The woman’s response, as Lewis reported it, was an interesting one: “It’s a public train, for heaven’s sake.”

Under this framing, it would appear that there are no customs or manners about noise in public places in Britain nowadays. Individuals and families are allowed peace and quiet at home. But once they leave that private space, they must put up with the freedom of others to do what they want, to impose and interrupt and disturb them at will.

The initial situation Lewis described is now depressingly familiar. Indeed the phenomenon, now known as “loudcasting”, has become so widespread that some travelers report facing it on pretty much every journey they take. Last week, the Prime Minister announced a campaign that promises to punish offenders with fines — though the instruction to watch videos “quietly”, rather than silently, suggests that little will change.

The practice is so objectionable because it irrupts through the boundary of our private space, imposing unchosen noise into the stream of thoughts that make for an individual life, while making private conversations more strained and difficult. It effectively imposes a law of the jungle onto public spaces, contributing to a sort of high-tech state of nature where the loudest and most brazen dominate public places, imposing their passing whims on everyone else.

The customs of private and public life that frame such encounters are the subject of Tiffany Jenkins’ recent book Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. The book comes with a warning: that private life is not just under threat in the Western world, but has been under attack — and in retreat — for decades. Long before consumer technology allowed us to place our private thoughts, intimate pictures and noise tastes into the public realm, the barriers between private and public life were collapsing.

As Jenkins writes, “by the mid-1970s, the idea of a private life as freedom from interference, forged over centuries, was evaporating.” In Britain, the Younger Commission Report of 1972 revealed a generational divide, with people aged 45 and above describing privacy as “keeping your own private affairs to yourself” and “other people minding their own business”, while younger people defined it in terms of “leading your life as you want to lead it” and the like.

This might help to make sense of the couple that Martin Lewis encountered on the train. They were leading their lives as they wanted to. It was just that, by doing so, they were making it impossible for those around them to do the same.

Pressure on private life has come from many directions in recent times, not least from our own actions online. Revolutionary Leftist politics has also done its bit. In the late Eighties, the radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon argued that the very division between public and private spheres should be dissolved, suggesting that it “works to protect systematic inequality” and serves “male supremacy”. Another radfem, Carol Hanisch, meanwhile promoted the idea that “The Personal is Political”, one consequence being that all personal (i.e. private) life is open to scrutiny and intrusion. The Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing chimed in with the assertion that family life is a primary source of mental illness and social dysfunction, while promoting psychology, his own practice, as “the key to the interpretation of experience in its political significance.” From here on, it seems now, your private thoughts would be a primary target of experts seeking to engineer social change.

Social science, including psychology, has a crucial role here as a source of authority that justifies intrusions into the private world of the self and intimate relations. These intrusions, it is claimed, address the root causes of social problems. Left-wing social scientists and political figures treat such things as “hate” and “Islamophobia” as if they are perversions of the mind that the state and civil society must work to eliminate. The individual’s role is to follow and do what they are told; to line up on the Right Side of History, not to think and feel for themselves but to defer to the experts.

The big claims of sociology and psychology that underlie such efforts often tend toward totalitarianism. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera recognized something like this in the Soviet bloc in which he lived his early adult life, valuing by contrast the space that liberal society offered. “Public and private are two essentially different worlds”, he says in one of the opening epigraphs to Jenkins’ book, and “respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free.”

Jenkins herself states: “It is essential to have a private space shielded from corporate, state and public scrutiny — a place where we can be alone.” Solitude, she says, “enables us to develop an inner life and a sense of self without constant external pressures.”

These “constant external pressures” may be those of the state, but they can also be those of our fellow human beings, variously “loudcasting” on the bus, shouting about politics via amplified sound systems in our town centers, or even dropping litter.

In a recent BBC article, Dr Rachael Kent, a senior lecturer in digital economy and society at King’s College, London, suggested that loudcasting is “performative… a way to rebel.” Harry Witchel, a professor of physiology at the University of Sussex, meanwhile described it as a “phenomenon of marking social territory”. Littering is similar: the person dropping the takeaway food carton or used water bottle on the street is rather like a dog peeing against a lamppost. They are leaving their imprint on the world, marking their presence, affecting others, perhaps enjoying how they can get away with it.

In this way, private life isn’t just something we experience between the four walls of our home. We take it with us: on the train, in the streets and the hospital waiting room. The condition of respecting it is what we might call “civility”: courtesy and politeness, respecting others.

In Britain, Jenkins writes, private life and the civility which facilitates it developed largely by accident from the late 17th century on, in response to religious and political conflict. “Out of the convoluted twists of history and the English Civil Wars, England’s people eventually forged a path towards the idea that political communities could survive in the midst of religious diversity if they limited their activities to a ‘private’ sphere, thus endorsing its possibility.”

In this time, toleration and freedom of conscience emerged as principles regulating public life. Queen Elizabeth I summed up the new spirit with the words, “Her Majesty is not inclined to peer into men’s hearts and secret thoughts”, later rendered into the famous line: “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls.” As Jenkins puts it, “the new political order… established that there were places the state could not go. From this the private realm was built.”

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By these principles, an individual human being was thereby allowed a space of their own to think and feel as they wished, in a “society of strangers”. This society was necessarily composed of people who, by and large, showed restraint and refrained from imposing themselves on others. In retrospect, perhaps the old reality of the train carriage full of silent commuters was the apotheosis of this, reflecting a society of non-interference and suppressed self-expression: Isaiah Berlin’s “negative liberty” made flesh.

The changes we are now experiencing reflect an evolution of liberal society away from restraint and towards self-expression, or what Berlin would describe as “positive liberty”. Globalization has also contributed, bringing together populations who do not observe such strange rules as the divide between religion (as private) and politics (public).

Islam, for example, particularly in its modern Islamist strains, is a public, political religion whose leaders would never accept God being consigned to a private sphere, let alone one of individual choice. Conservative dress, such as the niqab, is one part of this. Public prayer, of the kind that occurred in Trafalgar Square in March, is another, as is the more abstract expectation that Muslims serve the “ummah”: that is, the global community of Muslims. There is private life for Muslims under the leaders who require or encourage this behavior, but it’s not the same sort of private life that developed in the West. This sort of private life is not a place for religion but a place that must not interfere with religion. Even those Westerners who are not Muslim must take more and more care to mind their language when they talk about Islam, lest they suffer social or legal consequences or even be forced into hiding. Thus they, too, find their lives to be further intruded on by religion.

This reality jars against one of the most important aspects of private life for Jenkins: its interdependence with public life. As we have seen, private life is vulnerable and requires public permission. It requires the state but also our fellow human beings to show restraint. In turn, public life benefits, at least in theory, from the space available for thought and reflection in private life.

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Systems of multiculturalism and diversity appear to threaten this idealized state of affairs, with old liberal rights that used to attach to the individual being quietly transferred to what are termed “communities”, overseen by community and group leaders. This attaches the Muslim, gay or black individual to the group rather than affirming their right to think and feel for themselves.

Individual conscience and freedom of thought have little role in this system of diversity, either for members of protected groups or for outsiders, who are more or less prohibited from interfering with this allocation of authority away from the individual and towards group representatives. In this way, through systemic multiculturalism and diversity, the relationship between private thought and public action, a crucial plank behind the promise of liberal democracy, has at least partially broken down.

Splitting the necessary world of society and politics from private life was, we might reflect now, a civilizing process: allowing individuals, families and intimates the space to think, reflect, make mistakes, indulge interests and explore possibilities without being subject to the controlling gaze and noise of public life — including community leaders demanding fealty. As Hannah Arendt said, “Thinking and acting are not the same, and to the extent that I wish to think I have to withdraw from the world.”

The distinction between public and private also allows us the space to reach towards greatness. For, unlike what arts bureaucrats tell us, greatness in art and culture doesn’t arise from immersing ourselves in group orthodoxies, but from the mind being allowed to roam free. As Jenkins puts it, “Originality begins in private, shaded from the conformity of social pressures, long before it is made public.”  The act of creation itself, as with scientific discovery, arises out of the self: from being on your own.

That self — and the private life that nurtures and protects it — is a foundation of modern freedom and civilization. We let it wither further at our peril.

These different aspects don’t always work in tandem. Indeed, the Brotherhood sometimes finds itself on different sides of political conflict. But such ambiguity can work to its advantage, creating leverage to maximize its interests and undermine its real enemies: to turn them against themselves and each other.

After decades of large-scale Muslim immigration, the Brotherhood as a movement, ideology and style is now firmly established within Western countries. Its positions on such things as decolonization, Islamophobia and Palestine-Israel are now mainstream positions in the West. But the Brotherhood itself, as a body, remains under the radar, clearly present but rarely overt. It operates in the shadows, with assertions about its influence easily written off as conspiracy-mongering.

Yet sometimes this influence becomes visible. In November 2015, former prison governor Ian Acheson wrote to the Ministry of Justice about how a review team he was leading had found numerous examples of Islamist extremist texts in British prison chaplaincies. In evidence to the Commons Justice Committee the following July, Acheson said the books contained “sometimes sectarian, homophobic and incendiary information that was freely available to vulnerable prisoners in many prisons with no obvious control over it”.

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Acheson’s review team looked at eleven prison chaplaincies and found inflammatory texts in nine of them, including titles from some of the main ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Way of Jihad from Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna; Milestones by Sayyid Qutb (also author of Our Struggle with the Jews); and The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Acheson submitted his final report to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Justice, in March 2016, with a stripped-down summary released in August of that year. Behind the scenes, he had also written to Gove highlighting what he calls a “significant finding”, beyond his terms of reference. This concerned the Senior Muslim Advisor to the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), which makes sure convicted criminals serve the sentences and orders carried out by courts. The advisor was Ahtsham Ali. Acheson stresses now that he was not making any specific allegations. However, he noted that Ali had appeared on platforms with extremists and had attracted complaints from Sufi imams who felt unfairly discriminated against in the prison appointments process.

Following Acheson’s warning, Gove launched an investigation into Ali. According to the Sunday Times, it found that 140 of the prison imams Ali had overseen the appointment of (around 70%) were from the Deobandi tradition, a conservative Sunni denomination prevalent in British Pakistani communities that has influenced the Taliban and has significant ideological commonalities with the Brotherhood. However, by the time the investigation process was completed, Gove had been sacked and Acheson’s term had ended.

Following the investigation, Ali was exonerated and he remains in his position today. The Ministry of Justice now issues the statement: “There is no evidence that Ahtsham Ali was responsible for extremist texts identified in some chaplaincies.”

But he certainly has strong ‘links’ to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai, Ali’s long-term teacher and guide, was a founder of the European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), part of the inner network of Brotherhood institutions in Europe. Qaradawi, author of one of the texts that Acheson’s team warned about, was a co-founder of the ECFR and led the organisation for many years. The Iraqi-born Judai is involved in other institutions of that network too: the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), also formerly led by Qaradawi; the charity Islamic Relief, recently deselected as an aid partner by the Swedes but retained as such by the UK; and the European Institute of Human Sciences (EIHS), the main branch of which was dissolved by the French government last year for promoting radical Islamic ideology and justifying armed jihad. Signaling that you are a longstanding pupil of someone with such connections sends quite a message to those in the know.

It is worth taking a moment to discuss Qaradawi, the foremost Brotherhood ideologue of recent times, who died in 2022. Qaradawi acquired a certain notoriety in the West for stating that Islam will conquer Europe via “da’wa [the Arabic term for proselytizing] and ideology” and for advocating a “jihad of necessity” against Israel, including civilians and the “innocent child” as legitimate targets. He also praised violent jihadists in the West for their aims if not their means, for their love of truth and the concern they show for Muslims.

Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam, one of the texts found in British prisons, is an interesting case. Effectively a handbook of Islamic law for Muslims and potential converts in the West, most of it is emollient and even ecumenical, far from being inflammatory. However, this stance emerges from a standpoint of necessary Islamic supremacy. As Qaradawi says, “Islam came to be followed, and not to follow; to be dominant, and not subordinate.”

Among non-Muslims, Jews and Christians at least deserve protection and even love from Muslims, he says, drawing extensively on the Qur’an and hadith — but only if they defer to Muslim dominion. “Neither rabbis nor priests, kings or sultans, have the right to prohibit something permanently to Allah’s servants; if someone does this, he has certainly exceeded his limits, usurping the sovereignty which, with respect to legislating for the people, belongs to Allah … alone.”

Jewish people present a difficult case here. On one hand, Qaradawi says, they deserve respect as People of the Book. But he also condemns them several times for their “rebelliousness”, their deviousness and a tendency to inveigle wealth from others.

Notwithstanding its generally peaceful tone, the book contains a clear threat. If non-Muslims resist the imposition of Islam and its codes of halal (lawful) and haram (prohibited), the latter including such things as the consumption of alcoholic drinks, homosexual marriage and uncovered women in public, then they may be fought against.“In order to keep the Muslim society purified,” he says, “a continuous war must be waged against all belief-systems which originate in man’s ignorance of the divine guidance and in the errors of idol worship.” And it is imperative, he adds, for the Muslim Ummah “to muster military power to the utmost extent of its capacity in order to defend itself.” This is the responsibility of every Muslim, not just governments.

Here we might see the origins of what some observers call the Brotherhood’s “double discourse”; also its “obfuscation” and “dissembling” on such matters when challenged. On one hand there is plenty of generous, peaceful language in Qaradawi’s book to demonstrate how Islam is not a threat to non-believers. On the other hand we find exhortations to violence against those who fail to submit to it.

Whether or not Ahtsham Ali had anything to do with this and other Brotherhood texts being present in British prisons, it is remarkable that someone with such links maintains an overseeing role in those prisons, including over the appointment of imams (leaders) who minister to prisoners.

Ahtsham Ali and Sheikh Judai were both offered the right to reply to the facts and assertions above which concern them, the former via his employer the Ministry of Justice. However, no response was forthcoming from either.

In recent decades, British prisons have become notorious for the domination of Muslim gangs. A Ministry of Justice report in 2019 noted that staff and inmates referred to the gangs as the “Muslim brotherhood”, with former prisoner Steve Gallant, hero of the 2019 London Bridge terrorist attack, describing it as “less an organisation than a network, one fusing Islamist extremism and grievance with the gang discipline of existing prisoner groups”.

This reflects a wider reality of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, as a style and source of inspiration as much as anything. The organisation has grown some serious wings.

***

The Muslim Brotherhood was originally founded by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, 1928, which was then nominally independent but dominated by the British. Banna was consumed by the colonisation of his homeland and much of the Muslim world by Western powers and Western modernity. He attributed this partly to non-Muslim strength — but also to Muslim weakness, which he attributed to the abandoning of Islamic principles. Real Islam, he said, was about fighting and defeating non-believers.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian nationalist, revolutionary and President from 1954 to 1970, was briefly a member of the Brotherhood in the Forties. A friend and associate of Nasser’s in the Free Officers movement recounted their initiation into the “secret apparatus” of the organisation: “We were taken into a totally darkened room where we heard a voice and, placing our hand on the Quran and a gun and repeating after the voice, we took an oath of obedience and total allegiance for better or worse, to the Grand Master [Banna], swearing by the Book of God and the sunna of the Prophet.”

Nasser soon turned against the Brotherhood (Ikhwan in Arabic), rejecting its insistence on shari’a law in favor of secular nationalism. In response, a Brotherhood member shot at him in 1954 as he was celebrating the withdrawal of British forces from the country. He was not hit. But the pattern was set for Egyptian politics: on the one side, secular nationalists who could draw upon the backing of the military; on the other, the Brotherhood, who drew their strength from within Egyptian society as de facto representatives of Islam. At times, the two forces have cut pragmatic deals with each other. However, their visceral opposition meant this never lasted: witness the coup that overthrew the Brotherhood-led government of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 — and the Rabaa massacre of protestors that followed.

Meanwhile the Brotherhood expanded internationally. Under Nasser’s rule, some members fled: to Saudi Arabia, where they began to exert particular influence in the universities, on Osama bin Laden among others; and to Europe and North America, where they started to pitch up in the Fifties and Sixties.

The institution-building they engaged in on arrival is one of the defining traits of modern Islamism, going to the heart of the Brotherhood’s style and success. For it is fixated on achieving things: on power, strength and winning. In The Way of Jihad, one of the books found in British prison chaplaincies, Banna wrote: “Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor evaded.” In another text drawing parallels between Islamic law and Italian fascism, he presented jihad as “the highest goal of humanity in this life.” Islam, he said, “urges its followers to be imbued with the military spirit in war and peace … Therefore, Signor Mussolini is not the only one who calls for this, and these are not the principles of fascism alone.”

A military-style approach to both war and peace has certain implications, including treating those who discard Islam like deserters and encouraging deception, a crucial tactic in war. Such traits don’t mean that the Brotherhood is against peace; nor that it won’t compete in elections — and win them, as it has in Egypt and Tunisia. It is more that peace appears for Islamists in its tradition as a situation that occurs after Islam has won, following the submission of its enemies. Until then, they are always pushing, always contending, seeking to increase their power.

Interpersonal and family relations are as important to this struggle as anything. Qaradawi’s The Lawful and the Prohibited In Islam describes how Muslim women are prohibited from marrying non-Muslim men, yet Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women, just as long as their wives’ beliefs do not influence the rest of the household. This law, if implemented, ensures that Islam prevails in the family environment wherever at least one partner is a Muslim, continuing through the generations.

Needless to say, this is not the law of a private faith that lets everyone choose their own path in life. Such law, if followed, effectively mandates that Islam can never decline; it can only grow. If followed consistently in the West, as it appears to be for the most part in Muslim communities, then the West will become more and more Muslim over time, making Qaradawi’s prophecies come true.

As founder of the Brotherhood, Banna had developed an ideology with a simple and effective good-and-evil dichotomy, whereby Islam is “the solution”, the source of good which must triumph. Western modernity, by contrast, is the source of evil, which should — and will, inevitably — be defeated. This framing was attractive for many — and the Brotherhood’s reach grew rapidly in the years following its founding. In the Indian subcontinent, it greatly influenced Abu Al-A’la Mawdudi and the Jamaat-e-Islami movement. Two of Jamaat’s members set up the Islamic Foundation, which named one of its halls in Leicester after Banna. Ahtsham Ali of the Prisons Service has spoken there, on the subject of converting prisoners to Islam. The then Prince Charles opened a part of its campus in 2000.

“Banna isn’t talking about a religion in the sense it’s understood in the West,” Shadi Hamid, writes in  Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, “but about a program to be applied and implemented.” There is no separation between religion and secular politics here like that which emerged out of the Christian tradition. One serves God by maintaining one’s devoutness, but also by winning territory, imposing Islamic law and drawing converts. As Hamid says, the Brotherhood recognized that achieving these things would require patience. “They believed that history — and God — moved with them, and so it was never a question of whether but when they would prevail.” Here we can see the apparent paradox of “Islamo-progressivism”, in which an Islamist movement that appears to be anti-modern is also consumed by “that most modern of assumptions: that history moved with purpose and that progress was inescapable.” As Banna put it, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Like other revolutionaries, the Brotherhood learned to protect itself through secret methods, establishing the usra (“family”) cell structure and being careful about introducing new recruits. Lorenzo Vidino, who has written two books on it, says: “We have to remember that the Brotherhood is a very selective organization. No one applies to be a member. You are selected based on a variety of skills that the spotters within the Brotherhood identify — and being extremely clever, extremely well-educated, extremely driven are some of the key features they look for. It’s an elite group.”

Once a potential member has been selected, he (always a he, it seems) is given tasks to fulfill in his specialist area — whether in education, politics, finance, media or, nowadays, social media. As recruits prove themselves reliable and trustworthy, they rise up through the different layers of the organization, becoming more distanced from everyday operations. The organizations that members create in turn establish centers of expertise to advance the purposes of the center, operating in unison but without public deference to an orchestrating force. This in turn conveys a crucial appearance of strength and weight — as if its objectives are shared by all Muslims when in fact, a relatively small group of people are behind it all.

It is worth emphasizing the scope and sophistication of this approach. Indeed, Banna even showed signs of digesting Gramscian political ideas, writing of the need to change al-rouh al-’am alazi uhaimin (the hegemonic public spirit) in Muslim countries before targeting state power. The Brotherhood’s aim is to maximize its freedom and therefore the power of Islam wherever it finds itself. It has learned to be flexible and make alliances which help to consolidate its position. As a result it has thrived in the countries that it saw as its principal enemies.

***

On 7th June 2016, just a few months after Ian Acheson submitted his report on Islamism in British jails, Dr Ibrahim Mounir, the elderly Deputy Supreme Guide of the global Muslim Brotherhood, sat in front of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in Westminster as part of its investigation into political Islam. The Brexit referendum campaign was in full swing. In his native Arabic, Mounir told the committee, “What we are hoping for is to achieve Islamic unity. A parallel of that is European unity.”

The Committee investigation came shortly after David Cameron’s Government published the main findings of its review into the Brotherhood. Within 24 hours of Cameron announcing that review in 2014, the Brotherhood had appointed a legal team including the former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord (Ken) Macdonald and threatened legal action against “any improper attempt to restrict its activity”.

Sitting alongside Mounir in Portcullis House were three others with associations to the Brotherhood: Dr Anas al-Tikriti, chief executive and founder of the Cordoba Foundation; Dr Radwan Masmoudi of the Ennahda party in Tunisia; and, in hijab, Sondos Asem, who used to serve as media advisor for President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and is now a senior news editor for Middle East Eye.

When pressed on how the Brotherhood legitimates and uses violence, each of the witnesses pushed back. Tikriti said there was no evidence for it. Asem stated that such claims were “unsubstantiated” and “misleading”. One might counter that the fact that Hamas was formed as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, or that the Brotherhood’s logo features two crossed swords, or that its leading ideologues like Banna and Qutb frequently invoke violence, speak for themselves. But the four held the line, not giving an inch.

Step forward to the present day, Britain looks like something of a redoubt for the Brotherhood and its wider movement. Salah Abdel-Haq, acting leader of the whole organization, has reportedly been resident in London since 2023. Highly-organized marches and protests for Palestine and against “Zionism” have attracted large crowds ever since Hamas’ attack on Southern Israel in October that year. On one occasion, organizers celebrated their success in being allowed to march down Whitehall again with the statement: “We are pleased to report that the police have yielded”: a telling way of framing it. Among the signatories of this statement, we find the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), founded by Tikriti, who described it to the Select Committee as “the closest there is to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Britain. Another signatory was the Palestinian Forum of Britain, one of whose officials was Zaher Birawi, a Palestinian-British journalist who was recently sanctioned by US authorities for his role “clandestinely acting on behalf of Hamas.”

Tikriti, who described the mass slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens on 7th October 2023 as “a lie” and the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance”, has also been advising The Muslim Vote (TMV) organization. He and his sister both signed an open letter released by TMV before the 2024 election, urging Muslims to “unite behind the single Muslim vote candidate” that it had chosen. The organization came from nowhere to back four Muslim “Independent” MPs who were elected to Westminster, also backing former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and various candidates from other parties.

London’s Metropolitan Police recently noted that the marches have “routinely seen arrests for racially and religiously aggravated public order offenses, for stirring up racial hatred and for supporting terrorist organizations. It is not normal to see criminality of this nature or on this scale at what are billed as peaceful protests.” Nevertheless, they have been a significant success for the organizers, mobilizing support from way beyond Palestinian and Muslim diasporas, keeping Gaza at the forefront of public attention, and bringing in support and resources for Muslim Brotherhood causes.

Primarily, the Brotherhood’s influence can be seen in British Islamist networks, which link its own predominantly Arabic speakers to Urdu-speaking and other Muslim groups in Britain. Bodies like TMV and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) share the Brotherhood’s emphasis on Muslim “unity” and on using the weight of Muslim presence to influence and dictate public policy. They have had considerable success. The Labour Government’s long-promised definition of Islamophobia, rebranded as “anti-Muslim hatred”, is a case in point, seeking to protect Islam and what we might call “Muslimness” from negative sentiment. The former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who chaired the working group that developed the definition, previously carried out a review on behalf of Islamic Relief, a charity in the Brotherhood network, following an anti-Semitism scandal. This last Ramadan, Islamic Relief has been soliciting “zakat” charitable donations via adverts featuring the slogan “Zakat is our Sacred Duty”: striking messaging that suggests a religious obligation to give them money, not far away from taxation — and in line with Qaradawi’s instructions on the using of charities where an Islamic state doesn’t exist.

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The French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who says she has received death threats for her work, has developed the notion of “frérisme” to describe how the Brotherhood’s influence works. Translating as “Brotherism”, it describes “a blend of ideological coherence and collective identity formulated around a specific vision of global Islamic hegemony, to be pursued with a strategy of slow infiltration that leverages [all] possible allies.” In a report for the ECR group in the European Parliament, she and Tommaso Virgili suggest that these allies “may include individuals and entities that are not part of the MB in any structural sense but are influenced by its ideology and operate accordingly, as well as individuals completely unaware of their role in the plan and even coming from very distant ideological backgrounds, such as the materialist left.” They point out that the Brotherhood has established religious and cultural institutions all across Europe, claiming to represent the Muslim faith and community before the state and public authorities. It has also founded numerous charities, think tanks and trusts that ostensibly have nothing to do with religion, while training a network of professionals “to penetrate all sectors of public life, including education, health, development, business, law and justice.”

Brotherist politics matches what is sometimes called the “radical flank effect”, by which the more moderate wings of a political movement benefit from the presence of more radical elements. This dynamic is on constant display in Islamist politics, as older, more respectable representatives maximize their bargaining power by emphasizing their ability to prevent street violence and terrorism. In this way, some think the emergence of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State has benefited the Brotherist tendency. Alain Chouet, the former head of France’s counterintelligence service, the DGSE, has even said: “Al-Qaeda is only a brief episode and an expedient instrument in the century-old existence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The true danger is in the expansion of the Brotherhood, an increase in its audience. The wolf knows how to disguise itself as a sheep.” We might also note the Brotherhood’s pragmatic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially via Hamas, currently bringing terror to the West as well as the Middle East.

***

V.S. Naipaul described Islam as “an imperialism as well as a religion.” Its followers are duty-bound to God to impose the ways of their religion wherever they go. Brotherist movements have articulated this commitment through modern ideology and political method. Founded in opposition to Western imperialism, they are now imposing themselves on the West, assisted by naive, unthinking and sometimes self-interested liberals and Left-wingers, including in the present-day Labour Government.

How do you counter something like this, that is both ubiquitous and intangible, that works within the system while eroding it? Some want to follow states like the UAE by banning the Brotherhood itself. However, you might respond: “Ban what?” The Brotherhood’s methods of organizational secrecy hobble such an idea from the start. There is no official organization to be banned. There are individuals who are either likely members of the Brotherhood or have previously been identified as members elsewhere; and then there are the organizations formed by these people, which operate within the letter if not always the spirit of the law.

The strength of Brotherism means something more comprehensive and joined-up would be required. Governments will have to recognize that these movements threaten the foundations of Western civilization, including liberalism, social democracy and conservatism. The Islamist scene is so large, so active and international that it is difficult for even dedicated researchers to keep track of what’s going on even in single countries, leaving policymakers and public in the dark about the organizations and individuals that approach them. In 2020, the Austrian government set up the Dokumentationsstelle Politischer Islam (the Documentation Centre on Political Islam, or DPI) to remedy this, to document and scientifically analyze political Islam, its networks and structures, to raise awareness about religiously motivated political extremism and its threat to democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights. We could do with a similar institution in Britain, with strong links to other countries and, if possible, the EU level, where Brotherhood network institutions are prominent lobbyists.

Western governments also need to offer a more convincing, attractive alternative to Islamic rule, re-founding their own weakened polities by gathering around core principles like individual freedom, legal equality and what we might call “civilized tolerance”. State bodies will have to refocus on core tasks, enforcing the law without fear or favor and dismantling the special carve-outs that multiculturalist structures have facilitated — and which undermine the state’s authority. They will also have to recognize that large-scale immigration has a negative impact.

Our governments should say they won’t work with, engage or financially support Islamist-related groups. They should also make it illegal for public bodies to give public goods — including public space — to them. They should reinforce the duty of public sector employees, such as those who work for the prisons service, to serve all citizens, not giving preference to certain identity groups.

Then there is the question of charitable status. In Britain, charities receive Gift Aid from the Government, since religion is recognized as a public good. Mosques, Muslim groups and even individuals exploit this widely. According to some researchers this helps Islamists to engage in political work full-time, giving them a major advantage over secular political movements. We should legislate to change this. Either Islam should be disqualified as a beneficiary of charitable status, or all religions should be.

Qaradawi, as the premier Brotherhood ideologue of recent decades and a keen advocate of using charities to exert Islamic power, called his approach wasatqiyya or the “middle way”, suggesting moderation. Yet this apparently moderate form of Islam explicitly calls for the Ummah to see itself as a military force wherever they find themselves, waging a permanent war against alternative beliefs and lifestyles. There is a clear ideological link here to violent attacks committed in the name of Islam. We are fools to not recognize and act on it.

Western democratic states should not be subsidizing movements that are encouraging war-like attitudes to groups other than their own while working towards their destruction. Unfortunately, unbelievably to many, this is what the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to do.

***

A previous version of this piece wrongly named Sheikh Abdullah al-Judai as an author of one of the texts Ian Acheson warned about. We apologise for the error.

That philosophy has a marginal role, even in the academy, is undoubtedly true in the West. But After Virtue doesn’t just examine what MacIntyre saw as the exhausted political traditions and moral confusions of liberal individualist Western societies. It also tries to offer an alternative, grounded in an idea of human essence and purpose, of the good life, inherited from the philosophy of Aristotle and largely, as MacIntyre saw it, abandoned.

In other words, in this book, MacIntyre is trying to change the world. He does so in a way that has particular resonance today, even a year after his death. His endeavor, in After Virtue, is to push humanity in a different direction — sometimes referred to as a “post-liberal” one — and, in a sense, to go backwards, to recover something lost through the turn to Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism. You don’t find much that even vaguely resembles this in modern philosophy, characterized as it is largely by pedantic quibbling and unreadable obscurantism.

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The critique that MacIntyre presents also informs his alternative. He argues that Western mankind became morally homeless by abandoning the foundations of Aristotelian morality in community and arete — excellence in one’s work. This Aristotelian morality does still live on, but only as a sort of remnant, being found for example in distaste for “dysfunctional” individuals or institutions which fail to serve any useful purpose. But it rarely carries the day.

Its abandonment exposes us to the claims of untutored human nature, for which there are no ethics, no enduring standards and little conception of  excellence in and of itself. In this context, other types of moral assertion tend to prevail, generally based around ideas of equality and equity which tend to be suspicious of achievement. But these moral assertions often seem inappropriate — rewarding dysfunctional and even illegal behaviors.

One example would be the current arguments surrounding illegal migration in Britain. Our moral discussions on such topics typically go around in circles of assertion and counter-assertion. The state and other conforming institutions try to enforce a consensus, invoking Christian-style moral sentiments  like “kindness” and “compassion”. But these attempts don’t convince — and indeed, often appear to be attacks on other kinds of moral sentiment, say, based on ideas of deserving versus not-deserving. Meanwhile we find the “harm” of John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” — that individuals should be free to act just as long as they don’t harm others —  expanded and exploited. Anything disliked is asserted to be harmful, thereby turning the harm principle into a rationale for preventing freedom when in fact, it was meant to facilitate it.

There is an unreality to a lot of this cod-Christian, equity-centered moral assertion and its opposition. Both appear disconnected: sometimes futile; sometimes open to exploitation by the powerful. Moral statements about right and wrong still project moral passion. But the aims and ambitions those passions embody die on contact with the real world. Immigration activists preach compassion to refugees, but the migrants they seek to help hardly meet a compassionate world, trapped as they are between bureaucracy on the one hand and criminal gangs on the other. Those who wish to “Stop the Boats” meanwhile find themselves talking into a void. MacIntyre says: “We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have — very largely, if not entirely — lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.” Nothing works, nothing improves — and our divisions embed themselves more and more over time.

MacIntyre suggests that the government’s inability to express a moral consensus makes patriotism, which he sees as a virtue, no longer possible like it once was. Western governments appear merely as means to impose “a bureaucratized unity on society”. As a result, they struggle to mobilize collective commitment. The nature of political obligation itself “becomes systematically unclear.”

Our customary way out of this state of confusion is to fall into a pervading cynicism, MacIntyre tells us, reflexively dismissing moral statements from others as mere projections of self-interest. This cynicism gathers itself into a theoretical approach that he called “emotivism” and which sees self-serving, arbitrary motives behind others’ moral utterances, exposing the very idea of morality to routine denunciations of hypocrisy.

MacIntyre saw emotivism in everyone from Evangelicals to the Bloomsbury Group, Sartre and Nietzsche, and the liberal rights theorist John Rawls. Freud’s “superego” is another example. This conceptualizes an arbitrary, irrational eye of society that controls our actions via conscience, preventing us from being free. Emotivism coheres into a reflexive refutation of inherited morality, treating existing social bonds as oppressive. But the alternative it presents, of self-realization — the individual creating their own values — only leads us into more confusion as individual examples are unmasked in turn and rejected. And so we go around again, propelling ourselves into a brighter future only to refute it.

As MacIntyre presents it in After Virtue, emotivism is the dominant philosophical standpoint of our times. As with previous moral worldviews, it finds itself embodied through characters who morally legitimize certain forms of behavior. While in past times the public school schoolmaster, explorer and engineer furnished such ideals, MacIntyre says, nowadays the function of emotivism is fulfilled by the archetypes of the rich aesthete, the bureaucratic expert, the therapist and the protestor.

We might think of DEI as a sort of culmination of the emotivist spirit. For it is demonstrative and assertive, placing all wrongness outside itself and the groups it sponsors. It operates very much in the moral register. And it brings at least three of those archetypes together: wielding expert authority via the law-like generalizations of critical social science; protesting against the oppressive existing reality decreed by this science; and prescribing the overturning of existing functional society in order to fix it.

For the emotivist, MacIntyre says, moral agency is located “in the self and not in social roles or practices.” That individual self can pass judgment on the world — and can freely reject it. The emotivist perspective is universal and abstract and protected from criticism. It is apart from the world — at least until it starts to shape the world itself, at which point it finds itself assailed variously for cynicism and hypocrisy. And so we go around again.

MacIntyre’s alternative, Aristotelian, version of morality seems strange and counter-intuitive to the Western individualist mind. Bound up in social roles and the work we do, it does not exist in a walled-off individual self. It is not purely our own. MacIntyre uses the example of a sea-captain to justify it, showing that, in his role, the sea-captain should do whatever good sea-captains do. At least some moral agency is to be found in him being functionally effective in his work rather than in some sort of inner essence of goodness.

MacIntyre uses the idea of the “practice” to articulate this perspective further, explaining it as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized”. In this sense, kicking a football isn’t a practice, but the game of football is. Planting turnips isn’t, but farming is. Bricklaying isn’t, but architecture or housebuilding is. To enter into a practice is “to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice” — standards which change over time through a continuous process of critique and improvement. Painting and music qualify, since they are long-term traditions with standards that evolve over time; so does academic work like physics, chemistry and the study and teaching of history.

There is contrast here with our conventional utilitarian way of seeing things, for which the point of work is to achieve external goods — that is, work as a means for achieving separate ends. MacIntyre doesn’t dismiss such things, but focuses also on the “internal” goods of the practice, on maintaining and extending standards, which in turn requires the presence of virtues like justice, courage and honesty. For this perspective, your moral essence is to be found not in statement-making nor in abstract ideas about who you are, but rather attached to what you do — and whether this reflects the virtues of the practice. In this view, a sea-captain is no more virtuous for striving to ensure his crew is diverse.

The virtues help protect the integrity of practices against the acquisitiveness of institutions. But practices require institutions to protect and nurture them. When we consider the decline of institutions like the Civil Service and BBC, we might see it in MacIntyre’s framing, as reflecting a discarding of the virtues in favor of a sort of moralistic self-promotion.

Is there a possible political philosophy in all of this?

John Gray, perhaps our greatest current political philosopher, dismissed After Virtue in a New Statesman article soon after MacIntyre’s death a year ago, suggesting that, as “an avowed critique of the modern world”, it offered little useful guidance for modern urban-industrial societies. “Reading the book when it first appeared in 1981, I was struck by its political thinness,” he said.

This seems unfair. MacIntyre’s account of virtues and practices applies to modern industrial societies as much as any other society, embracing as it does science and improvement as part of a continual process of criticism and critique. Gray’s account, accusing MacIntyre of “pursuing an imaginary prelapsarian idyll”, appears to be at least partly influenced by a torrid four-hour exchange they once had in an Oxford college garden.

I, at least, found the book to be original and refreshing. It also offers a contrast to the reflexive pessimism that Gray falls into. It taps into our confusion about morality. But it also offers an alternative, and strangely practical vision, based on a deeper, more meaningful conception of work. Under MacIntyre’s idea of practices, work is essential to human flourishing, giving us meaning and purpose, a role and status in our community, something we can be expert in and work to improve. This emerges as a different way of looking at morality, assigning moral value away from judgment-making and towards making a contribution through our actions.

There is plenty to question about this vision. Applying such an idea to the low-paid drudgery of much work is not straightforward. But giving extra substance and recognition to work that is “socially useful”, in Mervyn King’s phrase, like street cleaning and caring for the elderly, is surely well within the bounds of our imagination.

It is also easy to imagine “practices” being employed to prop up unjust and oppressive regimes. But on the other side, you could argue that the integration of practices into the workplace could be transformative in a good way, infusing both capitalism and the state with a new spirit, infused with the virtues. There is hope here, possibility, surely a sine qua non for any democratic politics.

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In a postscript included in a later edition of After Virtue, MacIntyre admitted that the book’s argument is underpowered in certain aspects. Its confrontation with modern moral confusions is certainly limited, having little to say about sexual morality for example.

The book’s value can be found precisely in application. MacIntyre’s analysis offers both critique of what has gone wrong and a route back to what may be made right again. Under his framing, such things as media production, academia, housebuilding and architecture, town planning, war-fighting, crime-fighting, public cleanliness and sport might all be thought of as practices to which standards of excellence apply over and above the assertion of moral supremacy. Certainly, the idea of practices runs counter to the promotion of self that we find so widespread in institutional life nowadays, which divert attention and resources away from delivery.

Indeed, far from being politically thin, After Virtue appears to open up a deep and rich seam of applications. As an account of work, it applies equally to public and private sectors. And, encompassing these two sometimes antagonistic sectors, it might just confer on us a practical theory of state and society: a political philosophy, requiring collective political action to implement in all areas where work matters. It ought to be an ideal prompt for the think-tank world.

“Bob always took care of people who cooperated with him,” Screvane told Moses’s legendary biographer, Robert A. Caro. But only the people who cooperated, as Caro notes in his biography of Moses. “If you didn’t there would be no consulting jobs, no authority make-work, and you would find your pension was less than you had believed you were entitled to.” 

Not long ago, Caro turned 90. In a short recent book on his writing career, he reflected how he came to write his biography of Moses after realizing what he was doing as a journalist was “bullshit”. In contrast, people like Moses wielded powers of patronage that startled politicians like Screvane who stood to benefit from them. Caro recalled: “Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power.” 

The book that he eventually completed, The Power Broker, has passed into legend along with its author, becoming widely recognized as one of the greatest biographies ever written. It offers many lessons, from how a new road or housing development can generate blight in a neighborhood to how the Tammany Hall system of political corruption worked in New York. However, its main subject matter is how Moses effectively deployed a new, technocratic, form of corruption.

Most importantly for us perhaps, The Power Broker sheds light on how democracies are fragile and open to erosion and exploitation, casually handing away their crown jewels without realizing it — and with hardly anyone noticing. For the Britain of 2026, it helps clarify how a trusted and even loved institution like the BBC has lost its way, getting carried away on its own hubris and — crucially — remaining detached from public accountability thanks to the license fee. 

Moses’s hubris arose not just from natural arrogance but a deep well of achievement. He studied at Yales, Oxford and Columbia, where he wrote an admiring PhD on the British Civil Service, before he sought to apply his learnings to the state government of New York. His goal in this work, he explained in a later report, was “[to] press for progress toward responsive, responsible, efficient and democratic government in the state.”

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But he got to advance in his career only by accepting the compromises and accommodations of politics. As assistant to New York State Democratic governor Al Smith, Moses became an expert in drafting bills to conceal their real content. He got himself appointed to various independent Commissions and built parks, playgrounds, parkways (i.e. roads) and even beaches for families to flee to in the hot summer months. He built up a reputation as someone who Got Things Done — things which helped people. 

As Caro writes, the prevailing image of Moses in the pre-Second World War years “was of the totally unselfish and altruistic public servant who wanted nothing for himself but the chance to serve… The image was of the fearless independent above politics. The public believed authorities — entities outside the normal government setup, entities whose members were unsalaried and appointed to terms long enough in theory to ensure their independence from politicians — to be ‘nonpolitical.’”

This image helped Moses to get away with his greatest power grab. This was to turn the Triborough Bridge Authority, which built what is now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, from an instrument of the city into an independent, permanent entity insulated from interference by city and state officials.

Using the drafting prowess he had obtained while working for Al Smith, Moses had concealed the power-grab in the financing documents of the bill that established the Authority. Once the bridge itself was complete (1936) and had paid off its bonds, its toll revenue flowed into the Authority’s coffers, rather than going to the city that had commissioned it.

With the end of the Second World War, the volume of car traffic soared. The Triborough Bridge went from carrying 11 million vehicles in 1941 to 23 million in 1949 and 46 million in 1960. Meanwhile, the Authority’s income from this and other infrastructure swelled from $8 million in 1941 to $26 million in 1951, $37million in 1960 and $75 million in 1967. The money allowed Moses to attract extra financing through bond issues, giving him an extra  $750 million to spend on public works in New York City in the 15 years after the Second World War. All this money also allowed him to grease the wheels of New York politics whenever resistance arose to his projects from citizens and their representatives. 

The Triborough Bridge Authority acquired some of the powers of a sovereign state, including the power of eminent domain, permitting the seizure of private property. The bill Moses drafted gave it power not just over bridges and their approaches but roads, streets, and parkways connecting with those approaches. And so Moses started hacking through highly populated areas of the city to build expressways to connect to his bridges. One of the most stunning chapters in The Power Broker, “One Mile”, details the consequences of this in a one-mile stretch of the Bronx where a community was torn apart and destroyed.

Altogether, around half a million city residents were forced to leave their homes to make way for Moses’s projects. He built 627 miles of major road infrastructure and much more besides. The justification he used for his road-building was that it would reduce traffic congestion on existing thoroughfares. But his projects only ended up creating more traffic. Within a few years of them being built, the new roads were as congested as those they were meant to relieve. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway’s infrastructure was decaying. Moses successfully blocked any new track being laid.

“In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator’s powers,” Caro writes. “And he used them. He enjoyed using them — for using them gave him what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on other people.” But all along, Moses maintained that he was not political, that he was the antithesis of the politician and never let political considerations influence his projects. Compromise was what politicians did, he said. He saw himself as above politics: concerned with right and wrong, where he was right and anyone who objected was wrong. 

Of course, these ideas of “independence”, of “independent expertise” and being “above politics” retain a powerful currency today. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestine Territories, describes herself as a “UN Independent Expert”, despite her evident sympathy towards Palestine. In Britain, whole swathes of government functions are farmed out to supposedly independent bodies. One of the most high-profile is The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which provides authoritative and easily-available predictions which, in practice, work to heap pressure on the government of the day. Never mind that those predictions have proved consistently wrong.

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But perhaps the most egregious examples appear in the non-economic sphere; see the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which sometimes appears vulnerable to activist exploitation. There is a distinct tendency for “quangos” to start acting like mini, alternative governments. This tendency is exacerbated when the quango is expected to have an impact, not just in its own particular areas of concern but on society as a whole. Arts Council England (ACE), for example, has broadened its remit from funding artistic work to supporting “creative practitioners” which it describes as “an umbrella term for all those who work to create new, or reshape existing, cultural content.” This has pulled in all sorts of groups and people who would not previously benefit from arts funding, including a BAME-only organization called Rising Arts Agency, which plastered the billboards of Bristol in 2020 with messaging including “The blood is on your hands” repeated three times accompanied with the message: “So, Mr White Man… What are your plans?” As the ACE chief executive Darren Henley has said, “Together, let’s create better lives.”

However, perhaps the best match to Moses in Britain, in terms of scope, style and impact, is the BBC. It is a carved-out part of the British state, but with independent income. In this respect, the license fee mirrors the tolls Moses collected from users of his bridges and tunnels — tolls that were almost compulsory for those living in the suburbs. Like Moses, with his manic road- and bridge-building, the BBC has magnified itself over time, intruding into ever more areas of life with a proliferation of channels, platforms and activities, while giving us news high on interpretation and promotion — from Israel-Gaza to Trump, the latest celebrity clickbait and puff pieces on drag queens. Moreover, the corporation’s ability to do this without advertising or charging extra has deterred any competitors, similar to how Moses deterred competition from railroad and subway.

Like Moses, the BBC has exploited its previous reputation as a trustworthy, broadly impartial and high-quality broadcaster to push in the opposite direction. Its commitment to “due impartiality” has become heavy on what it has thought is “due” and lighter on “impartiality”. If Donald Trump is a bad man, so the logic runs, then it is appropriate to emphasize that rather than report accurately on his ongoing activities. The approach could cost the BBC dearly, with a vengeful Trump suing it for $10 billion in a Florida court over Panorama doctoring his January 6 speech — a case that has already led to the resignations of both the Director-General and Head of News.

In truth, the very idea of being independent of politics, or “anti-” or “above” politics, is another kind of politics. The activists who heap pressure institutions like the Beeb, from inside and outside, have a point. All are sites of power; and the BBC is no exception. Politicians from Ed Davey to Harriet Harman want the BBC to be a bulwark against right-wing populism, but in doing so they point to how this idea goes wrong. They treat the BBC as an arbiter, promoting what is right — basically liberal-left progressivism — rather than serving in a more modest fashion as a reporter, mediator and facilitator for discussion. Theirs is the logic of the dictatorship rather than democracy, of Pravda against the old BBC. If a national broadcaster becomes a voice for some, in opposition to others, it does not deserve to survive while taking the money of both groups.

William Exton, a reformer and critic of Moses’ West Side Improvement project, told Caro: “His only reply to everything we had proposed was an ad hominem attack on us, and it was all a lie, a goddamed lie.” Cut to the reactions of BBC supporters to its present crisis and you hear talk of “right-wing” conspiracies and even “coups”, of nefarious “political” forces that are trying to destroy the noble Corporation. These could come straight out of a Moses playbook; except that Moses used accusations of Communism.

Moses ultimately fell victim to a ruse of the kind that got him his power in the first place. He was eased out of Triborough by New York Mayor John D. Rockefeller while he wasn’t paying attention. It may be that this sort of ruse, of an intensely political kind, is the only way the BBC can be reformed and restored to anything like the entity that built its reputation. Maybe the insiders and outriders are right. Maybe the leaking of the Prescott memo was a political act. And maybe it will prove to be the beginning of the end of an activist BBC, provoking a return to the rigor, trustworthiness and restraint that made the BBC worth exploiting in the first place.

But, like the formidable Robert Moses, the Corporation shows few signs of turning and few signs of regret.

You hear it in the friend talking of how public figures they loathe will “inevitably” fall from grace. You read it in writers’ pronouncing about how “future historians will say” whatever they fervently believe right now. And you detect it in talk of how certain things are “outdated” or “not relevant” to “the modern era”: invariably an excuse for the powerful to consign things they dislike to the Dustbin of History.

These assertions all relate to time in a particularly progressive manner: as a vehicle of improvement. This means that, by definition, the future will be better than the past; that which is of the past — and therefore not modern — does not belong and must be removed. Time appears to this progressive style not merely as a succession of moments taking us from one minute to another, but as a redemptive force, clearing out what is wrong in the world and bringing in what is right: newness, change.

Crucially, the idea also gives an exalted role to the person who understands progressivism: the wannabe theorist who claims to understand the sweep of history, seemingly without temporal or geographical limit. He — and it is normally a he — knows how social improvement comes about. He knows what needs to be promoted and eliminated in order for History to move forward. And anyone can take on this role if they get the style right.

This is the case even for those who stand on the anti-progressive side of our culture wars. Earlier this year, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann unveiled the “Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science”. It argues for a “critical approach to progressive social science’s ‘critical’ claims”: including those which relate to systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity. Progressivism, as Kaufmann has put it, is “synonymous with the hybrid ideology of Left-modernism”, which is located at the overlap of expressive individualism (including avant-garde modernism), cultural egalitarianism and humanitarianism. It is “more Lennonism than Leninism”, he writes, but it is on the wane.

The manifesto is a serious attempt to redirect Western intellectual life, proposing, as Kaufmann puts it, “a reunification of grand theory with positivist social science”. However, this idea of “a Post-Progressive Era” immediately set my progressive radar off. For it presents the intervention both as political (a new initiative seeking to win support) and as sociological analysis: an assertion that what is desired is in fact happening, that history itself is moving in the way proposed.

Besides the Lennon-to-Leninist kind, there is another powerful strain of progressivism in our culture which I think is reflected in Kaufmann’s paper: the Protestant-inflected liberal idea of progress. This form is generally less invasive than “Left-modernism”, albeit it served to justify British imperial expansion and the conquering of North America. Its narrative of ever-rising freedom and prosperity, summed up by Herbert Butterfield as “the Whig Interpretation of History”, first appeared most obviously in Britain before becoming a foundation myth of the new United States.

It has faith in history rather than gripping it by the throat. And it has also tended to trust in power, vesting particular faith in economic power: thereby serving as an Establishment ideology.

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A century ago, in his defining tome The Idea of Progress, J.B. Bury referred to progress as “the animating and controlling idea of western civilization”. He added: “The phrase CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS has become stereotyped, and illustrates how we have come to judge a civilization good or bad according as it is or is not progressive. The ideas of liberty and democracy, which have their own ancient and independent justifications, have sought a new strength by attaching themselves to Progress… Socialism, at an early stage of its modern development, sought the same aid.”

The progressive style of supporting its desires with predictions certainly gives any creed or proposal a little extra oomph, invoking social power as well as right. This creed isn’t just right but is going to win, the message goes, so you had better get on board or face the consequences. History as progress therefore ends up mobilizing interest perhaps better than any other form of assertion that doesn’t invoke God.

And so we find thinkers and politicos almost reflexively putting themselves and their ideas forward not just as desirable but inevitable: they are not just right, but destined to win. And this is so not just on the progressive Left. Donald Trump has always done this, presenting himself as the ultimate winner in the American style. Nigel Farage tries to emulate him in a more eccentric English manner. Islamists do it too. The Labour peer Lord Glasman, a prominent anti-progressive, recently said of his opponents in the party: “I think their time is gone… It’s changed”: assuming, perhaps, that we have indeed entered a new post-progressive era.

The terms “post-liberal” and “post-liberalism” tap into the same sort of energy. C.B. MacPherson proposed a “post-liberal democracy” as far back as 1964, to push back against liberalism’s anti-democratic tendencies. More recently, John Gray and David Goodhart have invoked it in their writings, as have Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. However, as with “post-modernism”, there is an inherent dualism to post-liberalism. Both terms suggest a change, away from modernism or liberalism, as well as implying that this change is occurring or will occur afterwards, later in history. They represent both proposal and prediction, even the statement of historical fact. And post-liberalism is or will be better, more suitable to the times.

In other words, the progressive mindset is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that even anti-progressives show elements of it. It is as if we need to certify our opinions and desires with the findings of sociology and historical analysis to make them somehow valid in a scientific style. It shows a lack of confidence in ourselves and our species: that the society we want, the life we want, who we are, requires “independent” blessing by the forces of history to become real. And the adoption of this style as a social currency leaves us vulnerable to those who are more able to mobilize the forces of social and historical analysis, in academia and other sites of knowledge production: places that remain pretty much dominated by what Kaufmann calls “Left-modernism”.

The temptation is to imitate their techniques. However, the style only really works for those with power to hand, with the baubles and titles, the nomenclature of “expertise”. Notwithstanding how they are linked to change, progressive assumptions serve to justify existing power: offering it a bit of magical authority, with its specialized knowledge of the future.

There is another way, if we are prepared to think, in the frank embrace of politics as politics, to return to what J.B. Bury called the “ancient and independent justifications” of liberty and democracy, justifying measures by what we or the people want (and don’t want): returning to human agency as a legitimate source of political action. Moreover, such a style of thinking would embrace truth in a way that progressive historicizing claims to, but falls short of.

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Nevertheless, we should admit that there is something in the air: some sort of genuine historical change going on: a passing from one era into another, perhaps. During Trump’s first presidency and 14 years of Conservative-led government in Britain, Left-liberal hegemony was barely touched. Indeed, it seemed to get stronger in some respects. But there are some signs of change now, positive change in certain respects, suggesting a possible new era both for intellectual life and for politics and society more broadly.

A true “post-progressive era” would be something different though, requiring a huge change in the way we think and see the world. It is intriguing to think about how it might look. However, for the moment, we must admit that it is a long way off, that progressivism remains in our existential bloodstream, whichever way we turn: that we are all progressives, really.

The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.

It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.

The origins of this unsavoriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism program, William Shawcross described the organization as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.

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How can we best understand this concept of Islamophobia? One of its problems is how it seems to mean whatever the likes of the IHRC dislike at any given moment. The literal meaning, though, is implicit in the word: Islam-phobia. It suggests an irrational fear of Islam, prompting questions of whether fear of Islam is itself irrational (a view that would match Islamic doctrine) or whether versions of that fear can be rational.

From the Islamist scene in Britain, a group called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) has placed itself at the forefront of efforts to identify and combat Islamophobia. It provided significant support for a landmark report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, co-chaired by current Health Secretary West Streeting MP.

MEND stated that Islamophobia was:

“…a prejudice, aversion, hostility, or hatred towards Muslims and encompasses any distinction, exclusion, restriction, discrimination, or preference against Muslims that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

This, you might say, is a maximalist position. In a cutting response to the APPG report for Policy Exchange in 2019, Trevor Phillips, John Jenkins and Martyn Frampton noted that “the comprehensiveness of the behavior that MEND seeks to place beyond the pale is striking”. A whole smorgasbord of other potential definitions can be found in the APPG publication. Some of these definitions came from academics. One came from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a grouping of Muslim governments from around the world. The OIC described Islamophobia in 2007 as “the worst form of terrorism”. In a follow-up report, it said:

“Islamophobia signifies the contemporary proliferation of discrimination against Muslims and distortion of Islam and is partly due to the ignorance and lack of understanding of Islam in the West. It would be an unfortunate error of judgment in believing that Islam is linked to terror; that it is intolerant of other religious beliefs, that its values and practices are not democratic; that it favors repression of freedom of expression and undermining human rights.”

The APPG report makes similarly bold claims, the core one being that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The behaviors it deemed Islamophobic include those which are already illegal, such as threats of violence, and discrimination at work. But the report also claims that Islamophobia encompasses Muslim students failing to win places at top-level universities, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted questioning whether young girls should be wearing the hijab. And if you think these definitions are overly expansive, then you might already be an Islamophobe. Another example of Islamophobia, the report says, is “accusing Muslims… of exaggerating Islamophobia.”

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Islamophobia is a total wrong, it appears: blasphemous but also irrational and immoral; rooted in Western racism and ignorance. And from it arises the error of thinking there is any link between Islam and young Muslim men yelling “Allahu-Akbar” (“God is Great”) as they plunge knives into passers-by on European streets. As the OIC points out, this would be unfortunate. Not wrong, inaccurate or unfactual, but unfortunate and an error of judgment.

These claims are worth unpacking, not least for how they demonstrate the characteristic Islamist fusing of a so-called “mediaeval” religion with the techniques and styles of Western secular modernity, particularly progressive social science.

From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.

These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the ideas that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.

The West’s ignorance of this perspective matches the Islamic notion of “jahiliyya”, which describes the age of ignorance before the Prophet Mohammed received the word of God. Applied to Western countries, it supposes that we are in a pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Mainstream Left-wing history and social science see things in a similar way. In this view, Muslims and other immigrants serve as a motor of change, bringing us to a higher historical state.

In this way, the notion of Islamophobia helps to bring together Islamic and Western intellectual traditions. It converts Islamic law — or merely the desire of Islamists to punish those who displease them — into secular rationalist and moral language, helping to mobilize both Muslims and non-Muslims in support. In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality. This makes it an effective tool. Critics of Islamophobia often speak of how it gets “weaponized”. This assessment is accurate, for the concept is consistently used as a prop to punish, but also to deter and bring others onboard via the appearance of strength. At the very least it is a form of social technology, working to advance the group’s aims, to build the size and strength of the group, and to weaken its opponents.

In this regard, the lack of an agreed definition can be a strength. The nebulousness of “Islamophobia” grants maximum flexibility to those who deploy this weapon. It is a weapon that can be used freely to denounce anyone who displeases Islamists and their allies. It can be invoked against the authorities, to intimidate and win concessions. And it can be used against fellow Muslims, as a more ecumenical version of takfir. (Takfir is excommunication from Islam, or society, potentially meriting death).

If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect. We must bow to Islamists’ authority to decide the boundary between right and wrong in relation to Islam. This fits into the Islamic distinction between the “dar-al-harb” (the House of War) and the “dar-al-Islam” (the House of Islam): assigning all bad things in the world outside Islam, to a state of war. Through this framing, Islamists can bypass inconvenient issues like the “grooming’”(or “rape”) gangs and Islamic terrorist attacks. The culprits are not the individuals involved, but external forces: lax morals in Western society, colonialism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and discrimination against Muslims in the West.

This distinction between the House of War and the House of Islam helps explain another of the Islamists’ tendencies: that of inveigling themselves with the authorities one minute and denouncing them in the strongest terms the next. There is a tension here. Islamists see the West as a place which, while not of Islam at the moment, at least has or might have arrangements with its representatives. At the same time, the House of War is implacably hostile to Muslims and must be fought against. The APPG report points towards the latter in describing Britain as an “Islamophobic environment”: it is another way of describing a House of War.

In this framing, like the closely related idea of systemic racism, everything is touched by Islamophobia and so everything will have to be changed to defeat it. From the track record of advocates, their maximalist approach and their intolerance of differing views, they will likely never be satisfied.

Nevertheless, the British state is trying to satisfy them. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, recently set up a group “to deliver a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia within six months”. Explaining the creation of this group, the government said that “incidents of anti-Muslim hatred reached the highest number on record in 2024.” The group’s chair, the former Conservative minister Dominic Grieve KC, said the group’s task was to balance the pressing need to impose a definition on behalf of British Muslims “with the unwavering requirement to maintain freedom of thought and expression under law for all.”

Eventually the Government will have to decide: between censorship and freedom. If a definition is indeed agreed and, as activists demand, operationalized, the effects will be significant. Media reporting will become even more fraught with risk, leading to a more aggressive culture of self-censorship. Academic work likewise: further undermining the culture of truth-seeking in universities. To resist the demands of Muslim activists in the workplace will become perilous for both bosses and employees, clearing the way for Islamic practices to be embedded in daily routines while others are blocked for being discriminatory. At Michaela School, for example, the activists have been temporarily set back, but will eventually win.

It seems that Western traditions of free speech and inquiry, already straining under repeated attacks, will no longer apply in relation to Islam and Muslims in British public and institutional life. And so gradually, seemingly inexorably, Britain will continue its weary progress into becoming an Islamic state in all but name. Islamophobia is a crucial tool in the battle to make that happen: a startlingly effective social weapon.

In the next few hours, the BBC focused on this aspect of her address — that anyone discussing these developments further was irresponsible — and notably disapproved of Conservative leadership candidates Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch for expressing concern about a possible cover-up. During the News at Ten, the story was relegated to the end of the bulletin.

But the game was already up. At the press conference, Dr Renu Bindra of the UK Health Security Agency said that they were informed that ricin, a biological weapon, had been found in Rudakubana’s home “early in August”. In other words, leading agencies in the British state had had evidence to charge Rudakubana for producing ricin for nearly three months. They had also discovered that he had possessed a PDF file entitled “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual”.

The new information was quite a contrast to what we were told in the aftermath of the attack. Then, the police had said that the incident was “not believed to be terror-related”. Even during Monday’s press conference, Kennedy maintained that Counter Terrorism police were not classifying the Southport murders as a terror incident due to the lack of an established motive — even though they are now prosecuting their suspect under the Terrorism Act.

Then there’s the religious connection. Many of us immediately assumed that the attacker was inspired by radical Islam, connecting his rampage with actual and planned Islamist attacks on music events at Manchester Arena in 2017 and more recently in Austria. However this notion was stamped on hard after the killings, especially as far-Right riots spread around Britain in response, and Keir Starmer launched a blitz of prosecutions on those accused of “lies” and “disinformation” and for stirring up hatred against Muslims.

Something distinctly odd and unsatisfactory appears to be going on here. Certainly the timing of the police announcement gave off a bad smell, coming a day before the Budget. It was also notably delayed until a few days after a Tommy Robinson march in London, which would have been given fuel by the news.

The day the authorities released the news could hardly have been bettered from a media-management point of view, suggesting at least informal coordination between police, the Crime Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Labour government. But I think this is unlikely to take the form of any deliberate “cover-up” or conspiracy. Rather I suspect that any coordination will be wrapped in technical, legalistic language and of shared priorities like maintaining “community relations”: in the collective assumption that they were simply doing the right thing.

For, despite 14 years of Conservative rule, the British state shares broadly the same aims as the new Labour government. They speak the same language and have the same approach, especially to things such as diversity and equality. In the last and most domestically significant act of its previous time in government, Labour embedded identity politics in the state through the Equality Act of 2010. And this has now percolated fully through the system. The government and state, now largely aligned as shown in their common response to the Southport riots, give off the appearance of being a regime, one with a common sociology. Its mantra is “Diversity is Our Strength”: an unabashed assertion that diversity causes good things to happen, which also means not bad things.

We all now know what this messaging demands. We’ve seen it before, following outrages from 7/7 in London to Manchester Arena, Liverpool Remembrance Day, London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Reading, Parsons Green and Lee Rigby in Woolwich; as well as other largely unknown attacks happening at the fringes, such as in Hartlepool in 2023 and Burnley in 2020. Right-wing activists are familiar with the logic. Liberal-Left opinion managers know it like the back of their hands. So do the authorities, and they crank into gear whenever an attack occurs bearing the obvious hallmarks.

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By Simon Cottee

We all know instinctively that the system must defend diversity. It must be revealed as a strength, otherwise the meaning of our society is revealed to be fake: at best naive and mistaken; at worst mendacious lies, open for exploitation by those who mean us deep harm. The bold statements we used to hear about how such attacks have “nothing to do with Islam” are no longer convincing. Other tactics must be employed. Some things must be revealed and others concealed. And so the regime and its supporters go to war over “reporting”, “commentary” and “sharing information”. They say that this is a matter of responsibility versus irresponsibility, that it is legally necessary in order to not prejudice a trial.

But we get the wider message. We shouldn’t talk about it. We shouldn’t be concerned about the same pattern repeating itself. And we shouldn’t get angry about this information being withheld from us for nearly three months while people were convicted for overreaching in their anger.

This is not to say that the police and the Criminal Prosecution Service; the commentators and opinion managers on Twitter; the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and the Prime Minister Keir Starmer are all bad people, mendacious, cynical liars, determined to prevent people from knowing the truth. Rather, as Dominic Cummings keeps on telling us in between his relentless denunciations of these people: “The system is working as intended.”

This is the regime we live in. It is a regime of the Equality Act and associated Public Sector Equality Duty, of community leaders for some and not for others, of DEI commissars telling us to who must be favored and disfavored, of the Human Rights Act and European Convention of Human Rights protecting dangerous foreign criminals from being deported. It is the system of diversity: and it demands that certain things be promoted and others be suppressed. The regime has committed itself. Its functionaries are merely following the rules, following the logic of the system. Communities that qualify as “communities” must be protected from harm: and this means that we must all be protected from reality.

Almost a decade after his book was published, the latter view seems to have become embedded in our institutions, encouraged by the excesses of progressive sociology. The recent Wildlife and Countryside Link report submitted to MPs suggested that “racist colonial legacies continue to frame nature in the UK as a ‘white space’”. “Colonialism has driven the exploitation and erasure of the rights and knowledge of indigenous people, and the assertion of white, Western values and knowledge at the expense of other values and knowledges.” For this sort of unsympathetic account, the people of the countryside are not valuable members of a national community, but imposters and enemies whose very presence harms others.

Now, British farmers’ anger is starting to boil over, joining their counterparts from within the EU who have been in open revolt for months over low prices, cheap imports and environmental regulations. Britain’s farmers are traditionally more quiescent, but have been mounting their first public protests in recent weeks: including choking traffic at the port of Dover and 3,000 turning up at the Welsh Government building in Cardiff to get their voices heard. Meanwhile,  there are increasing signs that the Conservatives, the traditional party of the countryside, is losing traction in rural areas. A recent Survation poll concluded that 51 of the 100 most rural constituencies are set to switch to Labour at the next election, while a poll last year found only 36% of voters in rural seats agreed that the Tories “understand and respect rural communities and their way of life”.

Into this fractious atmosphere comes a timely Green Paper from the Social Democratic Party, the old SDP that just about survived the Eighties and has had a mini-revival lately under the leadership of William Clouston. Entitled Farms Fields & Food, its core theme is that, as Clouston puts it: “Cheap food is very expensive.” We may welcome it in the supermarket, but we pay for it in other ways: through suffering farm animals and poor public health, through degraded fields, rivers and wildlife. And through farmers giving up, their children leaving the family business rather than soldiering on. Margins are too small, the paperwork too gruelling, the lack of respect galling. And now, to top it off, they are facing organised gangs roaming the countryside and stealing their equipment, something to which they have no response; the police likewise.

The resulting reality is grim. One in five farms in England closed down between 2005 and 2015, with one in three of them classified as smaller farms. If trends continue, British family farms could virtually die out in the next 30 years — and with them the rural communities they support and the landscape they have created.

The story, as the report notes, is a familiar one from across British society: “Free trade and open labour markets have deterred investment in training and innovation, increased our reliance on over-extended global supply chains, forced food producers to prioritise yield over sustainability, and sold swathes of our countryside into foreign ownership.” As in the cities, the ground has started to erode under the feet from those whose families have lived there for generations. Others are moving in with other interests and priorities, more money and little familiarity with traditional ways of life.

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The SDP proposes a host of semi-radical, statist measures to address the situation. It wants Charter Co-operatives and Regional Marketing Boards to give more heft to small-scale producers. It wants an independent regulatory body for supermarkets to prevent the practices that often leave farmers stranded with suddenly unwanted produce. It wants a Royal Commission into conserving the British countryside. It wants affordable housing to be reserved for farm workers. And it wants to ban stuff: the routine use of antibiotics; junk food advertisements on TV and online; and imports of food and drink not produced to the UK’s environmental and animal welfare standards.

This is all quite a contrast to the establishment parties; perhaps playing that classic role of a smaller party in pushing the boat out on an issue, making it easier for others to jump in later. Amid the increasing alarm in country areas, Rishi Sunak came out with a new grant scheme and food security index recently, but this looks like more dancing to the tune of polls and headlines, a desperate move to mollify yet another group of restless natives.

For ultimately, the Conservative Party’s attitude to the land and farming is really subservient to their wider economic assumptions and the interest groups that feed into them, notably in finance and property development, sectors that are very much global in scale and urban in origin. They treat the land of Britain as “UK plc” or Atlantic Zone Production Unit No. 325: a place to be managed not for the sake of the people who live on it but as a business whose purpose is to maximise returns for shareholders. Today’s Tories understand land primarily as an economic resource open to market forces. If it does not pay economically, then it should be sold to someone who can make a better fist of it, perhaps by building houses for the growing population rather than trying to feed them. Competition, trading and development will solve problems naturally over time according to this perspective.

But this account is detached from any specific valuation of farmers and their work, of the origins of food and of rural community. It regards land as a tradeable asset with no wider meaning. And its most immediate, visible costs are defrayed onto places and people who are relatively few in number and/or have relatively little lobbying power: such as those family farmers and working-class consumers seeking the cheapest food. If the approach means further large slugs of farmland being taken out of farming use, then so be it. Global Britain will fill in the shortfall with cheaper imports as a result of post-Brexit trade deals. This is part of a wider story of neoliberalism that we might call the Glazerisation of Britain, by which the country’s territory serves like Manchester United has for the Glazer family of Florida: as a distant resource to be tapped for income, without reference to its meaning and significance for those who live and breathe it.

Contrasted with this, the SDP’s Green Paper is a refreshing reminder of the reality on the ground. It refers to, for instance, how “population density has increased by over 15% since 2000 and is predicted to keep rising”. Quite simply, as many progressive campaigners have warned us in recent years, Britain is a small rainy island drifting in the Atlantic Ocean: our space is strictly limited. The population of England alone increased by 6.5% between 2011 and 2021 to an estimated 56,536,000, giving the country a population density of 434 per square km. Only tiny Malta and the flat Netherlands have a larger density in Europe.

Yet our rulers, think tanks and indeed those same campaigners treat the territory as if it is boundless. We need more workers, more houses, more energy production and transmission, more water reservoirs, more roads and railways and schools and hospitals and GP surgeries. We need more factories and distribution centres, more technology centres and the rest. And we also need more trees and better protection of wildlife.

All these require space. Yet in a small and already crowded piece of land, they are competing with each other. And so choices must be made. But how?

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At the moment, they are made through an incoherent combination of market, local and national decision-making, with plans signed off in isolation. But leaving land use to the market and the current patchwork of isolated state interventions means certain types of life and community dying off. There is only so much love to go around. And the same goes for land. To give more weight to the interests and opinions of farmers and rural communities means reducing that of others who currently have more prominence.

To justify such a re-allocation will require some serious politics, but also some serious strategic thinking. We need to decide what our limited land is for and take the steps needed to apportion it rather than rushing headlong to meet one set of needs, like housing a rapidly growing population, without thinking about energy, water and food provision. We need a full-scale land strategy, a major piece of work to lay out what our priorities are and how to meet them. “Joined-up government” is a bit of a joke term in Westminster, but it really is time for some of it now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll get it. Although Labour is sizing up the curtains in No. 10, the recent protests by farmers against its administration in Wales suggest a relative lack of understanding and interest in the party for rural concerns. Indeed, Labour seems even more detached than the Tories from the interests and rhythms of the countryside. If rural voters want to be heard, it seems they will have to continue their revolt — and might want to abandon the establishment parties altogether.

In 1993, the political consultant Philip Gould wrote a paper for internal Labour Party consumption advocating a “new populism”, based on the time he had just had working on the successful Democratic Party campaign for Bill Clinton. In his later book, The Unfinished Revolution (a bible for New Labourites), Gould said his memo went down “like a lead balloon” with the party machine. However, it proved influential with the young modernisers rising through the ranks, including Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Gould went on to work on Blair’s leadership campaign the following year and then served as a pollster and trusted communications adviser in opposition and government. He died of cancer in 2011.

The day after Blair was selected as leader, Gould wrote another of his lengthy memos, its message eerily prescient as Starmer sets out his pitch to the Labour Party faithful today:

“I argued that the real political agenda was a combination of Right and Left. It was Right-wing on crime, welfare, immigration, discipline, tax and individualism, but Left-wing on the NHS, investment, social integration, opposition to privatisation and unemployment. People wanted change, but they didn’t yet want Labour… There is still a lurking fear about unions and the loony Left; there is potential concern about Labour because of its liberal social positions; there is anxiety about tax; there is almost no idea what Labour stands for.”

In 1999, after Blair’s first landslide, Gould wrote once more of this “new populism always seeking to hear the voices of those not often heard”. Crucially for him, this did not mean the unions and minorities, who Labour already paid a lot of attention to, but “working-class achievers and the middle class under pressure”. These were the people he had grown up around; he saw them as natural Labour voters who the party had repeatedly betrayed. “I came from the land that Labour forgot,” he wrote.

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To get to these people, reassure them and to make them vote for you requires a lot of work: part of what Clinton referred to as the “head game” of politics. In his foreword to the revised edition of Gould’s book, Blair himself acknowledged this: “Politics is far more intellectual exercise than people ever think… You will always end up with a strategic definition of your overall political position. The question is therefore: do you impose it on yourself or do your opponents do it for you?”

What this revealed is that, for all its faults, New Labour understood how politics works — how people in the public eye are positioning themselves all the time, whether they realise it or not. And they decided it was better to do this deliberately. In this sense, theirs was not the intellectuality of the distanced, objective observer, who is committed to truth, but that of the participant who is in a fight and trying to win it.

This desire to understand where they stood with the public accorded a central role to Gould’s polling and focus groups, to the intense annoyance of many Labour MPs. Gould himself, perhaps somewhat naively, saw this market research “as an important part of the democratic process — part of a necessary dialogue between politicians and people, part of a new approach to politics”. He saw opinion polls and focus groups as a way for ordinary people to get their voices heard in the Labour Party and in government: a form of democratic idealism that contrasts starkly with New Labour’s reputation for cynicism and technocracy while in government, as well as with the distinctly anti-democratic tendencies of its supporters in more recent times.

In reality, however, this focus on responding to the public’s concerns was easily exploited in power, by giving one impression while doing the opposite: notably on immigration. This was particularly pertinent on immigration, where they made a lot of noise about restrictions while quietly opening up new avenues: something that subsequent Conservative governments have emulated. This feeds into a more general, jarring conflict between being attentive to moderate public opinion and New Labour’s sometimes maniacal focus on change and modernisation, on defeating the “forces of conservatism”, as Blair outlined in his conference speech of 1999. Given the stale Tory governments, stale Labour Party and stale country of the Nineties, the stars were aligned for the embrace of change. In fact, it seemed to fit so well that they effectively made it into a universal ideology: thereby departing in spirit from the natural conservatism that they had recognised in most people.

This tension in New Labour between respect for the electorate and the desire to overturn much of what the electorate holds dear appears in Gould’s book as a conflict between the ideas of the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whom he studied under at the London School of Economics, and the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel. Gould notes his debt to Oakeshott, but says that ultimately it was Hegel who prevailed in his mind for being “more satisfying, although more mystifying”.

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Certainly, Hegel has much greater scope and ambition with his theory of dialectical progress and world-historical change. Because of this he has a much greater claim to authority, something we might see embodied in one of Blair’s favourite themes: “the world of change”, of inevitable and ever-increasing social complexity, technology and globalisation. This perspective is now standard in the upper reaches of public life, no doubt partly down to how it implies handing power to an expert class with a superior understanding of social change: a progressive elite. It confers a sheen of novelty and optimism onto the actions of power: of technocracy, quangofication and the ongoing project of using progressive identity politics to organise the state. It also serves as a neat means to exclude non-conformers from high society: for if you do not accept that certain changes are inevitable and cannot be reversed, then you count as someone without the requisite knowledge, as out-of-date and to be treated as a regressive outsider by the organs of power.

Here, the conflict within New Labour — and within Gould’s own mind — resolved itself in a way that would end up shutting out the people he had sought to represent. Hegel’s own promotion of the Prussian state as the apotheosis of the historical process finds itself replicated in the way New Labour followers tend to treat their own consensus as an endpoint: a culmination of social progress. In effect, they therefore reject Hegelianism as a continuing process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Instead, they treat the conflict of ideas as over and the game already won, notably on such things as mass immigration (which is to continue indefinitely). Any counter-currents can therefore be safely quarantined as “populism” and dealt with as threats to be managed rather than interesting challenges.

This transition among Blair and his followers from populism to anti-populism reflects the transition from being outsiders to insiders. Formerly, they saw themselves as an insurgent force. But now they are comfortable and indeed broadly set the tone for public life both in state institutions and the mainstream media.

And Keir Starmer’s Labour Party appears to follow cautiously in their wake. It is, for instance, notably wary of getting on the wrong side of public opinion on subjects such as crime and immigration, just as New Labour was. But it is also solidly committed to the consensus established in the New Labour years, of relying on arms-length, extra-governmental bodies staffed by fellow travellers to help push through policy choices under the guise of independent expertise. Rachel Reeves’s proposal to give the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) legal oversight over any major tax and spending decisions is a classic example. You are only going to do that if you know the body in question shares your instincts. Mark Carney’s very public endorsement for Reeves yesterday shows that the old guard of technocrats are pleased with Labour at the moment.

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Today’s Labour Party, then, does not present itself as a populist insurgency against a tired Establishment as Blair and Brown did in the Nineties. Rather, it appears almost purely in a defensive role, its task being to reconsecrate the hegemony that New Labour initially established, restoring the equilibrium of the state and of Britain’s relations to the outside world. On the latter, Starmer’s Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, one of the most vociferous opponents of Brexit, has promised a “Britain Reconnected” — effectively a restoration in foreign relations.

Where does this leave New Labour’s populist spirit? Gould wrote about the importance of “a new long-term radicalism, to ensure that progressive instincts become rooted in the institutions of the nation, just as conservative instincts were in the past”. And in this respect, his new populism clearly succeeded. However, in doing so it turned against its own democratic spirit, bypassing the people it was meant to serve. Rather than seeking to do what people want, centrists of the New Labour stripe generally seek to manage them away, imposing their own preferences and presenting them as the only sensible, reasonable approach.

In 1994, Gould advised Blair that “populism… means Labour becoming once again the instrument through which ordinary people believe they can achieve their aspirations”. It is inconceivable that Keir Starmer would embrace such an equation. Rather, his role is that of a safe pair of hands. Like many Tory leaders of yesteryear, he is trying to convey the impression that Labour will not disturb you under his rule.

But this looks unlikely. For, as Labour leader, Starmer is almost necessarily aligned to a failing, incapable technocratic state which orders itself using the same, broadly unpopular, progressive identity politics that Labour does. This all promises trouble ahead. Starmer himself is certainly not leading a populist uprising — but I think we can expect one to develop against his incoming government in pretty short order.

Any idea of an “Anglo-Gaullism” would no doubt make the man himself howl with laughter. But despite his frequent bursts of Anglophobia and jabs at the “Anglo-Saxons”, I suspect he would have quite liked the idea. As he looked over the Channel in the post-war years, he commented that Britain was giving up its self-respect and sense of responsibility. Now under attack over everything from museum artefacts to Brexit, Ireland, colonialism and slavery, our traditional diplomatic sang-froid is looking ever more like quiescence, sometimes blending into agreement as the activists work their way through the institutions. Britain today appears often as an opponent of itself: a self-cancelling entity ripe for dissolution and dismemberment.

This is pretty much how de Gaulle saw France during the Second World War — and even how he presented it during Les Trente Glorieuses, the 30 years of growth and prosperity that followed. During that time, as President, he told Harold Macmillan that he had been so tiresome during the war because he was representing a country that was ruined and dishonoured.

Now, ruin and dishonour are concepts we aren’t really used to in the Anglophone world. But they were central to de Gaulle’s success in politics. Comparing him to Philippe Pétain, the military hero who headed the Vichy dictatorship, Julian Jackson, in A Certain Idea of France, observed: “The core of Pétain’s appeal to the French people in 1940 was his decision to remain on French soil to defend his compatriots, to defend French lives, while de Gaulle left France to defend what he later called his ‘idea of France’.” De Gaulle, in other words, put honour above life.

This may sound pompous and ridiculous, but it was what elevated him from obscure general to national symbol during the war years. It was what framed French resistance to Nazi tyranny. Its sources were spiritual, concerned with what it meant to win or lose, to be present or absent. As Jackson wrote, for de Gaulle, “conflict was the oxygen of politics”. In this, he was strongly informed by writers such as Henri Bergson (who privileged élan vital over frozen doctrine), Émile Boutroux (“the importance of the heart and the soul in thinking about the world”) and Maurice Barrès (who “gave back to the elite a consciousness of national eternity by revealing the links that attached it to its ancestors”).

During his final spell in government in the Sixties, de Gaulle read two or three books a week, and he regularly corresponded with their authors. In his own book on leadership, he wrote that great leaders needed to display mystery, ruse and hypocrisy. After all, in a world of conflict and struggle, it pays to keep your opponents wrong-footed. De Gaulle did this with great skill throughout his political life, especially in foreign relations (something the French continue to excel in, notably in their responses to Brexit and the Aukus pact). Crucially, de Gaulle succeeded in this by transcending Left and Right: attracting and repelling figures from both sides at various times. “Gaullisme” appears not so much as a political philosophy or ideology as a politics, a praxis, one that gathers around the nation and adjusts for “circumstances”, which is to say threats and opportunities.

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By Kathleen Stock

However, for him the nation wasn’t just any old nation. De Gaulle embraced the common idea of his generation that France, in Jackson’s words, “had a mystical vocation to bring enlightenment to humanity”. During the war years he presented himself as the embodiment of this France that was still standing, retaining its honour. He forced himself into the spotlight when necessary, such as when he spoke of taking up arms against Britain over its intervention in Syria during the war. As he put it, “to count on us they must take account of us” and “with the English you need to bang the table, they will flatten themselves before you”. In 1965-6, he used similar tactics, boycotting the institutions of the European Community in order to secure generous terms for French farmers via the Common Agricultural Policy.

The contrast with Anglophone post-politics of the present day is striking. Our politicians and bureaucrats often behave as if they have reached a place beyond conflict, or at least that should be insulated from it. This makes them singularly ineffective when confronted by it. De Gaulle would no doubt have been contemptuous of our leaders, from their failure to confront the ongoing revolution within our institutions to the failure of Boris Johnson and leading Leavers to defend and see through Brexit after going to the trouble of securing it.

Le général was never keen on ceding French sovereignty. However, he embraced European unity as a way to embed French power in the post-colonial world: Europe as an extension of France. In this way, he tended to see the world through a colonial lens, leading him to some rash interventions, such as his comparison of Québec’s situation in Canada to that of France under the Nazis. But he was not an inflexible headbanger. In the early Sixties, he admitted that the French game was up in Algeria, that the local Arabs had reason for grievance and that he must stand up to his army, which had gotten out of control in its attempt to maintain Algérie française.

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None of this is to detract from his occasional racist outbursts. He regularly slammed the English and “Anglo-Saxons”, but also the “Negroes” of Africa. He criticised Israelis as Jews who were predisposed to exaggerate as a result of their religious upbringing. He claimed Arabs and French were like oil and vinegar who could never properly integrate; and he mulled mass deportations of Algerians from France. Perhaps the best you might say of all this is he didn’t seem to like anyone, seeing each national and ethnic or racial group in a negative light. Indeed, some observers have maintained that he didn’t really like people. And in his brooding depressions, like those of his old sparring partner Churchill, he damned the French as much as anyone.

At its most useful, then, Gaullism is best thought of as a style and an attitude which attaches itself to the nation as a primary unit. And any Anglo-Gaullism would be characterised by a greater assertiveness in British politics and diplomacy: seeking to reform our institutions and being prepared to annoy other governments, particularly the Americans. It would accept the need to walk away from international bodies and agreements that no longer work such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — ideally in order to reform them; a classic Gaullist tactic.

Among the first confrontations of such an attitude would likely be with France, particularly over Channel migration. However, such a stance might at least inspire a little recognition and respect from the old adversary across the Channel: something in short supply in recent years. A Gaullism with British characteristics would, you would hope, have more moderation, tolerance and humour than the man himself showed much of the time. However, it would also have a sense of history, geography and realism that he consistently demonstrated.

The alternative — the old laconic British diplomatic style — seems lazy in the context of a world we live in, where prime ministers, seemingly by default, choose to avoid conflict. But de Gaulle saw conflict as the essence of politics, so unavoidable and to be managed in a serious fashion. This helped him to see problems before they arose. Yes, this made him insufferable to both colleagues and allies. But, whether they were asking for it or not, he provided leadership — and, in response, they started treating him as a leader. In an era defined by widespread despair and defeatism, we could do worse than follow his example

The Lark Ascending; Romance for Violin and orchestra was a revised version of a composition Vaughan Williams wrote just before World War One for solo violin and piano. Referencing a poem of the same name by George Meredith, the piece lasted around 15 minutes and had little in the way of musical pyrotechnics for Hall to get her teeth into.

Yet today the Lark regularly tops ClassicFM’s annual Hall of Fame — ahead of Beethoven, Mozart and all the rest. Explaining why they love the piece, fans often point to how it evokes the beauty of the English countryside, rather like a Constable painting. As Peter Sallis, assured of his place in English rural folklore from his role in Last of the Summer Wine, put it: “You’ve only got to listen to it, and you’re listening to England.”

The Lark has often assumed a sense of nostalgia, conjuring up images of what has been lost: the unspoilt England or Britain that existed before the arrival of two World Wars and the era of mass road-building, sprawling housing estates and out-of-town shopping centres. It recalls “an Arcadia that perhaps never was,” as one radio presenter recently remarked with a hint of a sneer.

There is certainly something in these descriptions, not least in the orchestral accompaniment with its gentle rise-and-fall which maps on to the undulations of the English countryside — and indeed to English speech. Talking about Vaughan Williams and his fellow English composer Edward Elgar, the late conductor Richard Hickox said: “Our speech has a lot of rise and fall and our countryside [that] they knew so well has lots of rise and fall. I think the landscape of England really did affect them…”

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However, Vaughan Williams’s music and his attempts to create a definably English musical language are routinely dismissed as parochial. Chrissy Kinsella, who runs the London Music Fund, recently wrote that the Lark “is one of the dullest pieces of music known to man, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on” — a sentiment, it seems, that is shared by many.

Now it is certainly true that the Lark can be dull. Vaughan Williams’s champion Adrian Boult once lamented a performance in which “we all agreed that the poor lark never left solid earth”. Overplay has made it over-familiar for many. Sometimes it does not always match our moods. Some of us may never be in the mood.

However, it is uncanny how often these comments appear with a political edge. The Lark’s popularity and its associations with Englishness, nostalgia, the past and the countryside is more than enough to trigger the average progressive. Kinsella, whose charity has London Mayor Sadiq Khan as patron, laughed along at a colleague blaming the Lark’s popularity on the English. The music writer Hugh Morris recently suggested: “the residual spectre of British (read: English) exceptionalism that characterises our politics, governance, and musical life runs strong in Vaughan Williams… It’s no surprise that he now represents a highly middlebrow attitude to music in the UK.”

Again and again in such comments we find the assertion of quite a strong “us” and “them”, gathering Vaughan Williams and his unassuming piece around England and Englishness as unfavoured categories, typified by dullness and backwardness. A certain referendum result never appears to be far away. “Just like Brexit the British are fixated on The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams,” says one critic.

These recurring associations suggest how the piece serves, at least in part, as a proxy to display distaste for other things and people. Certainly, attacks on the Lark tend to be addressing a wider world around the piece as much as the piece itself.

One of the common accusations made against it is “backwardness”, which implies a ranking schema based on how it relates to history: a work either looks backwards into the tainted past or forwards into an imagined and apparently better future, either sharing the taint or the betterment.

In this way, the theorist takes over the meaning of works of art: measuring and judging. It rather evokes what John Carey wrote about in The Intellectuals and the Masses: of self-styled intellectuals working — and using their work —to distinguish themselves from the inferior plebs.

Certainly for many, disparaging the Lark, its popularity and its English associations appears as a way to demonstrate superiority, to place oneself ahead of others, as more mature in the progressive fashion. This also brings the group together, reproducing solidarity through group superiority, thereby reproducing political power.

In a lecture given at Cornell University in 1954, Vaughan Williams said:

“My old teacher, [the German composer] Max Bruch, used to say to me, ‘You must not write eye music, you must write ear music.’ But many musical writers who ought to know better think that music is not what we hear with our ears but what we see on the printed or written page; and some of them say with pride that they never want to hear music, it is enough for them to see the score.”[1. Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Making of Music (Cornell University Press, 1955). Chapter 3: ‘How do we make music?’]

In privileging what is written over what is heard, the theorist wrests music away from the listening experience towards the measurable and tangible, which are more accessible to judgement. Is it inventive and innovative? Does it represent a “step forward” from the “music of past”? What do people invoke in support of a piece and how does this measure up to our value system?

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However, appealing to the tangible often ends up disregarding and delegitimising meaning. Talking about the Lark on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac captured how powerful the music can be:

“It hearkens back to my father again. But also, when I first heard this piece of music I collapsed in tears with emotion. I just thought it was probably the most beautiful piece I ever heard. And also, interestingly, Peter Green was very influenced by this piece of music. It hearkens to some elements of what Peter’s playing and his guitar when he plays Albatross and other such pieces  . . .  It’s like a prayer.”

The comment sections of Lark videos tell similar, often moving, stories. One of the most highly rated comments on YouTube reads: “My sister told me about this beautiful work today, as I was feeling pretty suicidal…. Listening to this music lifted my heart above the clouds and I felt the pain subside… I know there is Love because it is written into this music”. Indeed, the Lark seems to contain a special magic for those who are struggling existentially. “This is what finally coming out of a depressive episode feels like,” reads another comment.

In this latter sense we might think of the Lark representing what it is like to be in-flow, in life: not in conflict with the world or withdrawn from it, but aligned to it and living within it.

Vaughan Williams’s widow Ursula wrote:

“He had taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought in The Lark Ascending and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken.”[2. Ursula Vaughan Williams: RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1964), p.156]

From this standpoint, the violin part is not so much attempting to translate the words of the Meredith poem into music, as to be that flight and that song. The accompanying orchestral parts, which some players find dull and boring, have a quiet yet powerful role, gently supporting the soloist. They form the environment in which the little bird sings its song and soars to great heights.

Perhaps, in its simplicity and ease — and in its sense of the individual being supported — the Lark shows us what it means to be free. We might think, then, that its sneering detractors, in trying to prevent the Lark from speaking for itself, display a certain contempt for freedom.

“The mighty collective power of the UK’s £20bn advertising industry – which has been united in its support for Remain – has failed to find the compelling messaging we so desperately needed. Shame on us.”

For Christine Beale, global editor-in-chief for the industry magazine Campaign, and  her fellow PR and advertising gurus, Brexit presented a mighty wake-up call. Their job is to ‘sell’ us buying choices and opinions, and on the 24^th June 2016 their collective power had been found wanting. The sector was left licking its wounds.

The Referendum was direct democracy, unmediated by party politics and our first-past-the-post electoral system. Votes in safe seats counted equally to those in swing seats. The fixation of party managers on the latter, which simplifies their messaging efforts no end in general elections, was only of marginal importance here.

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By Matthew Goodwin

For those in the business of influencing, the message was clear – they had to do a lot better. They had to get serious, and far more political, and that meant turning their attention to democracy itself.

Once their initial outrage and despair had cleared, it was clear that campaigners for Remain were going to continue the fight, and that they would not be short of funding to do so. Over time they have consolidated around two fully-staffed operations: People’s Vote (headed by the City PR man Roland Rudd, with Peter Mandelson as a director) and Best for Britain, Gina Miller’s outfit that George Soros has funded.

A large part of their efforts has been focused on media management straight from the conventional PR-Mandelson playbook: lining up a succession of important and well-known folk to make targeted interventions in the public arena, co-ordinated by messaging and timed to have maximum impact on politics.

Day after wearisome day we have seen and heard the results of this as figures from our economic, cultural and political elites have been wheeled out to recycle the approved lines of the day: some variation on ‘Brexit is a disaster and must be overturned for our own good’.

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These efforts have appeared overwhelming at times, dominating our public sphere. But the campaigners have also realised that this sort of pressure is only part of what they need; that they are vulnerable to charges of elitism. They have seen that direct democracy is different; that 17.4 million votes needs more than a renewed Establishment push to overcome.

Hence the campaigners sought to reach out and build a ‘movement’; to defeat one instance of direct democracy with other versions – hoping that this will culminate in a second referendum on their terms; a People’s Vote. The drive to convert Leave voters goes on, but with limited success. It has been in mobilising Remain voters to participate – by posting on their social media, by marching, signing petitions and making donations – that they have been much more successful.

Just recently we have seen the astonishing success of these efforts. At the time of writing the Revoke Article 50 petition has secured nearly 6 million signatures. At the same time campaigners have managed to get mainstream media to report their claims that their march in London on Saturday attracted a million people (the likely real number is less than 400,000; still impressive but nowhere near the iconic figure claimed).

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By Robin Aitken

We know that Remain voters tend to be much more educated, younger, more networked and also wealthier than Leave voters on average. Check out the Revoke petition sorted by constituency and you will find a list of the wealthiest urban areas in the country, overwhelmingly in London. They are places full of people connected into networks of political, economic and cultural power; and also fully equipped with new technology to access the latest messaging and talking points.

In other words, the average Remainer participating in these activities is the sort of person that advertising and consumer public relations target anyway as a matter of course. They have proved relatively easy to reach and to mobilise.

Brexit voters are rather more elusive. This has been both a strength and a weakness for the pro-Brexit side. It is a strength because they have been mostly impervious to the daily bombardment of media messaging, both before the Referendum and since. But it is a weakness because this lack of connectedness reflects a general lack of access and organisation, a lack of political power beyond that basic ability to go out and vote.

We can see this in the contrast between the several well-attended anti-Brexit marches and the dearth of similar efforts – or rather successful efforts – to defend Brexit. Saturday’s gathering in London may have been much smaller than the campaigners and their media supporters said, but 400,000 is still a big number – and the widespread positive media coverage testifies to its success.

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Compare this to Leave Means Leave’s effort, led by Nigel Farage, albeit without his presence for most of it. The idea of marching from Sunderland to London to protest is a powerful one, evoking the Jarrow March of the 1930s. However Farage is a divisive figure, the numbers have been small and the effort has gained little media coverage.

This relates to a wider issue. While the London media can hardly move for pro-Remain voices from various groups, pro-Leave ones are much thinner on the ground. Pro-Brexit activities struggle for funds, and are hampered by the greater dispersion of Leave voters. Compare Remain and Leave campaigning now and you see on the one hand a professional, well-funded and proactive operation and on the other a motley crew of small organisations and individuals who are constantly in reactive mode, bickering with each other and responding to what the other side are doing rather than setting the agenda themselves.

The Brexit vote was perhaps the only way in which those people who voted for Brexit could bypass established political and economic power and get themselves heard on their own terms.

At least for a brief window, a powerless, disorganised rabble shook things up and defeated the powers-that-be – by voting.

However, those powers have regrouped, adjusted and redeployed since this rebellion. They have mobilised their most ardent supporters, gathering them together to form a group that has developed a strong identity; a class consciousness even. They have learned the techniques of direct democracy and deployed them to re-assert their own power.

These and other counter-moves have left the largest exercise in direct democracy this country has seen in tatters, torn apart from every side: from within the Government itself, by most of our media and major institutions, but also online and in the streets.

This is what political power does. It wins.

All those new houses may sound great, but if the development goes ahead, Keresley will cease to exist. At the time of the 2011 census, the parish had a population of just over 700 residents. As the local councillor Glenn Williams says, adding thousands of homes will transform it from a village into a town, and, presumably, remove the very reason many residents choose to live there.

No doubt Liz Truss, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will be delighted by Coventry Council’s steam-roller approach. In a speech earlier this month she cited Nimbys as Public Enemy Number 1.

“The worst vested interest we’ve got is existing home-owners who block development. I think that is the biggest challenge we face – how are we going to reform the system when there’s a fundamental anti-development bias in our country?”

“We do have to be prepared to take on those who don’t want a house built in the field next to them.”

It is an odd stance for someone claiming to be a ‘conservative’. The roots of the Conservative Party name in the verb ‘to conserve’ are nowhere to be seen here. Rather than conservation, the Truss-Treasury approach favours a combination of destruction and construction, which is the more familiar terrain of the revolutionary.

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This vision is really a progressive one, closely allied to Tony Blair’s ‘world of change’, lauding transformation and upheaval over the preservation and conservation of established goods.

Perhaps the most important established good is the home. The home is somewhere familiar that responds to our needs and wants and where we gather what is valuable to us in one place. It is also a place that is not circumscribed by the four walls of the property itself. The garden, the street, the lane, local amenities and neighbours who you know are all part of the familiarity and comfort of home.

Nimbys typically get blasted by policy elites for only caring about house prices. But someone saying ‘Not in my Back Yard’ to houses, roads, a runway or a new waste plant near where they live is attempting to preserve the meaning and quality of their life; attempting to defend their little corner of social capital against the forces of economic Progress, which are expanding relentlessly into our environment.

Destroy that environment of familiarity and space around the home and it becomes less of a home. Communities are uprooted. Relations between people and places are diluted and destroyed.

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Truss explained her stance as a way of attracting the youth vote, of winning over areas that don’t traditionally vote Conservative and as a “popular free-market agenda” that will “give people a greater feeling of control over their own destiny and a greater feeling of pride in their country, their area and themselves.”

The residents of Keresley are not benefiting from a greater feeling of control. The Council’s agenda to push through mass development will strip many of them of what they value about their home – whether peace and tranquillity, a nice view from the front room, or that feeling of living in a small, close-knit community.

The freedom of developers to build new estates is at the same time a compulsion on existing residents to put up with a big change in their circumstances.

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As economic historian Karl Polanyi (nearly) said, laissez-faire must be planned in order to work. Truss’ version of free markets must be enforced by government in order to prevail. Other sources of power – like that of communities themselves – must be removed. Local Plans like in Coventry help to do just that.

Of course, Nimbys can be wrong about development. They often fixate on irrelevant or insignificant issues in order to express their more general opposition to development, any development, that affects them even in the most trivial way. Truss is right that their micro-local focus does not help address the issue of young people not being able to afford their own homes, or even to rent.

But that doesn’t mean they should be ignored, or worse vilified; they still play an important role. By their nagging and hectoring, they put pressure on councils and developers to be more thoughtful in their proposals, and to abandon many bad ones.

This is how local democracy should work: by the involvement and consent of local people.

But, along with democracy at other levels in our globalising, market-driven world, the local version is under threat.

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Those who oversee our society have a problem to deal with, one that their own policies created. After all, it is they, with Treasury mandarins at the forefront, who created our housing crisis, by overseeing an economy reliant on ever-increasing house prices – and by sponsoring a twenty year population boom via mass immigration. The situation we find ourselves in is the entirely predictable – even intended – consequence of their actions. Progressives on the liberal-Left and the free market Right both deserve a share of the blame.

Transferring that blame and seeking to traduce the most community-minded of local people shows how far this progressive overclass have moved away from those with strong links to the places where they live.

These people are typically older than the mobile, anonymous worker-bees who, beloved of economic planners, have no roots in the community, and who do not know it well enough to want to defend it.

Nimbys are sufficiently rooted in their local environment that they want to preserve what for them is the best of it. That might be a nice view, a meadow where they take the dog for a walk, or the trees that make walking down a city street so much more pleasant. They attend the boring planning meetings, lodge the objections and gather the petitions that the rest of us are too busy, too tired and too lazy to do – or are simply oblivious to. They are protecting the environment – our environment – for free, against vested interests which are much better organised and resourced than they are.

It says a lot about the way we are being ruled that these local community activists are seen as the enemy of so many in government and policy-making circles. It also says a lot about modern conservatism that those making economic policy in a Conservative Government are fully signed up.

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This chimes with an all-too-familiar sneering attitude towards any art born in Britain – and England in particular. By praising Elgar for taking his lead from the Continent, Barenboim was drawing an implicit – and negative – contrast with those who found – and find – their inspiration closer to home.

Like, for example, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). He was a composer who sought to forge a distinctive English or British music from the folk songs ​and popular tunes​ ​of ordinary people, from the modal harmonies of church music and early English composers such as Henry Purcell and Thomas Tallis.

Vaughan Williams himself heard enough of​ the Barenboim​ ​view in his own day, ​writing​ in 1941 of how ​“the attitude of foreign to English musicians is unsympathetic, self-opinionated and pedantic. They believe that their tradition is the only one (this is specially true of the Viennese) and that anything that is not in accordance with that tradition is ‘wrong’ and arises from insular ignorance.”

Nowadays, Vaughan Williams is still routinely dismissed as a parochial, nostalgic, backward​-looking​ ​nationalist – a kind of musical Brexit. The Lark Ascending, his little song of freedom for violin and string orchestra, conjures particular sniffs of derision from those who see themselves on a higher plain.

In this way, Vaughan Williams serves as a sort of signpost in our culture wars, to declare which side we are on. For some he is a positive, someone rooted in his community and who saw this as a foundation of the good life and of great art. Others see in the same what they are most against.

And yet Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Roy Hattersley, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd and Bernard Ingham are all admirers, having selected his music among their Desert Island Discs. Jeremy Corbyn turned to Vaughan Williams’s symphonies during the 2017 General Election. So who can claim him as their own?

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Vaughan Williams was a nationalist and anything but narrow-minded. His first love was Bach. He travelled to Berlin to study with Max Bruch and later to Paris to learn from the great Maurice Ravel, who became a good friend. His was a nationalism far from what we would recognise as such today, though. As he said: “Artistic nationalism goes hand in hand with international unity … where every nation and every community will bring to the common fund that which they, and they only, can create”.[1. Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Elizabethan Music and the Modern World’, in David Manning (ed.), Vaughan Williams on Music (Oxford, 2008), p. 68. Found in ​Katie Palmer Heathman, ‘“​Lift Up a Living Nation”: Community and Nation, Socialism and Religion in The English Hymnal, 1906’​, Cultural and Social History, The Journal of the Social History Society, Vol. 14, 2017 – Issue 2]

This pursuit of a definably English musical language led Vaughan Williams and his close friend, Gustav Holst, to travel the countryside in the early 20t​h​ Century trying to find songs that were then disappearing, with Vaughan Williams alone collecting more than 800 songs and variants. The two friends also gave a nudge to preserve musical traditions elsewhere, ​encouraging the ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey​ to record everything he could in Africa before it was lost to the modern world (Tracey ended up recording 35,000 tracks in 18 countries over 50 years).

Rejecting the idea that he was a nostalgic nationalist, some anti-Brexit campaigners are keen to claim him. They note how he was a leading figure in the UK-based Federal Union, founded in 1938. As he wrote: ​

“I believe in a Federal Union of free peoples under a common government elected by and responsible to the people for their common affairs, with national self-government for national affairs as a first step towards democratic self-government for the prevention of war, the creation of prosperity and the preservation and promotion of individual liberty.”[2. Letter from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Herbert Howells]

So, while it is true he supported a​ ​European Union, his democratic vision and keenness to preserve national distinctiveness doesn’t entirely match the current EU project.

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On the touchstone subject of immigration, he was ​heavily involved​ in organising for refugee musicians and others from Nazi Germany to settle in Britain, but was concerned that Austrians in particular might come to overwhelm and dominate British musical life. ​He said​: “The great thing which frightens me in the late peaceful invasion of this country by Austria is that it will entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture.” It is not much of a stretch to imagine him being concerned about this happening on a much wider scale now, allied to his passion for protecting the countryside from ugly urban sprawl.

We can, it seems, all find something to like about this man. Staunch Brexiteers will find their love of home, of the beauty of the countryside and a yearning for what has been lost over the years. Remainers and progressives who are willing to see past the stereotypes can find ​a committed anti-fascist​, a ​cosmopolitan​ and even a kind of feminist, given how many of Britain and Ireland’s best female composers were pupils of his.

But the greatest truth is in the music of course, something that Vaughan Williams avoided explaining, not wanting to oblige listeners to hear what ​they ​thought they should. This stubbornness has helped sully his reputation, not least in relation to his ​Pastoral Symphony​, which he wrote following his return from service in the First World War. The music writer Michael Kennedy called it his “greatest and most original symphony”. But he also said:

“The composer never publicly gave any clues as to what lay behind the music, leaving its title to mislead most commentators into portraying it as a kind of Cotswold rhapsody or a distillation of English folksong (partly true) and into making silly remarks about cows looking over gates or ‘V.W. rolling over and over in a ploughed field’.”

However, “it is really war time music”, ​as VW explained​ to his lover and, later, second wife Ursula Wood 16 years later.

The conductor Sir Roger Norrington ​has said of Vaughan Williams’s music​:

“He wanted music to be for everybody, almost to sound as if it was written by ordinary people. But he wanted the music to be English, really just English . . . There’s a sort of honesty, simplicity and a romanticism, I guess – an English romanticism such as you see in Turner for instance, one of the great English painters.”

He appears as a sort of Everyman. ​As ​Norrington has written elsewhere: “He was passionate and idealistic, a natural socialist and man of the people. . . [His] soul was ablaze with glory, pity and anger . . . He was the greatest man I am ever likely to meet.”[3. Roger Norrington in sleeve notes to Vaughan Williams Symphonies 4 & 6, London Philharmonic Orchestra (Decca, 1998)]

Simon Heffer, meanwhile, ​has written​ of the tumultuous ​Symphony No. 6 that “it says something to me as an Englishman. It speaks to me of my cultural heritage, my conception of myself, where I came from, what my people have lived through, what the world that my parents were young in was like, and what paved the way for the one I was born into. So I suppose, for me, it is not just music, it is baggage.”

Vaughan Williams continues to carry his own baggage, but over recent years, his reputation has been revived. Some of the lazy stereotypes have been debunked. With Brexit and our relentless, roiling culture wars dominating our current cultural and political life, we must hope that the same lazy stereotypes now used to define his country and its people will eventually suffer the same fate.

The latest Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report on EEA migration is in many ways an admirable piece of work. But, in its assumptions and way of proceeding, it is cut largely from this technocratic cloth.

In his foreword to the report, Alan Manning says that its purpose is “to provide an evidence base for the design of a new migration system after the end of the implementation period in 2021”. However, when he says later on that “EEA migration has had impacts, [but] many of them seem to be small in magnitude when set against other changes”, and specifies a 1.7 % increase in prices following the EU referendum, a few alarm bells should be ringing.

By any measure, the changes in our communities and increase in population over the past 20 years have been more significant than a small adjustment in prices brought on by exchange rates. This, though, is the level of elite discourse on immigration. It focuses on ‘data’ and ‘evidence’, but in an abstract way, directed towards business interests and removed from the lived experience of people. The MAC itself acknowledges there may be dangers to this approach – but only deep into the report, far from its headline statements.

It is an approach characteristic of that behemoth which dominates British government and wants to keep the tap of mass immigration firmly on – the Treasury. George Osborne, now editor of the Evening Standard, articulated this when he attacked Theresa May’s immigration targets as “economically illiterate”: “If I had a regret,” he said, “it’s not that we didn’t manage the immigration system properly… we were, I think, too intimidated to make the arguments about the benefits of immigration.”

Further reading

How Labour lost the art of politics

By Jonathan Rutherford

At about the time Osborne is referring to, Gordon Brown’s former economic adviser, Jonathan Portes, was demanding that Cameron’s government put prosperity and growth before arbitrary migration targets, praising the UK’s flexible labour market and employing the now almost ubiquitous language of “open, outward-looking Britain”.

It’s fair and reasonable to make the economic rationalist argument that maximising the economy is best achieved by a liberal migration regime. The trouble is that this view is often pushed forward as rational in an absolute sense, with any dissenting views denounced as “irrational” – and often worse.

Portes, who carried out some analysis for the MAC report, has never been backward in his politics over immigration – and is keen to invoke his authority as an expert to back it up. As he wrote after the report’s publication:

“Over the past eight years, immigration policy has been based not on analysis and evidence but on unpleasant and damaging nativism. The MAC report provides an opportunity to reverse that – let’s hope our politicians have the courage to take it.”

This echoes a theme that recurs in my book, The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity – the marrying of economic rationalism with the politics of diversity and identity. As I have written it, this has happened particularly around the subject of immigration. For Portes, as for others, mass immigration appears rational on an absolute basis because it is supported by the “analysis and evidence”. However, we can see him also playing the race card, attacking governments that have talked about limiting immigration as “nativists”. The way he presents it, they aren’t just irrational but also racist.

This informal alliance between free market liberalism and the politics of diversity over mass immigration is, as I say in my book, “one of the political stories of our time”. It has given technocratic liberals some moral authority for free market policies, while also allowing the liberal-left to claim economic credibility and support from business for their advocacy of increased diversity. You can see the merging of these tendencies in figures like Portes, Osborne and Sadiq Khan.

It’s an alliance that first found sustained expression during the 13 years of New Labour government from 1997 to 2010; Portes was an influential figure, helping to establish the consensus in policy-making circles that remains with us today. Even politicians on the farther reaches of the Left, including Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas, now gather around this position and the authority it offers.

Abbott, for example, responded to the MAC report by calling it “rational”, invoking the authority of “evidence” and “expert advice” in order to support high levels of immigration. We can see similar forces at work in the support of far-Left politicians and activists for the European Single Market – something that the older generation of Lefties, including Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn resolutely opposed.

Further reading

What should a sensible and fair immigration policy look like?

By David Laws

But the strength of this position is a political one; it is not necessarily an indication of how appropriate a liberal migration regime is for Britain now – or in general. In my book, I avoid making a technical, calculating judgment of the kind that the MAC report leans towards and that Osborne, Portes and Abbott advocate. I think contemporary mass immigration is much too complex for us to be able to do this. Any judgments we make are limited by what we take into account – as well as what we don’t – which is generally dictated by our politics.

For while the tabloid treatment of the immigration question often plays on fear, unjustifiably and stupidly politicising migrants (at least in headlines) as negative and dangerous, the economic rationalist approach also reduces modern immigration to a lot less than it is. Specifically, it tends to rule out any consideration of the existential aspects: of how we experience and interpret the world, often treating such aspects as illegitimate: as ‘subjective’ and ‘irrational’, as not based in facts and evidence, and therefore to be ruled out of consideration and banished from politics itself.

But the feeling of loss that someone experiences when their world becomes less familiar, and their connections into it die off, is real and important. It’s an experience of what I would call ‘existential defeat’ – of losing rather than winning in ways that aren’t always clear and certainly aren’t easy to explain. It’s unsettling, traumatic even.

Further reading

If you're pro-immigration you can't be anti-development

By Peter Franklin

The economic rationalists are making a political choice when they dismiss these concerns as trivial or describe them as ‘necessary’ sufferances in order for the modern world to progress. It’s the same with their accusations of racism or ‘nativism’. It’s their way of adjusting to the world and and assessing where political power lies within it. Osborne, for example, knows he can align with the bulk of business opinion and many on the liberal-Left by supporting the loosening of migration rules. The same goes for Portes and Abbott.

We all make calculations like this – considering what best suits us – in our daily lives. And how immigration affects us is no different. If democracy is to have any meaning at all, it must listen to and respond to the voters. If we allow core existential questions like who we are and what we are to exist beyond the frame of democracy, in the hands of those who present their politics as facts, then there is little point in democracy at all.

The Tribe: the Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity by Ben Cobley is out now on Imprint