The majority of right-to-buy sales occurred between 1980 and 1990 (about 1.5 million homes) but despite this drop in social housing numbers, in 1992 the private rented sector was at its lowest level in history. The shift, as the policy intended, was from social rented to owner occupation. The rise in private renting wasn’t driven by the decline in social housing numbers but by increasingly unaffordable market housing, especially in London and the South East of England. The only reason we have such a large number of people, chiefly young professionals, who cannot afford to buy a house is because we haven’t built enough new homes where housing demand is highest.

In Romania and Slovakia, home ownership levels exceed 90%. There may be factors helping this process (declining populations, for example) but the principal reason is pretty simple. There are more than enough houses to meet the need for housing. And, in broad terms, people are able to build houses on land that they own. If you travel along the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava there’s a steep sided section where one side of the river is in Austria and the other in Slovakia. Both sides are heavily wooded but, on the Slovakian side, with a more liberal approach to development, there are new homes dotted across the slope, each built to capture the river view. On the Austrian side, with strict planning controls there are no new homes. Nearly everywhere the level of house prices and rents reflects the extent to which the state has sought to control where and what can be built, often resulting (as in England) in the banning of almost all development in areas of greatest housing pressure.

In England, we used not to have a situation where 40% of households couldn’t afford to buy a house. The reason we have this today is entirely the consequence of two policies: the tightening of planning restrictions after 1997 leading to a boom in house prices, and the accompanying relaxation in immigration controls leading to additional housing pressure. But even if we didn’t tighten immigration controls, allowing development keeps rents down and ensures more people can afford to buy. If your response to these housing challenges is to build council housing, all you do is trap people into a tenure they don’t want (and one with a history of poor management). Young aspirational professionals in London want to do what their parents did, buy a house, yet are now being told that this is impossible.

Which brings us to one of the biggest myths about housing in Britain, the post-war boom in housing. This boom, we’re told, was made possible because the state built council housing. Harold Macmillan’s programmes from the 1950s and the slum clearances of the 1960s are held up as evidence that private developers cannot meet housing needs, only the state can do this. The problem is that, when we look at the evidence, it turns out that the private sector not only can meet housing demand, it can do so at a scale and pace far in excess of what the state can achieve. The 1930s in England (and despite economic challenges, the inter-war period in general) saw numbers of new homes developed at record levels as 70,000 building companies competed to build what became the nation’s suburbs.

Why (other than the interruption of the war) did all this stop? The answer is again quite simple. The sort of people who like planning finally got a government - Attlee’s Labour government of 1945-1950 - that liked central planning. Men like Patrick Abercrombie from the CPRE and a bundle of architectural experts hated the unplanned nature of suburban development and what they pejoratively called sprawl. So we got the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act, the green belt and the de facto nationalising of rights to develop. Under such a system, the only way to develop at scale was to do so via the state, either through new towns or the development of council estates. But even with enormous funding and encouragement from the ministry, Britain didn’t get to the levels of housing development delivered by the private sector in the mid-1930s.

Council housing didn’t work. It is true that it got Britain a short term fix of housing supply but did this at the expense of housing choice, quality and the trapping of millions into a dependent tenure they didn’t like. The first proposals for a right-to-buy came, not from radical free market Tories but from the Labour Party in 1959. It was seen that, as wages for the working classes rose, finding them a way to join the ranks of the owner occupier was a vote winner. And why should the state provide millions of homes with subsidised rents when workers could afford a real stake in Britain by buying a home?

To make matters worse, in a time of high inflation councils found themselves trapped between the desire to keep rents down and the need to fund the management and maintenance of their houses. Even without that inflation, councils couldn’t afford to upgrade homes. In some places the legacy of corrupt development procurement added to the problems for councils as shoddy building work, especially in system built blocks of flats, piled costs onto housing management. While not all council housing was poorly maintained and badly managed, too much of the post-war social housing stock and especially flatted developments proved to be difficult to let and expensive to maintain. Central government through estate renewal schemes, regeneration programmes and de facto debt relief for councils acted to patch over the problem but there was no way in which many councils and other social housing managers could sustain estates filled with poor-quality and unpopular housing.

Requiring new housing development to be 50% social housing may sound good but, especially if like the Green Party (and too many in the social housing sector itself to be fair) you oppose right-to-buy, what happens is you lock in the idea that young professionals in successful cities can only thrive if the state subsidises their housing. And that, unless they are incredibly financially successful, these clever, well-educated and ambitious young people will never be able to do what their mums and dads did and buy a house. Housing policies of mass council house building without the exit ramp of right-to-buy represent a simple admission of defeat. Even worse, the allocation of half the available development land to loss-making (and often value-destroying) rent-controlled social homes simply drives up the levels of private rents and house prices.

In London boroughs like Islington, Newham and Camden between a third and two-fifths of housing is social housing. These boroughs all have significant waiting lists for this subsidised housing, very high private rents and, despite the best efforts of regulators to make some housing unsaleable, wholly unaffordable property prices. When the London mayor, Sadiq Khan and other Labour or Green Party politicians argue for rent controls, they never mention that up to 40% of homes in central London are already rent-controlled. Maybe this is because this simple fact undermines their argument by demonstrating that rent controls simply result in homelessness, higher rents and general housing misery.

If we want a liberal, equitable and ambitious housing policy then it should start with the aspiration for England to have the same levels of homeownership as Slovakia, Hungary or Romania. Instead of a policy of building densely packed state-controlled tenements, we need a policy that, over all but the most precious places, people who own land are allowed to build houses on that land. And that what they build on that land is down to them not down to regulators or politicians. This doesn’t, of course, stop councils from buying land and building houses for rent but it does shift the development onus from the state to the private sector. And we know from the suburban development in the 1930s (and, indeed, today’s suburban development in places like Austin, Texas) that the private sector can deliver so long as you don’t place too many barriers in their way.

Britain’s social housing system is terrible: rents set by a national regulator, estates only maintained through periodic grant funding, and development only possible through taxing developers or subsidising building costs. Social housing operators maintain asset management programmes with funding stretched over 30 years or more and still struggle to fund managed works or active housing management. Illegal sub-letting, overcrowding and antisocial behaviour is rife with housing staff unable to operate safely. As always, this isn’t everywhere. There are many good and effective council and social housing operators but even the best are, in effect, holding up a collapsing edifice.

In the 1980s the aim of British housing policy was to create a nation of homeowners. Not to abolish council housing but to make it unnecessary, at least in meeting the general housing needs of the population. Between the foolishness of national policy-makers, the selfishness of existing homeowners and increases in immigration, Britain created a situation where having a property-owning democracy feels like an impossible dream. So impossible that some argue owning property is some sort of sin and others propose that the only way to affordable housing is smaller homes, rented homes and a state-controlled system of allocation, management and pricing.

But this is a lie. We can have a country where people can realistically aspire to having a real, physical stake in their nation, more than Dick Gaughan’s ‘one handful of earth’. We nearly did but politics, socialism, selfishness and stupidity raised their heads meaning that now 40% of households - over 60% in our capital city - are trapped in the curse of renting because rich snobs didn’t like sprawl, and their successors voted for higher house prices not homes for the next generation. If you want to change this, you don’t need council houses, you don’t need rent controls, you don’t need national housing regulators, you don’t need new regulations on renting or leasehold, you don’t need complicated schemes of land value capture (or theft as I prefer to call it). All you need to do is let people build houses on land that they own. Just that.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats’ poem was written in the aftermath of the first world war, a time of plague, poverty, displacement and, for some, a profound sense of dishonour. The poet, Ireland’s greatest, saw the end of civilisation, the final collapse of Christendom. Nick Tabor describes ‘The Second Coming’ as the “most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English” since its theme of society collapsing, with the emergence of that terrible beast “slouching towards Bethlehem”, is a metaphor for any and every perception of threat to what we see as the proper order of things.

For many in Europe the 20th century, or at least that part of the cursed time beginning in 1914 and ending in 1989, was not a time of greatness but of sorrow, death, destruction and the decline of what had been fine civilisations. Between 1918 and 1920 a fifth of the world’s population died, not from the bullets we remember so vividly from other poems but from a terrible plague. War had come but close behind her rode pestilence and his brother, famine. War, plague, starvation and of course death seemed the order of the day, that ‘blood-dimmed tide’ Yeats wrote about.

In the years that followed Yeats’ literary second coming, the world saw the worst of humanity and, albeit in glimmers, some of the best. Across Europe a new form of powerful leader emerged. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin: men driven by rage and hate, powered by the exploiting of grievance and encouraged by an unbreakable belief in the rightness of their cause and its destiny. Were these the rough beasts of that second coming? Powerful, inspired and inspiring men forging great societies from the weak cuckold that was Christendom. Places created by the memories of Rome’s greatness, the strength of old Teutonic myth, the comfort and sustenance of Mother Russia’s breasts. Societies formed by the destruction of chosen enemies: the church, the Jew and the landlord.

“And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”

Other parts of civilisation were spared the terror of the first horseman but not its partners. Poverty, famine and death brought suffering even to that great hope, the USA. Depression, racism, the anarchy of vigilantism, all made worse by the indulgence of moral panic. Society was collapsing:

Well, what is a vigilante man?

Tell me, what is a vigilante man?

Has he got a gun and a club in his hand?

Is that is a vigilante man?

Rainy night down in the engine house,

Sleepin’ just as still as a mouse,

Man come along an’ he chased us out in the rain.

Was that a vigilante man?

Black men were lynched, adulterers castrated, workers beaten with clubs, a legion of snitches served the powerful and the moral order banned drinking. Everywhere people stood in line; for a job, for a piece of bread, for water, for a bus maybe to somewhere better. Things were falling apart. In England hungry workless men marched the length of the land.

And then war, biding her time, returned. Once again everything was put on hold while young men fought to a standstill in rain, mud and blood. And this time old women and children died too as men found the power of the bomb. A few of those powerful men, the ones driven by hate and rage, were thrown down. And we celebrated until, so quickly, we saw that the rough beast was still walking towards Bethlehem. New warlords arose as the old order withdrew: in China, across Africa, in Latin America, and even in Europe. The horsemen still rode: poverty, famine, war and death persisted. Not in Europe, frozen into inaction by the memory of those two terrible wars, but everywhere else.

But things hadn’t fallen apart. It is no comfort to the dead in China’s fields, Congo’s mines or Cambodia’s rice paddies but far from falling apart, things got better. More people than ever had enough to feed their families and, for many, a space allowing children to go to school. New technologies, most created by a renewed United States, spread across the world as that nation broke free, at least in part, from its racism, moral panic and puritan urge to control people. An idea re-emerged: liberalism, cursed by its success in the 19th century and always condemned by those who seek power over society, began to work its old magic again. Men, free to order their own lives, created betterment. Beginning in May 1979 the world tried to reseal the cages of those horsemen: wars reduced in number, famine and poverty declined, and the world’s health, wealth and happiness improved. In 1989 the flood of liberalism broke through, Eastern Europe was free and, for a moment, the flood seemed likely to wash over Russia itself. In China an old man decided his legacy would be to make his people rich rather than himself powerful. The world healed a little.

Today the damage beneath the world’s healing seems infected again. The healing is real, nearly everywhere liberalism has made people healthier, wealthier and happier. But instead of celebrating the patient’s slow recovery, many people bash at the seals keeping those old horsemen at bay. Shades of plague, famine, war and death are let loose and wise sages once again tell us that doom and damnation is soon upon us. Society is collapsing. Angry men point at new enemies - technology, capitalists, liberals. Old enemies - black men, Jews, landlords - are dusted off. Mobs gather, sometimes with some semblance of purpose but often without excuse beyond an ill-directed rage. Men, too often men claiming the guidance of god, pursuing power, ride these dangerous waves believing they can, with a little drop of burning oil here or there, reach the top without finding themselves rulers of an ash heap.

But despite the efforts of these politicians to tell us otherwise, despite their selfish exploiting of grievance, things are not falling apart, society is not collapsing, men and women are not fleeing to safer places, the planet is not on fire. Our enemies are not businessmen or black migrants, car drivers or Jews. Our enemy is not the landlord or the oil company executive. Our enemy is the man - or woman in this age of equality - who wants to tell us that, if we dispose of those they label as enemies everything will be fine.

Our real enemy is Zack Polanski, Marine Le Pen, Greta Thunberg, Jeremy Corbyn, Rupert Lowe. Our enemy is anyone who thinks a better future comes from less liberty, less choice and more power to government. Our enemy is the person who wants to stop you having French cheese, New Zealand lamb or Argentinian beef. Our enemies are those - Mazzucato, Stiglitz, Deneen - who think betterment is directed by the state not created by a free people. Our enemy is tariffs, licences, bans and controls, he is Mike Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, Rishi Sunak and Wes Streeting. And yes, he is Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

Our enemy is the public health officer who wants to ban gambling, vaping, drinking and the humble hamburger. Our enemy is someone who says “free speech is vital but…” while calling for advertising bans on sweets or the silencing of someone - perhaps another enemy - with unsavoury views. Our enemy is the planning system, it is Ofsted, Ofcom and Ofgen. Our enemies are the ‘experts’ who say globalism and neoliberalism are to blame or who tell you free markets aren’t free and capitalism makes people poor. Our enemies are those who want to fix the price of fuel or rent or groceries, who believe they know better than millions of people making choices every day.

If society collapses, it will do so because politicians exploit - for entirely selfish ends - people’s real concerns. Whether it’s a worry about inflation, the price of fuel or anger created by what the Imam said about Israel. It is Green Party agents going door to door telling people to boycott Jewish shops. It is Rupert Lowe only ever talking about black rapists. It is Jeremy Corbyn blaming the supermarket for rises in the cost of living. And it is Matt Goodwin or David Betz carefully curating facts to make out that every social problem in Britain - housing costs, school discipline, declining high streets, shoplifting - is the result of mass migration. And that unless something tough and hard and stern is done society will collapse.

And so our free society would end. They use arguments about collapse to push for the end of liberty. They are our enemies.

“So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don’t understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.” Niall Ferguson.

“So let’s look at our typical idiots. Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives.”

It is one of those purposeless performances, an exercise in democracy where the people elected have no real power beyond the ability to inflate themselves into grand poo-bahs of uselessness. Most of the population, of course, wised up to this pointlessness some while ago, but the political classes and their media pals will treat it as if what happens on the first Thursday in May is of some significance to the public. What once involved the choosing of men and women to make real decisions about their town or rural area is now little more than a national test of political virility. And not a very good one.

Local government in England is a joke. Not because councils do unimportant or insignificant things but because they really don’t have any say over what they do. Rest assured that nobody standing for election on the 7th May will mention the utter pointlessness of their role and their inability to do anything much to change or improve services in their ward. Instead you’ll get a nice shiny leaflet, probably delivered through your door by a distribution company rather than a volunteer, filled with promises to fight housing developments, fill in potholes, end waste and reduce council tax. Accompanied by badly posed pictures and, often, a bar chart or reference to a “shock poll”. In the more enthusiastic places a few posters will get erected and, very occasionally, polling stations will be manned by volunteers telling for one or other political party.

Local government in England is also broke. Not because local councils and council officers are corrupt incompetents but because national government has mandated entitlements and issued duties without providing councils with the means to fund those duties and entitlements. But despite this, English local government, and its national representative body, the Local Government Association, chooses to ignore this truth for reasons that almost entirely escape me. Is it because the LGA’s bosses rather enjoy those snuggly little meetings with ministers and civil servants? Maybe the gentle sound of gongs calms their rage at the manner in which successive national governments have treated local councils? Or perhaps the endless game of setting different parts of local government against each other means rural versus urban, districts versus counties and town versus city take precedence over facing the real enemy of good local government, Whitehall and Westminster?

I will make a few predictions about the English council elections on 7th May this year. The first is that about two-thirds of voters won’t bother voting, preferring a day at work, a beer in the garden of their local, or an evening binging the latest Netflix murder series. And don’t start shouting about how this is terrible, calling for compulsory voting, and despairing of people who don’t vote. People are rational (well most of them, some of the time at least) and not voting in local council elections is an entirely sensible thing to do. This is because of my second prediction: the outcome of the elections in your local area won’t make the slightest jot of difference to the services you receive, or these days no longer receive, from your council.

Remember what we said earlier: national government has mandated entitlements and issued duties to councils without providing councils with the means to fund those duties and entitlements. So the things we’d like the council to get on with aren’t going to happen (litter picking, street sweeping, nice hanging baskets on the high street, a new playground for the park). Not because councillors don’t want to do these things but because at each local budget another chunk of money gets shifted from locally funded visible services to nationally mandated entitlements to care and support.

My third prediction is that all the analysis of election results in England will be about what it means for the leaders of national parties. Is Keir Starmer going to resign or are his Labour colleagues going to dump him? Are the Conservatives finished? Is Nigel Farage sailing serenely towards Number 10 or has his enterprise been holed below the waterline? And what about the dancing tit whisperer, Zack Polanski? Is his rag bag of Islamists, communists and a few remaining environmentalists headed for power? Now I guess all this does matter but it ignores how the asset-stripping of local government to fund care services means that provincial England struggles on with infrastructure built by our Victorian and Edwardian forebears. And that’s crumbling away for lack of cash to keep it.

The elections in England on the 7th May are futile, little more than a grand and expensive opinion poll (and not a very good one) in which lots of people are chosen for a modestly remunerated sinecure by, at best, 15 or 20% of the local voters. I was a local councillor for 24 years and probably did some good during those years. But I remember my father, a councillor for even longer, saying how the job became less and less purposeful and more and more political. My Dad would talk about how Tory majority Beckenham Urban District would elect a Labour councillor to chair one committee because they considered him the best person for that job. I also recall Syd Collard, old school, Tory-hating Labour councillor in Bradford saying again and again that there was now no point in being a councillor because you couldn’t do anything.

As councillors got more and more pointless, the role became more and more political. Councils acquired political groups with chief whips, voting at council meetings, even little area committees, was done on whipped political lines, and hanging over everything was the malign shadow of elections and another round of politicking. As we watch the parties launch their campaigns for the coming local elections, we see national politics not local issues, national concerns not the betterment of places, and a competition between meaningless promises about planning, council tax and the inevitable potholes. None of the parties will direct our attention to the embarrassing nudity of England’s local councils. They have no clothes on but everyone playing the election game this May will ignore this and promise instead a different style of illusory clothing under their party’s leadership.

I will vote. I’ve always voted. I know who I will vote for too and will be pleased when - if - those people win. But I also know that the quality and range of visible services - the things most people think we have a local council to provide - will continue to deteriorate. Organised street cleaning will be replaced by volunteers running community litter picks. Colourful park planting will be replaced by ‘rewilding’ that’s sold as eco-friendly but is, in truth, just a way to save some money. And the frequency of bin collections will fall and the availability of housing waste sites will drop while councillors have their picture taken calling for action on fly-tipping. Cracked pavements, crumbling roads, shuttered youth and community centres, and ever more expensive parking, all done so the council can stagger through another year with more old people needing care, more kids with special needs at school and more families arriving at the council’s door in need of a home.

Your council simply doesn’t have the money to do the things you want it to do but the political parties don’t tell you this. Those party politicians prefer to lie, blaming other parties for the lack of cash for services, and dissemble by campaigning on issues like immigration, the NHS or wars in distant countries. And I understand this because whoever gets elected, whoever runs the councils, there is no way they can do what councils should be doing until national government takes its fingers out of its ears and fixes the problem with entitlements, duties and the financing of local government.

There is a glorious and passionate left-wing tradition in English folk music. From Billy Bragg’s remembering of Diggers and Levellers through the seemingly vast Kettle family giving us Merry Hell, to the traditional songs of John Spiers and Jon Boden. There has always been the idea that folk music is the music of the people, of the ordinary man, not a carefully curated presentation dished up by the posh for the bread and circuses of the poor. Because the songs, many carefully collected by the likes of Gustav Holtz and Ralph Vaughan Williams, were the songs of ordinary people, they were songs about the lives, loves, losses and laughter of those ordinary men and women. At the same time, in the secular meaning of the word, the act of preserving and celebrating folk music, however radical it may feel, is profoundly - literally even - conservative.

Among that part of the left (let’s face it, not a big part of the left) with a passion for folk music there is often a search for radicalism, a political relevance that isn’t really present unless you put it there:

“...folk music has too much of what I call ‘Billy Bragg Syndrome’, a desperate urge to be politically relevant, radical and edgy, to escape from that Ralph Vaughan Williams, Thomas Hardy and Cecil Sharp conservatism (literal conservatism - the saving and conserving of traditional song and dance). In part this latter problem merely reflects the former problem by suggesting that your nerdy love of old tunes is made relevant by talking about Gerald Winstanley and The Diggers or getting some African drummers to ‘reimagine’ ‘On Ilkley Moor’.”

One of the left’s problems with English folk customs and traditions isn’t them seeing such things as a bit twee but rather an ongoing trepidation where, if they recognise the importance of symbols like the flag of England or St George as the national patron, they will somehow be endorsing their favourite boggart, a thing they call “the far right”. Writer, broadcaster and DJ Zakia Sewell has made it her mission to lead the charge, through the medium of folk tradition, against this terrible boggart:

“Finding Albion looks to history to help undermine attempts by far-right groups to co-opt traditional symbols and stories to fuel division. “Many of our national symbols in England aren’t rooted in English soil at all,” Sewell says, noting how England’s patron saint, St George, never set foot in England and had Palestinian roots. And St George’s cross, the national flag, originated as the flag of the Italian Republic of Genoa. “The English even paid Genoa a tax for many centuries for the privilege of using the flag,” she says.”

Sewell tells us that we should come together in rejecting the “stories of Britain that are enmeshed with military, monarchy and empire” and instead adopt a different storybook based on a modern invention, the supposedly Pagan calendar. We should do this because, I assume, singing “Over the Hills and Far Away” is somehow an endorsement of the king and the army. Or even that the idea of monarchy is a bad one, that armies and navies are some sort of oppression, and that we shouldn’t remember those who served king and country. Worse, for the likes of Sewell such remembering and tradition is ‘far right’. You feel almost that bowing our heads on the 11th November isn’t an honest, decent act of remembrance but instead an act endorsing ‘military, monarchy and empire’.

The worst aspect of Sewell’s reimagined, almost expropriated folkiness, is her ‘well, actually you know’ story about England’s flag and patron saint. This suggests to me that Sewell wants to be selective about what traditions are acceptable and which traditions should be ignored. Yes she wants morris dancing and local folk traditions (but suitably bowdlerised so as not to offend) while at the same time sneering that St George had “Palestinian and Turkish roots” and that England rented the flag off Genoa. It seems necessary to point out that neither Palestine nor Turkey existed when the probably Greek speaking St George was slaying dragons. Also the English paid Genoa to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean not simply to use the flag. Once the Genoese couldn’t do this any more England stopped paying. Sewell’s stories may sound nice but they are still, nothing wrong with this of course, just modern mythology designed as a slightly pathetic barb at her favourite boggart, ‘the far right’.

If you go to Halifax there is a wonderful memorial to the men of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. The monument features the face of the Duke himself as well as soldiers from the regiment’s history: from 1760 before it adopted the Duke’s name, a soldier of the 33rd Regiment of Foot who fought at Waterloo, an officer from the great war and a man from today’s regiment. It is wrong to tell us that the 205,000 men who served in this regiment aren’t part of Halifax’s local tradition or that them marching proudly through Bradford is somehow ‘far right’. No, the Havercake Lads are rightly celebrated for their heroism, sacrifice and honour. Keighley’s brewery Timothy Taylor gives us Havercake Ale each year to remember this and we shine a little light on a few heroes of Waterloo where the terror of Napoleon was ended.

Trying to expunge war, army and navy from England’s folk tradition, what Sewell’s mission seems to want, is to cut out so much that’s important in that folk tradition. We cannot deny that men went to war, fought with Henry V, with Drake, Marlborough, Nelson and Wellington. Nor can we deny that those men, and very often the women they left behind, are right near the heart of England’s traditions. We don’t know the names of those men, they are, as Kipling said “...mere uncounted folk, Of whose life and death is none, Report or lamentation”. But through music, verse and the traditions of England those men and women are remembered.

Willie Smith’s me true love’s name, he’s a hero of great fame

He’s gone and he’s left me in sorrow, it’s true

No-one shall me enjoy but me own darling boy

But yet he’s not returning from the plains of Waterloo”

“Well, if Willie Smith’s your true

Love’s name, he’s a hero of great fame

He and I have been in battle through many’s the long campaign

Through Italy and Russia, through Germany and Prussia

Oh, he was me loyal comrade through France and through Spain”

“Until at last by the French we were surrounded

Like the heroes of old we did them subdue

We did fight for three days until we did defeat him

That brave Napoleon, bonny, on the plains of Waterloo”

I doubt June Tabor sees herself as far right but in singing this song she celebrated the great victory over Napoleon and, as so often with folk, leavened this with the sadness of loss and the terrible cruelty of war. To deny this aspect of our history, to dismiss our flag and our patron is to deny so much of what made England. It is true that the land was made by Hobdens but it is equally true that the men who fought and sometimes died in England’s colours, who served Elizabeth, George and Victoria also made England.

If you want to deal with the racists who lay claim to our flag and patron with bad intent, then the way to do this isn’t to attack the idea of the flag or the person of the patron but to pick them up, hold them high and, as Steve Knightly wrote, proclaim “I’ve lost St. George in the Union Jack, It’s my flag too and I want it back”. You don’t exclude St George, you do what we did in Bradford and you put on a parade with the symbols of the city as well as the saint and his dragonish foe. Take flag and patron into primary schools, teach their history including Agincourt, vanquishing the Armada, Waterloo and D-Day, say that this is their country and that the men who wore those colours and invoked the spirit of St George are what made it a great place.

I like, despite the fake paganism, Zakia Sewell’s desire to keep those ancient traditions (and some not so ancient) and better still to get us involved with them. But we can do this as well as flying the flag of St George, celebrating king and country, and remembering that the great land where we are so fortunate to live didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of many things - trade, innovation, genius - and one of those things is that men fought to keep the land they call home free. Denying this is an insult to England.

In Elif Shafak’s “There are Rivers in the Sky” the little girl Narin, overhearing a worker in a Turkish hospital, asks her grandmother why he called them “devil worshippers”. This is the first jarring moment in the book as you realise that what we are seeing is the genesis of genocide, of hatred. Later we read how the grandmother, growing up, had been friendly with a Muslim girl and how while that friend’s family were outwardly friendly, they refused hospitality to the extent of hiding a glass of lemonade behind a tree. Supping with the grandmother’s family was, for those Muslims, ‘haram’. Even to the point of refusing to drink water.

This is fiction. That’s what you tell yourself. Just fiction. The world isn’t really like that. Until you hit the real world and realise that this little girl and her grandmother are Yazidi. And that the genocide became real. Those people who considered that old woman and little girl to be “devil worshippers”, adherents to what we’ll call popular Islam, really did get infected by a violent passion. And that violent passion resulted in the genocide of the Yazidi.

“Approximately 400,000 Yazidis fled to the neighboring Kurdistan Region of Iraq and tens of thousands took refuge on Mount Sinjar, where they faced near starvation. The rest, unable to flee, were killed or taken into captivity and subjected to horrific acts of violence – enslavement, forced labor, conscription, torture, and rape.

ISIS considered Yazidis “infidels” and ordered men to either convert or die. Women, on the other hand, were given no choice. They were taken captive, married off to the highest bidder, sexually enslaved, and forced to convert.

More than 6,000 women and children were taken captive by ISIS and nearly 2,800 are still missing today. Sexual violence was strategically used as a weapon of war and codified in ISIS manuals that explained how to traffic Yazidi women. ISIS believed that violating women would destroy the community from within.”

People that ask about the origins of what we’re told to call “islamophobia” should perhaps pay attention to the Yazidi experience. But, as Shafak’s book makes plain, the experience of these people, their treatment by Christians and Muslims - especially Muslims - is one of exclusion, mistrust and hatred. Simply because they maintained, clung to, their ancient relationship with G-d and the world. “Convert or die” screamed the Muslims of Daesh, just as the Catholics of Spain and Portugal had done to their Muslim, gypsy and Jewish communities. And because abandoning a thousand and more years of faith, dumping your entire culture, isn’t a simple thing, these people stood in shock as their oppressors hacked, bludgeoned and shot them leaving piles of the dead as a memorial to hatred.

Genocide isn’t about killing lots of people, although that’s necessary to its execution. No, genocide is the culmination of years - decades, even hundreds of years - of disdain, distrust, lies and hatred. The Yazidi weren’t slaughtered because they weren’t Muslims. The slaughter was because, despite fifteen hundred years of Islamic proselytising, those Yazidi had retained their ancient faith. Like Catholicism in Elizabethan England it was an affront to the religious certainties of the people with the armies, the guns and the power. And these people were devil worshippers, possessed by demons, why would you not destroy them?

When you read about Mount Sinjar, even in a fictional account such as “There are Rivers in the Sky”, you can’t avoid the truth. Thousands of armed Muslim men slaughtered an innocent, unthreatening community simply because they refused to be Muslim. Worse, those Muslim men chose to kill the Yazidi men and enslave the women, or at least the younger, more sexually attractive women. Including, as Shafak’s book describes, girls as young as nine.

People criticise today’s Christianity as having lost its punch, its passion. Some level criticism at portly bishops piffling about peace, love and understanding and suggest that there’s a need for something sterner, an assertive Christianity. For sure, much of this 21st century muscular Christianity comes from people whose connection to actual church-going is tenuous but do they consider the reality of a reconquista? The reality is Mount Sinjar, the cruel destruction of communities simply because they cling to their faith.

Do Muslim communities in the West feel embattled like those Yazidi families in Iraq, Syria and Turkey? I don’t get a sense that this is the case or that there is any real threat to their lives. Yet we are told, in a search for victimhood, that the world is troubled by “islamophobia”. Reading about the Yazidi, however, it is easy to understand why, for some people - those Yazidi, Jews, Ahmadi, Parsee - fearing Islam isn’t an irrational thing but entirely justified. And the Islam to fear isn’t the intense, theological Islam of stern bearded Imams but the popular Islam of people who really do believe that Yazidi worship the devil and Jews take babies for their blood and harvest bodily organs.

It doesn’t start with bloodlust. It starts with a medical orderly muttering “devil worshipper” almost out of hearing. It starts with “what do they do in that temple on a Saturday?” And it continues with talk of magic or secret meetings, of sex and drugs. These lies sink into the popular understanding and, for adherents of a competing idea - religious or political, fester away becoming the hatred that drives firstly exclusion, then oppression and, if the evil ones are poorly armed or vastly outnumbered, finally genocide.

Muslims are not under threat in Britain. This isn’t to say that there’s no anti-Islam words, pictures or commentary. But this is nothing next to the Yazidi experience. To demand a special protection - “islamophobia” - in an almost entirely benign and supportive environment is an act of assertion, aggression even. Compared to those Yazidi, and to Jews across Europe and North Africa, the experience of Muslims in Britain is almost entirely positive. It isn’t that the majority population understood Islam but that they weren’t really bothered by it. We now live in a place where Muslim exceptionalism means we have to be bothered by it, to accept how it bends what we do or to kick back. And the calls for rule about “islamophobia” are designed to stop people kicking back. We do not need such rules.

There is only one community in Britain who live their lives within a security blanket. Behind gates manned by suspicious men in stab jackets. Whose schools are prickled with security and who are asked every day to justify the actions of others. A minority, a tiny minority, just 300,000 in a population of seventy million. This community isn’t a Muslim community, it isn’t a violent community, it is - or has been - integrated into wider society, but like that Yazidi community in Iraq it lives within an ancient, truly ancient faith. This community is Jewish. And to draw a parallel between their world and the lives of British muslims is wrong.

There are over two million British muslims. They are noisy, filled with pride and increasingly successful. This community doesn’t live behind a screen of security, is indulged by every vote seeking politician and by virtue signalling bishops, and enjoys an almost entirely uncritical media. We should remember that it was popular Islam, the Islam of the Muslim streets, that set about eliminating the Yazidi for the only crime of not being a Muslim in a place where violent men thought everyone should be a Muslim.

Had a trip across the Pennines this morning for a panel debate about the North of Ebgland’s economy - the idea of a Northern Renaissance. Interesting panel (plus me) including Andy Preston, former mayor of Middlesbrough, and Jonathan Hinder, the decidely ‘Blue Labour’ MP for Pendle & Clitheroe in East Lancashire. Here, pretty much as delivered is my opening saying that there isn’t going to be a Northern Renaissance:

“There isn’t going to be a Northern Renaissance. Not a chance however many reports are written or speeches made by Andy Burnham.

I don’t like this at all but it is important to be honest about the North.

It’s not the people. Or even the weather. It’s that the North has almost no real control over its destiny. That destiny isn’t decided in Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle. That destiny is decided by anonymous men in smart offices in the City of London and SW1.

I used to believe in regeneration, to accept Michael Heseltine’s lie, the one that became the dominant ideology of economic development - that dollops of cash kindly given to local boards, council or mayors would ‘lever in’ loads of extra cash that would, through a sort of financial sleight of hand, mean hard up men and women in poor communities would have their lives transformed for the better.

We now have over 40 years of repeatedly testing this strategy. And it doesn’t work.

Regeneration, inclusive growth strategies and all the other paraphernalia of 21st century economic development have failed utterly to provide the slightest jot of betterment to the communities that regeneration was supposed to make great again.

It doesn’t work because simply making places look better doesn’t change the fundamental reasons for the North’s economic problems. Even if the zoom zoom whizz whizz projects are built - high speed rail, tramways, concert halls and football stadiums - there won’t be any renaissance until we pull the right levers…

1. Spatial planning

2. Tax

3. Regulation

4. Energy

Britain has a spatial planning system made in London. Worse, lobbying from hundreds of anti-development groups gave us a planning system designed to prevent any development and, if some development sneaks under the radar, to make sure it is so loaded up with restrictions, conditions and charges that the project only works if it gets subsidy.

If the North is serious about growth it needs to tell London that it is quite capable of writing its own - pro-development, pro-economy - planning framework. It won’t - because Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve think having a liberal planning system will lose them votes.

Tax. Imagine a world where rates of fuel duty, tobacco duty and duty on booze weren’t decided by the chancellor but by local councils. And that this money was collected locally and spent locally. In Denmark - a high tax country - half of income tax is collected and spent by local councils. Imagine that?

Consider a tax system where Manchester or Leeds could remove taxes preventing businesses from investing in R&D? Or have a two year tax moratorium for people setting up a new business?

If the North is serious about growth - wants that renaissance - Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve would be demanding that Parliament give them real control over taxes, not just to raise money but to allow local choices about who pays and how much they pay. They won’t.

Think of a North with local control of the things that regulate the lives of residents and businesses, the thousands of petty controls overseen by worrywarts and fussbuckets. Regulation means higher prices, and slower economic growth - in the UK we’ve lost an estimated 6% of GDP just from new regulations introduced since 2015. And the impact of regulation on prices makes those hard up men and women in the North’s towns and cities literally poorer.

If the North were serious about getting that renaissance then its leaders - Andy, Tracy, Oliver and Steve plus Ben and all the others - would, every time they got near a public platform, be demanding that the anonymous men in those Whitehall offices give the North control over the regulations that govern so much of our lives. But they won’t.

We’ve heard how the North’s heavy industry and manufacturing has, in many cases, all but died. And that energy costs are right at the centre of that collapse.

So why are the North’s leaders holding seminars about getting to net zero rather than demanding the end to an energy system giving Britain the highest industrial energy costs in the world? Why are those leaders spending millions on ‘climate change’ and nothing at all on arguing for the North having cheap and abundant energy?

An industrial strategy is nothing without control of energy policy. Why aren’t the North’s mayors campaigning for fracking, urging the government to open up the North Sea and demanding that the nuclear programme is accelerated? Without cheap and abundant energy there will be no Northern renaissance.

I understand why none of this happens. Not just because Andy Burnham wants a bigger job. Or because Tracy Brabin prefers talking about the arts. It doesn’t happen because nobody thinks making these arguments will work. And making them means less regeneration cash to spend on pet projects. We won’t get a Northern Renaissance.”

The subsequent debate washed around ideas of ‘reindustrialisation’ and ‘real jobs’ idea that, if we took a breath, we’d quickly realise are a combination of fantasy economics and a delightful nostalgia for the old days when men walked to the factory in their thousands to ‘make things’.

It was glorious to hear Andy Preston saying we need to stop going on about building railways - to which I’d add trams - and that the Manchesterism boom that Andy Burnham talks about is achieved not by innovation and entrepreneurship but by state subsidised property development and the, in effect, intellectual asset stripping of all the region’s smaller towns.

Worth noting that the appause I got came when I asked why the Mayors of the North were spending millions on climate change strategies rather than calling for cheap, abundant energy.

“About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don’t question the opinion at all; it’s an axiom.” William Thackeray from The Book of Snobs

This week’s Spectator Diary written by the magazine’s owner, Paul Marshall, reminded me of my late father-in-law with this little anecdote:

“Forget Macron or Lecornu, or even Bernard Arnault. The most powerful man in Paris is Luc, the maître d’hôtel at Brasserie Lipp. If you look like a tourist or, most heretical of all, come dressed in shorts, you will be dispatched upstairs. If you are not known to Luc or his team but look respectable, you may qualify for a seat at the back of the restaurant. If you are a regular or a friend, you can hope for one of the prime tables in the front. From there we watch through the mirrors the comings and goings of Parisian intellectual life…”

My father-in-law was a great one for telling us how the maître d’ at this or that restaurant or hotel knew him. This, of course, came with the hint that this being known comes with privileges, special treatment and advantage. Just as Paul Marshall does in his anecdote, we’re reminded that they are special, more important, grander people because the maître d’ knows their name. Now there’s no doubt that, Paul Marshall being a very rich man, the restaurant has a great interest in treating him well (one hopes they treat everyone well but the anecdote suggests otherwise) on purely economic terms.

The thing here isn’t, however, the fact that Paul Marshall gets looked after well at a restaurant he has visited often but that he feels it necessary to tell the world how important he is and how us mere mortals would be ushered away into the furthest recesses of the establishment because we “look like a tourist”. The very epitome of Thackeray’s British Snob.

All this brings to mind a wealthy publisher with whom my wife had business dealings (I think she bought some journal titles from him). This gentleman, the owner of a gorgeous Ferrari Spider, was in London and passed by a car dealership in which he saw a special edition BMW. The gentleman was, at the time, wearing scruffy work clothes because he had been clearing out some rubbish at his mother’s flat. Our publisher pops into the dealer to look at the car and, to put it mildly, is treated rather rudely. Later that week he bought the same car from another dealer and drove to the snobby London dealer to point out to them that they could have had the commission if they’d not been so rude.

It is quite hard to get to grips with the idea of snobbery because we were inured to different characterisations of the tendency: Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, the excruciating Hyacinth Bucket, and endless dramas featuring social class each one disparaging the social climber, the nouveaux riche or hoity-toity middle class manners. Elsewhere there’s a sense, so well satirised by Thackery, that snobs are necessary as arbiters of taste, cultural mavens that can guide us through the right and wrong of decor, clothing, speech and food. Plus music - here’s Charles Moore sniffing about Radio 3 Unwind, the BBC’s attempt to rescue some audience from Classic FM and Spotify, and the channel’s further endeavours to build an audience:

“Radio 3 Unwind is the broadcast equivalent of assisted dying, music as a drug to end life’s pain. Music can indeed be balm to the troubled soul, but a whole channel devoted to this degrades culture into therapy. Turning on Radio 3 proper in the car this week, I heard Georgia Mann excitedly announcing the first ever weekly classical chart, whose hit parade the station will avidly report. So Radio 3’s classical music offering is now a choice between a 33rpm version of Top of the Pops, and the sleep of death.”

Simply putting on music in the background (and if Charles Moore was driving the music is quite literally background to his primary activity of watching the road, my old boss Barry North refused to allow music in the car because it distracted from safe driving, indeed you couldn’t even talk to him when he was at the wheel) is not the monstrous insult to the music that people like Mooore and Simon Heffer, in acts of glorious snobbery, would have us believe:

“Even more depressing is that I am told many people do actually listen to it, a comment on some of our fellow Britons that I would prefer not to dwell upon. Others of us have grown up believing the canon of classical music contains innumerable works of art that should be approached and treated as such, not used as incidental decoration. The Classic FM/Unwind model appears to focus upon music the former has long categorised as “smooth”: music that will not interfere with any doze you might choose to have on your sofa or in your armchair while you listen to it. Concealed from the poor devils who fall for this garbage is the fact that much of the world’s greatest music is disturbing, turbulent, violent and noisy and, as a consequence, opens up psychological depths beyond those attainable through repeated indulgence in Chanson de Matin or the theme tune from Band of Brothers.”

If Moore and Heffer were simply to rant about how classical music channels play altogether too much Vaughan Williams and not nearly enough oratorio, I might be cheering them along (out of personal prejudice) but they aren’t doing this, they are telling us, like Paul Marshall at his Paris restaurant, they they are better than us and that institutions like grand Paris hotels and the BBC should indulge their greater knowledge not the preferences of a larger, ignorant audience.

Unsurprisingly Country Life is keen to jump to the defence of snobs, mostly by redefining what the word means and by quoting overrated critics like Anthony Bourdoin (“I don’t want to sound like a snob; I am a snob, but I don’t want to sound like one”). We’re told snobbishness is great but not when it’s about accent, water bottles or dessert:

“But is it a good thing that we are no longer snooty about art? About food? About taste? More than an existential question for the snobs themselves, it presents a conundrum for society. For who will keep us on the straight and narrow if we don’t have a designated authority to do so?”

Somewhere out there designated by who knows what, there is someone who’ll tell you your outfit is trashy, that no intelligent person finds Michael McIntyre funny, and that those mid-market bar restaurants with vaguely Italian sounding names are irredeemably naff, especially if you drink prosecco in them. Above all modern snobbery manifests itself through a set of active social, even regulatory, controls. Eating McDonalds isn’t merely naff, it is bad for you. It is largely OK to smoke cannabis, despite it being literally illegal, but inhaling essentially harmless blueberry vape is utterly beyond the pale. If you take a step back from the endless moral panic of public health the unmentioned truth is that it is all about snobberry not health. The bad things - ultraprocessed food, vaping, betting shops, lager and fizzy pop - aren’t bad things because they’re worse than the snobs’ choices, they are bad things because they are done by those who, in my father-in-law’s words, ‘aren’t our sort of people’. These bad things fall into the same category as garden Christmas lights, hen parties in Benidorm, and demi-sec blush wine. Oh, did I mention Mrs Brown’s Boys!

The objective of the snob is not to elevate others but rather to validate their own preferences by presenting them as superior. And the arena where the snob is most powerful is the arena of, in its wider sense, culture:

“By possessions, I mean increasingly cultural and social capital rather than simply economic capital. Indeed ,the simple display of material possessions could readily become the object of snobbery. In these matters, at least, cultural capital trumps economic capital. Further, for our present concerns, what is important is the way in which cultural capital interacts with social capital.”

This is from the late David Morgan’s brief essay on why snobbery matters. I think that it captures the most important aspect of the snob; not the social climbing of Mrs Bucket but rather the conscious endeavour to characterise the culture of another group as inferior, to dismiss their mores, their lack of the right education (‘what! You haven’t read Iffy Haughtynose’s Booker Prize shortlisted social commentary?), and their musical, art and food choices. Above all the snob is not trying to bring you gently into a better word but rather, as we saw with Paul Marshall, telling you that, because you dress or speak wrongly, you can’t be part of my superior world.