This may, currently, seem counter-intuitive. Donald Trump, the global figure most associated with postliberalism, is alienating electorates across the West and Victor Orbán, the leading European postliberal, has just lost power.

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage’s insurgency, despite local election success, seems to have hit a ceiling just below 30%, and many mainstream politicians still refuse to accept Reform as a legitimate opponent.

Yet even as Keir Starmer, in his recent last-chance-saloon speech, cast Reform as “dark” and “dangerous”, he was also embracing several postliberal themes: celebrating immigration restriction, regretting the graduate-only route to status and reward, and nationalizing British Steel as an insurance policy in a post-free trade world.

The backdrop to politics for most of my adult life has been metropolitan openness — the market deregulation of the Right plus the moral deregulation of the Left. This combination is now disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Up ahead looms a new postliberal political landscape, one in which centrist liberals and national populists battle it out (with a noisy sub-plot from a green Left).

The neoliberal or hyperliberal era of metropolitan openness, starting in the Eighties, is best summed up in the saying that the Right won the economic argument but the Left won the social argument on equality and rights. There were some differences between center-left and center-right on the size of the state and levels of redistribution and immigration, but also a broad consensus on how to prosper.

Globalism in economics, and legalism in politics, meant a sacrifice of democratic control. But the new consensus brought many benefits. Most people became richer, and society became fairer, especially if you were a woman or a member of a minority group or a clever child from a lower-income family. The expansion of higher education produced a bigger and more permeable elite than in the post-war period. (The 1957 Cabinet was entirely male and public school-educated, and more than half Etonian). The decline of the industrial working class meant many dangerous jobs in heavy industries were replaced with knowledge economy jobs in comfortable offices.

There were also many losers from this consensus, especially outside the greater Southeast, and their number grew after the crash of 2007-8. This was not just about inequality, de-industrialization, and the loss of well-paid jobs for men of average or below average academic ability.

Suggested Reading

How to save liberalism

By Adrian Wooldridge

For three deeper trends, trends that have defined Western liberal modernity, also accelerated in these decades. One of them is the further loss of religion. Strong traces of Christian belief still animate public and private life, but mass secularization has removed a handrail of collective ritual and moral guidance.

The changing relationship between the sexes is another. Women’s financial autonomy and mass entry into paid work and public life represents the biggest increase in Western freedom since 1945. But, as Helen Andrews points out, the female domination of institutions such as education and the law is unprecedented, while many men have lost their provider role and found nothing satisfactory in its place. At the same time, fertility has fallen well below replacement rate.

There is a third big shift. Within the lifetime of today’s young adults, the ethnic majority in many Western countries will fall below half of the population. In Britain, the post-1997 liberalization of immigration means that, today, nearly 20% of the population is foreign-born. The white British core has shrunk from almost 90% in 2000 to around 70% today (lower in England). Just 53% of births in 2025 were to white British mothers. Britain is on track to become majority-minority in the 2060s.

The 2016 Brexit vote, and the Trump vote too, was a raucous and disorganized slap in the face to establishment. They were protests, not only by those who felt they had suffered the economic effects of hyperliberalism, but also those who experienced a sense of loss and disorientation from the big cultural shifts.

Democracy worked: imperfectly, of course. After the Brexit vote, a section of the political class tried to reverse the result. When the impasse was broken by Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory, Brexit was indeed done, but the two further promises, to reduce immigration and to start “leveling up” Britain — a direct response to the Brexit vote — were both dramatically broken.

Nonetheless, in 2026, we have shifted towards a new small-c conservative consensus, much of which even a Labour government is forced to adapt to. The loose coalition behind it comprises older, non-graduates from left-behind, “Somewhere” Britain, combined with the many people of all classes and regions who feel the Blair/Cameron settlement is no longer working economically or culturally.

After nearly 40 years of metropolitan openness, the backdrop is now provincial insecurity and this coalition’s new set of priorities: wanting national interest, and national citizen preference, more vigorously pursued; deep anxiety about free-riding, hence the need for tighter control of both immigration and spiraling public welfare; desire for more orderly neighborhoods; rejection of progressive excess; skepticism about both big business and state capacity, but a strong desire to see the latter repaired.

The new consensus is not just the result of reaching a tipping point in the number of losers. There has also been a loss of momentum in the previous settlement. The growth of the professional and managerial class (PMC), the social base of the metropolitan era consensus, has stalled. It now accounts for about 33% of all jobs (13% higher PMC, 20% lower PMC), but that number has increased only six percentage points since 1991, despite the production of ever more graduates with generalist academic qualifications and unrealizable expectations. And that is even before AI replaces so many professional jobs.

This has been accompanied by a loss of confidence in the system of government that has grown up since the Seventies, when what the academic Michael Moran called light-touch “club governance” was replaced with the “regulatory state”. There were good reasons for more accountability and greater legal regulation, but we have overshot and ended up with the bat tunnel-fish disco Britain in which nothing gets built.

After 20 years of stagnant growth, the political class, Left and Right, is being forced to think harder about the gridlock that results from liberalism’s reflex to disperse more power to courts and regulators.

The emerging cross-party consensus (minus some parts of the Left) echoes the priorities I described above. It now includes: a permanent low level of legal immigration, and a goal of zero illegal immigration; ongoing attempts to hack back the regulatory state; acknowledgment that higher education has over-expanded and technical skills have been neglected; the recognition that the triple lock is unaffordable and welfare spending is out of control with too many dropping out of the labor market (only four-in-10 households are net contributors); the need for a rethink on Net Zero, a regional rebalancing to the economy, an openness towards some degree of re-industrialization, more national control over critical assets, and limits to free trade in the coming bloc-based global economy; more investment in innovation, defense, and the application of AI, including by UK pension funds; greater pushback against the progressive activist war on tradition and authority; more concern about polarization, anomie and loss of meaning, especially among young people, a concern now focused on social media regulation.

This new consensus tilts more towards the Right bloc (Conservative/Reform) than the Left bloc (Labour/Greens/Liberal Democrats); that does not guarantee the Right will prevail. Minus the skepticism about Net Zero and welfarism, plenty of the above could align with the economics of Andy Burnham’s Manchesterism. Nevertheless, in the short term, internal Labour politics, with or without Starmer, is likely to require more old-school, statist, tax-the-rich Leftism (despite the fact that we already have the most progressive tax regime in the developed world).

But is the new consensus postliberal? There are many schools of postliberalism, each defined by their distinct critiques of liberalism. Matt Sleat, in one of several recent books on postliberalism, complains that it is often little more than an immature rage against liberalism. And it is certainly unformed as a distinct ideology by contrast with older rivals like socialism, conservatism or liberalism itself.

Yet there are family resemblances between most of the writers who claim the mantle. Liberalism, in most critiques, is seen as a bloodless ideology focusing too much on individual rights, constraints on power and value neutrality. Postliberal critics argue that it stifles democratic governance and dispatches the human needs for community, belonging and meaning to the private sphere.

The American version, associated with some people in the Trump court, is more militant and religious. Writers like Patrick Deneen regard liberalism as a form of nihilism that encourages our worst selves. The religious postliberals believe that the good society requires virtue to precede freedom and, implicitly, demand a return to faith, usually Catholicism. This is more pre-liberal than postliberal.

More mainstream postliberals prioritize the “common good”, but that begs the question of who defines it. Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour, the chief UK variant of postliberalism, is more a vibe — Left on economics, Right on culture — than a political philosophy or policy program. Glasman’s last book is subtitled The Politics of the Common Good but provides no clear answer to the question of how we can arrive at a consensus on it in societies with such diverse interests and values.

In today’s Britain, there is no significant appetite for the illiberalism and religious authoritarianism of US postliberalism, nor for Blue Labour’s hardcore socialist economics and the quaint idea that the working class longs to return to the factories.

Another dead end is nostalgia for an overwhelmingly white Britain. This nostalgia is now found on the ethnonationalist fringe of the postliberal universe among people who also toy with extreme forms of remigration.

Of course, English ethnicity should be allowed to breathe. Ethnicity simply means shared ancestry and the shared habits and history connected to that ancestry. The English ethnicity has always been a relatively open one, as befits a once sea-going people. If it can absorb millions of Irish people over two centuries, then it can certainly absorb people of different racial and religious backgrounds if they come in manageable numbers and assimilate into the national culture (people such as Rishi Sunak, who is stereotypically English in the modern, self-deprecating, patrician manner).

The re-emergence of English ethnicity as a normal identity, after centuries of being submerged in a broader British or Imperial identity, is to be welcomed, not feared. And postliberals are right to stress the enduring importance of both ethnic and broader national identities. In more fragmented societies, a critical mass of people sharing a strong fellow-citizen attachment, regardless of race or ethnicity, is essential to navigating future collective action problems.

In any case, no political party will get elected in modern Britain without accepting, at least in spirit, both of the post-war social revolutions: the welfare revolution of the Forties and Fifties and the equalities revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.

It is also true, on the conservative side of the ledger, that a big reason for the appeal of postliberal ideas is widespread regret at the loss of community and national solidarity, and the related reductions in trust and volunteering. People regret, too, the loss of stable family life: nearly half of British children are not living with both their biological parents at the age of 16. The epidemic of mental fragility and the collapse of birth rates speaks to a malaise — it is tempting to label it a spiritual one — that liberalism, by design, has no answer to.

But modern electorates are both liberal and conservative in complex combinations. The weakening of community and family often happens because people place their own individual freedom and desires first. People want community but many of them want wealth, freedom and mobility more. We might regret losing the sense of a single national conversation when there were only three television channels, but few of us want to give up the choice of entertainment we now enjoy. Most of us have been happy, in Yuval Noah Harari’s phrase, to “give up meaning in exchange for power” — or, he might have said, for comfort.

People don’t want to abandon liberalism; they want a better version stripped of its excesses and silences, economic and cultural. Focusing on liberalism itself as the problem — rather than the recent marriage of economic neoliberalism and progressivism — opens the door to reactionary postliberals who think everything went wrong with Luther or Locke.

We don’t need a revolution: we need a course correction, as Adrian Pabst and other moderate postliberal voices have argued, a politics that speaks to the priorities of the Somewheres at least as much as the Anywheres, without jettisoning pluralism and the essentials of historic liberalism.

Adrian Wooldridge makes a similar point in his book Centrists of the World Unite! He frames his argument as a reinvention of liberalism, but it’s one that overlaps with the kind of postliberalism advocated here: a decidedly un-centrist challenge to the bourgeois-bohemian economic and moral deregulation of the past 40 years.

One way of thinking about postliberalism as a course correction is seeing it as an attempt to reinvigorate some of the background factors that helped liberalism to work better in earlier decades. Liberalism, say postliberals, is parasitic on other forces to thrive: freedom and value neutrality work best in a context of individual restraint, shared norms and demographic stability.

Post-1945 liberalism in the West certainly benefited from factors that are now either absent or weakened: a growing population; rapidly rising incomes; the moral constraints provided by residual religious belief and deference to experts and leaders; stable family life; a single, national media-led, public conversation; large ethnic majorities with a pre-political solidarity (reinforced by the last war) creating a strong “imagined community” and common norms across social classes.

Today, by contrast, we live in low-growth, aging societies, with an archipelago of competing value and interest groups consuming individualized media, with weakened families and national attachments, and with faith in politics badly dented. Liberalism is under strain and needs a helping hand from postliberal priorities, even if the term itself remains too obscure for mainstream debate.

My own version of that helping hand, which I categorize as belonging to the Left-conservative school of postliberalism — a synthesis of moderate social democracy and moderate cultural conservatism — has three main elements.

1. Small-c conservative common sense.

• Acceptance of the moral equality of all humans, but rejection of the moral universalism and post-nationalism of the Left.
• Restoring authority to elected politicians.
• An immigration pause, plus the understanding that a society with a shrinking ethnic core needs an attractive, broad-based national identity more than ever.
• A belief in personal responsibility and reciprocity, entailing a shift to a more contributory welfare state.
• Recognition that money alone is not the answer to poverty and social dysfunction; family structure and upbringing matter too.
• More support for stable families, marriage and higher fertility by minimizing the motherhood penalty, but also by making it easier for one parent to remain at home when children are pre-school.

2. Market-friendly, national social democracy.

• A national preference in public procurement.
• Tougher paternalistic regulation of industries with power to poison bodies (food) and minds (tech).
• Less exposure to the market in some key public utilities but more exposure in areas where competition is weak.
• Transition to Dutch-style social insurance model for health and social care.
• An end to current Net Zero plans; ensure the lowest possible energy costs for businesses and households.
• Limited use of subsidies and tariffs to prioritize national industry, reshoring and innovation, and national control over critical infrastructure/utilities.
• Incentivization of a more patriotic business elite, and clearer distinction in the tax system between the productive and unproductive rich.
• Reduction in the tax/regulatory burden on small businesses.
• Promoting higher levels of home ownership and entrepreneurship, especially among young people.

3. A regional settlement for the crisis of demoralization in Somewhere Britain.

• Tackle extreme regional divides by promoting public investment and growth companies in left-behind areas, plus investing in local institutions: sports clubs, youth clubs, pubs.
• Reverse the over-production of people with generalist academic qualifications and under-production of skilled workers and technicians.
• Create more outlets for public-spiritedness. In a more dangerous world, with a more erratic climate, we need an expanded military reserve plus a civic and environmental taskforce. We also need an easy-to-use online national volunteering platform.

This is not a radical manifesto, but it cuts across still-powerful liberal assumptions in key areas: the reluctance to accept discomfort at rapid ethnic change as legitimate; the economism of so much social policy that focuses only on higher welfare payments; the persistent belief that more graduates is good for the economy and society; the reluctance to rethink rights legislation even when it thwarts democratic common sense.

There are policies here borrowed from Right and Left, but the Right bloc would be most comfortable with it. To turn the cultural dominance of the Right bloc into political power requires, as well as an electoral accommodation between Reform and the Conservatives, two things that it currently lacks: an ability to reach out to centrist voters and a coherent political economy.

Both of these failings are especially, perhaps unavoidably, true of the insurgent Reform. As Farage tacks to the center, with Restore Britain nibbling at his Right flank, he may be able to reduce his unpopularity at the local tennis club. A balanced political economy that can combine some of the productive, deregulatory spirit of the Thatcher years while also protecting, and reforming, the social state and reviving the left-behind parts of the country, remains a work in progress.

Liberalism, as Wooldridge points out, has had several course corrections in its history. The course correction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, via the New Liberals in Britain and Teddy Roosevelt in the US, jettisoned laissez-faire and the sanctity of private property.

Suggested Reading

The Hungarian revolution isn’t what it seems

By Aris Roussinos

Today’s course correction requires nothing more from liberalism than accepting a new balance between the dispersal of power and the need for an effective democracy. As even the raffishly liberal Financial Times writer, Janan Ganesh, has recognized, liberal democracy needs to be a bit less liberal and a bit more democratic.

Historic liberalism is a sensibility as much as an idea or institution. It is built on reasonableness, open-mindedness, good-faith argument, and a willingness not to see opponents as enemies.

This sensibility can no longer be taken for granted, and some variants of postliberalism have contributed to that. But this is a problem that afflicts all political traditions, exacerbated by identity politics on the Left and ethnonationalism on the Right.

Tribalism is on the rise not just because of social media algorithms, but because it’s harder to find compromises when politics is more about culture, values and emotions than about size of the state and levels of redistribution.

It is therefore all the more important that The Rest is Politics centrists learn to accept this new, more cultural terrain of politics and the legitimacy of “decent populist” parties like Reform that eschew racism and ethnonationalism. Rather than demonizing opponents as bigots or elitists, we need a new generation of politicians, on both the liberal and populist sides, who can speak across the Anywhere/Somewhere divide.

After the relative calm of the second half of the 20th century, huge challenges are now piling up. And the ability of politicians to manage them is made more difficult by an increasingly divided and demanding electorate. This explains Britain’s high turnover of prime ministers. If some strands of postliberalism are part of the problem, then the movement’s broader intuitions are a necessary part of the solution.

***

A longer version of this essay can be found at David Goodhart’s Substack, A Goodhart is Hard to Find.

The mixed-race Polish-Nigerian writes in a gentle and nuanced manner about the messiness of human identity, especially in its racial and ethnic aspects. And his own life story — one foot in a relatively rich poor country (Nigeria) and another in a poorer rich country (Poland) — has given him an unusually privileged vantage point from which to observe the complexities, and complexes, of race.

Members of the political class (broadly defined) in modern democracies are increasingly called upon to be both outsiders and insiders. The 42 year-old Adekoya is a model outsider-insider, and able to act as a discerning connection point between different worlds.

He has felt the humiliation of racial abuse, particularly as a young man in Poland, and even after many years of living in western countries can still feel the pull of the traditional worldviews that still prevail in much of the developing world. Yet he is also an insider, an accomplished journalist and now academic, well-connected in three different countries.

His African roots allow him to speak about race with less circumlocution and evasion than is common in the liberal West. He can write with authority about the tendency to in-group preference, about the racism of whites and non-whites and the psychological well-spring they both share, and he understands the cultural chauvinism of parents who do not want their children to be lost to the tribe or religion.

So who better to write a book not just about race but about being mixed race? Biracial Britain: A Different Way of Looking at Race is a timely antidote to the sectarian finger-pointing and moralising about race so prevalent in our contemporary debate.

More from this author

Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

This is mainly a showing not telling book: a series of 25 extended interviews with different people about the experience of growing up mixed race, framed by his commentaries and often wry reflections on his own biracial journey.

It is not an academic book. There are few facts and figures. There are people telling their stories. And Adekoya’s interviewees have been selected to provide the widest possible range of experiences spread across all relevant ethnic mixings and across time.

The basic numbers for this country are simple enough: the mixed race population of the UK is around 2.5% (about 1.6m) and is the fastest growing ethnic group, about 50% are white-black, 25% white-Asian and 25% intra-non-white. The future is beige: in his book, Whiteshift, Eric Kaufmann estimates that the UK will be 30% mixed race by the end of this century and 75% by 2150.

Mixed race people in the UK (at least those with one white parent) tend to be better integrated and, on average, more successful than their equivalents in the non-white ethnic group that one of their parents belongs to. But they still experience their own peculiar brand of joys and sorrows, and are now emerging more confidently as a distinct group to tell that story.

From interviews with younger mixed-race people, it is clear that the overt hostility towards, or pitying of, the older “half-castes” growing up in the 1950s, with two sets of grandparents who never speak to each other, has long gone. But dilemmas remain.

There is, for example, the pressure from society and relatives to identify more with one side than another. Adekoya even describes how some black activists follow their own version of the “one drop” rule of the racist American south: insisting that someone who is half or even one quarter black must identify as black.

Mixed-race people have more options for both belonging and rejection, and some of the interviewees admit to not feeling completely at home in either of their ethnic groups. Many have had bumpy rides of various kinds. There is the joy of discovery when finding a non-white father who had been absent when an interviewee was growing up. There are the accounts of people feeling pressured to “perform” an ethnicity that they have no real connection to. There is the disappointment of visiting an ancestral home and finding you are not accepted. There is even a pair of mixed-race twins who don’t get on because each identifies with different sides of their heritage.

Adekoya says he could rise above the racial abuse he encountered in Poland because of the Nigerian sense of superiority his father had drilled into him. “Nigerians firmly believe they are a special people endowed with a unique intelligence, resilience and creativity that predestines them for greatness. This is the gospel I was raised in and I was a firm believer.”

But this shield does not protect all black people. Indeed, in his reflections on so-called “colourism” Adekoya argues that the opposite is often the case. The curse of colourism is the tendency of black people in poorer, non-white, parts of the world to esteem lighter skin, which mixed race people with a white parent tend to benefit from, often with a guilty conscience.

More from this author

Has BLM picked the wrong target?

By Remi Adekoya

And his answer to this is controversially pragmatic. “Colourism will not be eliminated by well-meaning intellectuals telling people it is a bad thing; it will be eliminated when the white world stops being so much richer and more successful than everyone else. Then regular black and brown folk will stop looking up to it so much and start admiring their own kind. But this will only happen if their own nations become rich and successful. I do not like that this is the way it is, but this is the way it is. Wealth and success is what impresses the world today. The road to the end of white supremacy lies in economics, not sociology, history or semantics.”

This is a powerful insight and if the economic success of Africa in the past decade is replicated in the next five then we might be able to test the hypothesis. But what if Nigeria does not become as rich and successful as Denmark in the next 50 years, even as it heads towards becoming the most populous country on earth? Are black people around the world, including in the North American and European diasporas, condemned to battle a collective inferiority complex?

This is surely too pessimistic, at least for black minorities in the US and Europe. Two ethnic stereotypes have changed dramatically in Britain in my life-time. The Irish and the Indian. The Irish shift follows Adekoya’s logic: as Ireland moved from being a poor, rural country with relatively low levels of education, to being a highly educated, post-industrial one, richer than Britain, the old stereotype of the slow-witted Irish became untenable.

The Indian stereotype has also changed dramatically as British-Indians have marched into the professional middle class in their millions and yet the reality of India has not changed that much, the country has patches of great wealth and a growing middle class but it is still home to the largest number of truly poor people in the world. Indian success in the diaspora has changed the image of Indians, not the rise of the Indian economy.

Surely that success can be replicated by black minorities in rich countries too. A critical mass of successful black professionals is already emerging in many places and that looks a better pathway to generalised black confidence than a well-governed Nigeria with a booming economy, a decent welfare state and nuclear weapons.

Half-Indian/Half-Irish Sunder Katwala, the head of the British Future think tank (and the only interviewee to be identified), is an optimist on this and says that “Britain is doing much better on race than on class”. But the reason why this does not seem more apparent is because “there is now a split between academic, media and political environments and the lived experience of the rest of the country… the problem is that the race discourse is dominated by people who spend all their time on it, we don’t hear enough from people who just get on with their everyday lives and are not defined by race.”

This is not, however, a complacent book celebrating a post-racial country; it rather reflects a messy reality in which about half of ethnic minority Britons think their colour has held them back in life, while the other half think it hasn’t.

More from this author

Why the West isn't racist

By Ralph Leonard

Every mixed-raced child is a sort of gamble on the world becoming a less tribal place. And Britain’s mixed-race story is also unavoidably about the partnerships and marriages across ethnic boundaries. Adekoya observes his own parents’ difficulties with dispassionate sympathy but this is one area where a few more facts and figures might have been helpful. I wanted to know whether partnerships and marriages across ethnic lines are more fragile than those within them? And if so are they becoming more robust as society becomes more tolerant?

Adekoya does not have all the answers but, looking ahead, he sees the mixed-race identity becoming less defensive and freer to draw on multiple identities without feeling pressured to choose one. He also thinks that mixed race people have something valuable to offer in today’s atmosphere of racial polarisation.

“Growing up mixed race is a life experience that lays the groundwork for an inclusive open-minded attitude towards others… The circumstances of our mixed heritages and upbringing makes delving into the perspectives of others come somewhat naturally to us because it is what we had to do to fit in growing up.”

Barack Obama had a special talent for making different kinds of people feel comfortable around him because of his biracial life experience, says Adekoya. By the same token, Adekoya himself seems poised to become one of the most important and subtle new voices in Britain’s never-ending conversation about race.

So our rebellion, to the extent that it wasn’t just about smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, tended to be about class and class guilt. Like Malcolm McDowell in the 1968 public school revolution fantasy film if…., we were on the Left. We spoke with mockney accents; one of my friends became a skinhead and slipped away to Stamford Bridge every other Saturday.

Suggested reading

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

Today’s elite public school radicalism is a very different animal. The schools no longer think of themselves as conservative institutions training a ruling class to preserve a national heritage — they are now academic forcing houses attracting and producing a global elite of the “brightest and best”. They think of themselves as academic meritocracies, albeit with a bias towards the affluent, and are often in the vanguard of the most fashionable pedagogical and social trends.

Contemporary race- and gender- based progressivism is therefore no threat at all to the people running the schools, indeed it is positively welcomed by them. One can observe this in the kerfuffle surrounding the Eton master who has been sacked for explaining, and at least partially defending, the concept of patriarchy — it was the Eton authorities who intervened, not an uprising of radical pupils, and some parents and pupils have actually been protesting against the sacking. But in my experience of speaking at London private day schools and knowing plenty of young people who have emerged from them in recent years, progressive groupthink is the norm.

I recently stumbled across an example of this in the alumni magazine of St Paul’s, another elite private school. It featured an interview with former pupil Jonah Freud, who has recently launched a petition to “Decolonise St Paul’s” that has been signed by more than 1,000 current and former students. The letter calls for “educating through a global, rather than eurocentric, curriculum” and “deconstructing the racist fabric of our society”. Jonah, who studied Race and Pop Music at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualised Study, is the son of Matthew Freud, grandson of Clement, himself the grandson of Sigmund. Interviewer Tom Adeyoola writes of the moment Freud was awakened:

“For someone already ‘woke’ it was something closer to home that compelled him to action in writing to St Paul’s; the similarity between the names of George Floyd and his older brother George Freud. In his own words, ‘I have never experienced anything of the fear that George Floyd’s family would have feared and the only reason for that is that I am white.'”

Suggested reading

The secrets of the ruling class

By Alex Renton

I don’t want to sound cynical about this; it is obviously a welcome development that young men and women, many of whom will graduate to important jobs in our society, have egalitarian instincts and are aware of their privileges. But what about the most important privilege of all: their parents’ wealth? It is rather morally convenient for them to believe passionately in every kind of equality except economic equality.

Perhaps at some unconscious level the elite progressive public school authorities and pupils feel they will get a free pass for their huge financial advantages, if only they shout loudly enough about how they are challenging all other kinds. And as the conformist young progressives agonise about their white privilege it is rather handy that this places them in the same boat as lower income white people in struggling post-industrial towns. If both groups are primarily privileged by their race, the heads of Eton and St Paul’s can with a clear conscience complain about anti-public school bias when Oxford and Cambridge colleges try to raise their quota of people from such low income backgrounds.

More from this author

What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

“If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere,” said Theresa May in 2017. It was a clumsily expressed sentiment. But isn’t this exactly what she was talking about? A financial and educational elite, including significant sections of big business, who are increasingly disconnected from the feelings and interests of the rest of the country yet regard themselves as leading the struggle for human progress.

Shaun Bailey, the Tory London mayoral candidate, talks about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national “team”. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support; but a worrying aspect of the BLM protests earlier in the year was how it divided the country, between a big section of the white elite — who embraced it enthusiastically — and the white provincial majority who seemed to be looking on with some scepticism.

Surely, if elite public schools do have any justification in a modern liberal democracy, it is precisely that the people who run them are teaching their privileged pupils to think clearly, honestly and independently about social (and other) problems, not egging them on to embrace the latest fashionable cause. As the greatest of 20th century Etonians, George Orwell, put it: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

When I started on this course, I was seldom challenged. I was asked to make a radio programme about the changing face of ethnic minority politics in 2011 and no one then thought to question my right to do so because of my colour.

For better or worse, this would be far less likely to happen today. I have just been appointed to an official body concerned with combating discrimination of many kinds, none of which I will ever experience myself. Some people complained that my background renders me incapable of doing the job properly.

I hope to prove those doubters wrong, but there is a serious point here. Personal experience is, of course, very important in shaping one’s views. To take a topical example, I notice that friends who have had a bad dose of Covid-19 tend to be more supportive of tough lockdown measures than friends who have not had it at all or only lightly.

Personal experience is a kind of knowledge. But it is also highly constrained and even misleading, that’s why accusing someone of being anecdotal is usually an insult in an argument. Your own experience is one part of the truth but usually quite a small one.

When we are talking about big abstract things, like society or the economy we would not get very far just basing things on our own direct experience. We need facts, reliable data, objective things which can give us a handle on the bigger picture. We may then select the data based on our own interests or worldview — indeed it is almost impossible not to — but at least we are making some effort to use the apparatus of objectivity: logic and evidence.

Our knowledge of the world is usually some sort of balance between personal experience and abstract ideas. And it is my contention,  perhaps not a very original one, that in recent years the balance has been tipping away from the realm of the objective towards personal experience.

Suggested reading

Racial categories are reactionary

By Ralph Leonard

To repeat, that is not always a bad thing. One of the reasons we want our institutions to be at least somewhat representative of our society is that we recognise the importance of different experiences of the world: female, gay, ethnic minority and so on. And making it easier for people, especially from previously unheard groups, to speak for themselves rather than be spoken for, is self-evidently a step forward.

I have just written a book called Head, Hand, Heart which argues, among other things, that those with a certain kind of academic/analytical intelligence have been too dominant in our institutions and that we need more space for other aptitudes, intelligences and experiences.

But the focus on the primacy of subjective experience, and the authority that it is thought to bestow, can also go too far. At its most extreme it might call into question much of art and literature. Can, for example, the female writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner write truthfully about the sex life of the male lead character in her novel Fleishman is in Trouble?

That may seem like a silly example, after all, if she couldn’t plausibly get inside a man’s head, no one would have bought her best-seller. Yet quite extreme subjectivism is on the march. Consider America’s current polarisation with pro and anti-Trump forces having not only different opinions but selecting different facts about the world to fit their experiences.

The identity politics Left also often prioritises experience over data. Indeed, identity politics is partly based on the authority of who it is that is saying something, rather than what they are saying. And this is not a fringe phenomenon: the BBC’s new guidelines on racist language ask the reporter to consider who is saying the words.

The other source of this new bias towards individual experience as the source of knowledge and authority is surely social media. The new forms of public communication have dispatched the old gate keepers of the elite media, and given everyone who wants it access to the public square. Now conspiracy theories seem to compete on almost equal terms with well-established facts in an information free for all.

Suggested reading

What we meritocracy critics get wrong

By David Goodhart

The personal experience bias of social media has also seeped back into more traditional forms of media. The stiff, but authoritative, news programmes of my youth have given way to news that is much more focused on emotion and human interest, something all too evident at the height of the pandemic.

And our schools are not immune either. I was recently invited to speak about the Black Lives Matter movement to the sixth form of a girls’ private school in north London. I made what I think of as the liberal case for scepticism about two big assumptions associated with BLM, first that little has changed for black people in the last 40 years and second that claiming all white people are privileged by their race is a helpful way to promote race equality.

I cited lots of facts about the advance of black people and other minorities in education and employment, including into elite professional jobs — minority Brits now have higher representation in the top social class than white ones. I pointed to the private school itself — about half-white, half-Asian — as evidence of Britain’s relative openness. This did not go down well.

Afterwards a group of girls came up to me and told me about their experiences of racism in everyday life. It is true that the kind of micro-aggressions they were talking about are hard to capture or quantify in objective data. And for them, their bad experiences swamped my statistics of success and they felt by giving priority to those aggregate facts I was showing insufficient respect to their individual plights.

For someone like me, with privilege and power, to be challenged on these issues is obviously perfectly healthy, and if it makes me feel uncomfortable well that’s my own little First World problem. But too much subjectivism is also contributing to a less mature political conversation. Just as cleaving too exclusively to “the data” can produce a sort of blindness about human emotion (remember the Remain campaign’s focus on a dry cost-benefit analysis?), so, allowing your own personal experience to loom too large leads to a sort of equal and opposite blinkeredness, maybe excusable in 17-year-old students.

By chance I had an appointment with my mixed-race physiotherapist the same day as my sixth form talk. It turns out he is involved with a small group called the Cultural Health Club who are trying to make their profession more diversity-friendly. I asked what the problem was, and he said that physiotherapy was very white and middle class. I replied that this is a majority white middle-class country so that is hardly a surprise. No, he said, but did I realise that only 3% of physios were black? I did not realise that, but did he realise that according to the census only just over 3% of the UK population is black (meaning of black Caribbean or black African heritage). No, he had not realised that.

Suggested reading

Facts vs feelings in the BLM debate

By David Goodhart

He took my point in his stride and asked me to send the relevant statistics. He lives in a majority-minority part of London where it is easy to assume that the black population of the country is much higher than it actually is. I use this example not to challenge or belittle his reality — he told me of a horrible experience of being rejected by a patient because of his race — but to suggest that in democratic argument subjective experience needs to be combined with some knowledge of the bigger picture.

That ought to include knowledge of the basic facts of UK demography and perhaps also of the huge range in minority outcomes and experiences and, indeed, of views. A recent YouGov poll found ethnic minority Brits split down the middle on whether race has had an impact on their ability to succeed.

So, we all see the world somewhat differently but there are also shared perceptions that apply to particular groups, though even they tend not to be homogeneous as we have just seen.

And the subjective individual experience of someone does not necessarily tell us much about the average experience of someone from that group. To take a trivial personal example, I’m unusually tall and that means that I experience the world somewhat differently from a man of average height. But the fact that I’m prone to knock my head on doorways doesn’t mean the country as a whole needs to adjust the height of the typical doorway.

(I do not imply by that example — as some critics suggested when I used it in a BBC Radio Four essay — that we should defund support for better disabled access!)

To try to understand the experiences of others, to walk in others’ shoes, is clearly desirable. And this applies especially to those whose experiences are untypical and a source of pain and suffering.

Some untypical experiences require public policy responses, others do not, obviously. We can leave those doorways that I have to stoop to get through where they are. Yet where does all this leave the wider argument?

Maybe one should not think of the subjective-objective as on a spectrum from personal truth to aggregate truth with the latter a higher form of truth than the former. Rather they exist on different planes, to some extent incommensurate. They both tell us different things about human experience and are both valuable in different contexts.

Meanwhile, the world is still coming to terms with the radical upending of our public information and communication systems. Elites have lost a lot of narrative control, to no one in particular. And the space for the objective stuff has been diminished, partly replaced by personal experience and emotion. That is not all bad but it seems to be making it harder to come to democratic compromises. And if a growing number of us come to believe that individual experience and perception is the primary truth then it just becomes your truth versus mine and we are all, like Fleishman, truly in trouble.

This is an edited version of an essay for BBC Radio 4’s  ‘A Point of View‘

My own new book, Head, Hand, Heart, shares some of this critique, but my complaint is more that the type of merit that the modern meritocracy favours has been too narrowly focused on Head/cognitive ability. In order to shift more prestige and reward to the relatively neglected Hand and Heart aptitudes, we may, paradoxically, require more meritocracy in those spheres.

And while all of these books critique the principle, none of them really answers the question: if it is not merit that determines the allocation of reward and status, then what does?

Most mainstream politicians in developed democracies remain firmly wedded to the idea of meritocracy. It seems, after all, to combine fairness — rewarding people according to their abilities, not their family connections — and efficiency — getting the right people into the appropriate top jobs for the benefit of society as a whole. Moreover, it is easy and objective to measure through exams and related tests, or at least appears to be so.

Partly for those reasons, it was the moderate Left that first took up the banner of meritocracy and equality of opportunity in the 1980s and 1990s. It challenged undeserved privilege while avoiding the unattainable, and unpopular, goal of socialist transformation and equality of outcome and provided a story for the moderate Left at a time when it was conceding much of the economic argument to the Right. Meritocracy, it might be said, was a substitute for socialism when the latter seemed unviable.

Further reading

The war on social mobility

By James Kirkup

Thatcherites didn’t talk about meritocracy so much but practised it, including in the Tory party itself where the estate agents were taking over from the grandees with estates. By the Major years, and even more for Cameron modernisers, meritocracy and equality of opportunity had become part of political common sense for Tories too. A new political consensus had been born.

Much of the intellectual Left, including in the UK, has now discarded the meritocracy banner. It is not hard to see why. It has been in the ascendancy as a political idea at a time when income inequality, especially in the US, has been reaching grotesque levels and social mobility seems to have slowed or even stalled. Meritocracy, by allowing a few people from disadvantaged homes to climb the ladder, stands accused of providing a fig leaf of legitimacy to old and new unfairnesses.

In the US, of those born in the lowest 20% of the income spectrum, only 5% make it to the top 20%. Meanwhile, more students from families in the top 1% of the income spectrum attend Ivy League universities than students from the whole of the bottom 50%. It is a similar story in the UK with those from the richest 20% of families seven times more likely to attend a Russell Group university than those from the bottom 40%.

Moreover, our experience with partial meritocracies has focused attention on just how hard it is to establish meaningful ones. In a free society that allows parents to pass on advantage to their children they will do so, and even without the extra leg-up of private education that will often be decisive in shaping life chances. As Polly Mackenzie puts it: “There are endless debates about whether ability comes from our genes, or the environment in which we are raised. It doesn’t matter… My parents gave me my genes and they gave me my childhood.”

So meritocracy can quickly ossify into a kind of oligarchy. Even if you don’t mind the tyranny of the talented, just wait, it will become the tyranny of the talented’s children, as American philosopher Tim Sommers pithily puts it.

The apparent impossibly of anything but a partial and flawed meritocracy has switched attention to the undesirability of the very principle itself. Much of the recent critique draws on the work of the pioneer meritocracy sceptic Michael Young, a socialist and one of the authors of the 1945 Labour manifesto. Young did not like meritocracy partly for simple egalitarian reasons: he did not like any inequality of reward and status whether based on merit or inheritance or anything else.

Further reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

Michael Sandel is not a socialist but his book The Tyranny of Merit shares Young’s dismay at the idea that where we stand in the social pecking order is fair because it is merited. This can create despair among the losers, especially in modern secular societies which have eroded traditional meaning-generating social roles and religious consolation. And it can create hubris among the winners who believe their high status is deserved, ignoring both the luck and the social infrastructure that underpins their success.

Michael Young’s son Toby (who was a pupil of Sandel’s in his youth) takes a different view. “I like meritocracy for the same reason that my father disapproved of it: because it helps to secure peoples’ consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government. I say this not as someone fond of inequality but as someone who believes limited government is preferable to a large coercive state.” Meritocracy does this by helping to create wealthy, dynamic societies; by allocating reward in a way that at least seems fairer than the alternatives; and by creating opportunities for some of those born on the wrong side of the tracks.

We meritocracy sceptics have to acknowledge that Young junior is still winning this argument, the meritocracy critique remains more persuasive in the seminar room than in the cauldron of modern politics. When I say to people that turning society into a competition that the most able win and the majority lose is a recipe for creating populist resentment, most people readily agree. Most people also accept the general egalitarian/Christian sense that all humans are of equal moral worth which ultimately underpins the meritocratic critique.

But these vague sentiments do not translate into practical policy ideas beyond the familiar notion that we should tax the rich, push minimum wages as high as possible and respect essential workers, even if low skilled, as we did in the early days of the pandemic.

The issue is this: there will always be hierarchies of competence and ability and those will tend to generate related hierarchies of both status and income. We can (and do) mitigate the latter but it is much harder to do something about the former. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has eloquently put it: “The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur.”

It is not in the gift of politicians to control the distribution of status, beyond some nudging at the margins, and when they have tried to do so and claimed to be implementing Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” it has not turned out well.

Further reading

Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

Moreover, nobody, not even Michael Young, really objects to the principle of meritocratic selection for jobs, particularly the most important ones. We want our best nuclear physicists to be in charge of our nuclear research programme; it is not something that can be chosen by lottery. And who wants to be operated on by a surgeon who failed their exams? So, the puzzled voter might ask, “you want meritocracy for jobs, but you don’t want a meritocratic society, how does that work?”.

It is a subtle distinction but a real one, somewhat akin to Lionel Jospin’s wanting a market economy but not a market society. And the key word is want. The minimum that meritocracy critics require is an acknowledgement of what Sandel calls the “dark side” of meritocracy, that it is a pragmatic labour market principle not an ideal for the good society. The reward to merit should be balanced by other principles such as the equal moral worth of all citizens and an awareness of the fact that merit is generated by society, through family, education and so on, as well as by the individual. (Listen to Yascha Mounk’s excellent interview with Sandel on his The Good Fight podcast.)

This, however, does not produce an especially distinctive politics for meritocracy critics, beyond a mild form of social democracy. My own approach in Head, Hand, Heart offers an alternative with more traction. I argue that the problem is not so much meritocracy itself, though the principle deserves a proper scepticism, but rather the rise and rise of the cognitive meritocracy in recent decades. This has over-promoted one form of human aptitude. The political task is to try to spread some of the reward and status hoarded by the cognitively blessed to those with aptitudes related to Hand (technical and craft) and Heart (caring and emotional intelligence). It is a call for a wider understanding of what constitutes merit and indeed skill.

The cognitive takeover of the past 40 years has been actively promoted by public policy and has now become dysfunctional. It has created too narrow a definition of a successful life: do well at school, go to a good university and into a decent professional job. It has also, with the expansion of higher education driven forward by Tony Blair, created a single ladder up to safety and success through the modern university. There used to be many more little ladders up and more promotion from below in big organisations, now around 40% of jobs are graduate-only.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Peter Franklyn

So, the answer is not so much to suppress the idea of meritocracy — which remains the worst system for allocating reward apart from all the others — but to spread it more widely. This is easier said than done. Non-cognitive forms of merit in craft or care are often harder to quantify. As Madeleine Bunting points out in her new book Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care the containment of pain and distress is elusive and hard to measure, and care is usually embodied work in a culture dominated by the abstract and analytical.

And we typically apply cognitive criteria even in non-cognitive fields. If you ask an economist why people working in care homes are so poorly paid he or she will say because anyone can do it. But that is just saying that minimal qualifications are required. Anyone who has worked in a hospital or care home, or even visited one, knows that there are good carers, middling ones and poor ones, as in other areas of life. Yet we often lack the meritocratic selection mechanisms for distinguishing and rewarding them.

The ‘spreading rather than suppressing’ approach to meritocracy now has history on its side. For we are reaching Peak Head. The knowledge economy doesn’t need as many knowledge workers as had been assumed, and AI is increasingly coming for the middling and lower cognitive jobs. Education policy, social mobility policy and even economic policy in the UK have all been partly premised on the idea of an ever expanding cognitive-professional class of graduates. But in recent years this has slowed to a crawl: in 2000, the proportion of the workforce in the top two social classes in the UK was 35%, today it is 37%.

Higher education is still pumping out graduates while the graduate premium is less than 10% for the majority of men (once you control for education differences prior to college) and more than one third of graduates are not in graduate jobs more than five years after graduating. This is creating a crisis of expectations which may lie behind both the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn eruptions. Meanwhile there are recruitment crises in nursing, care homes, skilled trades and middling technical functions.

Further reading

Which is worse, work or no work?

By Ian Birrell

Much of the expansion of the cognitive meritocracy was necessary at the time. And it is far better to have a mass graduate elite of one third of the population than the much narrower elite when I went to college. But no thought ever seems to have been given to what I call the 15/50 problem, meaning when 15% of your school peers go to college and you don’t it is not a big deal, when nearly half go and you don’t it is a different matter.

This is not, of course, an argument against the importance of intelligence and knowledge in our society both for individuals and for a post Brexit Britain that must remain a global centre of education, science and innovation. But we have got things out of kilter. The mass knowledge economy jobs are going and the future is likely tilt more towards care, coding and craft. The idea that a majority of people would be taking up prestigious professional jobs requiring analytical intelligence and delivering a sense of purpose and even self-expression, is not going to happen. Most people still regard work as just a means of earning a living and get their sense of meaning and self-expression away from work. This may apply to even more of us in the future.

Nietzsche spotted a long time ago that the idea of democratic equality runs up against the reality of big variations in human ability and that democracy would thus find it hard to escape a plague of mass resentment. It has done pretty well so far, at least since the Second World War. But if mass resentment is not to make a reappearance, people need to feel respected and useful. That in turn requires a better spread of reward and status across those three clusters of aptitude relating to Head, Hand and Heart. Democracy is now demanding it.

Head, Hand, Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century is published by Allen Lane

And the announcement by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, came not a moment too soon. The headlong rush into mass academic higher education, leapfrogging even the US, happened faster in the UK than in most other comparable countries and it seemed to happen on automatic pilot, with remarkably little thought given to the economic or social consequences. The only serious debate we ever had was on tuition fees.

Already about 30% of school leavers were heading to university when Blair made his pledge in 1999, but the accelerated push for 50% (which on some measures was reached last year) has turned out to have very significant unintended consequences, many of them negative.

Consider the following: more than a third of UK graduates are in non-graduate employment more than five years after graduating and the graduate pay premium is shrinking to below 10% for nearly half of male graduates; meanwhile employers are desperately short of people with higher manual and technical skills and there are big shortages in both the skilled trades and the care economy. At the same time, more than a third of all jobs, and most of the good ones, are graduate only, shutting out people without degrees. And in the period when the proportion of graduates in the adult population has risen to 35% (and around 45% among the under-30s) productivity has declined, social mobility has at best flat-lined and cultural divides have grown starker.

More from this author

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

Yet we are so used to thinking of a university education as an automatic good and a passport to a successful life for pretty well anyone that the powerful university lobby still has a powerful grip on the country’s imagination. It is sure to hit back at the new course that the Government is setting as it attempts to re-set the economic and cultural signals away from the classical university to a much wider variety of post-school options.

Jo Johnson the former Tory universities minister complained last week that there was no evidence that sending fewer young people to university “is the route to a more productive economy”. That may be so, but there is no evidence on the other side either (causality in such matters is notoriously difficult to establish) and it is a simple historical fact that the most rapid post-war economic and productivity growth happened when barely 10% of school leavers went to university in the 1960s.

There is an extraordinary amount of magical thinking about the beneficial impact of higher education on productivity, economic growth and social mobility, (the education writer Alison Wolf compares it to the Soviet Union ’s irrational belief in capital goods). In fact, to repeat, all of these things have been stagnating in the years that university enrolments have been roaring ahead and rich countries with very different numbers of graduates can produce very similar growth and productivity numbers.

More graduate teachers and doctors, and other public service professionals, were required with the big expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s. And there was strong demand for graduates when the knowledge economy took off in the 1980s. All of this helped to create today’s more open and democratic mass professional elite. It is also true that the UK saw a productivity surge in the 1980s and 1990s, as graduate numbers were rising, (though that was largely thanks to the Thatcherite elimination of the least productive companies and even sectors).

In more recent decades it has been a very different story. The American economist Robert Gordon, in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, says that innovation has been nose-diving in the era when there has never been more investment in research universities. Productivity has been in particularly sharp decline in those parts of the economy that are graduate-dominated. And some analysis even sees professional bureaucratization stemming from mass higher education as an active drag on productivity.

Moreover, higher education has done nothing to reduce inequality and its expansion in recent decades has clearly widened the value and cultural divides that have contributed to the votes for Brexit and Trump. This is particularly true in the UK which is an international outlier both in the high number that go to residential universities and the lack of a prestigious technical college alternative to university (after the polytechnics were abolished in 1992).

suggested reading

Cambridge University's very modern bigotry

By Douglas Murray

One reason that the rapid expansion of higher education, to half of school leavers, seemed self-evidently desirable to those in the room when the decision was made is that all of them were graduates — a classic case of groupthink.

One man in that room and closely involved in discussions over Labour’s 50% target was David Soskice, the LSE political economist and son of former Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice. When I spoke to him about the target he can remember nobody in government involved in the decision raising any objections. The economy seemed to want more graduates, judging by the (then) graduate income premium, and university was regarded as a ladder of social mobility for those from middle- and lower-income groups.

What I call the 15/50 problem does not seem to have been considered: the idea that when 15% of people in your class or school or town go to university and you don’t, it does not create a ‘left behind’ problem, but when 50% go to university and you don’t it does create such a psychological problem.

And it is absurd that so much higher education spending is focused on those aged 18 to 22. Many of them have acquired useful life experience and grown into young adults away from home for an extended period for the first time. Many have also acquired useful professional skills or pursued intellectual interests for the sheer joy of it. But far too many have learned little of value, and what they have learned they have quickly forgotten, their degree acting primarily as a signal to a future employer that they have the right personal characteristics to enter the bloated cognitive class. It is a ranking system and, in the UK, it is reinforced by the physical and social separation of the residential universities. And the sorting hat of higher education creates a qualification treadmill requiring ever more differentiation, with post-graduate degrees now booming.

Some people argue that more or less everyone should go to something called a university and the colleges should then specialise in different kinds of education and vocational training. Such people point to the fact that around 40% of university courses, and even more in the post-1992 universities, are essentially vocational — whether traditional, high-prestige, vocational courses such as medicine, law and engineering, or newer university degrees such as nursing, quantity surveying or marketing.

suggested reading

Slaying dragons: Britain's world-leading universities

By James Kirkup

Yet the relevant question for the UK is this: is a classical university — with its bias towards academic essay-writing skills, and lecturers who are often researchers first and teachers second — the best place to deliver the kind of higher vocational skills that many individuals want to acquire and that the economy, especially in the UK, so badly needs? Public opinion in the UK clearly does not think so. A survey by the think tank Onward found that 66% of respondents agreed that more people going to university and fewer gaining technical qualifications had been bad for the country overall; 34% said it was beneficial.

Yet the current incentives in the UK, from very tangible financial ones to less tangible cultural ones, focus on three- or four-year fulltime courses for 18–19-year-olds, usually at residential universities which is very expensive both for the country and the individuals concerned and not always an effective use of someone ’s time. And those incentives tend to discourage part-time study, mature students, shorter diploma-type higher vocational courses. Moreover, thanks to the student-demand-led higher education funding system the UK was in the bizarre position, in the 2011–17 period, of increasing university teaching funding in physics by just 6% per student, compared with 27% for business degrees and 34% for sports sciences.

It is not that we are investing too much in education in general, but too much is going on signalling efforts for the higher-level exam-passers and not enough on the vocational, professional and technical skills, and indeed the lifelong learning, that most of the population, and the economy, need to flourish. It is a bit like acquiring a state-of-the-art nuclear weapon while your tanks and artillery decay.

If, thanks to an oversupply of graduates, advertisements for teaching assistants or accounting technicians begin to routinely require a degree, it is common sense for individuals who wish to work in these fields to obtain one. But it would be better for both individuals and society if the arms race could be called off and access to such jobs restored to conscientious school leavers and apprentices, as used to be the case.

suggested reading

Can university survive Covid-19?

By Gerard DeGroot

Moreover, today’s graduates, as Paul Lewis of King’s College, London, argues, tend to have unrealistic expectations of high-status, well-paid jobs and when they are actually employed in the middling technical or junior manager jobs that their non-graduate parents might have done they quickly become dissatisfied. The system is producing the wrong mix of skills, with too many graduates and too few actual technicians and skilled trades jobs especially in construction, health and information technology from coders to web designers. UK employers in 2017 complained that they had trouble filling more than 40% of skilled trades vacancies.

We are suffering an epidemic of square pegs in round holes. And these disappointed graduate expectations may lie behind some of the more extreme campus identity politics and eruptions of political emotion from the Corbyn movement to Black Lives Matter.

It is true that longer, residential courses are popular with students — many are naturally attracted to three years fun and freedom away from parents at age 18/19 — but the high cost (both for the individual and the taxpayer) and disappointing returns is starting to shift attitudes. And if Covid-19 is going to mean a permanent reduction in the flow of international students, whose high fees have helped to subsidise the system in the UK, this middle-class rite of passage may be a luxury the UK can no longer afford. The residential experience can be a useful one in learning how to cooperate and rub along with people from different backgrounds but there must be other ways of providing that experience through residential apprenticeships or civic volunteering schemes.

The obvious point is that university does not produce the best outcomes for everyone. It makes no sense for many young people, from all social classes, who do not flourish in the rigorous academic environment that a university should be (but increasingly is not). And it makes even less sense for an economy that requires a range of skills and aptitudes many of which are better acquired in workplaces or other kinds of post-school educational institution.

And it is surely just self-defeating to assume that the answer to our growing education-based status (and income) divides is to send even more people to university. People from all backgrounds, especially less privileged ones, should be encouraged to go to elite universities if they have the aptitude for it. But in Germany it is perfectly normal for middle class children to do an apprenticeship or go to a technical college. And congratulations to Gavin Williamson for declaring he would be very happy if one of his children were to take a non-university path after school.

In my observation too much of the case for mass higher education is based on an indiscriminate spirit of not wanting to kick away the ladder on the part of people who have had a valuable university experience themselves. It is a decent instinct but it also contains within it a kind of narcissism that says: be like me, pass exams at school, go to a Russell Group university and enjoy a successful professional career.

More from this author

Test article

By David Goodhart

But there are strict limits on the number of people who can do that, even if everyone in the society had exactly the same level of cognitive ability. There is also a strict limit on the number of higher professional jobs. Indeed, it turns out that the knowledge economy doesn’t need so many knowledge workers after all; AI is now coming for the middling cognitive jobs that university expansion was designed to train people for.

And isn’t it better to widen the sources of achievement and try to raise the status of ‘not university’ rather than send as many people as possible to university, and in the process raise expectations of professional success that in many cases are likely to be disappointed, while starving the economy of the middling, technical skills it needs?

Tony Blair’s target has turned out to be bad economics, bad politics, and even bad for academic standards, as the value of a first class degree or 2:1 has plummeted.

There is no need for the Government to actually close universities. But thanks to the Covid crisis and an imminent demographic bulge, which would require another 20 or 30 universities to keep to the current proportion of undergraduates, it can encourage university mergers and just allow the proportion of school leavers going to university to slip back down to 30 or 35%, roughly the level when the Blair pledge was made.

Meanwhile if the Government gets its reforms right many more school leavers will find more satisfying, and more economically relevant, alternative forms of non-academic post-school education.

Many people of goodwill, including many white people, have joined marches in the UK. Young friends of mine who have been on the marches tell me I should tread carefully writing about the issue because I cannot know what it feels like to be black in Britain.

That is true. Yet if we are going to have an honest conversation about the condition of the black minority, then we should consider facts as well as feelings.

The most important fact is that there is no single black minority. Over recent decades some ethnic minority groups have been climbing the ladder faster than others. That divergence story can now be told about Britain’s black minority itself, which in recent decades has generally experienced less good outcomes than most other big UK minorities.

Suggested reading

Black America can't take it any more

By Christopher Rhodes

The UK doesn’t yet have a US-style black middle class, but we are getting there. More than 35% of British-Caribbean men are now in the top two social classes (out of seven) up from just 11% in the 1990s, British-African men lag behind at 28%. On average poverty is higher and accumulated wealth a lot lower for black people, but pay is now only a bit below average.

Black children now slightly outperform whites in the Government’s Progress 8 school measures. Young black people are more likely to go to university than whites, 41% to 31%, albeit only 9% go to elite Russell Group universities compared to 12% of whites. Black people are well represented at the top in sport, music the arts, and the public sector, while under-represented in business and academia.

So far, so relatively good, especially given that most (not all) of Britain’s 1.8m black people trace their roots back a few generations to mainly poor, and poorly educated, immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

There is, however, a substantial minority of the black population stuck to the bottom of British society, (14% of black people live in households with persistent low income compared with 8% of whites). They are likely to live in public housing in inner city London or other big cities. Their lives are shorter, more violent, poorer and less healthy than other black people and almost all other groups in Britain. It is their pain, and anger, that is easily connected to a narrative of slavery and humiliation, to historic white stereotypes of inferiority, as well as to more recent stories of police brutality.

Racial disadvantage is a reality but a complex one. It affects some groups more than others, and often overlaps with social class disadvantage. And the extent to which it is caused by white people is moot, given the apparent decline in racial prejudice of recent decades. It is possible to have racial inequality without a society full of racists. Less than 1% of the population admit to hard racist attitudes, though around a quarter admit to some prejudice, and back in 2006 only 1.3% of 35-54 year old whites objected strongly to having a black boss. The British Social Attitudes survey has not asked the question since but if previous trends had continued, and even allowing for some flattening out of the decline, that figure would now be close to zero.

Suggested reading

How racist is Britain?

By Tom Chivers

There is no widely agreed definition of racism but prejudice clearly operates on a wide spectrum and manifests itself in many different ways. Even allowing for the fact that racism is a central taboo of British society, and that people therefore may not give honest answers in surveys, the evidence says it has been declining in recent decades. Yet many people on the anti-racist Left maintain that it has merely become less visible, a view with considerable support in parts of the establishment.

I have taken an interest in race issues for 15 years (seven years ago I published a book partly on the subject, The British Dream) and I know that the data, with one or two important caveats, tells a generally positive story of minority, including black, advance. (An enduring image for me of the Covid-19 crisis and British openness is Chancellor Rishi Sunak talking to BBC economics editor Faisal Islam about an NHS in which 35% of consultants are British Asians.) I also listen to a range of black and Asian voices, not just those BLM sympathisers who have dominated the airwaves in the past fortnight.

Everybody selects facts to suit — and make — their case, but we are currently seeing an epidemic of politicised selection (including in a Times editorial on Saturday on black advancement that uncritically recycled activist claims about disparities).

There is also the context of historical disadvantage versus current disadvantage. Black Caribbean households have on average just one third the assets of white households, and only one third of all black people own their own home compared to two-thirds of whites. But you would expect some disparity, given a general starting point a few generations back of a poor newcomer without assets or much education, and it is noticeable that 40% of Caribbeans now own their own home compared with just 20% of Africans who have been here a shorter time.

Suggested reading

Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

When BLM supporters use evidence to support their arguments for systemic racism it usually runs like this: take the black population in the UK of 3% and then point to big over-representation in bad things (prison population, stop and search, deaths in custody, being sectioned, unemployment) and under-representation in good things (top professions, Oxbridge, football management, Parliament, corporate boardrooms).

This is statistically naive. The over-representation of black people in prison, at 12% of the total, should not be looked at in relation to the total black population but rather to those involved in serious crime: in recent years black people accounted for around 20% of robbery convictions and 15% of murder convictions. Apparent disproportionality also falls away for stop and search (when you focus on who is on the streets in the places it happens), deaths in custody and being sectioned, but not for higher rates of unemployment (which was at least moving in the right direction prior to the crisis).

Suggested reading

What Antifa and the alt-Right have in common

By Mary Harrington

Under-representation in good things is a more mixed picture. There are some real issues here and Britain needs to do better, especially in business (just 0.9% of the top 20 executives in FTSE 100 companies are black). Indeed, one source of the alienation of some black BLM protesters may be frustration that after getting decent degrees they are not achieving the high-status employment they expected. The same is true of a lot of young whites too, sometimes seen as the driver behind Corbynism.

Looked at in this light, the anger of the black BLM activists might be seen, in part, as the growing pains of the expanding black middle class. And both anecdotal and labour market evidence does suggest that recruitment and promotion is harder for young professional black people than white ones.

Stereotypes and unconscious biases do linger on, possibly reinforced by AI. They persist even in the mainly progressive world of education. A friend of mine who teaches at an inner-city school in London, with mainly minority pupils, says he notices that white teachers get promoted faster than black ones. In some cases, he says, that is clearly because the whites deserve it, in other cases he is not so sure. But it is also worth remembering that stereotypes change when the social reality changes; in my lifetime, the dominant stereotype for both Irish and Indian people has been completely transformed.

Suggested reading

Should we trust AI to hire and fire?

By Tom Chivers

Nearly 40 years ago in Brixton mainly working class British Caribbean young men rioted over openly racist policing, today we have black graduates (a mix of British Caribbean and British African) angry over unconscious bias and slower promotion. That surely represents some kind of progress.

And happily the black elite is now large enough to accommodate real intellectual variety. In the recent row over the review of ethnic minority Covid-19 deaths the mainstream black view, that they must be caused by poverty and racism, was challenged by leading black figures like Trevor Phillips and Tony Sewell who argued that we should consider all evidence, including the role of conditions that especially afflict minorities such as diabetes, and follow where it leads.

Suggested reading

Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Sewell featured in an issue of Prospect magazine I edited in 2010 called Rethinking Race. As did Munira Mirza, now head of the No10 policy unit, who summed up part of the rethink, saying: “Of course, racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.”

To repeat, none of these people say there is no black racism here. But they would, I think, challenge the BLM story in three main ways. First, if you want to help disadvantaged black people focus on practical solutions to inner city problems: more investment in anti-knife crime units; more black police officers (just 1% at present); greater efforts to deal with obesity levels and chronic bad health; a national volunteering scheme for inner-city school mentors. Second, do not ignore the self-inflicted wounds of violent crime, fatherless families, anti-educational “acting white” culture. Third, reject victim culture which can discourage young blacks from aiming higher, using racism as an excuse for any setback.

Shaun Bailey, the black Tory London mayoral candidate, likes to talk about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national team. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support. But a worrying aspect of recent events is the gulf between white elite reaction to BLM and the white majority who are likely to be looking on with some bemusement.

Consider this routine statement of anti-racist political activism: “We must be clear in the workplace that racism and inequality are enemies we must keep fighting; that racism takes many forms; that privilege takes many forms. It’s why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important. And that it’s not enough to be passively anti-racist; we must take a stand, and we must take action.” And then consider the fact that it was written a week ago by Richard Heaton, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Justice. A more establishment position is hard to imagine. BLM is a broad movement without much by way of programme or hierarchy but to the extent that it has a manifesto it calls for the de-funding of the police and its retreat from black communities (the opposite of what most of those communities want).

Elite reaction in the media was also captured by Andrew Marr on his Sunday programme asking black British historian David Olusoga to tell him: “What should white people be doing to change our lives… to make this a better country for black people.” Olusoga didn’t really have an answer but talked about the subtle ways that black people are psychologically damaged by systemic racism, in language for example.

Marr’s instinct is, of course, a perfectly proper one but it reinforces the general assumption that whites are the central problem — which ends up placing too much focus on the white conscience, with even some suggestion of white people asking for absolution from black people.

I worry that these debates are being heard very differently in white middle England. White privilege tends to be a concern of privileged whites. As Barack Obama put it: “Most working-class and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.”

Suggested reading

The Democrats' patchy record on race

By Justin Webb

And in the UK, BLM’s attempt to unilaterally rearrange the national heritage is a potential recruiting sergeant to the normally minuscule far-right. More worrying is the danger that it will drive an even bigger wedge between a progressive establishment, happy to embrace much of the BLM perspective, and the bulk of non-privileged, non-guilty, whites, who are not taking the hiring or promotion decisions that might disadvantage black people, and resent being labelled as racists. At a time when we should be trying to make it more, not less, comfortable to talk about race, they are likely to be more on their guard on this issue, and in the presence of black individuals they do not know.

Olusoga says we should listen to young black British BLM marchers when they say they see echoes of George Floyd’s experience in their own lives. But, to put it politely, there is an intense subjectivism here. About 1,000 people are killed every year by the US police, one quarter black. Three people in the UK were killed by the police in 2018 and none of them were black. Over the last 10 years 163 people have died in or following police custody, 13 were black. But taking the category of all those who have been arrested a white person is more likely to die in custody.

Black people in the US are closer in time to a truly brutal official racism and remain far more segregated. In the UK, nearly half of Caribbean men partner with white women and the mixed-race ethnic group is the fastest growing, a living symbol of integration.

False or exaggerated claims of victimhood are all too easy to make in the current environment but they are damaging to the cause of both equality and rational argument. And the whole debate is disfigured by disproportionality. The gravitational force of ideology focuses the attention of young radicals on a small problem, at least in the UK, of police harassment, while ignoring some far larger problems in the black community.

How does attacking white people for unintended micro-aggressions help a middle-aged black woman living in the inner city? She belongs to probably the unhappiest group in Britain. The father of her children is statistically likely to be absent, she lives in fear that violence will devour her son, she commutes a long distance to a low-paid job, she has more than a 50% chance of suffering from high blood pressure and obesity. When BLM comes up with some solutions to her problems the country should listen carefully.

Peoples’ feelings and perceptions are important, but they are just one piece of evidence in this jigsaw. And if we accept that the perceptions of young black BLM supporters is the only truth that matters then it just becomes my tribe versus your tribe and we are truly lost.

The pandemic also illuminates a wider retreat from full-on free trade that has been gaining in support and legitimacy over recent years—everywhere, that is, apart from in the economics profession. Democratic politics and national social contracts are starting to assert themselves against the laws of comparative advantage — which in any case turn out not to be quite as benign as the economics professors claim. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I heard a very senior Tory say that he was, until recently, an orthodox free trader/free marketeer but now regarded himself as an economic nationalist.

He is not alone. World trade fell last year by 0.4%. There has been no multilateral trade agreement since 1993. Donald Trump wants to bring back some of the US supply chain from China. And this is not a Trumpian eccentricity, most of the US political class is behind him on this, acknowledging that allowing China entry to the global market economy in the belief that it would transform politically (and become less mercantilist economically) is a gamble that failed. There has been technological decoupling too, the world will not end up on single global platforms.

Suggested reading

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

The ascent of climate change anxieties up domestic and international agendas is also making life uncomfortable for unfettered free trade, encouraging a bias towards localism, reduced travel and a degree of self-sufficiency. China’s air quality has improved dramatically in the past few weeks as a result of measures to contain the coronavirus. And more generically, Greta is asking whether you really need strawberries in March.

The truth is that the neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold. Free trade, as Keynes pointed out, only works if the people displaced from good jobs by imports get equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. The election of Donald Trump is one kind of proof that this has not been happening.

Hold on, say the free traders, of course there will be downward pressure on wages and job losses in the short run but, in the long run, the additional purchasing power we acquire from cheaper imports means we can buy other goods and services that will create equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, they say, when given the choice between protecting the Mid-West manufacturing plant and enjoying good quality, cheaper stuff in Walmart, people have voted with their wallets for the cheaper stuff.

But they have not been given a proper choice. Of course people would always prefer cheaper goods, but not at any price. If the choice was between slightly more expensive goods and services, and the preservation, or more gradual decline, of a certain agricultural or industrial way of life, they might well support such a deal. Indeed, they do so in the EU through the Common Agricultural Policy.

Suggested reading

Forget the free-trade agreements – here's how Brexit Britain can work with China

By Bruno Macaes

People are well aware that they are both producers and consumers. The end of production is not just consumption, as Adam Smith asserted, it is also about what sort of life you might have as a producer. This is one of those places where economics reveals its blindspot for culture and human beings in the round.

According to Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, most trade doesn’t follow any discernible pattern of comparative advantage, and Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin has shown that, for countries in North America and Western Europe, joining free trade agreements has caused slower — not faster — growth in recent decades. Unlike comparative advantage in natural resources, which is better described as absolute advantage, comparative advantage in manufacturing systems is usually quite marginal.

Much of the comparative advantage of recent decades has been achieved by simply taking advantage of lower labour costs in poorer countries. Apple makes iPhones in China, which does benefit US consumers, and to some extent Chinese workers, but the main beneficiaries are probably Apple executives and shareholders. Bringing some of that production back to the US, even at the cost of slightly higher prices, would not, I suspect, be unpopular.

The theory that free trade engenders a permanent peace has long ago been exposed as an empty dream, which is why national security and the threat of war (and pandemics) continue to provide justification for some degree of national protection. In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

Nobody sensible is arguing for self-sufficiency or anything like it, though it might be a good idea to retain at least some national capacity in certain strategic areas like steel or nuclear power plants or, indeed, vaccine manufacture. And, after all, isn’t the logic of comparative advantage to produce specialist monocultures in a world that values diversity in all things.

But there are some economists and political economists such as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Barry Eichengreen and Robert Skidelsky who are arguing, persuasively, that we need more democratic caveats to free trade. Rodrik argues that where there is a national consensus about preserving some aspect of an economy or culture, for example French restrictions on Hollywood film imports, these should be allowed and not attract sanctions from international trade regulators.

A UK government that is serious about regional and industrial policy, and shifting more high value economic activity towards the North, is implicitly protectionist. It is not going to promote high-tech export industries in Hartlepool and then allow them to be wiped out by imports. It will protect with either subsidies or tariffs. It is true that free trade theory does allow some such protection under the title ‘infant industry protection’, which is far preferable to senile industry protection, but EU state aid policy is not friendly to either.

Suggested reading

How coronavirus plays into Trump's hands

By Giles Fraser

The unlikely bedfellows of populism, environmentalism and technology are all pointing in the same direction — the reshoring of some forms of production, a bit more self-sufficiency, more teleconferencing with people in other countries rather than immigration, all in all a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of recent decades.

Free traders will, not unreasonably, point to the costs. It could mean a bit less growth, though neither the populists nor the greens will necessarily object. Global supply chains are, indeed, a force for peace and breaking them up could bring back inflationary pressures. It could also mean that the dramatic fall in poverty in poorer countries will slow or stop. So why not try to mitigate the costs of free trade better? Subsidise the losers more intelligently? Or, the free trade sceptic might reply, why not prevent there being so many losers in the first place?

As Barry Eichengreen says, the problem with the global economy is not a lack of openness, but a sense that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces”. And as Hans Kundnani put it in last week’s Observer: “it is time the UK Government adjusted its rhetoric and stopped its paeans of praise to free trade”. Part of the point of Brexit is to put politics before economics, democratic legitimacy before economic growth.

Of course, we still want lots of trade and sustainable growth but at less cost to other things that people hold dear. A new rhetoric is needed that combines an appropriate level of openness with a sense of national control. An economic nationalism that most liberals can feel comfortable with.

David Goodhart works at Policy Exchange, and is the author of The Road to Somewhere: The new Tribes Shaping British Politics.

Since he took control of the Greens in 2018, they have consolidated themselves as the main party of the centre-Left — and political home of the educated, professional class – making them the most likely coalition partner for the centre-right CDU/CSU in 2021. It is quite conceivable, if the Greens were to end up as the largest party after those federal elections, that Habeck—or even his co-leader Annalena Baerbock — could wear the German Chancellor’s crown

He certainly had an adoring audience of elite young Germans at the LSE, where I saw him speaking last week. The handsome 50-year-old father of four from the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein was a writer and translator (including the poems of Roger McGough and Ted Hughes) before becoming a politician in his late 30s. He has the same relaxed, articulate anti-establishment/establishment manner of a Blair or Macron. You can understand his appeal.

But how come a conservative-green alliance now seems such an uncontroversial possibility in Europe’s most important country? And what problems will such an alliance face in the future?

The new potential alliance is partly a matter of the contingencies of German politics — the further big strides to the centre taken by the Greens in recent years, and the implosion of the Social Democrats as the main party of the centre-Left.

But there is a deeper logic, too, that suggests it might be a historical accident that the green movement in general has hitherto ended up so definitively on the Left. After all, conservative and conservation share the same Latin root, con servare, meaning to protect from loss or harm. And there are many overlaps in the worldview of greens and conservatives: the belief that local is best, small is beautiful, a respect for limits, a belief in what is natural and harmonious, an interest in intergenerational continuity.

Suggested reading

Who will ride the Green wave?

By Peter Franklin

There has also been a kind of policy convergence. On the one hand, environmental priorities have gone mainstream — whether de-carbonising the economy or, in Germany, closing the nuclear industry —and on the other hand, market mechanisms have become an increasingly popular means to green ends.

The Green party itself has certainly travelled a long way since its formation as a radical anti-nuclear, anti-Nato, alternative life-style movement in the early 1980s. It entered the Bundestag with 5.7% of the vote in 1983, but found itself out of step with the rest of the country in the reunification period (its slogan was “Everyone is talking about Germany, we are talking about the weather!”).

It bounced back later in the 1990s, and joined the red-green coalition government of Gerhard Schroder in 1998 (though only on 6.7% of the vote) with Joschka Fischer becoming foreign minister. It has been out of national government since 2005, but has been in 11 out of 16 state-level governments and has seen its support creep up as the Social Democrats have crumbled, hitting a high note of 20% in the 2019 European elections and even outstripping the governing CDU-CSU in some recent opinion polls.

Meanwhile the party, as symbolised by Habeck, has become completely salonfähig (meaning socially acceptable). It is friendly to business, happy with Nato membership and comfortable with the compromises of power. When Habeck and Annalena Baerbock were elected on a joint ticket in 2018, they were embraced, largely uncritically, by almost all of the German media.

This is partly because German politicians have been unusually bland and dull in recent years. There was a thirst for something new —remember how this country fell for Nick Clegg not that long ago? The two Greens are attractive and articulate. Also, their election was the final decisive victory for the moderate wing of a party that has traditionally been divided between “realos” and “fundis”.

At the LSE, Habeck delivered a mish-mash of mainly familiar centre-Left ideas with some nice phrases, for example about how populists offer “not competence but intimacy”, and a welcome acknowledgement, from a progressive politician, of the importance of emotions in politics, albeit in a Hegelian frame  — “recognition is the driver of human history”.

He repeated a story he likes to tell about talking to workers in the dirty, declining industries in the old east Germany (where the Greens do not poll strongly) and prefacing his remarks to them like this: “Before we talk about what comes next, I am going to say thank you to you and your parents for dedicating your life and health to building the old industrial heart of this country.”

Suggested reading

If only we could be more like Bavaria

By David Goodhart

He sees that recognition, respect and status are as much the currency of society, and therefore politics, as money. And he also acknowledges that it is the neglect of these psychological factors in our politics that has been such a blessing for populist parties, who do not make the same mistake.

Fleetingly, it occurred to me as I listened that perhaps there was something to the incongruous idea that not just greens and conservatives but greens and populists are potential bedfellows. Both of them favour attachment to place and want to slow down the machine of liberal modernity. And consider what is happening in Vienna: Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz who heads the conservative-green alliance there talks about illegal immigration and climate change being equal threats to the Austrian way of life.

But this kind of rhetorical/policy combination is not going to happen in Germany, which Habeck’s speech really confirmed. Green party members, after all, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, are more highly educated, and sometimes more affluent, than members of most other parties, and especially populist parties whose members are usually at the bottom of both leagues.

Green party members and voters tend to flourish in the knowledge economy and post-industrial society. They mainly live in mobile metropolitan centres, favour openness, are comfortable with social and ethnic fluidity/uncomfortable with authority and tradition, lack strong group or national attachments and worry about discrimination and equalities of many kinds. Their green politics tends to be abstract and top-down and altruistic — a calling to save the planet. Populist party members and voters are almost exactly the opposite on all scores.

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

Habeck wants a politics of recognition in name only. He may like to flatter the people of east Germany with stories of their heroism but he then tramples all over their political intuitions. “It is simply an illusion that things used to be better,” he said to the LSE audience. No doubt an illusion to the young men, and especially women, in the audience en route to upper professional jobs in government, business or NGOs. But according to countless surveys many people in the declining regions and classes of Europe very strongly believe that the past was better than the present for them.

He also likes to play the old Tony Blair tune that Left-Right has been replaced by open-closed. But has Habeck ever met anyone who wants to live in a closed society? I doubt it.

Yet there are plenty of people, no doubt some of them tempted to vote for Germany’s main populist party the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), who think that recent forms of openness have not benefited them as much as those who vote for Habeck’s Green party, many of whom have the option of frictionless professional work or study abroad under EU free movement rules.

Like mainstream German politicians of all stripes, his answer to almost all political problems is “more Europe”. He also reproduced the standard cognitive dissonance on this issue in his speech by calling at one moment for more democracy and bringing politics closer to people while a few moments later calling for the European Commission to become a European government, for more majority voting in the EU and for vast areas of policy to be handed over to only very indirectly accountable technocrats.

One area where he does break with the current German orthodoxy is on ending the anti-Keynesian strict limits on budget deficits both in Germany and the EU, but even that has become something of a new consensus in recent months.

In all other respects, he seems to be making the Green party safe for the average liberal-minded CDU voter. Reaching out to the more socially conservative sections of German society is not on the cards. Habeck rejects the old German idea of the Volkspartei a party that represents all sections of society, even if it may be grounded in one class or another. In its place, he wants an alliance party of different sections of society and value groups. Populists are not welcome. And Habeck is one of the loudest voices wanting to exclude the AfD from the political mainstream, even though they have almost 100 seats in the Bundestag.

Suggested reading

The far-Right's appeal to resentful Germans

By James Bloodworth

Green policy on the environment seems to be mainly a somewhat more radical version of existing German government policy. Though Habeck did speak with great warmth about the Fridays for Future (Extinction Rebellion) movement, and rather chillingly warned of the great dangers ahead if they do not get their way through democratic channels.

How well will this go down with ordinary Germans? Much of the policy, on reducing car use for example, will be a lot more comfortable for affluent Green voters in big cities with efficient public transport, or those able to afford electric cars, than for people in smaller towns and suburbs.

It is hard to see a Gilets Jaunes type movement in Germany coalescing around an increase in petrol taxes. Ordinary Germans worry about climate change too, but if they find that much of the cost of adaptation is falling on them, the love affair with the new Greens could quickly hit a barrier.

By the end of next year, Robert Habeck is highly likely to be grappling with these conservative-green dilemmas as, at the very least, a cabinet minister in Europe’s most powerful country. The progressive establishment in Germany has evidently found a new voice, as his performance at the LSE proved, but one without any discernible new ideas and with the same old intellectual evasions and silences.

Nor is it clear that the Green party as a whole has the personnel or experience to take the next step up to becoming the dominant party, rather than the junior one, in a German coalition. The Green co-leaders have had a long honeymoon but the closer the election looms, the more critical scrutiny they will draw. Despite the rock star appeal of Habeck, it remains to be seen how attractive his party will seem to middle-ground Germans.

I guess if I were still a member of the Labour Party (which I was technically until 31 December 2019, having finally got round to cancelling my annual direct debit earlier in the year), I would vote for Lisa Nandy as the next leader. Judging by her UnHerd interview from last summer, she is vaguely communitarian in outlook and does not think social conservatism is a disease (for which she has been criticised by the Twitter Left).

But, oh dear. Thank goodness I no longer have a dog in that fight. For much of the rest of the interview she displays the familiar intellectual and moral confusion of much of the modern left. Nandy in two respects is almost indistinguishable from your average Momentum activist.

First, the inability to see your political opponents as they are, not as your hateful, polarising caricature paints them. Nandy, in the UnHerd interview, accuses Dominic Cummings of being hostile to minority rights. Admittedly she does this via accusing him of wanting to smash liberal democracy (“which protects the rights of minorities”) and being “completely at odds” with the liberal democratic settlement. Cummings is evidently a radical who thinks Britain could work a lot better than it does but to paint him as an angry authoritarian happily stamping on minority rights is just laughable.

Second, Nandy indulges a moral sleight of hand in her conflation of working-class community spirit with a universalist ethos that is distrustful of any limit on the spirit of solidarity (surely close to the opposite of communitarianism).

More from this author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

She tells the story of how around 100 young male African asylum seekers were unexpectedly housed in a hotel in a small former pit village in her Wigan constituency. When this, unsurprisingly, caused a bit of a commotion she called a community meeting and told local people that Wigan had already taken more than its share of asylum seekers and that the council had some powers to refuse to house this latest intake. But she then seems to have shamed the locals into not asking for the Africans to be housed somewhere else.

Freddie Sayers, the interviewer, asks what if they had not accepted the asylum seekers. Would that have been OK too in the name of community empowerment? Nandy sidesteps the question and talks about the working-class tradition of strong community and sticking up for people who are having a hard time.

But we live in a world in which, notwithstanding recent improvements in the living standards of the poor, the vast majority of people on the planet are still “having a hard time” compared with the average citizen of Wigan (and most of the asylum seekers were almost certainly economic migrants, judging by recent refusal rates for asylum).

The whole point of a real community is that it is not a random collection of individuals and it does not encompass the whole world, it must by definition be bounded and should be relatively stable over time (not completely closed) allowing relationships of familiarity and reciprocity to thrive.

Suggested reading

Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

It may well be that the 100 young men did not stay that long and were, in any case, easily absorbed for a period by a good-spirited neighbourhood. But to imply that saying no to a substantial disruption to a small community would have somehow been antithetical to the spirit of working-class community is turning logic and the meaning of community on its head.

Nandy assumes that if you trust people and take their concerns seriously they will take the “right” decision. But I would like her to consider the possibility that saying “no” would have been equally acceptable in this case, particularly given Wigan’s disproportionate asylum burden to date. And most important, it would not primarily have been driven, as so many people on the metropolitan Left assume, by xenophobia and racism (notwithstanding some extreme-right grumbling) but by a legitimate spirit of community protection. She might at least have encouraged her constituents to negotiate for something in return for the disturbance.

There is plenty of evidence from social psychology that having a strong “in-group” identity does not translate into hostility to outsiders; if anything, it correlates with a more welcoming attitude. The desire for a reduction in immigration in general in places such as Wigan is based less on hostility to outsiders and more on a feeling that the needs of newcomers are taken more seriously by London (and the Labour Party) than the needs of locals. Immigration has also become an emblem for too-rapid social change that is not in the interests of places like Wigan.

There seem to be two Lisa Nandys. The communitarian sounding champion of the neglected people of Wigan, and the academic universalist who thinks we have equal obligations to all fellow humans, and who seems indifferent to a world of constant churn and high mobility. I would have voted for the first against the second, but it seems that both of them are standing to lead the Labour Party.

Historians generally regard America as having won the trade war with China but in almost all other respects one-term President Trump represented the last hurrah of US global power. President Elizabeth Warren pulled the US out of Nato and the WTO. But life went on surprisingly normally, apart from one ugly dispute in Estonia in which two dozen British troops died in a border clash with the Russians.

It turned out that bilateral agreements between the great powers sufficed to keep trade ticking over and for keeping the peace. The Taiwanese, with no one to protect them, were not happy, initially, about being absorbed into the rest of China; but it turned out that the influence of Taiwanese assumptions about freedom, combined with the enormous power of the Christian underground, slowly ate into the power of the Communist party.

The events of 2016 did not come out of the blue; the rumblings had been audible for some time before. And yet on what slender threads did the new era hang! A few thousand votes in a few different places, plus some more plausible defenders of the status quo, and neither Brexit nor Trump would have happened, at least not at that time.

More from this author

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

When they did, the world turned on its axis in many surprising ways, slowly at first but more markedly in the 2020s and 2030s. Historians came to call it the great pivot year, from the centrifugal era to the centripetal one.

Western society had been dominated since the 1980s by dispersing centrifugal forces that extended individual freedom but weakened collective bonds and the power of tradition, and in the process allowed smart people to claim undue economic and political rewards. The affluent and cognitively blessed, and the two were invariably combined, became ever more powerful, while many others felt they had lost status and meaning. One journalist, writing in 2016, called them ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, and the emergence of post-industrial societies had opened up western societies to an unprecedented degree, and thereby weakened collective national and class identities; meanwhile, diversity of many kinds reduced trust and traditional social norms, while social media created conditions of ‘connected isolation’, promoting narrow tribal identities and individualistic identity politics. And all the while, depression, loneliness and cultish political movements marched on.

The centrifugal era turned out not to be compatible with democracy, and in 2016, the two great English-speaking lands decided that democracy came first and ushered in today’s more centripetal era. The nation state stopped retreating, and economic and cultural openness were both a little more constrained. Immigration fell in most rich countries, partly because of stricter rules, but also, with the exception of Africa, because of sharply rising standards of living in poorer countries.

More from this author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

Today’s centripetal era, which may itself be drawing to a close as 2050 approaches, helped to revive democracy and civic life in part through greater awareness of the psychological roots of what was then called populism — the humiliations and mass resentment built into modern, achievement societies.

As Boris Johnson, the long-serving Prime Minister (and later President) of the UK, put it: “Our beautiful democratic society must level up and find a useful place for everyone, not create a competition in which some succeed and the others fail.” Johnson, who successfully led the UK out of the EU by co-opting and channelling the country’s populist forces, became a model for other centrist and centre-right politicians.

The European Union, a product of the post-national, centrifugal era, was initially shaken by the centripetal one and almost came apart — especially after the election of Marine Le Pen as President of France in 2022 propelled on a nationalist wave after the Royal Navy had sunk several French fishing vessels and English home-owners in the Dordogne were expelled in retaliation.

Johnson and Le Pen more than patched things up in the 2024 Treaty of Calais and Johnson went on to marry Le Pen’s daughter Mathilde. The new Anglo-French Entente paved the way for the UK (minus Northern Ireland which had recently merged with the Republic) to re-enter a much looser EU that looked something like the one it had joined in 1973. The Eurozone had shrunk to Germany and the Benelux countries, and German influence had diminished after the wave of green terror paralysed the country’s energy system in the mid-2020s.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

Looking back, one of the remarkable things about 2016, is how unexpected both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were. How ignorant we then were about our own societies! Such ignorance would be impossible today following the digital citizen project which has truly connected us both to each other and to the local and national state.

After various data scandals, and the failed dirty tricks campaign against Elizabeth Warren in 2020 on the part of the digital giants, the socialisation of the core digital space swept through most western societies, rather as the welfare state had been nationalised after the Second World War. Not only did our digital citizen identities make the provision of state services, especially to the elderly, much more efficient but the constant monitoring of public preferences meant that no more surprises like those of 2016, or the watershed general election of 2019, were possible. (Those of uswho can just about remember surprising elections sometimes regret this.)

Perhaps the most unexpected post-2016 development was the spiritual revival in the UK and elsewhere. The left-behind places and people had been put on the map by Brexit, Trump and European populism. Governments tilted to the new centre, a bit to the Left economically and to the Right socially (in the now quaintly anachronistic political language of the 20^th century). In the 10 years or so after 2016, this helped to bring new life and prosperity to some of the poorest regions but it was really the spiritual revival that took off in the mid-2020s that improved the quality of life in the most depressed places.

Suggested reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

The post-2016 anxiety about dealing with the polarisation was partly based on the reasonable belief that the negotiation of value differences was going to be harder than dealing with the interest clashes of the old socio-economic politics that dominated the post-Second World War world. It is surely harder, people thought, to split the difference on immigration or family policy than on, say, the desired level of public spending or taxation

This fear turned out to be partly misplaced. The sharply declining hegemony of western countries after 2016— symbolised by the collapse in student numbers from China and India after 2020 — created unifying threats and risks, which pulled people together far more than any nationalist rhetoric ever could.

The new “mass elite” of the expanded higher education sectors of the early 21^st century found that the high-status cognitive employment that they thought they had been promised was in sharp decline, thanks mainly to AI. After some flirtation with the hard Left (in the now long-forgotten Corbyn movement in the UK) this group found itself drawn into alliance with the so-called left-behinds under a broadly small-c conservative banner.

The culture wars flared briefly for a few years after 2020, but a new consensus of a kind, finding common ground between liberals and conservatives, emerged under the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, Giles Fraser. It was best represented by the adoption, in the UK and across much of Europe, of Hungary’s successful natalist policies. Larger families were encouraged by public policy and became common again, ending what came to be seen as the narcissistic era of one or two-child families.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

But this did not, as radicals had feared, mean a reversal of gender equality. Quite the opposite, it brought with it a much greater respect for domesticity and the work of child-rearing and care for the elderly, inside the home as much as in the public economy. So-called Fifth wave feminism was associated with the feminisation of society. Many women still enjoyed success in the public realm and, by 2035, half of all MPs were women. After the monarchy was abolished, following the disastrous reign of Charles III, and Boris Johnson was elected first UK president, he was replaced as PM by Munira Mirza, the third Conservative party female PM (and first PM of Muslim heritage).

The spiritual revival was pioneered by a new form of secular Christianity stripped of much of the traditional theology, though not the ritual. The churches filled again as much as centres of community and neighbourhood as places of deity worship. This went hand in hand with a kind of remoralisation of human relations. More families stayed together for longer and child-care mainly took place within the family, and was increasingly undertaken by fathers (30% of main carers were men by 2035).

The co-option of populism represented by Boris-ism did not succeed everywhere and authoritarian governments did emerge in Austria and Sweden — in the latter after a horrific terrorist incident that killed thousands of people. The Sweden Democrat government imposed a curfew on all Muslims after the attack and many innocent Muslims died in random attacks.

Vegan terrorism was also a problem in parts of Europe, including the UK, even as meat-eating dwindled to being an exotic minority taste.

The dog that didn’t bark, looking at the big concerns of 2016, is climate change. Technological advances, including a final breakthrough in nuclear fusion and in the technology of de-salination, meant a largely carbon-free global economy by 2040 and security of drinking water in poorer parts of the world. Moreover, I am writing on the eve of 2050 in the middle of a mini-ice age, and sea levels have fallen so low that the Boris bridge connecting the UK and France now runs over dry land for several miles at both ends.

It is a wonderful symbol of how the fears of those people once called “Remainers”, who believed that leaving the EU in 2020 would cut off an independent UK from the continent, have proved so wrong.

Brexit did, of course, hasten this realignment. And spare a thought for the Theresa May/Nick Timothy strategy in the 2017 election which was widely ridiculed at the time, because it narrowly failed, but which can now take a bow as a necessary prelude to the breath-taking Tory advances made into historically hostile territory on Thursday.

Brexit, rather like immigration in the past couple of decades, has become an “emblem” policy. Support for Brexit is not so much about the details of EU regulation, rather it has become part of a wider, defensive reaction to the radicalism of the post-Cold War “double liberalism” of free market and cultural opening, represented in the EU by the two central post-national policies of the Euro and free movement.

Suggested reading

The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

The challenge for the Tory party now, as Mary Harrington lays out in her election night piece, is to represent aspects of this defensive, national reaction without turning its back on the attractive aspects of the economic and social openness of recent decades. There is no reason why this cannot be accommodated under the canopy of the “One Nation Conservative party” that Boris Johnson talked up last night and throughout the campaign.

On immigration, for example, Johnson has already been shaping policy to appeal to both wings of the new Tory coalition. While the overall stress is on control and a return to more moderate levels, there has been selective liberalisation — over post-student work opportunities, for example.

It is not even impossible that Johnson, pressured by the Spectator magazine’s enthusiasm for it, could announce an amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been here 10 years or more and who are never going to be deported anyway. Such a gesture to the liberal end of the coalition could be balanced with something for small-c conservatives such as the introduction of a citizen identity system (ID cards in the old language) which would, incidentally, make illegal immigration much harder.

More from this author

It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There will also be genuine conflicts of interest between different parts of the new Tory coalition. The small-state, low-tax Toryism of the affluent suburbs has hardly been in the ascendancy in recent years. But it will have to concede further ground to the new Tory voters who want quite high public spending and good public infrastructure. How much ground it will have to concede will be the stuff of battles to come.

Housing is another potential battleground. The interests of younger people and lower income renters not on the ladder are potentially in conflict with those who are already happily housed and worrying about the impact of a massive building programme both on the value of their home and its effect on the green belt.

Meanwhile, in post-school education, the over mighty universities, long institutions of the middle-class Left, may find themselves less favoured, as investment into the battered Further Education sector is prioritised. Yet universities should also be on the front line of a rejuvenated Tory industrial and regional strategy which tries to spread good jobs and economic success more evenly around the country.

More from this author

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

So new priorities need not always conflict with old ones. But one interesting thing to follow will be the changing tone and accent (literally) of the Tory party as the proportion of privately educated Tory MPs falls to an all-time low, possibly as low as one-third. The new generation of Tory MP, such as Eddie Hughes the working-class Birmingham man who won Walsall North for the Tories in 2017, do not have a noblesse oblige interest in decent public services for the masses because they have spent their lives depending on them.

People such as Eddie Hughes and the new generation of less middle-class Tories might also have an interesting impact on the party’s attitude to family, gender and race issues. In recent years, British Conservatives have not really offered any kind of alternative to liberal metropolitan thinking in these areas. This could be about to end. Fairness and opportunity for minorities and women need not take the often sectarian and hyper-liberal form of recent years and can better accommodate the priorities of small-c conservatives, in family policy for example.

The fact that Johnson has promoted ethnic minority Brits to leading positions in his cabinet and No 10 also bodes well for more balance in the area of race and minority rights and a willingness to challenge the assumption that any departure from perfectly proportional ethnic representation must always be down to white discrimination.

Suggested reading

Could the Tories ever win the black vote?

By Mutaz Ahmed

Is it possible that fresh thinking in these areas, thinking that is closer to what the decent average person thinks, rather than the average university administrator, might even filter through to younger people who are overwhelmingly under the sway of the Left? That is unlikely to change in the short term but if the Tories push back intelligently against ‘woke’ culture, they might find a surprisingly receptive audience among young people.

A significant section of educated Britain has been suffering from Brexit derangement syndrome in recent years. It might be seen as a less alarming version of the 1930s flirtation with communism. But, as in the 1930s, the sophistry and fundamentally undemocratic instinct of many of those wanting to overturn the Brexit vote has come up against the decent common sense of the new Tory voters.

As John Gray put it in a recent A Point of View talk on BBC Radio 4:

“Those who have studied to degree level and beyond have often embraced ideas and projects that many less educated folk instinctively recognise are dangerously absurd. Something like this happened in Britain in the 1930s — much of the intelligentsia was ready to junk democracy in Britain for a new order that they felt was coming into being somewhere else.”

The EU is not the Soviet Union but the quasi-religious embrace of the EU worldview does seem to have driven many people, some of them my best friends, slightly crazy!

This election result is a big blow to the confidence and cultural power of educated, left-liberal Britain. A new coalition of people from many different backgrounds, by no means all Tories, now has an opportunity to push back against the extremes and pathologies of that cultural hegemony.

But for someone like me, a conservative social democrat reconciled to Brexit, there is an interesting paradox at play: to make Britain safe for moderate social democracy, you really have to lend your vote to the flamboyant metropolitan Conservative Boris Johnson (or at least hope he wins convincingly).

The Brahmin Left cannot see this, though, and believes the future for social democratic politics over the next decade is “dire”, as Will Hutton put it in the Observer.

But the logic is plain. If Johnson wins a decent majority, it will only be because a sufficient number of mainly lower income voters in the North and the Midlands has switched from Labour to Tory. If this happens, it will shift the voter base of the Tory party and thus the interests that the party represents.

Suggested reading

What will survive this seismic election?

By Matthew Goodwin

Of course, the party will still also represent a solid block of the most affluent in the South and elsewhere, but why have the 2017 and 2019 Tory manifestos been so relatively quiet about the free market and tax cuts and so noisy about investing in public services? Brexit has forced the party to seek a new segment of the electorate and, contrary to all the talk of lurching to the Right, this strengthens the hand of One Nation Tories who are happy to see the party becoming more like a cross-class Christian Democratic alliance — minus the confessional attachment.

The party will remain in favour of the market economy and enterprise, but it is no longer going to be the party of small government, because its new voter base wants quite high public spending and plenty of redistribution. As Daniel Finkelstein put it in the Times: “If you win Bassetlaw or Hartlepool, you have to become the party of Bassetlaw and Hartlepool.”

You remain the party of the shires and the affluent suburbs too, and this will no doubt create interesting policy conflicts over the coming years — over housing for example — but the Left’s de-regulatory, small-state caricature of the Tories is going to look increasingly unbelievable.

Apart from getting Brexit done, the only other Johnson slogan that I have noticed, particularly evident at the manifesto launch, is that decent public services and public infrastructure underpin a successful market economy — and isn’t that almost a definition of market-friendly social democracy?

There are, of course, many Conservatives whose economic instinct remains more Thatcherite, and who tend to see the public sector as a sort of necessary evil, but they are a political hangover. And incidentally, although there is still a highly disproportionate number of Tory MPs who were privately educated, the proportion has dropped from 75% in the 1970s to 45% now (and possibly below 40% after the election) — so many more will have been dependent on public services most of their lives. Tory candidates look and sound more like the voters than ever before.

By the same author

It's a bad time for an illegal immigration amnesty

By David Goodhart

There is a second leg to this story about making Britain safe for moderate social democracy: it is the breaking of the hold of the true-believer socialists who currently control the Labour party. A thumping victory for the new Tory party described above is a necessary condition for that outcome.

This change will not happen swiftly and could entail a more complete break-up of the Labour party than the minor splintering we have seen so far. How swiftly exactly will depend on many imponderables, such as how serious the defeat is, which Labour MPs are left standing, and whether, after a second defeat (and maybe a heavy one this time), the Momentum surge might start to lose momentum. This itself might also depend on the medium term socio-economic fate of what one might call the ‘educated just about managing class’ — people with degrees from non-Russell Group universities who end up in jobs not so different from those of their parents.

In any case, a big victory for Johnson surely increases the chances of the sensible centre-Left either recapturing the Labour Party, or leaving it as a hard-Left rump party and establishing a new (Brownite) centre-Left party. This new party would be a few notches to the Left of the new Tory party on economics, and several yards to its Left (if that is the right word) on social and cultural matters.

Suggested reading

How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

So here is the second paradox of this election: at least in the medium term, it will shift UK politics in a European direction, with two cross-class “peoples’ parties” (like the CDU and SPD in Germany) with similar approaches to economic management, but with the Tories representing the more socially conservative strands of the electorate and Labour (or its successor party) representing the more liberal strands.

That will also mean that the most free market of the big European countries does not have a party that enthusiastically represents the free market (it is hard to see the social democratic Liberal Democrats filling that gap). But the free market can probably look after itself for now, and if Britain becomes too statist, the electorate will sense it and reshuffle the pack at some point in the future.

One doubt that some people, especially on the Left, will have about this thesis is whether a modest increase in NHS investment and a slogan or two about public infrastructure really amounts to a social democratic shift in the Tory party.

It is true that the Tory manifesto in the end was more modest on public spending commitments than I had hoped, and implicitly less redistributionist than I had wanted, with the promise not to increase any of the main income related taxes. The lack of a proper commitment to a partial socialisation of adult care costs, while understandable politically, was also a disappointment.

Suggested reading

What if everyone loses this election?

By James Kirkup

So is the Tory party just putting on a more centrist mask to appeal temporarily to the Brexit-voting lower-middle and working classes? I do not think the world works like that. Even for our short-termist, adversarial political culture, that would be an impossibly cynical move. It also ignores the fact that the party has almost certainly lost a section of the middle class over Brexit that needs to be replaced — and not just for one election.

No, from my own observations (and I work part-time in a centre-Right think tank and meet plenty of Tory MPs), I would say that the party — thanks to Brexit — is going through another of its great evolutionary shifts. My own think tank Policy Exchange recently produced a major piece of work calling for the socialisation of adult social care costs (with a supportive forward by that well known 19^th century mill-owner Jacob Rees-Mogg).

The last Tory party conference had a mantra of three policies for post-Brexit Britain: sort out social care, build a lot more houses (including public ones for rent) and invest more in non-university, post-school education for the 60% who do not go into higher education. If this is the plan for de-regulated, race-to-the-bottom Britain, it is very craftily disguised.

So why are so many Tories so passionate about leaving the EU if it is not to loosen protections that their new voters are strongly attached to? No doubt there are some who are keen to see the back of the Working Time Directive and so on, but de-regulation and autonomy are here too often confused. The moderate nationalism that Brexit appealed to is the localism of our more globalised world.

Brexit now allows us to make our own choices about immigration, about farm subsidies, about regional aid and state subsidies, about contracting out rules in the public sector, about VAT levels, about the future of our legal system and much more. In many areas we will stick close to EU rules, in other areas we will diverge, and pay some economic price for doing so, but it will be our choice.

Is all this just the grumpy rationalisations of a privileged 60-something who flirted with leftism in his youth and is now returning to his Conservative/conservative roots? Well, I was a member of the Labour party for about 35 years and continued to vote (and sometimes even canvas) for them right up to 2015. I voted Tory in 2017, largely on Brexit grounds (as a Remain voter who wanted the decision implemented), and I might vote Liberal Democrat as an anti-Corbyn tactical vote in 2019. So to the extent that beliefs are expressed through political acts, I think I can now claim a pretty sound centrist record.

But while there is a case to be made for an amnesty, it certainly shouldn’t be a general one — definitely not in the wake of a Windrush scandal that has, for now, partly paralysed Britain’s internal protections against illegal immigration.

There are many different kinds of illegal immigrant among the estimated one million (well, anything between 500,000 and 1.5m) currently in the country. There are people who came in with a false identity card or passport and live in the mainstream (working, paying  tax, using public services); people who came in legally but have out-stayed their visa, they too may be living in the mainstream undetected by the authorities; there are failed asylum seekers, who can then be subdivided into those known to the authorities (about 80,000) and those who have gone off the radar; and finally those who entered clandestinely on a lorry or boat and remain undetected. The latter often survive in a twilight world in parts of inner-city Britain where exploitation and modern slavery flourishes.

There are also many different kinds of amnesty. There is a general one, intended to encourage everyone here without status to come forward; or there are those defined by category, such as failed asylum-seeking families with young children that are hard to return; and there are those defined by length of time in the country, such as anyone who has been here more than 10 years, who does not have a criminal record.

Suggested reading

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

The Spectator is not clear about what kind of amnesty it wants — although it seems to want something short of a general one. It says: “A common sense line can be drawn between those who have lived here for several years, and those who have not put down roots, who can be removed in a way that deters illegal immigration.” In principle, this is not a stupid idea because the reality is that many illegal immigrants are never going to leave. It is, in an era of human rights law, very hard to remove them, especially those who have been here for a few years and can claim protection under the right to family life. Back in 2004 (under Labour), there were 21,435 forced removals; but in the year to June 2019, that had fallen to below 3,000 (excluding the 5,203 Foreign National Offenders).

Given these circumstances, there are two ways to reduce the stock of illegal immigrants — some form of limited and controlled amnesty for the hardest to remove groups or a so-called hostile environment that makes life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they choose to self-deport.

The sensible option is a combination of the two. Labour initiated a more rigorous system of status checking (and first used the term hostile environment) towards the end of its period in office but Theresa May as Home Secretary after 2010 gave it more teeth. This means that, in the absence of ID cards, the favoured status-checking system in continental Europe, people who have recently moved to the UK have to prove their status for jobs, renting flats, opening bank accounts, using the NHS and so on — with big fines for employers and landlords who are caught employing or renting to illegal immigrants.

For a while it looked as if the hostile environment might be working, as the number of voluntary returns climbed steeply from below 4,000 in 2004 to a peak of nearly 29,000 in 2016 (though better data collection may also have been a factor behind the rise). Partly as a consequence of last year’s Windrush scandal, both enforced and voluntary returns are now falling sharply, enforced returns are just over 8,000 a year (but most of these are Foreign National Offenders who are removed direct from prison) and voluntary returns have fallen to just over 13,000.

Suggested reading

Test article

By David Goodhart

Why is the Windrush scandal casting such a shadow? A quick reminder of what happened. More than 1m people came to live in Britain between the late 1940s and the early 1970s in the great post-colonial migration, almost all of whom were granted Indefinite Leave to Remain in 1971. In some cases, they did not acquire the documents to prove it, and in particular the poorer people in this group never acquired a British passport because they could not afford foreign holidays. For several decades this did not matter until, especially after 2010, the UK changed tack from the relative openness of the Labour years to a much more controlled border and a more concerted attempt to tackle illegal immigration.

This is when some of those people who were here legally, especially those of Caribbean background, found themselves being treated as illegal immigrants. More than 80 were actually deported, several hundred more were seriously affected — refused entry into the country after going abroad, lost jobs, refused NHS treatment — though nobody knows the exact number. Thanks to a Guardian campaign that placed this injustice on the national agenda in April last year, Amber Rudd had to resign as Home Secretary.

It is fair to say that this was an egregious error stemming from an over-zealous application of the striving for greater control symbolised by Theresa May’s period as Home Secretary. There are all sorts of more specific reasons for the mistake: the loss of historical memory in the Home Office, a “tick-box” culture being applied by people too junior to be taking these decisions, perhaps also the lack of people of relevant ethnic minority backgrounds at the top of the department who might, through family experience, have recognised that the Home Office was wrongly classifying a whole category of legal British residents.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the challenges of immigration

By Trevor Phillips

But there is a very powerful account from the Left (summarised in the recent book, The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman who covered the story for The Guardian), which states that the mistreatment of the Windrush victims was not a mistake at all but a deliberate policy, the inevitable result of a draconian attempt to reduce immigration, combined with an inhuman system of internal status checks, all driven by racism in both the Home Office and the wider society. The report on lessons of Windrush by Wendy Williams, expected early next year, is likely to reinforce a version of this account.

The policy conclusion from this account is that the hostile environment should in effect be scrapped and almost all forced deportations (apart from criminals) be stopped too. This is where we are currently heading. One Home Office official told me that once someone gets into the country illegally, their chances of being deported are now close to zero. Moreover, the chances of them leaving voluntarily are also close to zero because the hostile environment, apart from employer checks, has also been largely suspended, meaning that information about suspected illegal immigrants is no longer handed over by landlords, banks or NHS officials to the Home Office. Survival is now far easier for illegal immigrants.

The Windrush scandal is not a reason to scrap the current system — which is really a cumbersome UK version of an ID card system for non-citizens — but to make it work better and make sure, with the introduction of a Home Office ombudsman and other such measures, that the Windrush scandal can never be repeated. And if status checks tend to be demanded more from people who do not look or sound like the British majority then the simple answer is to make everyone submit to a status check when taking a job or renting a property.

Immigration restrictions are always most likely to be aimed at people from poorer countries, and people from such countries tend not to be white. If that makes immigration restrictions racist then the Home Office is racist. But it is also worth recalling that the largest national category turned away at the border every year are Americans (mainly white) and the top three countries for forced returns in 2019 were Romania, Albania and Poland.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

The Home Office’s completely legitimate attempt to bear down on the scourge of illegal immigration has, in effect, been kicked into touch. The Immigration Enforcement department of the Home Office employs nearly 5,000 people and spends almost £500m a year and parts of it are now paralysed by the post-Windrush trauma. Many of the decent people who work in it have been made to feel dirty about the important public service they perform. Too many of them are leaving.

This is why all talk of an amnesty has to be treated with great caution. Britain is, and will remain, an internationally open “hub” country inviting large annual flows across its borders. There were 142m arrivals into the UK last year. About 120m of those people are UK and EU citizens who have the right to live and work here, but 20m are people who do not have that automatic right and 3m of them came in on time-limited visas. The temptation, especially for some people from poorer countries, to overstay a visa is considerable before even mentioning the tens of thousands who arrive every year clandestinely on lorries or boats and a similar number who have their asylum claims turned down but are seldom removed.

There is a constant struggle by Immigration Enforcement to keep these numbers down and prevent the illegal population running out of control. So now is not the time for Boris Johnson to make a flamboyant gesture on amnesty, much as his sister-in-law might like it (his brother, Jo, is married to Amelia Gentleman). A general amnesty is a terrible idea and would be a huge incentive to illegal immigration at a time when the policing of the internal border has been severely weakened.

Clearly in the longer term, when the Home Office has recovered from the Windrush trauma, we need a sensible combination of quiet regularisation — I would favour an amnesty for anyone who has been here over 10 years — plus a restored hostile environment (with proper safeguards to ensure no repeat of the Windrush scandal), and deportation, enforced if necessary, for those who have no right to be here.

Suggested reading

10 things I hate about Germany

By Peter Franklin

It also makes sense to bribe people more generously to leave. Some of those funds that the Department for International Development sits on could be usefully employed helping illegal immigrants to return home with the promise of support to start a small business or fund a course of study or something similar. Many illegal immigrants are among the most energetic and ambitious citizens of poorer countries and while it is understandable that they want to short circuit the historical process by jumping straight into the rich world, their fellow citizens badly need them to help their countries catch up.

Of course, there is one simple policy idea that would have prevented the Windrush scandal, would deter illegal immigration, and would simplify relations between the individual and the state—the introduction of a national system of citizen identification (ID cards in old language). That is something worth putting in the Tory manifesto.

A version of this piece appears in the next issue of Standpoint

Some countries are absorbing these conflicts better than others. And there is one place, in particular, that continues to flourish in the era of polarisation — the southern German state of Bavaria.

It is one of the richest and most economically dynamic corners of Europe but is also famous for its conservative politics and Catholic traditionalism and sense of place — even the co-leader of the Bavarian Greens, Katharina Schulze, wore a traditional dirndl dress when canvassing in last year’s state election.

The German lands of Europe have traditionally come under the sway of either Berlin or Vienna, and Bavaria is in some ways culturally closer to Vienna. Bavaria fought on the side of Napoleon in the early 19th century, was one of the least pro-Nazi states, and its exceptionalism is underlined by the fact that it never signed the German “basic law” constitution in 1949.

Historically it was a largely agricultural state with no significant natural resources; Germany’s pre-1945 industrial powerhouses were the Ruhr region in the west and Silesia in Prussia.

But after the Second World War this all changed dramatically and Bavaria was one of the principle beneficiaries. Following Germany’s defeat, Prussia, one of the most successful and significant states in modern European history, was wiped off the map and the Prussians were, in effect, ethnically cleansed. Many of them ended up in Bavaria.

Suggested reading

It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

It is one of the best kept secrets of post-war German history that Bavaria’s economic take-off after 1945 was partly driven by emigrant Prussians and Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia. Millions found refuge in US-controlled Bavaria and some of the biggest names in German industry — such as Siemens, Allianz, Osram and Agfa — moved their headquarters from Berlin to Munich.

Bavaria has its own conservative party, the Christian Social Union, which is autonomous from, but in permanent alliance with, the main German centre-right party, the Christian Democrats. From 1961 to 1988 the CSU was led by the pugnacious but economically pragmatic Franz-Joseph Strauss who helped to establish Bavaria as the economic success story it is today in cars, defence and aerospace, electronics and most recently in the new digital industries.

The region has one of the best education and vocational training systems in Germany, not just for the cognitive elites but for competent middling performers too. It also boasts a network of top universities and research institutes, including the headquarters of the Max Planck institute which also moved to Munich after 1945 changing its name from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Former federal President Roman Herzog coined the phrase “laptops and lederhosen” to describe the state’s unusual blend of innovation and tradition.

The CSU has run Bavaria throughout the post-war period and although it has adapted with the times it remains considerably more conservative than the CDU. CSU leaders were vehemently opposed to Angela Merkel’s refugee policy and almost brought down Germany’s coalition government over it. Viktor Orban is a frequent visitor to Bavaria and his Hungarian Fidesz party was for many years protected by the CSU from being expelled from the main centre-right grouping of European political parties, the EPP. More recently CSU members outraged liberal opinion in Germany by opposing a leadership proposal for quotas for women in the party.

Suggested reading

10 things I hate about Germany

By Peter Franklin

The CSU is probably the last remaining true “Volkspartei” in Germany with a solid representation in all social classes, including the working class.

Bavaria also has a powerful left-liberal tradition in the big cities, which are mainly run by the Social Democrats and/or Greens. The Suddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, is Germany’s most influential liberal daily and has a lighter touch than its northern rivals. Munich is an open city with a distinctively southern variation on German-ness.

But a strong sense of belonging to Bavaria can accommodate both the traditionalist small farmer 100 miles outside Munich and a young, liberally-minded, digital entrepreneur in the state capital. The two-week Oktoberfest beer festival at the end of September every year is a celebration of Bavarian traditions that attracts around 6m foreign tourists and somehow manages to make historic peasant costumes seem cool.

Can this happy co-existence of Anywheres and Somewheres last? I was making the case for “model Bavaria” to a Social Democrat politician in Berlin a few months ago who, not surprisingly, did not like the idea. Moreover, he claimed that Bavaria is becoming a victim of its own success. By attracting so many people from all over Germany the distinctive Bavarian brand is being diluted. Soon, he said, it will be a German state like any other.

Other Germans, some of them migrants to Bavaria, say that is to miss the point — newcomers like, and want to preserve, Bavarian-ness. And, as its post-war history shows, this powerfully rooted place has been able to absorb millions from outside.

By the same author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

This was true before the war too; Ludwig Erhard, one of the shapers of Germany’s post-war economic miracle, came from the Protestant community of the wine region of northern Bavaria which also once had a flourishing Jewish community, Henry Kissinger and my own distant relatives the Lehman banking family were products of it.

Although CSU politicians take a hard line in general against mass immigration, they took a disproportionate number of refugees after the 2015 surge. Bavaria is likely to make a greater success of the influx than most other states thanks to the most efficient administration in the whole of Germany and the most no-nonsense police force.

It is too early to say how the integration process is going but it is generally easier for outsiders to integrate into a place that has a strong sense of itself, as, in the UK context, Scotland has shown in recent decades. Bavaria has a strong but open indigenious culture, anyone can wear lederhosen, and perhaps illustrates how a clear Leitkultur (dominant culture) rather than something to be ashamed of can help to foster integration.

Bavarians also tend to have strong sub-Bavarian local and regional connections and a healthy relationship to the bigger national entity. They say: “Because I am Bavarian I am German.” By contrast, a Scot is more likely to say: “I’m a Scot, hence British but certainly not English.” And many Catalans would say: “I’m Catalan, hence not Spanish.”

Bavaria is not, of course, completely untouched by the winds of polarisation, and the hard-right AFD polled 10% in last year’s state election, reducing the CSU vote share to 37%, its lowest figure ever. But conservative Bavarian politics has now also thrown up a new big beast — Marcus Söder — who seems capable of pushing the CSU back up over 40% and is now being whispered about as a possible successor to Angela Merkel in Berlin.

If only some of that Bavarian magic could be sprinkled over the whole of Germany and, indeed, the rest of Europe.

At the same time, democracies are struggling to supply some of the good things that they have been associated with in the past – such as ever improving standards of living, accountable decision making (as globalisation removes more decisions from the nation) and a sense of a broad equalisation of status and esteem among citizens.

The last of those supply problems arises from the new system of status stratification by education, and in particular higher education, that has turned us into what has been described as “diploma democracies” — political systems in which the main political parties and broader public sphere are increasingly dominated by the views and priorities of the highly educated and liberal minded, notwithstanding a few tabloid newspapers and some angry corners of the internet.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Stable, open democracies require representation of all the main strands of opinion in a society, and if significant interests are excluded they will find a way of making themselves heard. This is what has happened with the great democratic ‘rebalancing’ represented by Brexit, Trump and continental European populism.

This rebalancing is messy and disruptive and encounters resistance and push-back, and right now one of the main battle grounds is the British Conservative party.

Historically, the party has prided itself on being a broad church, absorbing all non-extreme views on the Right of politics. This tradition appeared to be at least partly abandoned by the Cameron/Osborne modernisation of the party, in which continuity with New Labour social policy was prioritised, and socially conservative views were largely excluded and seen as politically damaging. (The grudging exceptions to this story were the ill-fated “tens of thousands” immigration target and, eventually, the referendum concession.)

This move by the Conservatives effectively excluded a large body of national opinion from Parliament and continues to unbalance our politics. The militant ‘zero tolerance’ policy pursued by a small niche of metropolitan opinion, which patrols the public conversation seeking out heretics to expel, aims to keep it unbalanced.

Consider, as evidence, the recent sacking by a Conservative government of Roger Scruton, Britain’s most eminent conservative philosopher, for his tendentious comments about Muslims. And the ridiculous comments from David Lammy MP, the Nigel Farage of the Left, on Sunday about how retweeting something from a German populist party is an expression of Nazism.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Yet a large body of opinion in this country hold opinions that are anathema to much of the progressive worldview: about 45% of people support the death penalty, about 65% think that immigration has been either too high or much too high, around half the population want to leave the EU, 62% of people think that Britain “sometimes feels like a foreign country”, the vast majority of women and men want modification not abolition of a gender division of labour, 58% of people think that newcomers are not integrating well, about one third of the population say they would prefer to live in an area where almost everyone is from the same background and 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim.

Not all of these views are equally reasonable but, instead of excluding the people who hold them, would it not be preferable to persuade them to change their minds? Isn’t that how a democratic conversation is meant to function? Some of those views are gradually shifting in a more progressive direction as a result of the expansion of higher education and the generational shift, but not all of them.

Most people with such views are decent citizens, who are comfortable with ‘modern Britain’ but tend to think it is changing too fast. And it cannot be said often enough that the vast majority also accept the broad outlines of race, gender and sexuality equality – though might argue with equality activists about what equality actually means.

Academics have shown a steady drop in levels of racial prejudice since the 1980s. Only one per cent of the population now admit to being very prejudiced against people of different races (and they are almost all over 50), a negligible proportion say they do not want someone from a different race as a neighbour, less than 10% strongly disagree with gay marriage.

Further reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

Moreover, the constant insinuation, repeated by David Lammy on Sunday, that since Brexit, Britain has experienced a rising tide of violence and hatred against minorities is contradicted by the only reliable piece of evidence we have: the Crime Survey of England and Wales finds that hate crime is on quite a sharp downward trend, including in the period covering Brexit (when there was a brief spike in harassment).

Nevertheless, the partial suppression of legitimate small-c conservative views in the public domain, reinforced by our first-past-the-post electoral system denying representation to overtly populist parties, has ended up giving us Brexit instead.

Contrast this with continental Europe which has absorbed, accommodated and domesticated populist opinion over the last 20 years. Several populist parties have now taken part in government coalitions and in many cases, such as the Finns in Finland, have split and re-formed. The general direction of travel is towards less extreme views with experience of office tempering the views of leaders and most activists: consider the Freedom party in Austria and the People’s party in Denmark. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has gradually moved away from support for France leaving the EU and not just because of Brexit.

Further reading

Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

The Italian populist coalition has also just provided a good recent example of this domestication. Both the 5 Star Movement and Lega Nord were seduced by the anti-MMR vaccine cult and had promised to abolish a law banning children from attending school unless they had received jabs against 10 diseases. But when the 5 Star education minister was faced with an outbreak of measles in schools the party abruptly dropped its opposition to vaccination and in effect adopted the policy it had previously repudiated.

The influence has, it is true, worked the other way too and populist parties have influenced mainstream ones, most notably in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and the UK too (despite first past the post). But this is surely democracy working its magic, not some kind of poison injected into the system. One reason such socially conservative views are not going to fade away swiftly in this country is because they tend to be popular among the fast-growing and often religiously observant ethnic minorities.

“There is a feeling that commonly held values are being eroded and disregarded by an elite that believes it knows better,” wrote one prominent ethnic minority MP by the name of David Lammy in his book Out of the Ashes about the 2011 riots, a book that opposed a ban on smacking and excoriated the hedonism, nihilism and hyper-individualism of the ‘double liberalism’ of 1980s market economics plus a 1960s ‘anything goes’ worldview. The David Lammy of 2011 would surely have attracted the attention of the ‘zero tolerance’ policemen of 2019.

A constitutional reform programme that would give us some variant of proportional representation and so a political voice in Parliament for legitimate populism and social conservatism is not going to happen soon. Which means that the Conservative party must return to its broad-church tradition, as the Brexit result seems to be mandating.

Further reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

This is not rocket science. George Osborne, who was tweeting gleefully in support of the sacking of Roger Scruton, has a reputation as a fearsome political strategist but he must take quite a large part of the blame for his party’s current slump in popularity, as not only the author of an excessive austerity but also of a high-handed liberalisation of the party that turbo-charged Ukip and led to Brexit.

The obvious thing would have been to balance a liberal move, such as gay marriage, with something for the more conservative-minded family lobby – such as the right of couples bringing up children together to share their tax allowances thereby making it far easier for one parent to stay at home when children are young.

Instead, the Conservative leadership have found themselves cornered by a shallow, metropolitan worldview without the intellectual resources or political confidence to create the new kind of liberal-conservative settlement that the country and their future success requires.

In the long run, the main party of the centre-Right remains better equipped to lead that new settlement because it is easier for the Conservatives to shift Left on economics, as they did at the last election, than it is for the Labour party to shift Right on culture in the direction of a David Lammy (2011) Blue Labour politics.

But escaping the clutches of the ‘zero tolerance’ sectarians will not be easy, as exemplified by the Scruton episode, which speaks to a larger nervousness about the Muslim and Islamophobia question.

Further reading

Pakistan is betrayed by its blasphemy laws

By Farzana Shaikh

The party has allowed itself to be painted as having an Islamophobia problem on the basis of a few prejudiced statements by local activists and councillors and an unscrupulous campaign against Sadiq Khan. Sayeeda Warsi, the former party chairman, has played a central role in this as she attempts to turn herself into one of the key gatekeepers to Muslim Britain, describing the Muslim experience in the past decade as a “brutal” one. The BBC and other news outlets uncritically recycle the claim in part to provide balance to the anti-Semitism charge against the Labour party.

Very few Muslims, who now make up about 6% of the population, are Tory voters or members and there is very little knowledge of Muslim communities and politics in the higher ranks of the party. This has made it harder for the party to distinguish genuinely moderate and reform-minded Muslim leaders from those associated with the Islamist strain of politics that encourages separation.

And it makes the party and country incapable, it seems, of having a reasonable discussion about aspects of Muslim life that makes British society more wary towards their fellow citizens of Muslim background than towards other minorities.

For Muslims do, on average, live more separate, and often poorer, lives than other minorities. Many of them come from traditional societies and now often live in the most depressed parts of post-industrial Britain: 46% of the Muslim population lives in the 10% most deprived local authorities. Only about one third of Muslim women work, they are more likely than other minorities to speak a language other than English at home, rarely marry out, and still hold to norms that are more authoritarian, patriarchal and collectivist than the increasingly liberal, egalitarian and individualist British mainstream.

Moreover, British Muslim attitudes on homosexuality, blasphemy, religion in politics, even conspiracy theory accounts of 9/11, tend to have more in common with global Muslim opinion than with the rest of British society.

Given that a large proportion of British people have no Muslim friends – in 2004, this was 90% – and, from the Rushdie affair via grooming gangs to jihadists acting in the name of Islam, Muslims are often associated with extremism, it may not be so surprising that, as I described above 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim (35% of British Pakistanis feel the same about a relative marrying a white person).

Further reading

Steve Hilton's populist revolution

By Henry Olsen

It is true that some Muslims do suffer discrimination and harassment, probably more than other minorities, but there is no evidence that it is increasing. And it is not Islamophobic to raise these real issues of tension and difference. What we need is a deeper conversation about segregation and how to engineer more and better interaction across the Muslim-non-Muslim divide, plus a focus on the achievements of the growing Muslim middle class, rather than more intense policing of conversations at Tory cocktail parties.

The Conservative party should stop believing what their enemies say about them, remind themselves that they are the first party to appoint someone of Muslim background to one of the highest offices of state, and face down the zero tolerance sectarians.

In fact, if the party is to rise to the challenge of leading the post-Brexit settlement across the country’s great value divides, it needs to apply that reasoning across Conservative thinking on all social and cultural matters.

Or rather it is possible to detect the emergence of two broad strands of liberal response to recent events: the admonished and the militant. The latter is best represented by writers like AC Grayling and Oliver Kamm, most (though not all) supporters of a second Brexit referendum, and all those who like to preface the concept of sovereignty with the weasel word “notional” (yes, I mean you Andrew Adonis and Will Hutton!).

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Consider this perfect expression of unrepentant, militant liberalism from Oliver Kamm in Prospect magazine last year: “In the era of Brexit, Corbyn and Trump, it’s natural for us in the despised metropolitan media liberal elite to engage in soul-searching. I’ve done it and arrived at the difficult but ineluctable conclusion that I’ve been right all along. Our ideas have worked; they need reasserting.” I wonder how long he spent searching.

Kamm at the end of that same piece provides rather a good (Isaiah Berlinish) definition of a less militant, more pluralistic, liberalism that has evidently inspired many admonished liberals:

“Liberalism is an optimistic creed not because of misconceptions about human benevolence but, on the contrary, because it recognises something intrinsic to our nature: we all have different goals and conceptions of the good. And the things we value can’t all be realised simultaneously and made compatible with each other. A liberal society is the best method yet devised of recognising this multiplicity of aims. It stresses value pluralism in the face of political and religious dogmatism.”

Further reading

Steve Hilton's populist revolution

By Henry Olsen

Yet liberalism has not taken its own liberalism seriously over the past three decades. It has solidified into the political package I described in the first paragraph – one might label it FT/Economist liberalism – and regards itself as self-evidently for the common good and open to challenge only at the margin.

In my own language the Anywhere worldview of openness, autonomy and mobility, underpinned by the ‘achieved’ identities of the exam-passing classes, largely ignored the discomfort of the less well educated, more rooted Somewheres about rapid social change and the erosion of national social contracts. It closed the so-called Overton Window around the liberal package and excluded or vilified most opponents.

One small way it did that is by not inviting critics of the package to its gatherings. As a journalist and think-tanker I have had the privilege of being invited to countless conferences of the British, intra-European and trans-Atlantic policy elite over the past 25 years. Attempts have usually been made to balance centre-Right and centre-Left and, latterly, to have some gender and ethnic diversity at such gatherings. But the idea of inviting Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen to such an event would have been considered beyond the pale, even though both of them are intelligent and articulate representatives of the 20- 25% of voters who feel most hostile to the package.

Further reading

How the Third Way lost its way

By Bill Galston

I do not want to over-estimate the importance of those talking-shops, but if members of the liberal policy elite had actually met some real populists and had to engage with their ideas it’s possible that the liberal package might have been able to adapt rather better to its critics instead of facing the sudden shock of Brexit and Trump.

In any case, it may be too little, too late, but the barbarians have finally been ushered into the citadel by the admonished liberals. Let me cite two recent examples.

Earlier this summer I was invited to the Ambrosetti conference in Italy, a sort of Italian Davos. To my surprise I found myself on a panel with the very tall, baby-faced Geert Wilders. Also on the panel was Frans Timmermans, a vice-president of the EU Commission, who admitted to being a friend of Wilders, both of them are from the same part of the eastern Netherlands near the German border.

In the session Timmermans served up the old-time religion of European unity. He recalled how his coal miner grandfather had, before the Second World War, worked happily underground with many itinerant Italians and Germans, but then in the latter stages of that war had watched the obliteration of the nearby German city of Aachen, celebrating as every bomb landed. This, he said, is why we have the EU today.

The mainly pro-EU Italian audience of business people and academics clapped and cheered. A few minutes later they gave a less enthusiastic, but nonetheless respectful audience to Wilders who described the ethnic and religious transformation of some big Dutch cities.

Further reading

The West divided: Populism versus liberalism in the 21st century

By Peter Franklin

A short time later another big beast of the populist world, Matteo Salvini the Italian interior minister, was ushered in. Before his arrival this mainly liberal audience were invited to vote (secretly) on the various options for handling the refugee crisis, with the vast majority opting for something like the Salvini/Australia option of stopping them arriving in the first place through deals with surrounding countries. When Salvini spoke he charmed what should have been a very hostile audience and got hearty applause at the end of his speech.

The second example, which I only watched on YouTube, was even more electrifying: Steve Bannon, the ex-Trump adviser, addressing a recent Economist conference in New York. I think it would be fair to say that Bannon had the better of the argument with the magazine’s editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, who is no push over.

Bannon drew critical attention to a 10,700-word essay on the future of liberalism in the magzine’s 175^th anniversary issue, written by Minton Beddoes herself. He pointed out that there was no discussion of lost sovereignty or terrorism or crime or inequality. He was right. But he also missed a trick, because this essay is an extraordinary mea culpa from inside the heart of mandarin liberalism.

Suggested listening

Test article

By David Goodhart

It concedes that modern liberalism has lost its way and become too associated with smug elites and the status quo; that it must be saved from itself. The essay accepts that liberals paid too little attention to the people and places harmed by trade and automation, and too little heed to the things people value beyond self-determination and economic betterment, such as their religious and ethnic identities.

It said liberal views on migration have been “more influenced by the ease of employing a cleaner than by fear of losing out”, and must take account of the fact that many people place greater weight on “ethnic and cultural homogeneity” than liberals do.

It recommended a tough line on refugees (not that different to Salvini’s), a version of ID cards, lower numbers and phased social rights for immigrants, and facing down the detached liberals who dominate our universities. Nigel Farage would have agreed with much of it.

I welcome the Economist essay and the invitations to Wilders and Bannon as evidence that perpetual political polarisation is not necessarily our fate, that sensible (admonished) liberalism and sensible populism, often just a form of small-c conservatism, are not as far apart as both sides often assume.

Further reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

Most Somewheres, and most people who vote for populist parties, are not extremists but ‘decent populists’. By that I mean people who accept the broad assumption of human equality that has emerged in the last few decades because it has chimed with their own experiences and sense of fairness. But to most people the idea of human equality does not mean we have the same obligations to everyone, and decent populists have been especially alienated by the liberal drift towards post-national attitudes and the new aggressive identity politics – often driven by activists who command tiny levels of support in wider society.

But this is not just about feeling irritated by the proliferation of items on transgender politics on the BBC. Decent populists are not liberals in any meaningful modern sense, but neither are they illiberal, and liberals need to accept some of their communitarian political intuitions.

What are these intuitions? The importance of stable neighbourhoods and secure national borders; the value of national social contracts and the priority of citizen rights over universal rights; the importance of reciprocity and contribution, especially in welfare; the evolution but not abolition of the gender division of labour and support for family life; recognition and narrative (and decent training and post-school options) for those who are not cognitively blessed and upwardly mobile into the high-status professional world, but who still require a sense that they are useful and respected.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

Liberals do not have to accept all those things, but they must not rig politics against the large minority, if not majority, of their fellow citizens who do embrace them. They remain free to argue for the liberal package, but need to persuade not impose. And they can, indeed should, try to police the line between legitimate and illegitimate populism.

One of those lines is racism, though that is itself a contested concept: put simply, discriminating between citizens and non-citizens is legitimate, discriminating among citizens on grounds of ethnicity in the welfare state or job market is not. Similarly with Islam, Islamism is a political threat that is legitimate to mobilise against, Islam itself may be in tension with aspects of modern liberal societies, but wanting to restrict the rights of Muslim citizens is a form of racism.

Admonished liberals do not always get it right. Theresa May arguably over-compensated for her Remain support in the first few weeks after the Brexit vote which is why it is now so hard to find a reasonable compromise on leaving the EU.

But it is important that the ideas in that Economist essay win the argument within liberalism, for it is on the common ground between mainstream decent populism and mainstream moderate – or admonished – liberalism that the future of our politics must stand.