“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.

“She’s a figure of myth. And I mean by that everybody for hundreds of years will know if you say, she’s a real Margaret Thatcher, they’ll know what you mean. An ism has been named after her. Her character’s very strong, her beliefs are very strong and this has been an enormously important part in the history of freedom in the western world and it’s seen and admired, and often criticised but nevertheless strongly admired across the world.” Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer

A few days ago the Japanese ambassador, accompanied as ever by a small Paddington Bear doll, visited Grantham and posted on his popular ex-twitter account some pictures of him at her birthplace and stood before Thatcher’s statue in the town square. Reading through the responses to the ambassador’s posts, I came to see that for many in Britain, Margaret Thatcher is, as Charles Moore observed, a mythical figure. And the mix of responses, half hate-filled and describing Thatcher in demonic terms and half loaded with praise of her strength and leadership, brought to mind an Irish goddess.

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.

The first time I voted was in 1979 and, in helping re-elect a Conservative MP, I guess I contributed to Margaret Thatcher arriving at 10 Downing Street. At the time the motivation of many to vote Conservative was in a desperate hope that something would be done to sort out Britain’s problems and, most notably, the seeming stranglehold that powerful trade unions had over industry and public services. I still hold the view that the Conservatives won the 1979 General Election in spite of Margaret Thatcher not because of Margaret Thatcher. There was no Mythic Maggie back then, just an authoritative woman with a grating voice and what seemed at the time a radical economic agenda.

Over the next decade, through two more General Elections, nobody I knew saw Thatcher in the sort of terms commonplace in talking about her today. It is true that the political left came to despise Thatcher because her governments defanged the trade unions and introduced reforms that liberalised Britain’s economy. Most of all, of course, the left resented Thatcher’s success and in doing so paid the misogynist groundwork for one half of the Mythic Maggie legend. Terms like ‘witch’ and ‘hag’ became normalised by the left, firstly in describing just Margaret Thatcher but then latterly any female Conservative politician. I remember Labour councillors in Bradford yelling ‘witch’ at Margaret, now Baroness, Eaton as if this was somehow appropriate. Without the left’s myth of Maggie as a night hag such language would not have been tolerated but, since Thatcher’s actions in government were (in the eyes of the left) so terrible, abuse became somehow merited.

“Zheleznaya Dama Ugrozhayet” screamed a Soviet newspaper in 1976, “the iron lady wields a threat”. The intention was to attack Margaret Thatcher as a hardline anti-Soviet Cold Warrior but, for Thatcher, the moniker stuck, but as a positive: unbending, strong, authoritative and, as would come to pass, a Queen of Battles. It is true that Thatcher was a strong character and could seem uncompromising, dismissive of opponents but I suspect that much of this derives more from the necessary armour any women in politics required. Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show, would show Maggie in a pinstripe, almost as if the writers couldn’t countenance the idea of a woman wielding power. All this, plus of course the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands, presented Thacher as more than just another leader, as something special and different, something maybe more dangerous, at least to her foes.

But during the 1980s, for all that this language of strength, assertiveness and leadership was part of the Conservative’s messaging, Thatcher remained simply the Conservative leader and Prime Minister, the commanding but divisive woman with the grating voice. There’s even a view that, after the 1987 General Election, Thatcher saw herself as invincible with the result that terrible policy decisions - the poll tax being the biggest - were pushed through. The Telegraph columnist, Auberon Waugh would later on refer to the period from 1987 to Thatcher leaving office in 1990 as “Margaret’s Mad Period”. Indeed, the problem was that, by the late 1980s, most of the hard work of leashing the unions and liberalising business was concluded. What remained for reform - local government, planning, the relationship with Europe - presented a different set of enemies that, especially in the case of planning and Europe, sat within the Conservative party itself.

When Thatcher departed from office in 1990, to be replaced by John Major, the political right in Britain mostly heaved a sigh of relief because they believed (mostly wrongly it turned out) that the problem was Margaret Thatcher not those wicked issues. And especially the issue of Europe. For all that the image remained of the Iron Lady battling the unions and facing down the Soviets, “The lady’s not for turning” as Thatcher proclaimed, there was still a sense that the Conservatives needed a gentler, kinder, less abrasive leadership. So a tearful Margaret Thatcher drove away from Downing Street to the gleeful braying of the left, betrayed by the gentle, kind backstabbing of her cabinet colleagues.

Margaret Thatcher, however, didn’t go away. Yes, she retired from parliament but the sense of her achievements - real and imagined - got stronger the further we left 1990 behind. Thatcher’s warnings about Europe proved right even though few in the party realised this until it was too late (and in a strange twist of fate, the once anti-Europe Labour Party collapsed, under Tony Blair’s leadership, breathlessly into the arms of supranationalism). Thatcher, never anti-Europe in the 21st century sense, became the champion of those who opposed the renewed mission of greater unity. The Iron Lady became a Queen of Battles, a mythical figure sitting as a counterweight to the Night Hag myth of the left. Thatcherism stopped being a pragmatic policy response to the economic crises of the 1970s and became instead a bulwark against the softer, cuddlier parts of the centre-right. Margaret Thatcher became the icon of the Tory right and especially that part of the right wishing to take Britain out of what was now the European Union. The myth was complete, the idea of Thatcherism no longer connected to any of the policies or actions of her governments but instead to a legend of strength, patriotism and nationalism.

Mythic Maggie, as night hag or battle queen, is here to stay and as the years pass the legend will, in a political sense, become more important than the reality of her (flawed) governments. For the left, Thatcher will symbolise the horror of right wing government, while for the right, she’ll always remain the champion of the fight against socialism, the symbol of strength, authority and the defeat of our political enemies. Untangling the real Margaret Thatcher from Mythic Maggie will present a real challenge for future historians but, in the meantime, the legend will continue to fire the passions of people on both left and right.

“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” - Franz Kafka

It is widely acknowledged that the development of AI ushers in a revolution in the way we work, play and learn. As Ben Sixsmith tells us it has already ushered in a new generation of grifters and scammers as well as an emerging industry of spotters able to see ‘AI-produced slop’ when it arrives. Elsewhere Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK boss, is writing that the AI revolution will see the end of bureaucracy:

“It is the lanyard class that has most to fear from this technology, because AI is better than any human when it comes to paperwork. Blue collar will replace white collar in the hierarchy of value.”

I appreciate that Mosley works for a company that’s main energy is directed to the bureaucratic systems of “...government agencies, militaries, and corporations…” so you’d expect its bosses to be right on brand with ‘we kill bureaucracy’ messaging. It is also true that, for many facing the daily frustration of bureaucratic uselessness, the annihilation of the lanyard class presents a huge and appealing outcome, you can almost feel the sense of liberation building. But Mosley, and plenty of other AI promoters, are not arguing for the reduction of bureaucracy or the elimination of regulations. Were there none of these things then Palantir wouldn’t have much of a business model remaining.

No, Palantir and other similar businesses, are the living embodiment of the Kafka quotation I opened with. They present their AI systems as a revolution (and this is probably true) but do nothing to remove or reduce the sclerosis of bureaucracy and regulation: it is just the computer saying no rather than a human. I know this isn’t what they’re saying, it’s more about how AI can provide insights and analysis to large organisations and the message (familiar from each iteration of computing power) that this revolution will empower front line workers. Use of AI to complete the paperwork doesn’t remove that paperwork, instead it shifts the accountability for bureaucratic activity even further away from individual decision-makers and onto “The System”. When something goes wrong - and it is definitely a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ - the sub-contracting of oversight to AI means that nobody, least of all the front-line manager, is accountable for the error. To return to Kafka, we arrive at the perfection of his bureaucratic nightmare rather than any sort of liberation:

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.”

In the bureaucracy of AI, Kafka’s Surveyor wouldn’t even get the opportunity to appeal before unhelpful humans, but would instead be endlessly frustrated by computer-generated refusals to accept error or accountability. By the ‘slime of a new bureaucracy’. The problem with administrative systems isn’t efficiency but purpose. Saying you can replace lanyard-wearing HR officers with AI sounds great but does nothing to eliminate the bureaucratic reasons behind the explosion in the numbers of those lanyard-wearers.

The lanyard-wearer exists for two main reasons: firstly to ensure compliance with (the organisation’s interpretation of) laws and regulations enacted by the state; and secondly to provide protection for front-line managers by shifting accountability from them to the (relatively anonymous) system itself. The existence of AI doesn’t eliminate either of these bureaucratic functions and, worse, it leaves questions of accountability entirely unanswered. It is clear that large bureaucratic systems, and especially such systems within the public sector, already lack any real sense of decision-maker accountability. By replacing the people collectively used as cover for egregious decisions (compliance officers, human resources, DEI, legal services) with AI systems, either the accountability lands on the desk of the blue-collar front line worker and his supervisor, or else responsibility disappears into the ether, lost in the administrative certainty of the AI.

Most costs of regulation and bureaucracy fall on the individuals, families and businesses constrained by the rules, not on the administering of those rules. Replacing the man with the clipboard by a computer screen doesn’t get rid of the clipboard, it just gets rid of the person holding it. Those planning rules, licensing conditions, equalities act requirements, reporting obligations, environmental directives and pricing interventions will still be there, we’ll still be hobbled by regulations (probably including a whole new bunch of regulations around our use of AI, social media and the Internet). It is just that those regulations will be administered by an AI system programmed and prompted by someone you don’t know and will never meet, and overseen by a tiny cadre of administrators who will, without doubt, adopt the view that the AI is infallible, that there is no possibility of error and that your appeals to fairness or justice are specious.

Mosley, in an observation of surprising naivety, concludes that “...Friedrich Engels was right all along: the state won’t be abolished, it will simply ‘wither away’.” This is to suppose, ignoring the warnings of Kafka and the wisdom of Hayek, that the state is defined by the people who work for the state. Each change in the world, technical, social or economic, leads to the call for more regulations, for new rules and for additional laws. With each of the resulting acts creating the need for new bureaucracy. If you really want to reduce bureaucracy, the way to do so is to eliminate regulations, repeal laws and have fewer rules. But, and I appreciate this undermines Palantir’s business model which is predicated on the continued existence of bureaucracy, simply hanging the lanyard on the computer does not solve the problem of bureaucracy.

There’s no doubt that AI is going to transform economies, entertainments and governments but we need to answer basic questions about accountability, about the need for regulations and about the degree to which social control is warranted. If many of the state’s decisions are made by AI, who is accountable? Are the regulations we impose on business, families and individuals justified? How much autonomy should people enjoy and does that include not being filmed, spied on, tracked and ID’d all the time? Lots of the chatter about AI ignores these problems and prefers the sort of outlook pioneered by the likes of Palantir where intrusion and external regulatory oversight is justified by a sort of Benthamite panopticon, a MaxU world where the greatest good is defined as the greatest good for the state.

Using AI to administer bureaucracy doesn’t reduce bureaucracy. If we are to get the benefits from the latest iteration of technological revolution, we must start with answering this question, not with arguments for marginal and modest savings in the cost of administering the state.

I’ve an admission to make. Whenever I see the word ‘globalist’ in some or other commentary on society, economics or politics I immediately assume the worst of the person writing that commentary. Not just because the pejorative use of ‘globalism’ tracks to conspiracy sites like Infowars or even because the term links to antisemitic, even Nazi, ideas of internationalism. My problem is that the people who point and shout ‘globalist’ at people do so in bad faith and, often, ignorance. This means that the term, somewhat like ‘neoliberal’, ‘Marxist’ and ‘fascist’, ceases to have any meaning beyond ‘you are a bad person and your ideas are evil’ (admittedly, actual Marxist ideas probably are evil but everything left wing isn’t Marxist just because you choose to slap that label on it).

Despite this, the ideas of internationalism, what became called ‘globalism’, deserve attention and those concerned about national identity and sovereignty are right to raise questions about the “...assumption from international law that sovereignty can be partially ceded through treaty to some kind of a supranational body that sits above and beyond the reach of the nation.” It isn’t that treaty is a bad way to relate to other nations - it is certainly better than most of the alternatives - but perhaps general treaties setting up international institutions really do water down the sovereignty of individual nations. ‘Globalists’ make two distinct arguments here, often but not always cynically: firstly that some important concerns like regulating trade, responding to climate change or pandemic require co-ordinated international action best achieved through international institutions, and secondly that pooled sovereignty doesn’t mean that individual national sovereignty is diluted.

At the same time there is, in the eyes of globalism’s critics, an international class of people - “anywheres”, “flat-earthers” - that have more in common with each other than with the wider population in the nation states from which those people originate. While this gap is often seen in economic terms since this international class is, on the whole, significantly richer than average, it is also social and cultural. The Oxford educated son of an African political leader has more connection with the MIT trained daughter of an Indian millionaire than with the subsistence farmers of his home country. And, while such people remain linked to the source of their elite status, they gravitate to a limited set of places; big world cities like London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and Singapore plus elite playgrounds such as Davos or private islands in the Caribbean.

As a result the principal criticism of globalism isn’t economic but cultural. Harm de Blij, the Dutch-American geographer, describes the world of this cultural elite (‘flat-earthers’ in his taxonomy) as like living in gilded domes with the rest of humanity clamouring for admission, bashing on the outside of those domes. For some of those outside their objective is economic, this is certainly true of masses of Indians, Africans and Latin Americans, but for other opponents of ‘globalism’ the objection to the international great and good is cultural. It is this criticism, characterised by talk of ‘the great replacement’, ‘invasion’ within inconsistent nationalisms such as MAGA or National Conservatism, that results in my kneejerk reaction to people who use ‘globalist’ as a pejorative.

The problem is, however, that this international global elite seems entirely wedded to a set of failed responses to international challenges and to an economic orthodoxy forged after the 2007/8 financial crisis that has failed. We only need to look at two genuine global issues - climate change and the response to the COVID pandemic - to see how the great institutions of international treaty aren’t working. In the case of climate change policy, a multi-billion dollar international enterprise, the consequences of preventing the exploitation of fossil fuels in Africa and the opposition to nuclear energy give the lie to international collaboration being the route to salvation. During COVID, the consensus, driven largely by China through the WHO, quickly became the draconian authoritarianism of strict lockdowns, masks and social controls. It becomes clearer by the day that the social and economic damage caused by these policies vastly outstrips any benefits gained at the time. Yet there is no sense in either of these policy areas that the institutions responsible have learned any lessons or that they believe policy should change.

A weakness of this internationalist policy-making is that the bodies themselves, compared to large national governments, are not especially big. The total budget of the World Health Organisation (WHO) is a little short of $7 billion which is a lot of money until you realise that this is about 3% of the UK National Health Service’s budget. The problem here is that international bodies choose to supplement the money granted them by national governments with the generosity of billionaire philanthropists. This has meant that, in the case of the WHO, the entirety of tobacco control policy has been, in effect, sub-contracted to Bloomberg Philanthropies and, through that, to the prejudices of Mike Bloomberg who provides the money. We start with the comforting feeling that billionaires giving millions to international health or climate change institutions is a good thing and, in short order, come to realise that the spending of this money (constrained as it is by the conditions of grant) is accountable only to the preferences of the donor. As a result the principal objective of the WHO tobacco control policy is now the banning of vaping rather than the ending of smoking.

Were globalism merely as I have described above then those calling for (or simply predicting) its demise are right. The world would be better without international organisations strong-arming small and poor places into bad policy and a better place without grand juries and courts filled with the elite of authoritarian countries advised by the greedier sort of left-wing lawyer. But the anti-globalists don’t stop at this point. In their urge to describe secretive international cabals and the machinations of an unaccountable elite, the anti-globalists would throw out the baby of a richer world with the bathwater of corrupted global institutions.

The valid criticisms of globalism and ‘neoliberalism’ choose, almost every time, to ignore the real truth that the period they condemn (depending on who you ask the period either begins in 1979 with Margaret Thatcher’s election or with the dawning of the new millennium) witnessed the fastest reduction of poverty in humanity’s history. This is, I’d argue, no small matter and also that the anti-globalists have no answer to the criticisms of ‘neoliberals’ and de Blij’s ‘flat-earthers’ that their rejection of internationalism will not make people healthier, wealthier and happier and may, for many, actually make them poorer. Moreover, blaming open trade - even with a bad faith polity such as China - misses the more substantive reasons for economic sclerosis in many developed world countries: their own regulations and policies. Planning constraints, climate change policies, supposed workers rights (usually rights only for unionised workers), and a preference for welfare over investment are all far more significant reasons for that sclerosis. Anti-globalists talk of ‘deindustrialisation’ (often little more than a weird nostalgia for a time when men worked in their thousands bashing metal and ‘making things’) and blame China or India rather than energy policy, planning laws and environmental regulations. We’re told that trade in food undermines farmers but never talk about how regulation and protectionism did more damage to farming than any international trade.

Back in the 1970s Tony Benn, the now sainted British socialist, argued for a sort of autarky where Britain - outside the EEC as it then was - would sit behind tariffs and regulatory barriers while the government, in the name of the people, took strategic stakes in industries like steel, coal, oil and food. In government Benn had created the great successes of British Leyland, the Meriden Motorcycle Co-operative, and the national technology champion, ICL. Yet the idea persists that the state can develop an ‘industrial strategy’ based on strategic investments, tariffs and protective regulation. And worse, that this is the route to economic success according to many urging Nigel Farage and Reform to adopt this policy.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the idea of internationalism, of free trade and international co-operation remains a good one primarily because it makes the world healthier, wealthier and happier. Internationalism should not, however, be naive or to argue for the sort of bloc politics beloved of Xi, Putin and Trump. Nor should we believe that just because we trade with some other nation, that nation suddenly becomes our friend and ally. Rather than anti-globalism, we should continue to welcome more open trade and to recognise that this gives British consumers the benefit of more choice and cheaper food while presenting British business with the opportunity to grow. The changes needed in economic policy aren’t about who owns British business let alone the state taking “strategic” stakes but about us having cheap, abundant energy, the ability to make use of land without expensive and uncertain planning processes, and a regulatory system that defaults to ‘yes we like business’ rather than ‘no you can’t do that’.

The ‘international rules-based order’ is not responsible for Britain’s social and economic problems. These things can be traced directly back to specific decisions made by successive governments since the 1990s, from civil service reform and local government restructures through net zero and environmental regulation to a planning system focusing every effort of regulatory agencies to the prevention of development. Pretending it will, through a sort of 21st century Peronism, be fine if we just keep Johnny Foreigner and his money out of Britain is, without question, the very worst form of economic delusion.

I remain a globalist because free trade, international alliances and co-operation all represent the best way to make British people healthier, wealthier and happier. We need to reframe the way we engage, to move away from multi-national treaties and the obsession with ‘human rights’, perhaps be a bit more cynical, but putting up the shutters and closing the front door is a recipe for more decline and less growth. We need more open trade, less industrial regulation and the idea that we will work across the world to promote the interests of British people getting richer especially if, as happens with trade, this helps people in other places get richer too.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

It is going to be, like West Ham, ‘massive everywhere we go’. We start slowly with some social media posts featuring Andy Street, who used to be one of those fake sub-regional mayors, and Ruth, Baroness Davidson, who once upon a time led the Tories in Scotland. The messages didn’t say anything of substance just teased, telling us that tomorrow (which would have been Sunday) or maybe Monday there would be this amazing launch of a new movement for the centre right or the centre or the centre or the centre right or something. Our breath was bated, we couldn’t imagine just what amazing insight and innovation these two political giants might bring. And the excitement mounted further as a parade of former Tory ministers returned to ex-twitter from their Blue Sky redoubts to tell us about the launch of this amazing project. Amber Rudd, Gavin Barwell, David Gauke, David Liddington, Dominic Grieve, an incredible parade of the great and the good, the wisest men and women of Britain.

The whole of Britain was hushed. Old men stood, staring bravely out at the street, awaiting the announcement from our saviours. Wives caught up in the passion of the moment smiled and wiped away tears knowing that, at last, the great people of our great nation were stepping up to rescue us from Farage, Starmer and Badenoch. Small children tugged at their mothers’ aprons asking about these people. “Shush,” came the response, “that’s Andy and Ruth, Gavin and David, They are going to save us from ruin.” The moment came as our heroes appeared.

Sat snuggly together on a tiny BBC sofa Andy and Ruth told us how untold millions of the politically homeless would return to the centre right if it talked more about business, good government and how all the people who ran Britain from 2010 to 2016 (when something happened that, like Voldemort, we are not allowed to mention but that was obviously bad) should be brought back to run Britain again. The nation relaxed on its sofa, comforted that, for the first time in years, they could sit down to Sunday lunch secure in the knowledge that everything would be just fine.

The airwaves and broadband routers of Middle England hummed with pleasure as Gavin Barwell told us how hard he had worked on this project - the “new movement” as Andy described it. Gavin, the mastermind of Theresa May’s collapse from a 20 point poll lead to nearly losing to Jeremy Corbyn, told us they had done some polling which showed that the median voter was in the middle of the left-right political spectrum meaning that the only way to win was to move to the centre. Now replete from their Sunday lunches, the men and women of Middle England smiled at each other, sipped their post-prandial cup of decaf with contentment. “Gavin could be describing me,” they thought in unison, “even though I voted for Brexit, am fine with hanging murderers, and think the BBC irredeemably left wing, I am that glorious central voter.”

Gavin even has a name for the project. A name reaching into Britain’s conservative traditions and touching the lives of the nation’s people: Prosper. Andy, Ruth, Gavin and the others listed on the lovely website (you’ve never seen the word ‘former’ occur so often in a list of names before) are going to “...bring together people from politics, business and public life who believe the country can do better”. It is amazing to read, who could fail to be excited by this, that Propser “...wants a more practical, honest approach to the challenges Britain faces”. The sofas of Britain have seldom been faced with such a comprehensive assessment of the country’s problems and the way to resolve those challenges. Great insights like businesses create growth, inflation should be controlled, and regulation stifles enterprise are joined by carefully coded statements that these sage former leaders know appeal to the man in the middle: “individual freedom tempered by social responsibility”, “working with other countries to solve problems we cannot fix alone”, “energy needs to be clean and affordable”.

It is quite remarkable, a monument to the phlegm of Middle England, that it hasn’t taken its Chinese EV into London so as to carry our heroes shoulder high, placing them - by acclamation - back in their rightful place controlling Britain’s government. The need to go to work, to dig over the big bed at the allotment ready for planting, or to complete the Airfix Churchill tank perhaps held Middle England back but it knows - those seven million centre ground loving Brits know - that the chance will come to do the right thing and return to the glory days of David, George, Amber and Nick. The days before that dark day in 2016 when misplaced populism stopped these fine men and women from doing their great job managing Britain’s decline.

Prosper UK is unstoppable just as previous grassroots social movements like Change UK and True & Fair swept all before them on waves of centrist enthusiasm and passion. Ignore that the media quickly moved on from Andy and Ruth to talk about Suella Braverman, a man being shot in Minneapolis, and Keir Starmer visiting Beijing to clean President Xi’s boots with his tongue. Gavin and the Prosper UK team know that their time is now and that Kemi Badenoch and the Tories will, next week or the week after, come crawling back, handing over the reins to the 70 or so formerly important people whose leadership is the only future for the Conservative Party and, of course, for Britain itself. We can look forward to the future:

“That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.”

Politicians’ relationship with the armed forces sometimes appears almost abusive and certainly exploitative. MPs, Mayors, Councillors and those aspiring to these roles are very quick to lay wreaths, attend Freedom of the Borough marches and sit on top tables at veterans dinners. And these politicians will, of course, make speeches reminding us how my we own veterans for their service and sacrifice saying things like this for one MP:

“Thank you, to all who have served our great country and to all those who are serving.

Your service will always be greatly appreciated and remembered.

As a nation, we are thankful to all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and to the families who have lost loved ones - the whole country is with you.

We have the finest armed forces in the world and our contribution to international security is immense”

I’ve done my fair share of this virtue parading as a councillor and have witnessed the careful organisation of Remembrance Sunday wreath-laying across Bradford, a process designed to ensure that all the services - there are over 100 of them - who want one, get a representative of the city to lay a wreath. Because these ceremonies are public and popular, the wreath-laying sometimes becomes an argument, machinations take place so candidates get to appear, and that ever-so-boring dance of political performance is laid over the sombre remembering of fallen soldiers. Councils sign up to the ‘military covenant’ and appoint one or other elected member as a ‘veterans champion’ (providing another opportunity for political shenanigans). Political advantage is sought from the tabling of motions about veterans, the armed forces and remembrance. Almost all of this is done for the sake of show, for a sort of peacock parade for a borough’s great and good.

Don’t get me wrong, it is right that cities and boroughs respect the service we all get from those in the armed forces and remembering the fallen isn’t just a formality but an important reminder of the sacrifices and horrors of past wars and especially the two great wars of the 20th century. So setting wreaths from the Lord Mayor and City on cenotaphs and war memorials is the right thing to do despite the preening nonsense from politicians. And it is right that Bradford gave the Freedom of the City to the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, and it is right that each year Armed Forces Day is marked by a veterans dinner and by formal statements of thanks for service from the first citizen on behalf of the City.

It is understandable that, in response to yet another piece of crass insensitivity from Donald Trump, all the politicians leap to the defence of Britain’s armed forces and the men who serve in them. But it is hard not to feel again that sense of exploitation and hypocrisy from many of those politicians now so keen to lay claim to the sacrifice of others. The quote I shared above is from Mike Tapp, the Labour MP for Dover who served himself. You have therefore to ask, if that sentiment is so important to him, why Tapp supported a law removing protection from elderly veterans who served in Northern Ireland? We are about to witness, courtesy of the human rights industry and its cynical, case-chasing lawyers, perhaps hundreds of former British soldiers targeted simply for having served in Northern Ireland. It isn’t sufficient to know that this completely compromises the functioning of today’s special forces as well as other parts of the intelligence and security services. We also need to recognise that this relitigation of past wars totally undermines the functioning of military discipline. Soldiers are not angels but the armed forces can and do manage the failings of their men.

At the same time as we act to protect soldiers, we should also guard against the use of veterans to valorise extreme nationalism. We should be a nation able to protect those who served us in war at the same time as offering respect and support for refugees. This is not a binary, an either/or. If there are veterans sleeping rough, this is a failure of public care not a consequence of immigrants being housed, as is also the case for the over 90% of street homeless who were not veterans. Yet too many want to suggest that supporting recent immigrants is somehow the reason for a former soldier lying cold, wet and probably drunk under some railway arches. This is just as exploiting and hypocritical as Labour and Lib Dem MPs voting to chase ex-soldiers through the courts in pursuit of some probably imagined and certainly best forgotten crime 50 or more years ago. Veterans are not pawns in some political game but men and women deserving of respect, honour and, where they need it, support.

I hope Britain carries on remembering and celebrating the job soldiers, sailors and airmen do to keep us safe. And that we continue to push back against crass bombasts like Donald Trump who question the value of that service. But I also hope that Labour and Lib Dem MPs, not to mention those cruel exploiting lawyers seeking to cash in on lawfare, take a moment to pause and reflect on what they’ve done by indulging the fantasies and myth-making of Irish Republicans who, when they aren’t calling for an imagined justice, are celebrating the terror and murder that the IRA visited on Britain and Ireland for 30 years from the 1960s. Perhaps too, the sort of walts who march with iron cross flags and claim to be patriots will stop trying to turn the problems of veterans into a political war cry justifying their objectionable and ignorant demonising of immigrants.

Those who serve in our armed forces do so knowing their country expects them, when ordered, to put their lives in danger to defend Britain and its allies. We should mark this service, remember those who died, and recognise that the defence of Britain requires dangerous men to do things that the rest of us can’t or won’t do. Sometimes too those dangerous actions break some rules. I remember speaking with one veteran who told the story of listening to a BBC broadcast from the deserts of Oman where the government was clear that there were no British troops in that desert. “No idea what we were doing there”, he said.

The departure of Robert Jenrick from the Conservative Party to join Reform UK is perhaps less of a surprise than the earlier departures of Nadhim Zahawi and Jake Berry. The event has, however, re-opened the discussion, at least in the febrile world of Westminster media, about Kemi Badenoch as a leader. With all this accompanied by long discussions and thoughtful articles about how the centre-right is doomed because of ‘shifting plates’ or ‘new paradigms’ that result in the sort of politics we see in Europe with Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Russophile AfD in Germany, the racist Vox in Spain and, of course, our own beloved Nigel Farage fan club, Reform.

There is a group of young, largely male, writers and pundits who I like to call the “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club” because they’ve spent the entirety of her leadership telling us how bad she is and that the Conservative Party is doomed under her leadership. The “Boys Who Hate Kemi” adopted a series of tropes about her leadership and character that the club members repeat to each other, gleefully sharing any new arrivals endorsing these tropes especially when they’ve a media profile. Some simply argue that Badenoch didn’t handle Jenrick’s sacking well, even hinting that she somehow manipulated the event by not giving Jenrick a big enough job. The public, 59% of whom think Kemi made the right decision, seem to differ. But there are a series of other tropes that matter if we are to understand why the “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club” exists:

1. Kemi was the safety first choice by the party. As Henry Hill at Conservative Home argues, Jenrick levelled some unspecified ‘challenges’ that have been unanswered and that… “by not offering any answers, Badenoch made herself the candidate of everyone who didn’t have any, but knew that they didn’t like Jenrick’s.”

2. Kemi is lazy, rude and self-centred. There have been comments, in respected journals like The Spectator as well as in the torrid world of ex-twitter, that Badenoch spends her time scrolling on her phone or, worse, playing Candy Crush. Comments about Kemi’s rudeness track back to the contest for party leader in 2024 so can probably be sourced to Jenrick’s team.

3. Kemi isn’t really British. The “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club” don’t overtly make this argument but it is a prominent trope in Reform and other right-wing forums. Vague references to her tardiness are accompanied by references to African or Nigerian culture and there’s a vibe to the club that they’d really prefer a nice, public school and Oxbridge educated white man, a sort of right wing version of Hugh Grant in ‘Love, Actually’. Or, obviously, Robert Jenrick

4. Kemi isn’t interested in policy. Hill refers to this as “...bromides about personal responsibility, lower taxes, and a smaller state…” and claims that the only substantial policy announcement - leaving the ECHR - was ‘Jenrick’s policy’.

5. Kemi didn’t campaign. The “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club” were excited by their man Jenrick’s effective media during the Summer and thought that this was the way forward. In William Atkinson’s world Jenrick was the only effective Tory, largely on the basis of one ‘cut-through’ video about fare-dodging plus Bobby J’s own claims.

Kemi Badenoch is a long way from a complete leader. Had I been a Party member back in 2024 I’d probably have voted for Robert Jenrick. But then I’d have voted for Liz Truss so what do I know! Despite this, I think it is a mad idea that you start campaigning on new policies pretty much day one after the Conservatives were dumped unceremoniously from government by an angry electorate. It’s true that, as Jenrick did, you can point to real issues with immigration, with petty crime and with litter in Birmingahm, but you need to step beyond simply saying ‘Britain is Broken’ by offering a coherent way to fix the fractures rather than, as Reform has done, simply riding the wave of anger about the country that evident from both right and left.

To win an election the Conservative Party needs to be credible and believable. It could choose to do what Jenrick wanted and play Nigel Farage’s game of simply relating people’s fears and concerns back to them. But Farage is a lot better than anyone else at this deceptive game so the Tories would simply be a pale echo of Reform. Instead the Conservatives need to, as it were, triangulate between the rage of many ordinary people, what’s possible in Britain’s fractured political world, and a programme for government that might stand a fighting chance of turning stuff round. For all their claims, Reform is a single issue, one man party. Attracting some beaten Tories inside Nigel’s tent may help get some policy heft but it also risks the public simply seeing Reform as the Tories rebadged (and worse filled with the very men who made the mess in the first place).

The positioning challenge for the Conservatives requires them to be in a different place in the public’s mind map. The space to fill isn’t the now crowded one of immigration but an economic one. At the moment the only Party making any analysis or argument around the cost of living is Zack Polanski’s Greens but he wants to blame inflation on the shop not the state. Ordinary voters may worry about immigration and issues of identity but they are much more affected by how much it costs to fill up the car, spiraling energy bills and the agony of a £150 weekly shopping bill that not so long ago was £95. Part of the reason for this cost of living crunch sits squarely with the current government, with excessive borrowing, taxes on jobs, and the continuing financial disaster that is net zero.

I don’t know whether Badenoch’s Conservative Party will manage this pivot since the media doesn’t want to talk about the cost of living, literal bread and butter issues, preferring to get over-excited about Donald Trump’s latest craziness, goings on in Israel or somebody weeping crocodile tears over the fate of refugees. Plus the far right. But, without Jenrick’s “Reform Light” approach there’s a chance that we get a Conservative platform not just talking about nation and tradition but about the third part of Disraeli’s mission - the betterment of people’s lives. And the starting point is to talk about people’s economic circumstances because, for all the talk of ‘identity’ politics dominating, it remains undoubtedly true that people bother most about their home, their family and how much they have in the bank at the end of the month. James Carville is still right that “it’s the economy, stupid”. And you can only get so far by blaming people’s economic circumstances on immigrants, billionaires or globalism. In the end people want their government to get to grips with inflation, unemployment and the conditions of ordinary people. This, not immigration, identity or culture will be the defining issue come the 2029 election.

Robert Jenrick’s failure, despite all the efforts of his pals in the “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club”, has presented the opportunity for the Conservatives to talk about the economics of real life, about why people can’t get work, about why the pub, corner shop and hairdresser have closed, about the reasons for rising food prices, and about the policies that can put these things right. Part of this is about controlling immigration. Another part is about getting public services so they are actually a service. But a whole load more is about getting business to thrive, making hiring easy and reducing the costs on businesses that are driving inflation.

As an Englishman it has been remiss of me not to talk on this page about the weather. I’ve a friend who, in his work, speaks often to people in the far east. He tells me how it amuses him that these salespeople (my friend is a buyer) always open with talking about the weather, it’s as if their training tells them, “English people like to talk about the weather”, so that’s what they do. So here we go, let’s talk about the weather or, more specifically, weather forecasting and weather warnings.

There’s an old joke about England that we have weather, other places have climate. And it is true that Britain’s location and maritime aspect results in a climate featuring what we call ‘changeable’ weather. It was minus 5 this morning as I de-iced the car but it is entirely possible in an English January that the temperature next week will reach 10 degrees centigrade (for Americans and old school Brits that in Fahrenheit is 23 degrees and 50 degrees). This variability, however, is not my beef, although it is the reason why talking about the weather is a feature of British conversation. My beef is that, over recent years, we have begun to catastrophise weather forecasting and reporting. From a world where the possibility of snow and ice was accompanied by advice along the lines of ‘take care if you’re going out today’, we have moved to one where there are formal warnings and portentous state-sponsored advice not to go to work because it is cold, windy, wet or snowing. Plus, in yet another reflection of 21st century twee, we have begun to give names to rainstorms.

On Thursday and Friday this week, the Met Office, the BBC, my local council and assorted weather apps all announced warnings about snow, ice and wind. This was a ‘yellow warning’ which I think means you’re allowed to leave the house accompanied by an adult or something along those lines. The newspapers were filled with swirly AI-generated storm maps and talk of Storm Goretti (it seems it was the turn of the French to name the storm and they’d not got the message about using cutesy kids names for dangerous weather systems). I also appreciate that, for readers in England’s south-west this was a properly big storm accompanied by rain and, in some places, snow. But here in the beautiful South Pennines, having been warned of imminent chaos, what we got was a chilly wind and 24 hours of unpleasantly cold rain. My phone told me this phenomenon is called a “wintry mix” which does make it sound like one of those algorithm-generated Spotify playlists.

The problem here is that weather forecasting seems to have been taken over by Chicken Licken with the Met Office and its acolytes almost literally running around telling everyone that the sky was falling and they are off to tell the king. Where once we had blue and green weather maps presented by cheery men cosplaying as geography teachers in their tweedy jackets and checked shirts, we now have bright red and yellow maps or, worse, frighteningly animated maps swooshing across our screens. Perhaps there’s a terrible folk memory of 1987’s Great Storm where the forecasters got it very wrong with Michael Fish telling a viewer who called in about a hurricane that “if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t!”

Because humans are wired to give more attention to downside risk, the result of catastrophising weather forecasting is that people come to see bad weather as a crisis rather than as…well…bad weather. The very fact of a possibility of snow (the snow we ended up not getting) resulted in taxis refusing rides into the villages, in the cancellation of events and the now ritual closing of every school for miles around. At no point was anywhere near here inaccessible, it just wasn’t very pleasant out. But the warnings had done their job and people’s lives had been disrupted for no good reason.

I do think weather forecasting is important. For some people like farmers, fishermen and seafarers, forecasting is very important and accuracy (or at least a high degree of confidence) really matters. I also appreciate that forecasting isn’t as easy as it looks when that pretty young woman is waving her hands over a big map at the end of the evening news. And predicting snow (or not snow) is especially tricky in Britain. But none of this requires a system that seems to exaggerate the risks by applying a broad warning system that, too often, simply means it is a bit windy, icy or wet. Nor does good forecasting benefit from making out that regular summer or winter temperatures are a risk to life and limb. What people require is reliable information allowing them to make decisions ranging from ‘shall I set out into the North Sea’ right the way down to ‘do I need a hat or a brolly’.

Having a frequently used ‘yellow warning’ system really isn’t as helpful as the Met Office seem to believe. One effect of the weather not being bad enough to merit warnings (after the event) is that people start to see them as crying wolf thereby undermining the good intent of warning people. Part of the reason for the adoption of warning systems is how we consume weather forecasting with us relying more on a variety of apps and websites rather than the forecast on the radio or TV. But the current approach, by suggesting catastrophe, undermines the quality of forecasting. It should suffice for the public bodies leading on forecasting to simply provide us with their best assessment of the forthcoming weather and for risk assessments to be left to people and organisations better placed to make those assessments.

In writing this (to the sound of Weather Report obviously) I am avoiding criticising the Met Office’s actual forecasting. I know there are concerns from some quarters but I’m not qualified to assess how good or bad the Met Office’s forecasts might be. I am, however, qualified to talk about how they present these forecasts to the public and I think the agency does us a disservice by emphasising warnings for what is, in truth, pretty much normal weather variation. The simplest resolution is to scrap the ‘yellow warning’ and get a clearer understanding of what constitutes a red warning. Emergency services, local councils, transport organisations and plenty of private businesses are entirely capable of making sensible risk assessments based on forecasting without the forecasting agency pushing them towards seeing bad weather as almost always a risk.

The new year seems to have set off at a canter. Yankee troops swanned into Venezuela unmolested to arrest Nicolas Maduro, that country’s unpleasant communist caudillo. Meanwhile over in Iran half the population appear to have taken to the streets in protest against the Islamic Supremacists who rule that unfortunate land. If you get your news from the BBC you won’t have heard about this uprising presumably because it doesn’t involve either Donald Trump or Jews. Oh, and a good looking white female protester has been shot by cops in Minnesota where, in unrelated news, organised Somali criminals have stolen a cool billion in federal funding for childcare and support for children. Here in Britain the government, facing oblivion, has decided that the way to get back its lost working class support is to put all the pubs, local restaurants and tea shops out of business. All while intoning, with Orwellian genius, that the pub is the heart of the community. Labour MPs are spooked because they really do think they are the good guys despite getting banned from the King’s Arms across from their constituency office.

The British state doesn’t like pubs. I got into an awful lot of trouble twenty years ago because after listening to a Labour councillor describe the young people of Bradford as a criminal drunken rabble (because she’d been out wasting the time of police by sitting in their car finding out ‘facts’). My response referenced the essential fascism of this puritanical view of young people simply out having a good time. I made the national newspapers and headlined the regional TV. Trust me when I say that local councillors achieving this sort of coverage is never a good thing! But I’m right when I say that the British state - local and national - doesn’t like pubs. All the politicians will intone the mantra (“the pub is the hub” or some such nonsense), will get campaign pictures taken pulling a pint, and sign up to campaigns to stop another pub closing. But then those same politicians will vote for high duty, try to get the unwanted smoking ban extended to gardens, agree to the fussbuckets of public health having a say over licensing, and stand with ‘concerned’ local residents who dislike the fact that sometimes people leaving the pub aren’t as quiet as we’d like them to be.

The default position of every government in my lifetime has been that drinking is bad and drinking in public especially bad. Every chief medical officer can be relied on to tell us that even the smell of a sherry is going to take decades off your life and every public health department in the land is filled with people whose mission is, like the worst sort of Edwardian methodist woman, to get rid of the demon drink. All the work on alcohol policy for these bodies, for the NHS and for the government generally is produced by people funded by organisations born from the belief that even the tiniest sip of booze is a dreadful sin. So public health officers are ‘consulted’ over new alcohol licenses, often working in cahoots with the police who, mostly for the tidiness of order and control, would really rather that all the pubs were closed by 8pm and that wet-led pubs shouldn’t exist at all.

The current government is not content with policy creating the highest energy prices in the world, with massive hikes in business rates and with employment laws making the employment of casual staff, especially young people, expensive and onerous. Now they want to halve the drink drive limits despite the evidence from Scotland that this doesn’t reduce road deaths, it just kills off pubs and especially rural pubs. The Tories (and, tomorrow with the same policy only louder, Reform) want to fix this by scrapping business rates. Which is good but does nothing about the pettifogging regulations ranging from banter bans through fussy restrictions on vaping and smoking, to myriads of licensing conditions imposed by legions of local council worrywarts. These politicians - soon to be photographed with rictus grins pulling a pint while joshing with a landlord - would be more believable if they stated plainly that the point of the pub is to have a space, a male space in the main, where people can buy and drink good beer. But they don’t. Instead we get the familiar cant about community as if the pub is some sort of mystical institution rather than a place where blokes go to drink beer.

If you want to save the pub then start with getting the beer cheaper. Dump a load of the unnecessary regulatory burdens on these places. Get a licensing system that begins with the idea that pubs are a good thing. And tell the ghastly puritan fussbuckets in public health departments to get their tanks off the boozers’ lawns. Then tear up the ridiculous and scientifically illiterate ‘no safe level of drinking’ advice given by fake experts to decision-makers, then dump the equally unscientific 14 units a week limit advised by successive Chief Medical Officers. Give people good advice - don’t drink too much too often, don’t drink and drive - and let their good sense prevail.

Of course none of this will happen because every minister, every councillor chairing a health board and every retired bureaucrat made chair of an NHS board, will be told the same endless lies about drinking. How it costs the NHS billions, how it kills productivity and how it is a terrible drain on society in general. Followed, of course, by these same people campaigning for the Old Sun Inn to be an asset of community value in the vain hope that this will stop it turning into apartments or a day care centre because the government’s tax, employment and health policies make it impossible to run a pub there as a business.

The British state’s hatred of the pub is the most prominent of many hatreds directed against innocent pleasures by our government. There’s the snobbish dislike of vaping reinforced by Mike Bloomberg’s millions promoting lies and untruths about the risks of non-combustible nicotine sources (vapes, heat-not-burn, pouches, snus). We have a rampant and ignorant assault on gambling with the lie that on-line betting is peculiarly harmful when every piece of evidence about betting tells us it is informal and black market gambling that causes the most harm, not Dean and Matty spending £20 betting on the Sunday afternoon football. Of course the campaigners aren’t interested in the facts because they know that smoking (and any form of nicotine not from a pharmacy is smoking in their eyes) and betting are sinful.

To the fussbuckets, worrywarts and puritans, the pub sits at the heart of all this sin. It is where those lads drink pints of lager, engage in meaningless banter about something or nothing, put cash into fruit machines, stand on the terrace to vape and, very often, buy terrible ultraprocessed grub in the form of burgers and chips or pizza. How is the state going to control this epidemic of fun if there are pubs? We can’t have a bunch of tradesmen enjoying a pint before heading home for tea. We mustn’t allow Darren and Kirsty to go out for karaoke on Friday night. And we can’t allow a bunch of people to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night listening to a bad covers band while drinking five pints and a bottle of Pinot. And nice people, the sort who read the Guardian or The Times and only go to a pub twice a year, know that these sorts of pleasures are noisy, unhealthy and, while they don’t say it this way, sins against the modern cult of wellbeing and the orderliness of the state. The British State hates fun and, sadly, millions of pursed-lipped worrywarts who don’t go to pubs, agree with the British state.

Happy New Year! A few thoughts about the year ahead. I don’t really do predictions because I tend to get them wrong so feel free to point and laugh later in the year. What follows is mostly about British politics but seasoned with one or two other spicy things.

One of the dominant themes in British punditry is speculation about the future of Keir Starmer and here the assumption appears to be that Sir Keir is toast. Labour is going to be wiped out in the local elections, Scotland and Wales (more on this later) and the MPs, facing doom, or at least the to find a different more useful job after a General Election, will leap into action. I don’t expect Starmer to resign since that isn’t his style so 80 or more MPs need to stick their heads above the parapet to back some sort of challenge. Meanwhile the ‘King in the North’, Andy Burnham who represents the least incredible choice as next Labour leader, will be working hard to stop any challenge because that would exclude him from the contest.

If the local elections are a disaster it might be enough to get those 80 MPs to line up behind a challenger like Wes Streeting but I don’t get the impression that Streeting is all that well-liked and it would reopen the can of worms that is Streeting’s social media history as well as reigniting the discussion about whether he’ll hold his seat against an Islamist (or maybe Green-Islamist) candidate. The worst thing Labour MPs want is to pick a new, feisty but not especially likeable leader who is nailed on to lose his seat come a General Election. Other prospective candidates who might jump include Angela Rayner, who is popular but backing her hands opponents the bazooka of her stamp duty and housing shenanigans not to mention her messy personal life. Nobody will jump to challenge Starmer unless they have those 80 backers already lined up and I’m not sure any likely candidate has those numbers (this might change if Ed Miliband decided to act rather than sitting and waiting for the debris of the Labour Party to fall into his hands).

So what about those May elections? Is Labour going to get trounced? Unless something changes dramatically it seems likely that Labour will get the same scale of drubbing that the Tories got in 2022. And in England the elections will be dominated by Labour defending its heartlands of London boroughs and metropolitan districts. The Party will be fighting on several fronts, against Reform in working class suburban districts like Tameside, Sunderland and Wakefield, against the Greens across those inner London boroughs like Lambeth, Southwark and Haringey as well as in cities like Leeds and Newcastle, against (maybe Green-aligned) Islamist ‘independents’ in East and North London, Bradford and Birmingham, and against the Tories in posh central London boroughs of Westminster, Wandsworth and Hammersmith.

While the loss of seats will be traumatic, what matters post-election is the loss of council control. I don’t think Labour will lose inner London boroughs like Greenwich, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham. In most of these places the Party can afford to lose 15-20 seats without losing control. In metropolitan districts most are elected on thirds making changes of control more difficult. Outside of London it is worth looking to Bradford and Birmingham which have all-out elections (in Bradford’s case on new boundaries). I expect Labour to lose control in both of these places but what sort of leadership emerges in anyone’s guess. In Bradford expect a shaky alliance between Greens (who already have ten councillors) and the Islamist independents (currently with nine) but as one senior member told me ‘God alone knows what we’ll get”. In Birmingham a similar outcome is likely and in both cities reform will join the game with ten or a dozen councillors in each place.

For Reform UK the problem is different. The Party is convinced it will repeat what happened in last year’s County Council elections and, quite understandably, points to how many local by-elections reform has won since last year’s elections. I think, compared to their enthusiastic expectations, Reform will underperform. The loud noises about cancelled elections made for good tactics but poor strategy and it is unclear where, aside from places not having elections, Reform’s targets. You’d expect the Party to do well in Dudley, Wolverhampton, Tameside, Wigan, and Sandwell but the problem is that Reform can, in effect, win elections in these places and them still remain in Labour or ‘No Overall’ control.

I expect Reform to focus its big guns on the Welsh and Scottish elections with the aim of being the biggest party in Wales and the second biggest in Scotland. I don’t expect Reform to win enough in Wales to take actual power, the likely outcome is a Plaid Cymru First Minister propped up by Labour, Lib Dems and Greens. In Scotland the only real question is whether the SNP will get an overall majority or carry on governing courtesy of the Scottish Greens. It will be interesting to see if Labour or Tories come third as Reform becomes the second party although still a long way behind the SNP.

I think the Tories will be quite cautious not to raise expectations and will concentrate on a few high profile places (Westminster, Wandsworth, Trafford) where they stand a real chance of breakthrough while trying to hold the line where they remain strong (Croydon, Dudley, Solihull, Bromley, Harrow). Despite the arguments of former Number 10 staff about Kemi Badenoch being ousted after the elections, I think this is very unlikely especially if Reform (as I expect) do less well than their hype predicted. If the gradual improvement in the Tory polling position continues the Party may do a lot better than it wants you to expect.

For the Lib Dems these are also tricky elections as the Party did very well four years ago and needs to defend hard in some of the Districts where it exercises power as well as in places like Sutton where the Tories are the main challenge. Reform voters should do the Lib Dems a favour again by leaching enough usually Tory voters to keep them in power. Expect the Lib Dems to target one or two places (Stockport, Calderdale) where they have good organisation as historic strength. The safe predictions here are that Ed Davey will be filmed doing daft stunts and won’t shut up about Trump.

Finally the Greens will do well all over - winning seats in leafy suburbia like Solihull, in Leeds and Bradford, among cool lefty professionals in London and ethnic minority enclaves not already marked by Islamist independents. Zack Polanski will continue his ‘Oooh Jeremy Corbyn’ act making him the big favourite for the minority of students who bother to vote.

For the Party leaders, the most vulnerable is Starmer followed by Badenoch, but there’s a less than evens chance of challenges to either. In Starmer’s case a challenge depends on the willingness of the main players to raise the flag of rebellion. The stalking horse option doesn’t exist because of the need for 80 MPs to back the challenger (and the trauma caused by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader). Of course Starmer might resign but why would he unless it was inevitable he’d go down to a big defeat? No other leader faces any challenge so long as they avoid scandal or stupidity.

None of what’s above is the result of detailed analysis, life is too short for all that nonsense. And it all assumes there is no seismic event affecting British politics such as scandal, sudden death, illness or some form of economic collapse. If, say, Nigel Farage was to have a stroke or Sir Keir gets caught fiddling expenses again then the outcomes of May’s elections might be very different. Similarly a banking crisis or sudden surge in prices could affect the outcome (albeit less so since it is hard to see how Labour’s handling of the economy could be less popular).

On to some other random predictions:

1. West Ham will be relegated, Arsenal will be Premier League Champions and England will reach the semi-finals of the World Cup

2. In the Six Nations, England will win the title but not a Grand Slam

3. The US mid-term elections will see Republicans retain control of the Senate and the House. But only just.

4. There won’t be an end to the war in Ukraine, the progress to peace in Gaza will by glacial and there will be at least one terrible Islamist attack in a European city

5. Andalucia in May will be sunny.

I hope you all have a great year.

There are two pivotal ‘wicked’ issues facing Britain. They are not isolated issues but intertwine to help create the frightened rabbit impression of government in the UK. The issues are:

1. An economic stasis characterised by very little real economic growth, a sense of increasing personal financial struggle for many, and a resentment of those who are economically successful. Britain’s economy does not work for ‘the many’ or allow enterprise to bring growth.

2. The slow collapse of visible public services, the inability of the state to administer its services with any sort of effectiveness, and an obsession with petty, unimportant issues and the introduction of pointless bans and restrictions. We are badly governed and the state is too big.

There are, of course, other concerns - immigration, social cohesion, crime, low birth rates and the collapse of intergenerational respect - but these issues are eased if we get better government, a growing economy and control over who lives in our nation. The problem is that, while lots of people - left, right and centre - proclaim concern over bad government and a struggling economy, there is very little beyond rhetoric - policy proposals get determined more by how they land on the Sunday morning politics shows than whether they might work.

Britain’s sclerotic economy traces back to decisions taken by Gordon Brown’s government in 2008/9 (and indeed further back into the wider post-WW2 settlement with the planning system, NHS and a cultural distaste for allowing markets to set prices). But the failing strategy was reinforced by a cross-party agreement on economic development and regeneration best encapsulated by “No Stone Unturned: in pursuit of growth”, the independent report written by Tory grandee, Michael Heseltine. In this report Heseltine returned to his dirigiste themes from the post-Thatcher Tory government - the state is essential to economic growth and should direct the heights or the economy through a partnership with the private sector.

Heseltine was adamant that economic growth required ‘stability’, by which he means that investors will only invest if there is a high degree of political certainty. This is essentially what is meant when people speak of a ‘uniparty’ and, more cynically, the idea that it “doesn’t matter who you vote for the government still gets in”. Such an assurance is fine when the economy is going gangbusters but, as we’ve seen over the past two decades, useless when people feel they’re getting poorer. Most of the disgruntlement in Britain isn’t just a consequence of social change or dysfunction but is as much a consequence of how people perceive their economic circumstances. When Zack Polanski or Gary Stevenson say tax the billionaires they play to this sense of economic struggle even though they both know their proposals cannot resolve that struggle. It is the same ‘find someone to blame’ line as we see from Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe who point to immigrants implying that the fault for your economic conditions lie there.

Antonio Garcia Martinez, the author of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, posted a pertinent analysis of how the left-populist position arises saying:

“The only measure of poverty that matters is this: at what point of wealth inequality in a democracy do you get majority support for third-worldist grievance politics like Mamdani’s, or resentful confiscation like Khanna’s?”

The left-populists are correct to say that reducing inequality is a good idea but this is largely because if people aren’t resentful of others’ economic conditions they don’t elect people like Zack Polanski or Jeremy Corbyn. But you achieve this by economic liberalisation not by the further development of the state’s role in the economy. The Heseltine model - bizarrely popular with the people running Reform UK and other ‘National Conservatives’ - has been the dominant approach to economic development in the UK since the 1990s and, in the 21st century became the preferred approach for all the main political parties. It is fair to say that while it has failed, politicians and their advisors are unable, even those on the supposedly radical right, to find a way out from the tangle of price controls, regulations, state oversight, nationalisation and employment laws that represents UK economic policy.

At present the choice offered to the British public is either a sort of home-grown dirigisme or a version of socialism owing more to student politics than any considered economic strategy. Yet we know socialism doesn’t work and are coming round to the realisation that the managerialist regulatory state doesn’t work either. But getting a better economy requires politicians to face down important selfish and vested interests - NIMBY homeowners, the NHS, the ‘green economy’, trade unions, NGO leadership and public service management. It would be nice to say that an incoming government , elected on a radical platform, could simply act to make the change but the reality is that the Jim Prior approach of chipping away at the edifice of sclerosis is the only effective route. Revolutions create chaos, not better government.

The process of pulling the tentacles of public sector management from out of private business, opens up the prospect for reforming the public sector itself. Back in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher believed that the way to get better government was by introducing ‘business management’ and separating the process of decision-making from the job of administering services. Over 20 years or so from the mid-1980s British central government was completely transformed through the creation of arms-length public agencies and a host of regulatory bodies with the idea that this liberated those around ministers to focus on policy and associated decision-making.

The problem with this approach, however, has been that public services became less accountable, many agencies focused on expanding their role as regulators or service managers, and central government departments had less and less idea of what really happens at the interface between public service and the public. It isn’t just the high profile scandals such as the Post Office, NHS maternity care, or defence procurement but the whole system of service delivery. And as these functions grew larger and more complex, the chance of any ministerial oversight disappeared. The courts and Home Office give the impression of conspiring to undermine immigration and asylum control (they haven’t, merely taken these rules to their logical and ridiculous conclusion) and, as we saw with Covid, public health authorities simply ignore any ministerial direction that didn’t suit them. Worse, ministers and their advisors become captured by ‘experts’ within these systems and are effectively unable to break out faced with an inevitable media onslaught.

Just as refocusing economic policy requires a ‘softly, softly’ strategy, reforming how government functions - prising out those tentacles - is not something that can be achieved with a big bang. It is easy for a politician to proclaim that they plan on reforming the civil service but, so far, nobody has set out what this means in the real world. The ‘Next Steps’ reforms that started in the mid 1980s took over twenty years to implement, the idea that you could simply restructure the machinery of government over a wet weekend in February is plainly nonsense. Similarly, announcing plans to reduce civil service headcount represent a huge hostage to fortune. If you know anything about how bureaucracies implement cuts, then you’ll know that any mandated headcount reduction will be done in a way designed to maximise the front line pain. And when you say to managers that front line services are bad their response is simply to say “you wanted the cuts”.

Back in 2003 I had the joy of leading on Bradford Council’s budget process. There were many lessons learned but the most important one was the Finance Director telling me that, if you want actual budget reductions, the only way to achieve them is to stop doing things. Yes you can play smoke and mirrors with the numbers, you can not fully fund inflation or pay rises, you can promise efficiency savings, better procurement and reductions in waste, but all of this is just flim-flam, a process of handing responsibility for making cuts to middle management rather than owning the reduction of services yourself. If we want better government, we need to start with asking what better government looks like and what changes are needed to get the better outcomes we desire. Not merely in headline terms but right down to the detail - if you want fewer potholes then ask first why we have so many of them, if you want less immigration start by asking why we have so much of it in the first place, and if you want community cohesion perhaps begin by wondering why those parallel lives occur.

All of this is really dull, a bit like my former colleague John Hinchcliffe’s view of marketing - 1% strategy and 99% boring routine. The systems that are failing Britain right now were created over three or four decades (longer in the case of health and planning) and are seen - with the Kafka-esque inevitability of bureaucracy - as ‘this is how we do things’ meaning that those inside the system (which includes most politicians regardless of how much they love their radical image) simply don’t see what needs to be changed. As the surveyor in The Castle was told, there is no conception of error even if things go wrong.

Right now the only people thinking about how to improve what government does are those inside the system, comfortable warm frogs unaware of just how hot the water has become. As a result their proposals for change do not involve the state doing fewer things, do not argue for fewer managerial silos, and assume the current centralised, command and control approach is the only means to deliver. This percolates through to policy as civil servants advise ministers that we get more housing by employing more planners, we get less immigration by increasing resources for border control, and we improve community relations by investing in preventing hate speech. The idea that rising crime, illegal immigration or declining high streets might be down to perverse incentives rather than the resources available to the state simply doesn’t register as a possibility. The only way to solve any public policy problem is to spend more money.

Politicians, or at least those listening, will hear people’s real concerns: how do I afford the rent, why are there so many immigrants, why do my taxes go up while services are cut. But once those politicians get inside the state’s hive they wander frustrated from person to person trying to get something done before either giving up or accepting their role as performing seals designed to distract the public from the big issues. Meanwhile the task of getting better government remains untouched because nobody knows - is allowed to know - where to start with making the changes we need.