Let’s not go overboard – the lumpen mass of the Conservative Party continues to tear itself apart over Brexit and shows little interest in or capacity for anything else. There is a black hole where much of government thinking should be. No 10 is haunted by a spectral figure, like one of those ‘white ladies’ said to flit around the passageways of old mansions.

Labour is arguably a little better, in that it has at least produced some challenging domestic policy proposals that have inspired a degree of passion. Unfortunately those proposals are of such creaking vintage, and advanced by such darkly treacherous little men, that they promise only a return to a flabby, centralised state that would be an enemy of innovation and freedom, a malign, controlling force kicking down doors in places it has no business being, and a cuckoo in the nest of the Western alliance. The Marxist cadre that has seized control of Labour’s commanding heights has outfought, out-thought and out-manoeuvred its own backbenches, now seemingly inhabited by people too demoralised to resist, or even to think.

But the centre, pace Yeats, usually holds – when it finds itself outpaced by events, its levers and buttons turned rusty and ineffective, it has a knack of finding ways of catching up, of constructing a new toolkit to meet new challenges. This usually means shucking off strictures and golden rules that were once taken as gospel but are no longer fit for purpose, absorbing the best ideas from the fringes (or cleaned-up, workable versions of them), constructing a compelling case around change that can appeal to a broad coalition of voters, and leaving the crazies to wonder where it all went wrong. It’s what the mainstream music industry has done with each ‘unlistenable’ new minority craze, from jazz to rock n roll to acid house to grunge to rap to grime and beyond.

When speaking to a centrist politician (whether of Labour, Tory or Lib Dem association) it’s not uncommon at the moment to hear the phrase “Ed Miliband was right.” If that seems a curious view of a man who flopped so spectacularly as Labour leader, it’s usually followed by “he was just too early.” As one senior Labour figure put it to me recently, he was “a man both ahead of his time and a man out of time.”

It’s worth looking back at some of the commitments he made in the party’s 2015 manifesto. They included:

• Abolish non-domicile tax status
• Return the top rate of income tax to 50p
• Reduce university tuition fees to £6,000 a year
• Freeze energy bills until 2017 and give the regulator the power to cut bills this winter
• A mansion tax on properties worth over £2m

Many of these ideas were seen as problematic at the time. Despite a prolonged period of austerity and consequent cuts to services and living standards, there was as yet no national majority behind the idea of a more active state that could intervene in markets and raise taxes on the better-off. And even now, looking at this list, you may find some of the ideas objectionable. But there’s little doubt that the electorate’s mood has changed – and the politics and politicians with it.

There are now vibrant debates not just on the Left but on the Right over how to ensure the elite and super-rich pay their share; on tax rises to provide more funding for the NHS; whether tuition fees should be reduced or even abolished; whether robust state intervention is necessary to bring privatised utilities to heel; on how to create a housing revolution; and, as UnHerd has so comprehensively covered this week, whether there should be a shift from income to wealth taxes.

Recommended listening

Audiocast: Charlotte Pickles presents her wealth tax manifesto

By Charlotte Pickles

Whether you’re Nick Boles or Nick Timothy, Damian Green or Boris Johnson, Tim Montgomerie or, even, Theresa May, you’ve been wrestling with all this. “There is a critical mass that tax on wealth will have to happen at some point, as the system is unsustainable. It’s something the prime minister is cautiously interested in,” according to Theresa May’s former staffer Chris Wilkins.[1. .‘Britain’s long-standing opposition to tax-rises is slowly softening’, The Economist, 25 January 2018]

This is in part forced by necessity – the public services require more money, and fast. It’s estimated the NHS will require an extra £20bn a year by 2022. It’s a rare Tory these days who calls for the NHS to be replaced by a system of private insurance, or for tax cuts for the better off to stimulate economic activity. Instead, Left and Right seem roughly to be cohering around a set of ideas that were until recently unthinkable – and in doing so both are providing credibility and cover to the other. The financial crash, its after-effects and what they have exposed about the existing settlement have proved to be a game changer.

Not everyone’s happy at the prospect of wealth taxes, of course. UnHerd’s Peter Franklin regards them as:

“a dead-end, indeed a political graveyard. There is no short-cut to the reform of capitalism, no way forward but to defeat cronyism, corruption and exploitation. Win those battles and the only wealthy people will be those who deserve it.”

That might have been true a decade or even three years ago, but I’m not sure it is now. Telling long-suffering voters that fixing capitalism will be a prolonged, slow process and asking them to bear with us (again) is a dog of a political message. The times require energetic change, the refashioning of the social contract and a new approach to who gets what and why. It seems certain to me that wealth taxes will be a part of this new deal, and, more importantly, that they deserve to be.

Recommended reading

Could a Land Value Tax tame unscrupulous landowners?

By Liam Halligan

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Test article

By Charlotte Pickles

After the country became independent from the USSR, in 1991, it decided to pursue technological innovation as a way of carving out a distinct identity. The results have been remarkable. e-Estonia, the government’s tech arm, boasts today that 99% of public services are available to citizens in digital form, with only marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions requiring you to leave the house. Online voting for parliamentary elections arrived in 2007. The country’s tax returns are done online, with most of the data pre-completed thanks to links between the tax office and local banks.

Around 97 per cent of patients have a digital health record, to which doctors have quick and easy access: in emergencies, they can use a person’s ID code to find out potentially life-saving information such as blood type, allergies, recent treatments, and on-going medication. Patients can browse through their own health records and those of their children, and see who else has looked at them. More than 95 per cent of prescriptions are issued digitally.

Cabinet meetings are paperless, with non-contentious matters agreed online in advance, and as a result have been cut from five hours to as little as half an hour. Absent ministers can take part remotely. Most parliamentary activity is also done digitally. In total, e-Estonia reckons the country’s embrace of cyber saves it 800 years of working time every year. Little wonder Wired magazine describes it as “the most advanced digital society in the world’.

There is a commercial as well as a democratic point to all this. Estonia has been able to flog its smarts to other countries, including Finland, Azerbaijan, Namibia and the Faroe Islands.

And of course, where Estonia has blazed a trail, a stampede of fellow nations has quickly followed. Govtech is proving a majorly disruptive force to the way services have traditionally been delivered across the world. In the new era there is, simply, no longer any need to do things the old, slow, frustrating way.

The Phillipines

The government’s Department of Science and Technology has worked with IBM to create an AI-driven operations centre for dealing with disaster management. This provides emergency managers with a raft of information including advance warning of extreme weather events, feedback from first responders on the number of casualties and affected families, and the condition of buildings, roads and infrastructure.

Singapore

Never far from the frontline when it comes to innovation, Singapore has created a Government Technology Agency, where more than 1,800 tech whizzes, including software developers, data scientists, user-experience experts and geospatial engineers operate like a Silicon Valley start-up, experimenting, tweaking and tackling problems brought to them by various government agencies. The Hive focused initially on establishing the Business Grants Portal, which brings the government’s various grants together in one destination so companies can more easily apply for them. It has also done work on healthcare, an app for reporting non-emergency issues to agencies, and created chatbots that answer citizens’ questions and help them to complete forms. Its leaders are now installing crack teams of around 50 people into each government department.

Denmark

The Scandinavian state is a frontrunner in the use of telehealth, which enables remote contact between patients and doctors, plus digital advice, reminders, education, intervention and monitoring. This has been adopted in areas such as home rehabilitation and physiotherapy in Copenhagen, aiming to reduce hospital readmissions; in connecting diabetes patients and those with heart conditions with healthcare staff; and in home monitoring of older Danes, including video consultations and blood pressure monitoring.

Rwanda

Previously, reliance on the road network could mean the delivery of blood supplies to hospitals took five hours by ambulance. Now hospitals simply text a request, and drones parachute the blood in within around 15 mins. This avoids the need for refrigeration and dramatically cuts emergency response times.

Holland

Amsterdam is one of the world’s leading Smart Cities. It has cut living costs for homeowners by using a smart grid to reduce their CO2 emissions, brought in smart lampposts that save €10 billion per year, and automated bridge opening and closing to reduce waiting times for cars and ships, which has dramatically cut costs. It also uses an intelligent traffic management system, which has slashed the number of hours spent in vehicles.

These advances are important. Citizens around the world see the explosion in digital capability and potential and want governments to deploy technology for the public good. As the rest of their lives become more streamlined and convenient, they expect the same from the state. Slo-mo policians and civil servants look increasingly undynamic and out-of-touch with the modern world. A firm grasp of tech is vital – with alarming forecasts being made about the impact AI and robots will have on the workplace, the public is looking for reassurance that the state is alert to and managing this shift.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in the British government. The DWP is using natural language processing, machine learning and intelligent automation to read and categorise incoming correspondence, which is then sent to relevant staff. This liberates workers from the more mundane aspects of the job and, in theory at least, allows them to make a difference in more essential areas. Local authorities are going down the same path: Enfield Council, in North London, uses Amelia, robot technology that deals with frontline issues such as resident queries or authenticating licenses.

There is also a conversation to be had about the vast increase in storage and use of personal data and how this threat to individual privacy is best managed. It was public unease over state snooping that saw Tony Blair’s plans to introduce ID cards in the UK come to nothing in the 2000s. However, as we live more of our lives online, and willingly share more of our data with private companies, as biometrics and other identity analytics become commonplace, it seems likely we will return to the debate, and under different terms.

For example, future generations, raised in a different, more open and connected world, are likely to be less instinctively protective of their privacy. Arguments about convenience and inevitability will hold more sway, too. Estonia’s enthusiastic embrace of the new has seen the country introduce an overarching ID card, which, because all the government’s tech innovations speak to each other, has massively simplified the interface between citizen and the state.

As Siret Schutting of e-Estonia told Wired: “When you introduce an ID card, you get a lot of people asking, ‘Why do I need that?’ But then you add all of these services, and you can purchase a car from your living room, or vote from your living room or, when it’s like minus 40 outside and you have a newborn baby, you probably don’t want to go to the family office to name her: you do that online. Very small, pragmatic things.”

When you put it like that…

Today, Confucius is back in the officially authorised good books, to the extent that his name has been appropriated by the Chinese government’s international cultural outreach programme, the Confucius Institute (CI):

• There are now 516 such institutes in 142 countries;
• More than 1,000 ‘Confucius Classrooms’ in primary and secondary schools;
• There are 11 CIs in Britain, including at Edinburgh, Liverpool, Nottingham, Sheffield and Cardiff universities, and the London School of Economics.

It’s not hard to understand what’s behind that choice of name: in a world that remains suspicious of Beijing’s long-term intentions and short-term manpulations, and wary of its recent brutal history and modern-day authoritarianism, the great man’s brand is an unthreatening symbol of ancient wisdom and venerable cultural history.

The Chinese authorities insist the CI is a non-profit public institution that seeks only to promote and teach their language and culture in foreign countries – the equivalent of the British Council and similar organisations created by nations to advance their soft power. However, controversy around the programme and its intentions is growing. The CI is the only one of its kind to be based in universities and schools, leading to accusations it is a state-funded attempt to rein in academic and intellectual independence and to subvert and control how China is presented in the West. A number of Institutes have been closed down by their Western hosts in recent years.

China’s attempts to exert influence on foreign soil are known to exist on a massive scale – it’s estimated the country spends somewhere between $10-12 billion every year on its efforts. In his speech to the 19th Communist Party conference in October, President Xi, its most powerful ruler since Deng Xiaoping, promised that “China will be a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence.”

Before Christmas, the intelligence services of Germany and New Zealand warned publicly about Chinese activity in their countries, while Marco Rubio, chair of the US congressional executive commission on China, noted that “attempts by the Chinese government to guide, buy, or coerce political influence and control discussion of “sensitive” topics are pervasive, and pose serious challenges in the United States and our like-minded allies.” According to Christopher Johnson, a former head of the China desk at the CIA, “as we start to realise that China intends to socialise us rather than become more like us, the debate in the West has taken on a harder edge and people are asking whether 40 years of engagement might have been a sham.”

In this climate, the fact that China wants to double the number of CIs overseas by 2020 has set alarm bells ringing. There is concern at the level of central control exerted by Hanban, an arm of China’s education ministry that runs the programme, pays for the institutes’ operational costs, selects textbooks, and hires, trains and pays for Chinese language teachers. Critics say a particular image of China is promoted and that discussion of controversial issues such as Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Taiwan is discouraged. This goes against the founding idea of the Western liberal university as a seeker of truth beholden only to intellectual pursuit.

There is evidence of attempts to restrain academic freedom. In 2014 Xu Lin, a senior Chinese government official who is also the CI’s chief executive and Hanban’s director general, ordered pages referencing Taiwan to be torn from the programme for the European Association for Chinese Studies’ (EACS) conference in Portugal. The EACS stated that “such interference… is totally unacceptable.”

After being interviewed by the BBC, Xu Lin asked for sections addressing the scandal to be deleted. This led the Wall Street Journal to opine that “critics have argued that China’s Confucius Institutes pose a threat to academic freedom in the United States, Canada, Europe and beyond. Now the Beijing official in charge of them has confirmed it.”

In 2009, Li Changchun, the then head of propaganda for the Communist Party and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, called Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”[1.  As quoted in The Economist, 22 October 2009 within a feature on the Institutes, which included this observation: “The late Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 bestseller “The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order”, describes a Confucian world, with China at its centre, that will find itself in growing conflict with the West. This is the kind of view that the Confucius Institutes are intended to dispel. Mr Liu, a long-time physics professor at the University of Maryland, says his mission is to promote cultural understanding. He speaks of the “amazing similarity” between Confucian teachings and George Washington’s etiquette guide, “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation”.”.]

The Confucius Institute for Scotland was set up at Edinburgh University in 2007 by Hanban, along with two partners, Shanghai’s Fudan University and the Scottish Government. Its aim is “the promotion and development of Chinese language and culture”, and it offers a whole range of courses covering language classes, teacher training, cultural briefings for business, scholarships to China, private classes and more. In its first year the Scottish branch received an Award for Excellence in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, China’s political and state hub, and has since received a further five. In 2014, the Institute was one of only 10 worldwide to receive a special pioneer award. Its website lists 19 current staff and a further 53 who returned to China after a one or two-year placement. The Institute has worked with Moray House College of Education to develop a teaching qualification to enable Chinese language qualifications to be offered in Scotland’s schools.

But if the CI’s presence remains celebrated and largely unexamined in the UK, the same is not true elsewhere. In the past few years a number of universities have shut down their institutes, including the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, Canada’s McMaster University, the University of Lyon, and Stockholm University, which had been the first in Europe to host one.

An investigation (“Outsourced to China” by the National Association of Scholars, a conservative US advocacy group, into the CIs and published last April) concluded that all other American universities should also pull the plug.

Its found four main areas of concern:

“Intellectual freedom Official Hanban policy requires Confucius Institutes to adhere to Chinese law, including speech codes. Chinese teachers hired, paid by, and accountable to the Chinese government face pressures to avoid sensitive topics, and American professors report pressure to self-censor.

Transparency Contracts between American universities and the Hanban, funding arrangements, and hiring policies for Confucius Institute staff are rarely publicly available. Some universities went to extraordinary efforts to avoid scrutiny, cancelling meetings and forbidding NAS from visiting campus.

Entanglement Confucius Institutes are central nodes in a complex system of relationships with China. Confucius Institutes attract full-tuition-paying Chinese students, fund scholarships for American students to study abroad, and offer other resources. Universities with financial incentives to please China find it more difficult to criticise Chinese policies.

Soft Power Confucius Institutes tend to present China in a positive light and to focus on anodyne aspects of Chinese culture. They avoid Chinese political history and human rights abuses, present Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China, and develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country.”

As China rises it is clearly in the West’s interests to understand what makes it tick and what it wants, and on the Chinese part to present its best face to the world. But the evidence suggests there is a gap between what both sides see as the rules of acceptable cultural, political and economic engagement. It also suggests that the Confucius Institute, if not a cuckoo in the nest, deserves, at the very least, deeper investigation.

FURTHER READING

• Financial Times – Cultural Asset or Campus Threat?
• Democratic Audit – The Chinese Communist Party has growing sway in Western universities 
• Politico – China’s Sort Power Offensive

Freud, by then in his early 80s, knew or had known everybody and could be gloriously waspish, though never without good reason. In fact, what comes across most is his deep reserve of empathy for especially complex, troubled personalities, and his generously worded insights into what made them so.

One line has stuck with me above the rest. Gayford asked him about George Orwell – Freud knew him, of course – and after a quick overview of the work (“1984 is unreadable, but Coming Up For Air is a bit good”), he delivered a judgement of masterly precision: “I would say that he carried decency to the point of real imagination”.

Any fan of Orwell must surely read that line, sigh, nod, and acknowledge, “yes, that’s it”. Orwell was fired by a belief in decency, his work marinaded in the stuff: the struggle of each man and woman to live in such a way, physically, psychologically, morally; aching laments for its regular absence; and excoriation of those who gave it no place.

Freud may have had little time for 1984, but Orwell’s great dystopian piece portrayed a world in which decency had died, in which the innate dignity of the individual was rejected. In carrying indecency to the point of real imagination, Orwell reveals to us the centrality to any humane society of its opposite.

If it’s a good theme for literature, its surely not a bad one for public life. If you can convincingly describe your credo as an MP or minister as ‘carrying decency to the point of real imagination’, you’re setting your feet on the right path. What do we mean by decency? Something deeper than its rigid Victorian definition of suitable and decorous behaviour – also the care we should have for one another, those for whom we are immediately responsible, but also those who comprise the different onion-like layers of the society we inhabit, locally, nationally and globally. Not for nothing does Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state the following. “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

If the dignity of the individual is where we begin, then, I would argue, the modern Right has some big questions to answer.

Let’s start with Britain, where we have a government that simply seems to have forgotten about people – or, at best, to have deprioritised them. It is cocooned in the Brexit negotiations, in an abstract language of billions and tariffs and borders and frictionless trade. It is a pinball machine of egos and personal ambitions, of calculated slights and open plots. It is, in many ways, not a functioning government at all.

Here, at a little length, is what Theresa May told us from the steps of No 10 on the day she became Prime Minister.

“We believe in a union not just between the nations of the United Kingdom but between all of our citizens, every one of us, whoever we are and wherever we’re from. That means fighting against the burning injustice that, if you’re born poor, you will die on average 9 years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately.

‘If you’re a woman, you will earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.

If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you worry about paying a mortgage. You can just about manage but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school.

If you’re one of those families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly.

‘I know you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best, and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you. When it comes to opportunity, we won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

This speech was, not to put too fine a point on it, magnificent: a clarion call for decency. It seemed to herald something better, grittier and more real than the posh-boy chess match we’d grown used to. I was talking about this with a Labour MP last week and he admitted: “When I heard he say that I thought “she’s amazing. We’re f**ked.”’

Today, when you look around the country at the legions of homeless souls shivering in shop doorways, at the seemingly endless parade of desperate individuals crushed by the grinding cogs of the Universal Credit system; as you read stories about teachers handing out shoes and food to impoverished children; as you build into your weekly shopping bill a levy for the local food bank, something Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg apparently finds ‘rather uplifting’: that speech seems like a bad joke. In their ideological pursuit of breaking with the EU and their inner battles for control, the Tories have simply forgotten about the people who need decency from government most of all.

It’s ironic, in a way, that the Right is currently so obsessed with systems and statistics, its own equivalent of grand economic theory and tractor production figures. The consequences of this for its reputation and for the country are horrible. We seem to have a government that lacks any kind of heart, a hard, ruthless, unbending administration of shadows that is impossible to admire and that allows Labour’s grotesque neo-Marxist leadership to position itself as the caring, optimistic wing of British politics. The Tories have been cowardly on taxation, unambitious on social policy (as Tim says here, you can’t blame Brexit for the almost total inactivity on most other fronts), careless with the Union, and absent from the field where the poor and the sick are battling the toughest of environments. No wonder the devastating tragedy of Grenfell Tower felt like such a grotesque commentary on our times.

Sir John Major, a Tory lion to today’s mewling kitties, says his party needs to “show its heart again“. At their best the Conservatives have married heart and head in pursuit of transformative reforms, from the abolition of slavery to the introduction of same-sex marriage. Today, they seem part of a wider global movement that is interested only in its own self-preservation and ideological obsessions. One look at the US Republicans, propping up the worst and most shaming president in the country’s history as they shove tax cuts for the rich through Congress, shows where this mindset can end.

Sometimes the circumstances require you to govern in poetry, even just a bit, even when the weather is against you. If they carry on like this, the Tories will put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. They are allowing him and the hard, bad men who surround him to lay claim to the nation’s heart, to hoist the flag of virtue, to present themselves as tribunes for the vulnerable, to carry decency to the point of real imagination. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but when people are in need of a hug and all they are offered is a smack in the mouth, it should be no surprise when they look to the guy with open arms.

It’s not clear what led to the final breach, though on Tuesday the Mail was forced to issue one last, expensive apology on her behalf. On the same day H*pkins appears to have deleted nearly all of her past 45,000 tweets. Imagine what kind of individual you’d have to be to feel the need to do that, or for your lawyers to advise it, or to need lawyers in that way at all.

Still, nothing ever really vanishes from cyberspace. The greatest hits are there if you look: there’s the ‘we need a final solution’ classic that followed the terrorist massacre of young concert-goers in Manchester; there’s ‘Ramadan typically brings a spike in violence in Middle East. I get grumpy when I don’t eat – but I don’t blow things up. Religion of peace?’; there are the two from when Pauline Cafferkey, the Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola while volunteering in Sierra Leone, was given treatment in London: ‘Little sweaty jocks, sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn’t cricket. Scottish NHS sucks’, and ‘Glaswegian ebola patient moved to London’s Royal Free Hospital. Not so independent when it matters most are we jocksville?’

Then there was the column in the Sun comparing African migrants crossing the Mediterranean with ‘cockroaches’ and calling for gunboats to stop them, which the UN felt moved to describe as hate speech. Earlier this month she delivered an extraordinary speech in Florida to the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a far-right American think-tank, in which she said it was ‘a pleasure to be amongst people that are prepared to fight for their country’ and described this as ‘our time’: ‘We can commit to arm ourselves, not just with the help of the NRA. Get furious and fight back.’ She went on to insist areas of Britain are controlled by a ‘Muslim mafia’ and to claim Britain has ‘institutionalised discrimination against whites’. She also railed against “Muslim men” and the “Muslim mayor of Londonistan’.

Reader, it is not for me to condemn this reprehensible, inhumane creature – it is for you to do so.

Free speech: yes, I know. But free speech is the right to say any old crap (H*pkins: tick), even malicious old crap (H*pkins: tick), even offensive, malicious old crap (H*pkins: you get the picture) without fear of censorship unless you libel someone or are judged to be provoking violence (H*pkins: oh…). What free speech isn’t is a requirement that major mainstream news outlets, read, watched and listened to by mass audiences and with a significant and influential role in the national debate, make house room for the most contemptible, inflammatory views in our society. And yet that is what the Sun, and LBC, and the Mail did with this woman. It is a matter of judgement. As is Iain Dale’s decision to use his otherwise estimable Biteback imprint recently to publish her autobiography. And we are entitled to judge them back.

Why would you carry regular columns or broadcasts by someone like this? On the newspaper front it might be taken as an indication of weakness: the right-wing papers have watched as the less pleasant parts of their readership have hared off in the direction of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and maybe even Tommy Robinson, their baser instincts bubbling to the surface along with these ignorant, tinpot rabble-rousers. Falling circulations and revenues plus a radicalised constituency are a dangerous mix: desperation kicks in, the junkie hunger for clicks – regardless of who is clicking – is overpowering, standards plummet, you end up with a K*tie H*pkins column, she and her views now have your legitimising imprimatur, the national tone slips a bit further hellwards. So the cycle goes. Provocative writers are a must, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with radio’s shock jock culture. But where is the line drawn? Is there a line?

Whether they like it nor not, big institutions should have an eye to their moral footprint. The media likes to believe it stands alone and aloof, bad boys with a sheriff’s badge and a gun. But too often, and I say this as a lifelong newspaper hack, with a deep love of the medium, they demand a standard of behaviour from others – parliament, banks, celebrities and the rest – that they do not feel the need to meet themselves.

H*pkins is, in the end, a circus act, the equivalent of a medieval fool, using what limited gifts she has to make a living. From her first appearance in the public eye many years ago, on The Apprentice, she has been the cold, canny type: the kind who looks at a situation, calculates which position will generate the most controversy, then adopts it good and hard. I have no idea if she even believes what she says: if she believes in anything beyond K*tie H*pkins.

What should worry us more than a damaged woman spouting hatred from her bedroom laptop is the contamination of our shared space – the mainstreaming of opinions that have been regarded as beyond the pale for good moral reasons. Trump has praised Hopkins as a ‘respected columnist’ and thanked her ‘for her powerful writing on the UK’s Muslim problems’. He has patronised Nigel Farage, too, even if the former Ukip leader’s fanboy adoration for the President has latterly become an embarrassingly one-sided affair. Farage is arguably more responsible for Brexit than any other individual, and decent Leavers rode his racist tiger to victory, whatever their own views (Farage has a show on LBC – of course he does). This week Trump retweeted videos posted by the deputy leader of the BNP-linked Britain First that appeared to show extreme Muslim violence. At the less egregious end, though still swimming in the same swamp, is Alex Salmond and his appalling decision to present a talk show on the Kremlin mouthpiece Russia Today.

We increasingly appear to live in a world where all opinions must be afforded the same weight, where the parameters of what constitutes reasonable opinion are so wide as to be meaningless. Trump, Farage, Hopkins, Fox News, Breitbart and the rest are like a noxious gas seeping into our minds and respiratory tracts. Have we decided that this is fine, that we’re cool with it? Is it ok for our media to refuse to exercise restraint and judgement in the public interest? If hate weighs the same as love, what is either worth?

Then there is what from a distance looks like a harmonica. This is a MinION, a bite-sized DNA tester developed by Oxford Nanopore, which can read DNA codes in minutes and costs a revolutionary $1,000. It has been used to track the ebola virus across West Africa, and to research zika in South America. The company believes that the device will soon be used by people in their own homes and transform the way we monitor our health.

There is, oddly, a washing machine made of Lego. This represents the environmentally friendly work of Professor Stephen Burkinshaw of the University of Leeds. He was investigating how to help dyes stay on fabrics for longer and ended up solving the opposite problem. He found that polymer beads could be used to remove stains from clothes with small volumes of water. He called his company Xeros, which is the Greek word for dry.

All these are the consequence of good ideas meeting good capitalism. It is unlikely any of the companies would be in their current successful position were it not for the involvement of IP Group. It invests in early-stage innovations, mainly emerging from universities, with the aim of building them from a boffin’s Eureka! moment into a successful and, sometimes, world-changing business. As well as cash, it provides advice and practical help. With Xeros, IP drew up an initial business plan and provided interim management, including the CFO. It assisted on strategy and helped find new investors, a CEO and chairman.

IP is one of the UK’s leading players in the ‘patient capital’ sphere, where investors forego immediate returns in favour of more substantial earnings further down the line. It allows small companies to make decisions based on long-term strategy, scale up over time, and harnesses founders, staff and investors to the same ends. It is a sector that is not only good for professors with smart ideas but little business sense, but also for the badly tarnished reputation of capitalism itself. IP and companies like it are in for the long term – for example, IP has been involved with Oxford Nanopore for 12 years and has never taken a penny out. Its reward is a stake now worth something like a quarter of a billion pounds. Jacqueline Novogratz of the non-profit global venture fund Acumen describes patient capital as taking “the best of the markets as well as philanthropy and aid. Patient capital is money invested in entrepreneurs building companies and organisations that solve tough problems like healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy”.

Philip Hammond is well aware of the sector’s importance to the shape of the British economy and its future competitiveness. In his Budget next week the Chancellor is expected to publish the results of the Patient Capital Review, which he set up at the start of the year, chaired by Damon Buffini, former head of the private equity company Permira. The Review has examined the state-backed venture capital schemes known as the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), which give tax relief of between 30 and 50 per cent to those who invest in small, unlisted (and therefore riskier) companies. The Government felt some investors were choosing the least risky option and in effect using the schemes to cut their tax bills. The Budget seems likely to attempt to close off some of those loopholes.

Patient capital is one of the rare spaces where the Brits have leapt ahead of the Yanks, by getting involved in start-ups and spin-outs at an earlier stage of development. But possibly not for long.

Eric Ries, a San Franciscan entrepreneur, is attempting to start a long-term stock exchange, LTSE, and has secured the support of a number of successful venture capitalists. The aim would be to prevent small companies from being exploited by founders and investors in search of a fast buck. It proposes that the longer investors hold shares, the more voting power they would have, and remuneration schemes that actually force executives to focus on the long game by, say, having to hold stock for 10 years, even if they leave. Not even the City’s chief defenders can argue that the lack of genuine long-term incentives for executives has been properly addressed.

A shift towards a more respectable – and respectful – model of capitalism is long overdue and has only become more urgent in the past decade as public confidence in the business and financial worlds has fallen away. Stories like IP Group’s and innovations like the LTSE can help shift the public narrative away from one of a rapacious, untameable culture of greed and self-interest towards something more like Adam Smith’s original vision:

“Concern for our own happiness recommends to us the virtue of prudence, concern for that of other people, the virtues of justice and beneficence – of which the one restrains us from hurting, the other prompts (us) to promote that happiness.”

Patience, as the saying goes, is a virtue.

This is perhaps truest in the West, where relatively high living standards, long-embedded freedoms and an emphasis on individuality license a significant degree of leisure, self-indulgence and (usually anonymized) aggression. Those of us who live here inevitably focus our attention on the advances, limitations and cultural consequences of social media that emerge in our own society. But some of the most innovative and impactful uses of tech have come from less developed parts of the world, where the old battles for basic liberties are still being fought and where tech is a priceless tool against corruption and an over-powerful state.

One of the most impressive projects is ipaidabribe.com, set up in India in 2010 by the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit organisation that works to tackle corruption by harnessing citizen participation. The site allows people to report on personal experiences of corruption – their nature, location, frequency and cost, which Janaagraha says it uses to “argue for improving governance systems and procedures, tightening law enforcement and regulation and thereby reduce the scope for corruption in obtaining services from the government.” The I Paid a Bribe site has recorded more than 146,000 reports in more than 1,000 cities, typically covering cash demands by local officials or police officers to provide services. The site also allows users to detail occasions when they refused to pay a bribe and dealings with ‘honest officers – the good guys in the system’. It has now spread beyond India, partnering with 30 other countries to create replica sites, and is the largest online crowdsourced anti-corruption platform in the world.

It’s perhaps no surprise that such a venture began in India, a fast-developing, tech-obsessed economy with global aspirations but grave corruption problems. The country’s population in its cities is over 400 million, but is expected to reach 800 million, 50% of its total population, by 2050. The most recent report from Transparency International had the country languishing in 79th place on its 176-strong corruption index, with Somalia coming bottom and Denmark, New Zealand and Finland taking the top three, least-corrupt spots (the UK was 10th, the US 18th). The lower reaches of the chart are, predictably, dominated by countries from the regions of Asia Pacific, Sub Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa.

In an interview, ipaidabribe’s founder, T.R. Raghunandan, neatly explained his thinking: ‘Corruption has a huge economic cost in India. First, where there is corruption, it makes legitimate transactions difficult. Second, it perpetuates misgovernance by destroying any incentive for the government to reduce red tape. As long as systems are slow and convoluted, government officials and politicians can demand bribes to make life easier. Third, it creates a system where distrust pervades our everyday life; where we are suspicious of our government and it is suspicious of us in turn. Fourth, the widespread manifestation of “petty” corruption breaks the spirit of ordinary people, who lose the stomach to fight and get used to enduring bad services and paying bribes to procure them. And, the fact that corruption creates wealth for a few through unjustified means also erodes our values and damages our lives in many ways.’

Janaagraha has since gone on to launch more online ventures aimed at improving citizenship and tackling misgovernance. ichangemycity.com is an initiative aimed at building networks of communities and local civic bodies, providing data on urban issues and boosting civic awareness. Public Eye is an app for citizens to report traffic violations, and was developed in collaboration with the Bengaluru Traffic Police. Since its launch in 2015 it has received over 90,000 traffic complaints, with a 64% resolution rate. Swachhata is an app for citizens to report garbage hotspots, and was developed in partnership with the central government. In just over a year it has hosted more than six million complaints across 1,500 cities. More than 4,000 engineers are trained to use it to resolve complaints in real time, and 500,000 dumps have been cleared across hundreds of cities in less than a year.

Given the level of voter disaffection in the West, one might argue that we have much to learn from these tech innovations and how they are driving greater civic engagement and government responsiveness. Writing in the new edition of the Oxford Government Review, published by the Blavatnik School of Government (and edited by me), Janaagraha’s CEO Srikanth Viswanathan puts it like this:

‘Civic technology will be a transformative change agent when accompanied by three ingredients: systematic civic learning, neighbourhood-level community organising and government adoption. Civic learning is necessary to move citizens through the ladder of citizenship from passive to an interested participant. Neighbourhood-level community organising and civic technology can reinforce each other.  While civic technology can enable neighbourhood-level platforms for citizen participation through customised applications, such platforms are necessary to throw the citizenship net wider and engage larger number of citizens.  Government adoption of civic technology is a game-changer, irrespective of whether the government builds its own platform or adopts independent third-party platforms.  Government responsiveness is key to sustaining citizen engagement in civic technology platforms.  In an increasingly urban democracy with exponential mobile and data penetration, governments are increasingly adopting technology to connect with citizens even if as a signal of political proactiveness.’

It’s worth remembering that more and more of the world’s populations are expected to live in cities in the decades ahead.

Perhaps the closest we come in the UK to this form of bottom-up changemaking is when Twitter acts as a focus for public will – think of the #metoo campaign that has so raised the profile of sexual abuse and impropriety in recent weeks. The safety in numbers that comes with this crowd-sourcing of experience and opinion is not unlike what we see with ipaidabribe. Parliament’s petition scheme, where individuals can petition parliament to debate and take action on specific issues, seems rather lame in comparison.

There will be many great, jaw-dropping moments as the tech revolution unfolds, but we shouldn’t ignore the ability to better use what already exists. In this time of deep public cynicism about politicians, governments and other elites, we could do worse than look to India for an example in how to bridge the gap.

Yesterday evening, The Economist’s Berlin bureau chief and former Bagehot columnist tweeted: “Remotely interested in a possible new anti-Brexit party with transformative social-liberal policies? Email “I’m in” to: radicalsuk@gmail.com’.”

What Cliffe says was intended as little more than a bit of “speculative kite-flying”, a testing of the centrist waters, rapidly developed into something more substantial. He was soon getting around 45 “I’m in” emails per minute. Political veterans and commentators got in touch to give their support. People offered to help with logistics, tech, and, if and when needed, the ground game.

At the time of posting, the Radicals has a twitter feed (@RadicalsUK) of five thousand followers. Ladbrokes had the as-yet non-existent party at odds of 100/1 to win a seat at the next general election.

There is, of course, no guarantee that the Radicals will amount to more than a one-week wonder, and there’s been the predictable sniping on social media. But the idea that Britain needs a political realignment is one that refuses to go away. Cliffe has written about the subject before, and George Osborne’s former spad James Chapman has been pushing his idea of a party called “the Democrats” for some months.

In December, 2014, Tim Montgomerie, the Editor of UnHerd, wrote a column for The Times imagining how the map might be redrawn, and posing some pertinent questions:

“Should the Milibands — fiscally conservative David and tax ’n’ spend Ed — really be in the same party? Don’t we need some kind of realignment on the right so that anti-immigration, anti-EU Tories can cut loose from David Cameron and join a UKIP-type party? And what about the Liberal Democrats? It’s 100 per cent clear that there’s a big-state, interventionist wing of Clegg’s party and a small-state, laissez-faire wing. Wouldn’t Vince Cable and David Laws be happier divorced? Wouldn’t voters have a more honest choice if MPs belonged to parties that matched their beliefs today, rather than to parties that fitted them and fitted the circumstances of a few decades ago?”

Tim’s prescription was for four new parties (see graphic above) more closely aligned to the divides in the modern electorate:

• The left-wing Solidarity Party, standing for aggressive redistribution, public sector interests and assertive green policies;
• The Liberals, made up of social and economic liberals such as Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and David Miliband;
• The conservative Nationals, based on Germany’s Christian Democrats and the shared politics of Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Stephen Harper; and
• The right-wing Freedom Party, a home for the Farages, Redwoods and Tebbits. (You might note that the lion logo in Tim’s graphic has actually been adopted by Ukip!)

Nearly three years on, this still makes a great deal of sense to me. Indeed, one part of the realignment has in effect already taken place: Labour under Corbyn is now the Solidarity Party. Ukip may have faded, but the Conservative coalition remains in a bad and worsening condition, the strains between hard and soft right caused by Brexit growing every day. The shop-soiled Lib Dems under Vince Cable show little promise that they could become an alternative home for orphaned centrist voters.

We talk a lot about the idea of realignment at UnHerd Towers, and intend to explore the issue on a deeper level in coming months. Cliffe’s idea inevitably piques the interest. “I find myself, not unusually these days, feeling depressed about the state of Britain,’ he tells me, ‘and I wonder how many other people feel like that. Is the Lib Dem result in June really the ceiling for a politics that is neither Corbynista nor hard-Brexiteer? Do we have to accept that what we have now is the best we can do?”

The arguments against such a venture are well-rehearsed…

…the failure of the SDP is a warning from history…

…the First Past the Post voting system is an insurmountable barrier for new entrants…

…the success of Emmanuel Macron in France does not provide a template in the UK’s very different political culture…

our politicians are so tribally attached that few would be willing to flee their traditional nests…

Refreshingly, Cliffe is having none of it. ‘I’ve long thought the SDP precedent is an odd one to bring up.  It was an age before social media, and where one of the parties had a formidable leadership. Voters were much more tribal, much more attached to traditional identities like class:

“The Macron example – and remember how En Marche! was poopoo-ed at the outset – is just one of several around the world that shows the political landscape is changing. And of course First Past the Post is a barrier to be overcome. But in the end, what’s to lose? What’s the harm in trying? If not now, when?”

Quite: fail better. If the politicians lack the guts to bring about change, perhaps the answer is to focus on a bottom-up movement. That’s what drove Macron’s success, and Ukip’s, and Corbyn’s, and the extraordinary surge in support for a Yes vote during the 2014 Yes campaign in Scotland.  All of them brought new people into politics, tapped into public disillusionment with what already existed, and went on to bend the system to their will. The evidence shows that when voters feel disenfranchised they are willing to give the new a fair hearing.

Anyone who’s dug around a little knows that the money is there to fund a new muscular, liberal, centrist movement. We know a large proportion of the electorate sits somewhere in the middle of politics, and that the younger generation tends towards a more liberal, internationalist outlook than its predecessors.

Cliffe professes himself taken aback by the strength of the response to his idea, and will ‘take stock’ over the next few days. ‘The Radicals are not a manifesto-ready organisation!’ he jokes, and says he will hand the project over to a committee that is being set up to take the idea forward. His suggested policy palette includes a federal UK; and end to Brexit, or at least continuing membership of the single market; the embracing of tech disruption; a vast house-building programme; shifting the burden of taxation from income to unearned wealth; replacing the Lords with a senate of cities and nations; and a PR voting system.

It certainly appeals to this orphaned centrist:  I’m in. And even if this particular idea doesn’t fly, it feels like things must break apart and be reconstructed in ways that better fit the times at some point soon. After all, if not now, when?

***

A possible manifesto for “the Radicals”; as recommended by Jeremy Cliffe:

How the tables have turned. Before the referendum, it was the Leavers who were forced to strike an absolutist pose. Nothing good had ever come from the EU, and nothing good ever would. To say anything less, to admit membership has some beneficial and useful aspects, was a sign of weakness that would be ruthlessly exploited by the Remain camp. Now it’s the other way around: draped in their victor’s laurels, the Leavers are free to adopt a more nuanced posture. ‘Hey,’ they say, ‘membership has some beneficial and useful aspects. Let’s see if we can keep a bunch of them.’ Those of us fighting against Brexit – and what does that struggle amount to now? Demanding a soft Brexit? A second referendum? A military coup led by Captain Ashdown and Private Clegg? – find ourselves in the position of publicly venerating an institution that is, frankly, horrible.

Yes, I think the EU is horrible. It is: grotesque; monstrous; impracticable; caliginous; abhorrent; silly; absurd; rococo; scabrous; reptilian; weird; warty; atramentous; fatuous, purportless; ill-conceived; lepidote; preposterous; obfuscous; encrusted; bebarnacled; Pecksniffian; venal; obstinate; pharisaical; contumacious; furfuraceous. It is choleric, necrotic and Stygian. It is iffy, whiffy and knavish; It is aphotic. It is froufrou.

I must tell you that I feel much the better for typing the above paragraph. It may mean excommunication from the Guild of Remoaners, but the burden of being consistently nice about the European Union has been a considerable one. I can imagine how it has looked from the Brexiters’ side of the fence – the majority of liberal Britain has spent the past 15 months howling at their stupidity, denouncing the government for seeking to implement what the referendum result dictates, warning that our stately old country is about to turn into a mix of Belize, Yemen and North Korea, and calling Jean- Claude Juncker ‘daddy’.

I finally popped my cork at the weekend, watching those appalling images of Spanish police officers beating the hell out of ordinary Catalonians, male and female, young and old, for the crime of casting a vote in a referendum. Perhaps it’s something to do with being Scottish – even a Scottish Unionist – but the use of violence against a people peacefully exercising their right to self-determination, legal or not, was stomach- turning. It was like a scene from a wobbling African dictatorship. I looked to the enlightened leaders of the EU for an echo of my thoughts but found the merest pipette of comfort – Belgium’s PM Charles Michel tweeted that ‘Violence can never be the answer! We condemn all forms of violence and reaffirm our call for political dialogue’. Verhofstadt, a former Belgian PM, criticised the Catalan separatists for pushing ahead with the referendum but also ‘the use of disproportionate violence to stop this’. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said that ‘regardless of views on independence, we should all condemn the scenes being witnessed and call on Spain to change course before someone is seriously hurt.’ Apart from that, as far as I can tell, there has been either humbug or silence.

This reminded me of what I have so lately put out my head, namely that the EU is about systems and states rather than people. It is the bureaucrat’s bureaucracy, a hell-culture of edicts and regulations and treaties and directives, of the acquis communautaire and a token nod to subsidiarity, of a monetary union that is engineered to work in favour of the big guys, who won’t take the necessary fiscal steps to make it work for the little guys. It seems incapable of seriously debating the problems created by open borders and lacks the suppleness to address them. It is an institution that too often displays contempt for the nation state and national democracy. It is feather-bedded, decadent and trenchantly unreformable. It will back – or at least turn a blind eye to – the Robocop shock troops of Mariano Rajoy as they club the exposed skin of Barcelona’s unarmoured and unarmed citizens.

So it’s complicated, right? I still think we’re wrong – bonkers, frankly – to leave. I fully expect this walk-out to hit our economy like a sledgehammer – revenues and employment will fall, companies will go to the wall, taxes will rise, the poorest and the squeezed middle will pay, all based on a reckless right-wing gamble on the abstract benefits of greater sovereignty and the presumed desire of the rest of the world to trade more with us. I still believe every international institution benefits from British membership, and that we therefore have a duty to belong. We will lose heft on the international scene, our hugely important role as a bridge between the US and the EU is effectively over, and for all the talk of a shiny new era of co-operation and friendship, well, that all depends who’s in power, doesn’t it? Oh, and Brexit could ensure the person in power is Jeremy Corbyn. Cheers for that.

On balance – and all positions should be a matter of balance – Britain would be better off staying in. The only thing worse than the existence of the horrible European Union would be its non-existence. We should be inside on a matter of principle and on a matter of national self- interest. We should be the key motive force behind reform in the areas we correctly identify as problematic: one of these would be that aforementioned faceless, unaccountable, frenemy culture that stands aside as a member state kicks the crap out of a group of its citizens with no threat of sanction or barely even a cross word.

Brexit, to me, feels like a retreat, and a defeat, and not just for Britain.

For those of us who self-identify as centrists – call us Blairites, moderates, melts, whatever – these are barren times. There is nowhere to go. Most of us are anti-Brexit on the basis that it’s a bloody stupid idea and watch the self-serving pivots and shimmies of Davis/Johnson/Fox etc. with something close to contempt. We cannot vote for this incarnation of the Tory party, even if we found a decent number of policies to praise over the course of the Cameron administration. Labour are still worse: led by a stomach-turning ragbag of Trots and chancers who have mounted a hostile takeover of their party and its machinery and watched gleefully as the internal opposition tossed its weapons away and hit the deck in abject surrender.

That leaves Britain’s Third Party (I’ll leave the SNP out of it, on the basis they’re not great fans of Britain). If you’ve ever been to a Lib Dem conference and spent time among the membership, you’ll understand why this is something of a hard sell. Your inner voice nags away at you: ‘I didn’t avoid the grave for this long just to end up voting Lib Dem’. Still, if not now, when? One girded one’s innards and sought to approach Cable’s speech seriously and with an open mind.

He blew it. Of course he blew it. He’s a Lib Dem. He’s Vince Cable, a lab-grown synergy of Richard Briars and Mr. Spock. There are the obvious and easy complaints. It was a dull speech of bad jokes (Brexit is ‘the product of a fraudulent and frivolous campaign led by two groups of silly public-school boys reliving their dormitory pillow fights’ – sigh) and preposterous boasts he would be the next PM. Within a minute, he was banging on about the ‘illegal’ Iraq war. There were some rather desperate attempts to win back the student vote that fled in the wake of the tuition fees u-turn. In summation: meh.

It all adds up to an unmissably obvious conclusion: Vince and his mob aren’t – can’t be – the answer to what ails us. They lack the credibility to inspire, unite and dictate the terms of a new politics. These are not the centrists we’re looking for. The challenges are too great, the times too combustible, the Lib Dems too smoke-stained and careworn, too pious and limp. No, the only solution is a new party.

Centrism, due to its very nature, is a thing of pragmatism, compromise, a distrust of ideology, an openness to innovation and fact. It all too often lacks the swagger that comes with the quasi-religious certainties of left and right. Nick Clegg and the now distant era of the Orange Book is probably the closest the Lib Dems have come to providing us with a champion and a credo, but even Clegg was a bit, well, Lib Dem.

The arguments against the establishment of a new party are familiar and of course have merit. It would have little chance of winning an election; the sentimental tribalism of our politicians means they would rather stick with what they have; voters anyway seem to be drifting back towards the big two. Creating something new would be hugely risky, enormously expensive and, hey, remember the SDP?

But still. We are living through the most radical transformation of society and of our way of life since the industrial revolution. The existing parties were set up in and for a different world – Labour, especially, even down to its name, is a strange anachronism. They are Heath-Robinson contraptions, held together by sticky tape and moist-eyed emotion, that seem constitutionally unable to cope with the pace of change, to offer sensible, convincing policies that can ease us through the necessary adjustments. They are hamstrung by history, dogma and tradition. They are holding Britain back.

British politics and our public space would benefit from a party formed specifically to deal with the challenges and opportunities of the 21^st century. Free from the constrictions imposed by history, legacy and special interest loyalties, it could aggressively get to grips with intergenerational unfairness, the rise of AI and its impact on lifestyle and the workplace, devise a sustainable model for funding public services, develop a grown-up conversation about immigration, and the rest. It could do so honestly and in a language that explodes the carefully calculated jargon that so envelops and strangles our debate.

Further, in time we need to move on from a First Past the Post voting system that does not offer the variety of choice and diversity people are used to in practically every other aspect of their lives. The Labour and Conservative vote rose in 2017, but when your choices are so limited there’s nothing surprising about this. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition was largely a good, measured government and stands as a good example of how collaboration can iron out the wrinkles on both sides. We’d be a better nation if this were the norm rather than the exception. A proportional voting system would allow the electorate to slip the chains that currently bind them to just a couple of deeply unsatisfactory options.

A new, modern party of the centre would have its work cut out, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It would give many of us a cause to champion over the long term. It could be something to be proud of – a muscular, liberal centrism that makes its case with all the swagger of its rivals, and that is built – and fit – for the 21^st century.

That this is only true in theory – such a move would not end well – doesn’t disguise the fact that the British constitution is a mess, that it resembles an organogram drafted by a madman, and that this has always been so. It has evolved piecemeal over centuries to meet the crises, bulges and political fashions of the times. Outside the comment pages of The Daily Telegraph, it has rarely been the subject of the impassioned patriotic fervour its codified US equivalent attracts. And in truth this Heath-Robinson set-up has suited the UK, which is anyway a bodge job of four proud nations that often have differing cultural and philosophical expectations. For the system to work, there needs to be a lot of give.

Has that ever been truer than today? It is now twenty years since the biggest British constitutional upheaval for centuries, when Scots voted to create their own parliament in Edinburgh. Devolution, said Donald Dewar, the first First Minister, was a process not an event, and he was right. Since its inception there has been a steady transfer of further powers from Westminster to Holyrood as Scots have begun to enjoy making decisions for themselves. Brexit will deliver a whole new tranche of responsibilities in areas such as agriculture and fisheries.

The question is, where does it end? The independence referendum of 2014 delivered a barely decisive result of 55% for staying in the Union. In its aftermath, amid a spasm of tartan emotionalism, the popularity of the SNP surged and it has won every election since. Nicola Sturgeon would still like to hold a second referendum before the next devolved election in 2021. Has devolution only meant the drawn-out death, like a slow puncture, of the United Kingdom?

I focus on Scotland only because it provides us with a particularly dramatic example of the restlessness we currently witness across Western democracies. The old, top-down ways that saw strong central governments ruling at snail’s pace over subservient populaces – who were largely forced to take whatever gruel they were given no longer seem appropriate or durable. In our contemporary, fast-moving world of heavily politicised populations that are liberated, informed and engaged by social media, of big data that enables policy analysis and delivery at micro levels, of hyper-consumerism that expects responsive, individualised service from the state as well as the private sector, things must – and will – change.

If you have any doubts about this, look at research by Harvard’s Yascha Mounk and others, which has found public support for democracy is dropping, particularly among millennials. Alarming statistics abound: the share of Americans who say army rule would be a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ thing was one in 16 in 1995 but just one in 6 by 2014. Only 19% of US millennials thought it illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent, compared to 43% of older Americans. In Europe, 53% of older people thought a military takeover would be wrong, but only 36% of millennials.

Mounk finds the same trend across many long-established democracies. ‘In Germany, younger cohorts used to be reliably more pro-democratic than older ones. Now, both the young and the middle-aged express more authoritarian values than people did at similar life stages in the past. The picture is even less encouraging in the United Kingdom and the United States, where millennials surveyed today are markedly more favorable to having a “strong leader” than their parents’ generation was at the same life stage.’

There has also been a marked increase in young people identifying as extreme left or right, which helps explain the success of Jeremy Corbyn, the alt-right and some of the rather sinister populists who have popped up around the EU. For decades, the number of countries ranked ‘free’ in Freedom House’s annual survey rose steadily, but over the past decade it has charted a reversal – think of the authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, for example.

Yascha Mounk of Harvard University discusses falling support for Democracy with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria

Mounk writes that:

“Complacency has been the dominant response of Western elites to the looming threats of Brexit, of Donald Trump and of the rise of illiberal politics. The comforting assumption that the past will remain a reliable guide to the future — that countries would not vote for extreme candidates when they never have before, or indeed that core norms of liberal democracy wouldn’t come under attack where democracy has always been “the only game in town” — hasn’t worked out very well so far. Now is the time to stop being complacent.”

Easy to say, perhaps, but what is to be done? One of my greatest worries is that we spend so much time freaking out about Trump’s latest idiotic tweet or quasi-fascistic policy, or railing against Brexit and its consequences, or denouncing the Marxist inanities of Corbyn’s Labour, that we are failing to address the roots of their support. As we run around with our hands in the air, claiming arrogantly to be victims of our own success, nothing’s getting fixed, no intellectual heavy lifting is being done, we’re not preparing for what comes next. And what comes next could be even worse – imagine a competent Trump or a clever, persuasive Corbyn.

How did we end up here? Well, because a massive financial crash proved that the system was rigged against the little guy; that these enormous institutions and the super-rich individuals who ran them had slipped the bounds of democratic accountability, despite their systemic centrality; that governments, countries and even supranational organisations were toothless in the face of collapse.

We missed or ignored the fact that globalisation and liberal overreach was leaving too many behind, ostracised from and increasingly angry at the great, shiny project; we dismissed the valid bit of human nature that values belonging, whether to a local community, a nation, familiar mores and traditions, to somewhere recognisably home. We took down barriers and borders, we connected and built, we lined our own pockets and luxuriated in the innate goodness of our intentions, and, in the end, we got our ass kicked.

It seems to me the solutions to our crisis lie somewhere in that Enoch Powell phrase: power devolved is power retained. To stay together we need to loosen up, certainly in the UK. Individual and group identities have become too strong to tolerate remote, faceless government, not just from Brussels but from Westminster too. A radical programme of decentralisation and modernisation is needed. Extreme devolution to our cities and nations, to our councils and classrooms, would place power – and therefore accountability – closer to the people. Does anyone today look at a government minister and expect them to have all, or even any, of the answers? What a crazy idea. Why would they? How could they?

Reform of the Lords, which even a decade ago could be still taken for a gorgeous if stuffy piece of historical flummery but is now a national embarrassment, is becoming a priority – make it a senate of the regions capable of telling the Commons what’s what with a degree of democratic authority and regional awareness, and where mutual problems can be worked through.

Build up civic society by uniting its component parts in the pursuit of great, ambitious projects. Due to the impracticality of prime ministers and presidents agreeing and delivering on targets, the fight against climate change is now largely driven by sub-national administrations and voluntary partnerships between the private, third and state sectors. This should be a model for future participation and project management, and for how to cut out the malign influence of self-serving idiots like Trump.

If we are to re-establish the credibility of democracy and its institutions, of free markets and competition as the best routes to wealth creation, then people need a greater input into the process and a greater stake in the outcomes. We might scratch our heads at why our young people can look fondly on the kind of socialist economics that have caused calamity around the world, but we should also look at why the failings of our own approach have driven them in that direction. We have not created the society many of our compatriots, especially the most disadvantaged, the non-urban, the less educated, were promised or had a right to expect.

Our democracy is plodding, ineffective and distant, and therefore increasingly unlike the rest of our lives, which are immediate, professional and connected. If we want to avoid demagogues – perhaps better and therefore more dangerous demagogues – we need to tackle them at the roots. We need to be tough not just on Trump, but on the causes of Trump.

Manchester City’s players now sport the logo of South Korea’s Nexen Tire on their sinistral biceps, while Chelsea’s display that of Alliance Tyres, a brand recently acquired by their main shirt sponsor, Japan’s Yokohama Rubber Company. In the beautiful game, at least, the wheels of hyper-capitalism continue to spin freely.

Leicester, whose owner is Thai, have signed with Siam Commercial Bank. Liverpool, whose main sponsor is Standard Chartered, now trot on to the pitch wearing the additional logo of Western Union, a deal said to be worth £25 million over five years.

Olly Dale, Liverpool’s commercial director, explains that the fit with Western Union is about more than the basic fee (after all, what’s £5 million a year in the gazillionarium that is elite football?):

“Western Union is headquartered in the US [and] also a really well recognised brand across Asia, and those are the two marketplaces in the world that are of the greatest interest to us in terms of how we develop as a football club.”

The exponential monetisation of the world’s most popular sport is boggling to observe. From a logo on an arm to a teasingly intimate seat at the Etihad stadium: Manchester City this week unveiled their ‘Tunnel Club’, which, for prices between £299 for a single game or £15,000 for a whole season, deep-pocketed spectators are granted access to the tunnel that goes from the dressing room to the pitch. Behind a pane of two-way glass, these lucky few sit in a comfortable lounge with a bar and table service and watch the players and managers as they make their final pre-match preparations and return to the dressing room following the final whistle. As the New York Times’ Rory Smith writes, this premium experience gives the participant “a glimpse behind the curtain… in soccer, the tunnel, like the dressing room, has always qualified as sacred space, the exclusive preserve of players and coaches”. Another boundary fallen – how long, one wonders, till the final bastion, the dressing room itself, is breached? Well, how much are you willing to pay?

Innovations like these, coupled with super-rich owners, staggering levels of investment and fast-growing global markets are producing transfer fees that are not just record-breaking but record-shattering. According to Deloitte, spending by Premier League sides during this summer’s window has reached £1.17 billion, breaking the record set last summer. And there is still a week of business to be done.

The move of the sublimely gifted Neymar (pictured at the top of this article) from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) took the kind of sums being offered for and to players, which already seemed detached from any rational economic analysis, to an extraordinary new level. The £198 million paid by the French club’s Qatari owners was more than double the previous highest fee, which was only a year ago. It looks like PSG will follow up by recruiting Kylian Mbappe from rivals Monaco at a cost of around £140 million. The latter agreement, in a way, would be the real shocker. At 25, Brazil’s Neymar is generally regarded as one of the top three players in the world alongside Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Mbappe, though clearly blessed with a prodigious talent, is only 18 and to a large extent untested.

Such untamed volatility has rarely ended well in other industries and at the turn of the decade, in an attempt to establish some order, Uefa, the European game’s governing body, introduced the Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations. These are intended to keep the relationship between revenue and spending at sustainable levels. But the vastness of the Neymar deal appears to mock FFP rules, or circumnavigate them via blatant financial trickery. Spanish media claim the footballer is being paid around £200 million to be an ‘ambassador’ for Qatar’s World Cup in 2022, which allowed him to personally pay the release clause in his Barcelona contract and keep that astronomical sum off PSG’s books.

There is, understandably, much griping about the state of the game – dodgy owners and agents, obscene remuneration, players with no moral compass. Russian oligarchs, Arab oil tycoons, American wheeler-dealers and Eastern parvenus have seized control of football’s commanding heights. There is an industry of hard-eyed middle-men whose sole purpose is to bid everyone up, carving out a healthy slice of the dosh for themselves in the process. The relationship the humble fan once had with his club, the players, and the game itself, has morphed into something that can only be less intimate and more transactional. The passion is still there on a Saturday afternoon, of course, the hardcore still travel up and down the motorways on wet midweek evenings to unglamorous away destinations, but the guys on the pitch and in the dugout now belong to a separate caste – super-wealthy globetrotters who show little loyalty to anything beyond their bank balance.

The days of 1955, when Newcastle won their third FA Cup and the bonus was a job lot of tissue-stuffed handbags bought by the club for the players’ wives at a cost of £17, are long gone (“Everyone was howking away inside the bags,” Jackie Milburn recalled, but “there wasn’t a bloody thing in any of them.”) Today’s clubs are business behemoths with global reach and ambition. Backhanders and bribes have, according to media scoops, determined big decisions – even at Fifa – which is supposed to set the rules and police the scene. TV companies pay billions for the right to screen matches. For that ordinary fan, there’s an awful lot of self-deception and pretending required, a lot of forgiveness asked for, a lot of cynicism to be buried.

The journey to this giddying point is entertainingly mapped out by Richard T Kelly in Keegan and Dalglish, a new joint biography of the two legends.

As Kelly points out, Keegan, the son of a miner, was in many ways the forerunner of the modern, financially driven, self-interested, entrepreneur-footballer: “the exemplar of a player who always knew what he was worth, and not only where he was from but where he wished to get to.” In 1978, Keegan made £250,000, only half of which came from playing football. “The rest was media work, endorsements and promotion, putting his name and face to a great range of comestibles, some of them quality products, some pure tat.” He endorsed products including Pirelli slippers, a Lyons Maid ice lolly, and a transistor radio, and released a pop single that somehow made it into the Top 30. In his own words, Keegan saw himself as “the bridge between that innocent era of Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore… and whatever [football] is now.” Whatever football is now…

From the days when both men started out as promising young players to the point where as grizzled veterans they surrendered the reins of management for the last time, the trajectory of the game only ever went in one direction: bigger, richer, more, more, more. Poking around in this history suggests the glittering, if heavily tarnished, planetary colossus that is today’s game was really only ever the inevitable outcome. And there’s clearly a way to run yet…

There’s another shoulder, for a start.

***

> A YouGov/UnHerd transatlantic survey of public attitudes to who deserved their wealth… and who did not… found that in the UK, in particular, top sports stars were largely seen as “undeserving”.

In truth, it was a big moment, though not for the reason the grandstanding Trump might have expected. This President’s actions tend to produce quite violent reactions, and this occasion proved no different. On the same day, the Governors of New York, California and Washington state, which represent 68 million Americans and more than one-fifth of US GDP, announced they were forming a coalition to fight climate change. Since then, 10 further states have signed up to the US Climate Alliance, including Massachusetts and Vermont, which both have Republican Governors. Puerto Rico has joined, and 10 further states and territories have expressed their continued support for the Paris Accords. California’s Jerry Brown spoke for many of his fellow Governors:

“I don’t believe fighting reality is a good strategy – not for America, not for anybody… If the President is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavour, then California and other states will step up.”

In effect, the US battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has moved from federal to regional and city level. This is of a piece with the evolution of environmental policy in recent years, which has been towards a ‘bottom up’ approach. Organisations such as Galvanising the Groundswell of Climate Actions have brought together companies, cities, researchers and others to support and collaborate with one another in their activities. RE100 represents 100 top businesses committed to achieving 100 per cent renewable electricity. Members include tech behemoths Apple, Google, eBay and Facebook, insurance giants such as Swiss Re, Aviva and Axa, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, General Motors, Coca Cola and AstraZeneca. They are required to set a public goal to source 100% of their global electricity consumption from renewable sources by a specified year, and to disclose their electricity data annually.[1. They’ll be in pole position to be included in my next list of ‘businesses behaving ethically’ – for whenever I update it].

Even the Paris agreement reflects this move towards voluntarism: unlike previous global climate treaties, it requires each country to put forward a pledge, but allows the detail of the pledge to be ‘nationally determined’. This allows nations to choose the actions and opportunities that suit them best – most are seeking to boost their economy through the creation of new industries and jobs, improve public health and become less dependent on energy imports.

It seems to be working – the renewables stream has become a flood. As the Financial Times’ respected environment correspondent Pilita Clark reported in May:

“After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise. Even leaders in the oil and gas sector have been forced to confront an existential question: will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels? It is early, but the evidence is mounting. Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at an exponential rate, in the process driving down the price of batteries that hold the key to unleashing new levels of green growth.”

It’s estimated that:

• Almost three-quarters of the $10.2 trillion that will be invested globally in new power technology by 2040 will go to renewables, as the cost of solar and wind power plummets and the number of electric cars on our roads soars.
• Solar is already as cheap as coal in many industrialised nations, including Germany and the US, and the cost of solar electricity is expected to fall a further 66% by 2040.
• Over the same timescale, the cost of onshore wind is expected to drop by 47% and offshore wind by 71%.
• The perennial problem of storing energy from renewables for use in peak times is being addressed by the development of utility-scale batteries. According to Morgan Stanley energy analyst Stephen Byrd:

“Numerous key markets have reached an inflection point where renewables will have become the cheapest form of new power generation by 2020, a dynamic we see spreading to nearly every country we cover.”

The encouraging news just keeps on coming:

• In July, France’s environment minister Nicolas Hulot revealed a plan to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040, and said France will no longer use coal to produce electricity after 2022.
• The parliament of Catalonia has recently passed a law aimed at reducing emissions by 65% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. Businesses will be taxed $10 for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted rising to $30 in 2025.
• Norway is the latest country to endorse Under2, a global coalition of national and sub-national governments committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions toward net-zero by 2050, which now includes 177 jurisdictions on six continents that collectively represent more than 16% of the global population and 39% of the global economy.
• Many nations are meeting environmental targets that once seemed optimistically ambitious well ahead of schedule[2. And according to some research, highlighted by Inside Climate Data, even China and India might ‘over-deliver’ because “slowing coal use… has put the world’s two most populous countries on track to beat their carbon emission goals”].

There’s a long way to go before we can say we’re living in a world powered by renewable energy. But it seems like the tipping point has been reached. Investors and innovators are getting filthy rich; the technology is making exponential leaps forward; and the hard work’s no longer being left to national governments, which have struggled to balance the green agenda against competing interests and the pressures of domestic electoral politics.

As Tom Hale, an environmental policy expert at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, says:

“The commitments made by sub-national governments and private companies, if delivered, could remove as much carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 as the 190 pledges nation states made in Paris. That could potentially close as much as two thirds of the remaining “emissions gap” we face to get the world onto a trajectory to limit global warming to two degrees or lower this century.”

The momentum is surely now unstoppable, and in ways that should please both left and right. In the end, it won’t be state enforcement that will save our climate, or Al Gore’s latest film on the subject, An Inconvenient Sequel, which has just opened in the UK[3. Watch the official trailer]. Instead a healthy coalition of public, private and voluntary has come together out of commercial self-interest, community spirit and political imperative.

Thankfully, for the planet’s sake, it doesn’t look like anyone, including the current, thankfully temporary occupant of the White House, can get in the way.