The stereotypical middle-class Conservative voter is conventional and stable, conscientious but unadventurous; blessed with common sense and terrible taste in music. My parents were bohemians, to put it mildly, living in a rackety, messy flat surrounded by a mountain of books, with a circle of friends who were mostly quite unconventional in their habits (ie they were alcoholics). Yet they believed in a philosophy that supported convention, order and tradition because, as much as political leanings can fit personality types, it often just comes down to who annoys you the most.

My first political memory is of my dad chuckling one morning while reading the paper, and when asked, telling me that the GLC had been abolished. London was no longer in the hands of Ken Livingstone, the man seen as leading the “loony left” who ran local politics: the Trotskyites, CND-supporting peaceniks, radical feminists, various insane Marxist race campaigners who compared Britain to apartheid South Africa or even Nazi Germany; and the crazed teachers union, forever closing our progressive primary school down in opposition to FATCHA. Rick from The Young Ones was a brilliant fictional character, but people like him did exist in the Eighties.

I was eight, and my main interest was The A-Team, so I had no idea what any of it meant, but as time went by, I became aware of the sort of people who my parents were against – the Sandalistas, as dad called them, a pun on the Nicaraguan guerrillas who were the current flavour of the month among Guardian readers. Dad read the Guardian every day, and had worked there a long time before, yet he had an intense love-hate-but-mainly-hate relationship with the paper and what it stood for; in his politics he was motivated by an intense dislike of sanctimonious and hypocritical Lefties.

He didn’t particularly like the Conservative Party either; he seemed to loathe most of their MPs, thought they were only interested in enriching themselves and wasn’t convinced by the Thatcher revolution. I was never entirely sure what he stood for, except for a world stuck at a certain point of time.

For progressives, history is a succession of steps forward whereby the lives of the poor and vulnerable are liberated and the forces of darkness pushed back; it’s a view of the world they inherit from Judaism and Christianity, and which they share with Marxists. Faced with this glorious vision of unending change, conservatives can only offer a point at which the process should have stopped.

For dad, as he got older and more reactionary, that date went further back in time, until in his mid-70s he was arguing that western civilisation had reached its peak in the 14^th century. After that, everything had gone into decline.

Back when I was still young and innocent, the number of people who might now be termed “progressive” was relatively small; “political correctness” was yet to be popularised as a term, although academics such as William Hamilton had already begun to privately complain about a new atmosphere of intolerance on campus.

The chief political argument was about economics, characterised in a recent BBC documentary on Thatcher as being a great battle between economically liberal pointy-heads in SW1 and working-class men with sideburns and donkey jackets out on strike. Thatcher won that argument, but it sped up the social transformation that made Britain far less Tory; indeed it’s an interesting question who would now be regarded as more “Right-wing”, the strikers or the pointyheads, now that politics has become all about identity and values.

Thatcherism helped turbocharge the sexual revolution as more people acquired disposable income; the raunch culture of the late Nineties owed a lot to the economic liberalisation of the previous decade. Maggie’s government also vastly increased the number attending universities, which would become the main means by which progressive ideas were spread.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

I knew I was a Tory from quite a young age, but only joined (and left) the party in my thirties. I always assumed that any Young Conservative event would be largely filled with freaks and mutants. I don’t have to necessarily like or empathise with the people I broadly agree with, after all.

We’re less social than the Left; we’re also not credal about core beliefs which everyone must sign up to, which is why the Right is far more politically diverse, being more an alliance of groups that fall foul of the orthodox Left – from libertarians to Christian socialists. Conservatism also provides far less of a moral lodestar, which is why the decline of Christianity has drastically shifted people’s politics to the Left – because when religion is no longer a moral anchor, politics fills its place.

Our philosophy is more of an anti-religion, if anything. The origins of English conservatism lie in the conflict of the 17^th century and in opposition to “enthusiasm”, or the politics of Puritanism. The Godly, as the Puritans called themselves, wished to overturn the social order by basing status not on land or ancestry, but on religious fervour, and their moralising made them hugely unpopular.

Later, most famously with Edmund Burke, the Tory worldview was articulated into a coherent philosophy about the wisdom of preserving institutions, even those – especially those – which in theory didn’t make sense.

The Conservative Party then evolved into opposition against the Whig and Liberal Party merchant interests, and in defence of crown and altar, before becoming a coalition of liberals and conservatives opposed to socialism. Thatcherism was part of that struggle, but with the Great Realignment, we’re now back to where we started, with the Tories there to oppose moralising fanatics who are creating an atmosphere where dissenting opinions feel threatened.

Family history has a nice cyclical air, and a generation on, I vote for a Conservative government I dislike mainly because the Opposition are sanctimonious fanatics. Except the difference is that there are far more progressives today, and Rick from The Young Ones is no longer an aberration but the norm. And in the medium term, let alone the distant future, they are going to win.

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Life is one big status game

By Ed West

One of the curiosities of the modern world is that everyone thinks they’re losing, and the Tory Party is certainly good at elections – in my lifetime they’ve come top in 8 out of 11. It’s better than the alternative, as Woody Allen said of old age, but they’ve hardly spent the past decade in power reshaping the country in their image.

Under their rule we’ve had anti-natalist child tax credit cuts, the introduction of no-fault divorce, restrictions on stop and search, Theresa May’s equality report Burning Injustices and the publishing of gender pay ratios. Very little has been done to make family formation more affordable, which more than anything would make the country more Tory-leaning.

Cuts to police spending have seen crime levels rise once again under the Conservatives; this year my 12-year-old daughter has seen one knife fight and the aftermath of a second, and in-between those exciting days out a teenager was murdered about 100 yards from my son’s primary school. The Tory Government was way ahead of Black Lives Matter when it came to defunding the police.

David Cameron made promises about immigration, but the economy had already become too reliant on it; high immigration satisfied the financial needs of Telegraph readers and the moral needs of Guardian readers, and the Government didn’t want to upset either. So we got Brexit, which helped speed up the realignment, giving the Conservatives a solid majority. And for as long as Labour is captured by a relatively extreme minority and spends its time debating the dictionary definition of woman, the Tories are able to cruise along with their winning mixture of centrist policies and reactionary vibes.

But time is not on their side, for the least Tory social categories are now the most demographically ascendant – the young, the single, ethnic minorities and renters. The youth problem might be alleviated by housing reform, but it also reflects a significant generational shift in values.

The cohorts born after about 1975 and especially after 1990 tend to hold a range of views that will make it hard for the Tory Party to win their support, without abandoning their values to the point of meaninglessness. On most of the key identity issues, such as racial diversity, immigration, sexuality and gender, and (increasingly) our treatment of animals, there is a generational shift that dwarfs anything seen before.

The causes are varied; the globalised digital economy and the rise of English has weakened nation-states; the decline of religion has made utilitarian arguments about bodily autonomy impossible to resist; increased urbanisation makes people more liberal; progressivism financially suits the ruling class in a way it never did previously, and because politics is much to do with status, others imitate them.

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Such a generational shift has only happened twice before in European history; during the Reformation, and in the period when Christianity itself replaced polytheism. Just as with progressives in our own time, in the fourth century Christians had started off as a small, cranky minority, but had come to dominate the education system; they won because they were popular among the young, and especially young women, and were concentrated in cities where they could control institutions.

Their numbers grew until, at some point, in the words of one Christian apologist, the pagans would have to “wake up” to the fact that they were now a minority. Soon the temples were left to rot not, most likely, because of Christian persecution, but because no one believed anymore. It would seem absurd, and embarrassing, to profess a belief in Jupiter. Julian the Apostate had tried to turn back the clock, but it was impossible to fight Roman institutions which were now controlled by Christians.

Just as in Rome, conservatives today face professions that are dominated by their opponents, the most profound example again being the education system. Like Julian, Boris Johnson has recently made attempts to ensure that cultural institutions are not entirely controlled by the new religion, but he is fighting a losing battle.

The problem is not just with institutional control; the most important comparison with the last days of Rome is in the control of taboos. Whoever owns society’s taboos comes to win, and Christians just believed with greater force that to blaspheme their God was an offence against public morals, while the polytheists had stopped caring to defend theirs. And the ancient world impiety was often viewed as a worse crime than murder.

Today it is progressives who own taboos, and those who offend the sacred ideas of race and sexual identity face the terror of being charged with impiety (or “cancelled”, to use the secular term). And if you don’t control society’s taboos, it doesn’t really matter how many elections you win — you won’t shape the future.

And so, there you have it, it all went wrong in the fourth century. Even my dad would be impressed by such a reactionary view.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable

The French love of protesting at the drop of the hat is perhaps their defining character trait, but it reflects a deeper culture of political violence that goes deep into their history, and not just the revolution.

Theirs is a culture in which use of force is much more acceptable, and where authority has both menace and glamour. Last time I made the crossing back from France to England, the first UK Border Force man I saw was sat in one of those knackered old swing office chairs, with the word “Colin” written on A4 on the back; the whole veneer served to ensure that authority in England was something to not take too seriously.

It was a different matter two weeks earlier, crossing from Italy into France, where one is greeted along that slightly sensitive border by a parade of young French soldiers carrying machine guns and dressed in dazzling outfits, like a Jean Paul Gaultier advert. It’s designed to show that they mean business, and that authority should be admired and feared.

While our police spent much of their summer either on their knees in front of Black Lives Matters protesters, or running away from them, the gendarmes have a somewhat different attitude to demonstrations: since the gilet jaunes protest began at least 24 people have lost an eye as a result, while five have lost a hand; 315 have suffered head injuries, and two have died.

France’s frequent eruption of violence is baffling to its neighbours. They have short working hours, generous welfare and a first-class health care system (far better than Britain’s). The French live very long lives on a comfortable pension, and their disposable income is rising.. The French inhabit a country that to many of its neighbours feels like paradise, and so the Dutch expression“leven als God in Frankrijk” (live like God in France), but then historically that partly explains the readier resort to violence — you had to have a certain belligerence to occupy Europe’s most desirable real estate.

Next time you’re lucky enough to visit the country, take a glance outside when you’re driving through the Loire Valley and look at what you see – chateaux, lots of them. There are over 1,000 in that region alone, because chateaux tended to be built to replace older castles and strongholds, and western France was littered with them.

The geography of Britain ensured that a monarch based by the Thames was able to grow wealthy enough to rule over the entirety of England. The kingdom of Wessex united all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 927 and there was never any danger of the north being powerful enough to secede. Wales was slowly conquered and while Scotland was a different matter, it was never an existential threat to England.

The sheer size of France – four times that of England – made it much harder for Paris to establish dominance over the country’s natural boundaries, which are shaped by the Pyrenees and the Alps on two sides of the hexagon, the sea by two others, and by a vulnerable and ambiguous region to its east and north. The kings of the Franks ruled with the help of 12 regional lords, and until the revolution “France” was effectively the region around Paris.

The variance of France made it a country hard to unite, with huge divides in language and culture, likened by one essayist to “a horse whose four legs move in a different time”. Graham Robb in his brilliant The Discovery of France identified 55 different languages and dialects, and noted that in 1789 just 11% of the population spoke the national language. In Gascony and Provence people from the north were still called Franchiman or a Franciot (“French”).

France’s militarism is a legacy of Paris’s inability to create a monopoly of violence in a land which has been intensely fought over down the centuries. Medieval castles were a form of arms race between highly-independent duchies and counties, and the same was true of cavalry warfare, which largely developed in western France. The Normans, in particular, bred ever stronger and more aggressive horses, spending huge amounts of effort on mastering this form of warfare. The Battle of Hastings was won with a faked retreat, a tactic that requires a great deal of training and coordination; the Anglo-Saxons, in contrast, did not fight on horseback, which is why you probably knows lots of Williams and Roberts but not many Leofwines or Wulfnoths.

Cavalry was the foundation of medieval Europe, which is why French became for centuries the language of the ruling classes from Scotland to Jerusalem. It is why pretty much every single English word to do with war – apart, perhaps, from “war” itself – comes from French rather than Germanic roots.

It’s strange that those raised in the English-speaking world are taught a cliché of French army tanks that go backwards and joke about  “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, when, historically, France is by far the most war-like country in Europe.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

In his Decisive Battles of the World, Victorian historian Edward Creasy wrote: “If we were to endeavour…. to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.” At the start of the First World War, the country had four times as many soldiers in uniform as Britain, and almost as many as Prussian-controlled Germany, which had 50% more people.

Even in the build-up to the Second World War, France was more aggressive than Britain towards Hitler, and many divisions fought bitterly against the Germans in 1940, with even the Dunkirk evacuation carried out with French support and the loss of 18,000 Frenchmen. But the country was fatally divided politically, psychologically scarred by the huge losses of the First World War, when 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, and facing an almost psychotically determined enemy.

In living memory, France has been engaged in two hugely costly wars, losing 20,000 men in Vietnam and another 25,000 in Algeria. These casualties dwarf the numbers of British troops lost either in the Northern Ireland Troubles (763) or colonial insurrections like Malaya or Cyprus, which had fewer British casualties still. Relative to their population, they were also much more devastating than Vietnam was to America.

The violence in Algeria spilled over into metropolitan France, which is one reason why President de Gaulle is believed to hold the record for number of assassination attempts, somewhere in the region of 25 or 26, and his survival is all the more impressive considering his giant stature. Britain’s own Queen Victoria survived eight, although some of these were quite feeble (someone firing tobacco out of a gun, for instance). When the OAS try to kill you, they really try.

While the last massacre of English civilians took place in 1819, Parisian authorities killed at least 40 and maybe as many as 200 people in 1961, there protesting the war in Algeria. Because of the way that the American narrative has completely captured the British imagination, this story is much less well known than relatively peaceful campaign for civil rights in the US. A similar event in California or New York would be the subject of countless films, songs and plays.

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During the Sixties, France even seemed close to a coup, and still today its military contains various elements who seem quite keen on overthrowing the government, something inconceivable in Britain. A coup would actually be quite popular with the French public, according to polls, although it’s hard to know if this is just performative Frenchness at work. But, then, this is a country which still holds military parades, and still takes military honour and valour seriously.

Everything in French history is much more violent than ours. There was nothing like the Albigensian crusade in England, a regional conflict that killed maybe a million people, although the Harrying of the North came close (done, of course, by you-know-who). The Jacquerie, France’s equivalent of the Peasant’s Revolt, was far more violent than the English uprising, both in total deaths and the sadism and cruelty involved. During the Reformation Mary Tudor was regarded as a monster for killing 300 Protestants, while her sister Elizabeth put to death 200 Catholics priests and their sympathisers. The French Wars of Religion killed an estimated 3 million. As well as the Terror, the French Revolution also led to what was arguably the first modern genocide, in the Vendée.

Religious violence has now made an unwelcome return, and in recent years it has been quite normal to see French soldiers patrolling the streets, often protecting cathedrals that previously suffered destruction at the hands of the revolutionaries. Britain and France share a similar sized Islamic terrorism problem, but the scale of the violence there is much more spectacular and terrifying, largely because there are so many more firearms available – 12.7 million vs 3 million – plus the ease of transporting guns over the border. Britain has such a disarmed population that it is something of a running joke online, with London police divisions tweeting out their latest confiscations of Swiss army knives and particularly vicious-looking spoons. It makes us safer, but there’s also something quite demoralising about it.

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While there is something about the French readiness to protest and riot that is shocking to the Anglo-Saxon soul, it also quite admirable. Deep down, there is a great deal of respect for this belligerence, part of that wider Gallic battle with Americanisation, the modern world, and often reality.

We, though, are too timid and passionless to spend every Saturday blocking the centre of town, or driving a lorry load of slurry into the nearest government building; and if we protested like the French, we couldn’t do so with the same panache. Even the gilet jaunes movement managed a certain stylistic triumph while wearing high-viz vests, which in Britain are the very symbol of health and safety-driven inertia and defeatism. For us, the constant protests would get tiresome, the strikes would be a pain in the backside. And we’d look as cool as someone called Colin holding a clipboard.

The modern world’s cultural divide dates to the Sixties, a sort of second Reformation that was to start with a generational conflict between a cohort raised in sacrifice and patriotism, and one that wanted to change the world with peace and love. And shagging, obviously.

As it transpired, only the Who’s drummer Keith Moon died before reaching middle age, while lead singer Roger Daltrey would go onto become a prominent supporter of Brexit, the biggest generation-dividing issue in British political history.

It’s fitting, for an age cohort which first popularised generational warfare has gone onto become its biggest punchbags. Today the “Boomers” are the subject of intense rage among their impoverished descendants; although just as Henry Kissinger famously said that the Battle of the Sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternisation, so too with generational jihad.

Still, Britain’s twenty-somethings have just spent a year under house arrest, losing money and, even worse, one of their best quality of life years (it doesn’t get better, I’m afraid). This was ostensibly in order to protect that most beloved of baby boomers, the NHS, but in reality the generation most vulnerable to Covid and who account for the majority of NHS spending — those born before 1960. Now they are being asked to put their hands in their pocket once again to help pay for the elderly care of the luckiest generation in history.

Britain might not have leaders as old as America’s but it’s arguably more of a gerontocracy. When in 2017 Theresa May suggested that people’s assets might be needed to fund their increasingly expensive care needs, the proposal, dubbed the “dementia tax”, helped destroy her electoral prospects. Her successor Boris Johnson will not make the same mistake, and so the money to pay for care will instead come from a new, additional form of National Insurance, paid by taxpayers across all age ranges — including the 89% of young people who have no housing assets.

The Tories seemingly have no choice. While British politics has gone through a great realignment since 2016, with political loyalties now based on values rather than economic views, it’s also about home ownership, car use, rural v urban — but most of all age. This latter divide is not only unprecedented in British political history, but is far more pronounced than the age divide among our neighbours; indeed, in France and Italy the young vote more for radical Right parties than the old.

It is most of all in Britain where there has grown a great divide between the Sixties generation and their descendants. It is here where the governing party serves the interest of older voters so devotedly, without any real consideration about what happens next. But then it’s fitting for a generation which never thought about posterity.

“Baby boomer” is an Americanism, first used to denote the enormous rise in fertility that took place in that country from 1945-1960, a result of the unprecedented prosperity of post-war America, and the sexual conservatism that followed the conflict. Britain had a slightly different experience, with a relatively small baby-boom in the late 40s and a later surge that peaked in 1965, five years later than the States (the latter cohort, sometimes referred to as Britpoppers, also have outsize generational weight).

Whatever we call them, those born in the late 1940s or 50s have been blessed with a freakish level of good fortune, something that my generation could never hope to enjoy. As for the group younger than me — doomed to perpetual exclusion from the London housing market, a Black Mirror-style dystopia where everything they do remains on record, and a brutally unequal dating market that resembles the world of Steppes warlords — the idea of paying more tax to ensure that the luckiest generation in history has a smoother exit must be infuriating.

The blessed generation didn’t have it easy to start with. Around 3 in 100 children born in 1950 died before their fifth birthday, compared to about 1 in 100 when I first appeared in 1978 and around 1 in 250 today. (But for the baby-boomers’ parents, 1 in 10 didn’t make it.) Absolute poverty would have been by today’s standards dreadful, with half of all household’s lacking even a bath. Today’s lucky “Zoomers” can of course expect to have a shower in their first flat-share, even if it might be en suite in the kitchen.

Growing up in the 1950s, things like flu and pneumonia would still have been a serious threat, and I imagine that a great deal of generational attitudes towards Covid risk were informed by this relative life experience; the Asian Flu of that decade was far more dangerous to teenagers than Covid, but no restrictions were ever really considered.

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But if you survived those early years, you were officially part of the luckiest generation in history – especially since we tend to compare our lives with our parents, and their mums and dads had a terrible time.

Assuming you were born after May 1946 at the latest, you would have avoided losing a father in the war. You would have dodged National Service, abolished in 1960, and so unlike your American counterparts had no fear of being sent to Vietnam.

Your childhood would have coincided with the least violent years in British history, and crime would not reach its catastrophic modern levels until you were out of adolescence (and so most at risk of street violence). Muggings, a ubiquitous misery for the next generation raised in London, would have been unknown to you; indeed, this Americanism was not even popularised until you were already grown-up.

You would have been the last free-range children, able to walk a huge amount on your own, partly because there was far less fear of crime, although much of our urban fabric had already been surrendered to cars and your chance of being killed by one was high.

You might have gone on an extended hippy trail, visiting Iran, Afghanistan and a wider Islamic world that has become increasingly dangerous for subsequent generations (although eastern Europe was largely out of bounds). You would have enjoyed the great satire boom, and the decline of cultural restrictions, before the arrival of their newer — and in many ways more intolerant — replacements.

You would have come of age at the most perfect time in history to be young; although the sexual revolution in reality started a fair bit earlier than the 1960s, it certainly accelerated with the use of birth control and more permissive attitudes. This coincided with a uniquely creative period in music, led by the greatest band of all time.

Penicillin had become widely available during the Second World War, and the first cases of HIV would not be noticed until the late 1970s, so you would have enjoyed a unique period with no real fear of sexually transmitted disease. When I was growing up in the 1980s the Government was busy bombarding us with terrifying adverts featuring tombstones, warning us that if we so much as unzipped our trousers we’d end up with an incurable wasting disease. As it turned out, the risk to heterosexuals from HIV was low, but the same was not true of chlamydia, and today one in 20 young people in some parts of London have the illness.

But then, inevitably, the downsides of the sexual revolution weren’t going to affect those directly involved in it, but rather their children and grandchildren. It was a Ponzi scheme as much as the welfare system serving the baby boomers is a Ponzi scheme, with later generations being left with the bill; already Generation X and Millennials have worse health than their parents, partly due to far greater drug and alcohol use that came about following the Sixties. Similarly, the decline of marriage and the nuclear family only hit Britain in the 1980s, the actual 1960s generation largely unaffected.

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As a young baby boomer you probably didn’t go to university, but then you would have lived in cheap, central accommodation surrounded by lots of other young people with opportunities for fun, and complete independence; effectively the sort of setting universities try to recreate today, because it is otherwise unavailable.

A modern-day time traveller visiting Austin Power’s Swinging Sixties, as seen in the 2017 documentary My Generation, would have been startled by how young it felt. Not only was London youthful, but so were its desirable areas. Today the most noticeable thing about high-end London districts like Chelsea or Highgate is the ancientness; few young families can live there, let alone people in their 20s. This is, of course, relates to the real issue at the heart of the generational divide: the catastrophe of housing costs, which means even far less salubrious parts of London are unaffordable.

It was long assumed that rising house prices were a healthy sign, the tabloid obsession with the subject being a running joke. Not enough people cared that it was a bubble, and that with all bubbles it would eventually become too expensive for new players to join. Few pointed out that we should have been saving instead. No one observed that during that remarkable period of growth, late 19^th–century Britain, house prices actually declined. Victorians wouldn’t have tolerated runaway housing costs because they cared about posterity.

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Housing inflation is one reason that the percentage of millionaire-pensioners has risen from from 7% in 2008 to 25% in 2018. It’s why, when the baby boomers were young, the average pensioner was much, much poorer than the population while today there are more pensioners in the top fifth than bottom. They have enjoyed immense asset wealth, never to be repeated.

It is not their fault as individuals that the housing bubble coincided with the lifetime of the generation that had everything. But it’s unfortunate for those that follow, and unfortunate for the Tory Party which, being dependent on the support of homeowners, has therefore increasingly come to rely on older voters as a voting block.

I wouldn’t say those born around the millennium are the unluckiest of people – 1895 would have been a bummer. But, growing up after the financial crisis and austerity, and with house prices still increasing 10% per year, it must seem hopeless at times. It is especially frustrating for younger voters who align with the Tories on cultural or economic issues and dread a Labour government, yet see a party entirely devoted towards serving the luckiest generation.

Boomers, the group that got to enjoy the Beatles and the Stones, Hair, the Isle of Wight Festival and the hippy trail, have grown old to become synonymous with an aimless and short-term vision of conservatism, locked in a deathly embrace with the Tory Party, the last chapter in the incredible story of a truly lucky group of people.

By the time that Capt Cook set sail for the South Pacific in 1769 he had grown confident in a remedy, the only problem being that it was sauerkraut – never a particularly popular meal in England, and at a time when vegetables were looked down upon. How to convince the crew to eat 7,860 lbs of fermented cabbage on their long journey east? Cook simply ordered it to be a served only at the Captain’s Table, not to the men. As he noted in his journal: “The moment they see their superiors set a value upon it, it becomes the finest stuff in the world.”

“Sure enough, the lower ranked players began requesting it,” Will Storr writes in his excellent new book, The Status Game. “Before long, sauerkraut had to be rationed. The number of men that died from scurvy on that expedition was a record-breaking zero.”

The battle for status has defined human history; in the form of kleos or “glory” it provides the impetus for Homer’s heroes; it has been the subject of countless works of English literature; and the inspiration for absurd fashions from codpieces to ruffs to unwearable high heels. More recently, as status markers like accents or dress have levelled, and traditional barriers to social climbing (or abseiling) reduced, so the ways of signalling status have become more nuanced. And in some ways more competitive and vicious.

Life is a status game, and Storr identifies three methods by which we reach the top: dominance, competence and virtue (although most people use a combination of two or all three). It is the last of these which is the most interesting, and sometimes the most dangerous, inspiring immense cruelty.

Status is extremely important to wellbeing, so much so that it can have a profound effect on our health. People more successful in their careers tend to live longer, even taking into account confounders like smoking. The demoralising feeling of lower social status can send our bodies into a sort of crisis mode which in the long term puts us at higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, heart disease and cancer.

Being a loser can be fatal, and people who feel low status are also more likely to become ungenerous towards others and pick up destructive personal habits such as eating more sugary food — unsurprisingly, being overweight is an obvious status signal in rich countries. They are also more likely to kill themselves, with loss of job or divorce being the biggest risk factors for male suicide in middle age, for men who find themselves no longer provider or patriarch. Some people find the status game so stressful they simply drop out, most notoriously in Japan where more than half a million hikikomori have “social withdrawal syndrome”, locked in their bedroom doing God-knows-what.

Such is the beneficial effect of high status that most workers would choose a fancier title over a pay rise; in comparison having more power does not equal a happier life, heavy being the head that wears the crown. Our lust for status, in contrast, is insatiable.

When a high-status individual does something, Storr writes, “our subconscious copy-flatter-conformprogramming is triggered and we allow them to alter our beliefs and behaviour… We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised. People will believe almost anything if high-status people – whether priests, generals, actors, musicians, TikTokkers – suggest them.” Indeed they will profess to believe quite obviously untrue things.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, a huge amount of effort goes into signalling and detecting. “High-status people tend to speak more often and more loudly,” he notes, and “are perceived to be more facially expressive; achieve more successful interruptions in conversation; stand closer to us; touch themselves less; use more relaxed, open postures; use more ‘filled pauses’ such as ‘um’ and ‘ah’ and have a steadier vocal tone”. In fact our voice tone and even the frequency of our voice – the hum – changes to match the higher-status people. I’ve known workplaces where people come to imitate the laugh of the boss; you could hear them howling together, vocally members of the same tribe.

These signals dominate office and corporate life. A friend who works in finance recounted how Zoom conferences were far more exhausting because in real-life meetings you can easily tell from body language who was important, and mentally zone out when low-status clients started babbling away.

The human need for status can be hugely beneficial. Visit any major art gallery and you will see the result of this intense competition in late medieval Italy, where rival families hired the greatest artists and architects to raise their status. In 18^th century Britain, membership of clubs and societies became a social marker, the result being that the number of learned societies rose from 50 in 1750 to 1,500 in 1850, with an enormous impact on education levels, wealth and a variety of other measures.

Another example he cites is British cooking, which improved from the 1980s with the rising prestige associated with leading chefs, influenced by the very alpha male Marco Pierre White. (It is worth noting that, where something is low status, it will often be female-dominated because men place huge emphasis on employment status: whereas the traditional English male chauvinist believed that women belonged in the kitchen, his French equivalent saw it as the exclusive domain of the all-male culinary art.)

But just as often status games can be toxic, and do dreadful things to people — especially if religion, politics or some other marker of identity are involved.

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I’ve long believed that political beliefs work as status-markers, and have become more so in recent decades as other signals have declined in importance. People will adopt positions not just out of sincerity, partisan loyalty or conformity, but because they signal social status. Crime and immigration are the most obvious examples, because liberal positions are associated with higher education levels. Low-status members of society are less likely to benefit from freedom of movement, and more likely to be victims of crime. At best these views are vulgar.

This can have perverse results, the most visible example being with architecture. Post-war architecture is almost universally loathed, which is why pre-20^th century buildings consistently sell for more, even though they have huge technological disadvantages. Polling shows that a dislike of modernist architecture is one of the few things that every demographic agrees on – black, white and Asian, male and female, rich and poor, young and old. They all prefer the vernacular style.

The one section of society which disagrees happens to be architecture students — and the longer someone has been studying architecture, the more pro-modernist their views. That suggests an opinion which has become a status signal, marking the sophisticate out from the hoi polloi who share Prince Charles’s love of “pastiche”. If the public suddenly decided they actually liked the stuff that wins architecture awards, the high-status people would all be trying to build the new Poundbury.

That may be just my cynicism, but humans will repeat untruths if they feel it helps their position, and Storr cites various social science experiments showing that participants will make statements which they know to be false if other, high-status “participants” (actually actors) say it first. Worse still, “those asked publicly not only endorsed the false majority view, they punished the sole teller of truth by down-grading them.” If you’re ever mobbed on social media for a bad opinion, it might be of some comfort to know that a lot of the people throwing stones will secretly agree with you. Or perhaps it won’t.

To some extent all societal debates are in part a status competition, especially with regards the modern quest for moral status. Although dominance games are behind a great deal of violence across the animal kingdom, humans have evolved to live in far larger groups than other great apes and have therefore become much less violent. Instead, we we have learned to use virtue to raise our status, a quality which shows commitment to the wider community.

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Unsurprisingly, it has been the strategy of choice for manipulative bullies since time immemorial, with virtue games inspiring some of the most appalling cruelty in history, ranging from the witch hunts of the 17^th century to the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s.

Those responsible for these atrocities played a virtue game, creating the narrative that they were fighting some all-powerful, evil enemy, with the “maintenance of conformity, correct beliefs and behaviours being of heightened importance.”

The same process is clearly at work behind social media-led bullying, These are always framed in terms of protecting the weak, the urge to care and protect from harm; the more people imagine themselves aiding the vulnerable, the more horrendous their behaviour, giving them free rein to commit what Jonathan Sacks called “altruistic evil”. People do terrible things more out of love than out of hate. But it is also a status game, the aim being to “seek the maximal removal” of their opponent’s status: “ideally, reputational death.”

“When their mob grows into a status goldrush, a massive blast of vindictive energy gets directed at the victim. Attracted by the prizes, more and more ambitious players pile in and the game becomes an animal of attack, glorying in the ecstasy of dominance.”

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This is all especially dangerous because status is important not just to individuals but to groups, too, and many people feel that collective success and failure intensely. When a group is on top, its people feel happier; Storr cites a study tracking language across millions of books and newspaper articles which suggests that the British were most content in the 1880s. I don’t find this implausible: despite the huge amounts of poverty and early death relative to today, it was around the period when “to be born an Englishman was to win first prize in the lottery of life”.

Modern-day identity politics is dangerous because it unleashes a competition for status that can never really end. Many idealists hope to make the world fairer by raising the status of one group, often by increasing the prestige of their ancestors through historical reinterpretation. Yet status is a zero-sum game, and unlike wealth the pie cannot be expanded: if your group rises in status, others must fall, and the psychological and even physical effects of losing status are real.

Most of humanity’s problems have to some extent been solved or alleviated by technology and progress; we have never been richer, healthier or more at peace. But desire for status is the one thing that can never be overcome, because it is not enough that I succeed — others must fail.

We’re off camping again, among millions who will take advantage of our non-ability to go anywhere hot without hassle by sitting under a canvas, wearing two jumpers at night and trying to find a comfortable position to read with a head torch.

Like many fellow metropolitan ponces, my destination of choice would be the south of France, one of the push factors being that England is so expensive to holiday in. With just 250,000 second homes compared to France’s 3 million, our summer housing market manages to be more acute than our normal kind.

And so we go back to nature.

Britain, and England in particular, is very urban. It is the most cultivated, and most artificial of countries, with a population almost uniquely disconnected from nature. This explains our extreme sentimentality towards animals — at the time of writing the alpaca is still alive — and our romantic ideas about the countryside, which co-exist with a callous indifference to its destruction, both of native species and river life from pollution.

It also explains why we are such a nation of campers, despite having a climate almost comically unsuited towards the pastime. Camping has proved a strangely resilient form of holiday, despite people having more disposable income in general, and more distant trips becoming affordable. Our family never went camping as children, and I don’t even remember friends who ever tried it, yet almost every parent I know now does it, often quite regularly.

It’s a particular social scene very popular among certain London types, the people who bring hummus to Clissold Park picnics, who buy their daughters those illustrated books about empowering women, who might actually drink Brewdog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test beer, who have great taste in food and culture and terrible taste in politics. At some of the bigger campsites, such as Eweleaze in Dorset, huge swathes of Haringey, Islington and Hackney can be found. It’s like a seasonal migration of north Londoners, watched by anthropologists who are so impressed that they all manage to find their way to Weymouth each year, in search of fresh-baked artisan bread and yoga.

Yet camping in itself is one of the most classless of past times. Unlike foreign holidays, where some people go to Andalusia or the Canary Islands and others to Tuscany or Provence, campsites will contain all multitudes. Probably uniquely, it’s where you meet all the English, all together, in their natural habitat, which explains the special atmosphere, a shy friendliness. This has been the case since the craze started at the start of the 20^th century, when after the first British camping club was formed its president noted how “almost every division into which society in England is split has contributed to the ranks of the Camping fraternity of today”.

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But is it actually fun? I’m not sure. The first time we went camping was with a young baby, which I highly recommend. There’s nothing like being woken up by a piercing scream at 4am, a scream that also wakes up your neighbours who will spend the whole day resenting you. You’re still drunk, because it’s impossible to sleep on the ground otherwise, and you’re also wearing all the dry clothes you brought because it is so cold. And the ground is all wet and dewy when you step outside. And the toilet is… well, the toilets.

That first camping experience was on “eco” site, which means having the inner glow of saintliness while visiting a toilet which is literally just a medieval-style mound of excrement covered with sawdust. The perversity of paying money to live as our ancestors did, in an age of rampant fecal-oral diseases and sheer squalor, is a mystery.

It’s a hugely popular British pastime despite everything being completely at the mercy of the elements. On one of our earlier trips, I spent the entire first night holding up the tent as the rain and wind crushed its feeble structure, water coming in. In my other hand a beer, doing that British thing of pretending the rain doesn’t make everything completely shit. That this is, technically, a holiday. Not for the first time, I wondered, I could literally be at home on my sofa, warm and completely confident in centuries of advancing plumbing technology.

Clearly it has its challenges, yet for the children it is a small taste of the freedom that my generation of neurotic parents has largely denied them, a real-life Famous Five/Hardy Boys adventure. As for parents, I’m not convinced anyone actually enjoys it. Once while at a Eurocamp I remember a Belgian family opposite us, with three young blond children, and a bedraggled blond dad who spent the entire time lumbering up and down, carrying things, looking after children, applying sunscreen, chopping. He didn’t smile once the entire week, and inside was probably muttering “living the dream” sarcastically in Flemish.

But then the rain clears, and the children quieten down, and you get to stare at the fire. If I were going to come up with some cod-evo psych explanation, then I suppose it most mirrors the environment our species grew up in, with large groups sitting around a flame with only the stars above — always the most hypnotically beautiful moment of the holiday. It’s a completely fake, ersatz form of traditional living, which is of course the best kind.

In his landmark television series Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski made the point that “the largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture”, something he ascribed to “an act of will” by mankind. So why on earth are we desperate to go back? Well, like most ancient traditions, it’s an invention of the Victorians.

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There were long ago enthusiasts for getting back to nature, including Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854. A keen camper, he once built a campfire that was so successful it ended up burning down 300 acres of wood. There was also John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club and once camped with Theodore Roosevelt, an event which inspired the president to build America’s system of conservation.

But by far the most important figure, and the man called the inventor of modern camping, was Thomas Hiram Holding, whose 1908 work The Camper’s Handbook was the founding text of the movement.

Holding had been born in Shropshire in 1844. His parents were Mormons, which at the time was a very recent movement and considered a dangerous cult, one that practised polygamy. The Mormons had originated in upstate New York but after repeated attacks from neighbours trekked en masse to the safety of Utah. Popular with the then largely Anglo-American population in the northeast US, it also attracted converts from the UK and even today Mormons are overwhelmingly of English ancestry.

Yet the trek across America was brutally tough, and for the Holdings it would be heart-breaking; they lost two of their four children on the journey and the devastated family returned to England. But the unfathomable awfulness of the American trip perversely gave Thomas a great love of the outdoors. He had first experienced camping on a plateau overlooking the Mississippi river and sought to recreate the sheer natural beauty of this experience back home.

In Britain, the new interest in the outdoors was specifically linked to urbanisation. In the 1870s and 1880s the cost of food plummeted, mostly due to the opening up of huge areas of North America to farming, as well as improved storage and transportation; the countryside in England, long in decline, further emptied. “As fewer people lived in the countryside, memories of rural life became hazy and romanticised,” Matthew de Abaitua wrote in his history of the craze, The Art of Camping. A population that had become alienated from the countryside was now keen to create an idealised version.

In 1886 Holding went to the west of Ireland with three friends: two of the men were “fairly much married” and the other two were to “study the characters of the settled and sensible men who had become sobered and broken to the most earnest duties of life”, as he put it. A late Victorians lads’ holiday, it was arguably the first modern camping trip, and they travelled by bike, since “cycle camping” was also tied up with the new popularity of cycling.

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The cycling scene in late 19^th century Britain often had a progressive and proto-feminist edge to it, and many female cyclists also took part in the Victorian women’s football movement. Unsurprisingly, then, Holding was very keen on encouraging women to camp and remarked on “How quickly they pick up the making and mounting of a tent and its appliances, the cooking and the tidying up, and how they take on the bathing.” There was even a female contributor to the Camper’s Handbook, a “Mrs F Horsfield” who described it as a break from domestic chores. Well, up to a point.

Holding began a craze that would grow to huge heights after the Second World War, always a passionate evangelist for the outdoors. Camping, he explained, “keeps old men young” and “revives his taste and love of the country”. He advised that “it enabled a man to get away from his family; or his family to get away from him for a spell” and “It makes men more tolerant of the domestic life”.

The last one, of course, is the key. People go camping so that they can appreciate home again, enjoy the absurd luxuries of a power-shower or bath, a dishwasher, a sofa, even an actual bed. It’s a very strange way to view holidays, like going to a failed state just to appreciate the transport infrastructure back home. Indeed, it’s more like a medieval pilgrimage, where the whole point is to suffer rather than simply “enjoy”.

But we do it because it’s our tradition — even if, like all the best traditions, it is entirely invented.

Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.

In recent years, unpalatable political ideas have often been presented under the cover of humour. Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually. But he’s not alone – in Italy and the Ukraine, comedians have risen to very highest office, and France may be next.

Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously”. Or as comedian Andrew Doyle put it: “You’re far more likely to remember a joke than an argument.” But perhaps because we live in such a serious and pious climate, the authorities have never been more scared of jokes.

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Earlier this year an EU report warned that online memes were a menace to society, potentially dangerous to social peace. These memes, it said, are being used “to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.”

The document identified a number of popular Right-wing memes, including Pepe the Frog and Wojak, the former symbolising “a kind of superior nonchalance toward others, helping to normalise hostile attitudes toward minorities and political opponents” and “anti-elite arrogance and condescension”.

Pepe the Frog became a household name about five years ago during an election that involved humour to an unusual degree. At the start of September 2016, after Hilary Clinton had made a speech attacking her opponents as a “basket of deplorables”, Donald Trump Jr posted on Instagram a doctored photo of the Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables replaced with The Deplorables, with a line-up of Trumpians, including the Donald, his even more repellent son, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and… Pepe the Frog.

Pepe was originally a harmless cartoon amphibian who occasionally peed himself, so old in internet terms that he first appeared on MySpace, back in 2005, and it was only in 2015 that it begun to be adopted by users of the notorious 4chan website.

When Trump announced his candidacy in June that year countless images of Pepe wearing a Make America Great Again cap began appearing on the site, seen as a veritable womb of trolling. Clinton then denounced Pepe as a symbol of white supremacism, joining a long list of often arcane supposed white nationalist signals, from milk to the okay sign.

The frog came to represent an online movement of meme-creating, often involving quite creative pranks. During that election, countless online comment pieces and reports focused on the influence of 4chan, written with the horror of a strait-laced reporter investigating the dangerous phenomenon of Mods or hippies (and continuing a long history of journalists misunderstanding the site). Trump’s win was viewed as a sort of 4chan troll that got out of hand, or as one user put it: “We actually elected a meme as president.”

Some of the site’s users were clearly delighted about the election win, but it seemed primarily motivated by the pain it would cause to pious, sanctimonious actors, hysterical commentators and the rest of the progressive establishment. The meme-creating trolls aim to shock and to wind up, and journalists – privileged, pompous and partisan – are obvious targets.

It’s this very organic nature of memes that makes them effective, an in-joke magnified. They cannot really be controlled or faked. Their power depends on who is using them, and the Meme life cycle means that, by the time a 43-year-old journalist is writing about a meme, it’s probably dead.

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Authenticity is the key, and Clinton’s attempt at making popular cultural references aimed at younger voters always sounded flat. Similarly, just as Hillary’s Twitter account was clearly written by a group of insufferable Ivy League graduates, especially crafted for the election strategy, Trump’s tweets were obviously written by the mad bastard himself; they were authentic, just as he was authentic, and, despite his immense faults as a human being, also very funny.

Many memes aren’t necessarily far-Right or even Right-wing but are just socially obscene, which is basically the same thing now. For example, Norf FC, a satire of English football fans, would certainly be considered “problematic”, to use the language of sanctimonious bores who police discourse. Originating on 4chan, it’s decidedly offensive but also funny, at its best a modern-day Hogarth, making fun of certain aspects of English life, including the English abroad, their obsession with football above all else, and their tendency to drink and fight. But it has also expanded organically to cover our history, including the Napoleonic Wars and the Roman invasion. (A remake of Our Island Story but illustrated with Norf FC would make an excellent book).

Then there is Wojak, perhaps the most popular of Right-wing memes, and arguably the bleakest. The EU report describes how the meme “has gradually been adapted and advanced by far-Right meme culture to portray liberals with blank expressions” who “do not question the information that comes from mainstream press and politics”.

One of the earliest variations of Wojak was NPC, or Non-Player Character Wojak, a grey, lifeless figure who repeats empty phrases like ‘‘The future is female” and “Reality has a liberal bias”. “NPC” comes from online gaming, and reflects the view that most of the population are mindlessly conformist, lapping up the low-brow mass culture which carries a shallow progressive message, and repeating it.

Wojak has evolved into various other forms — Withered Wojak is a favourite, often used in response to the latest self-harm masquerading as life advice spread by journalists and other opinion formers, or to children being exposed to drag queens, or the most recent race-baiting directives from on high. He represents despair that this will never be over and will only get worse.

Then there is Soyjak, who with his mouth agape in pathetic admiration is not just physically unimpressive, but mentally emasculated, desperate to win the approval of women and of polite society. The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone, while the facial expression – also known as “cuckface” – comes from the idea that an open mouth is associated with lower social status and submissiveness among male primates. This was a scientific theory first posted on a 4chan messageboard, which is good enough citation for me.

Soyjak is often paired with Gigachad, a manly, ubermensch figure (in reality an Azeri model called Ernest Khalimov, who apparently is vaguely aware of how his image has become a meme but otherwise lives a wholesome life far away from this madness). Soyjak and Gigachad often appear together in memes, the former hysterical about something of little real importance, the latter relaxed and happy, unafflicted by modernity-afflicted neurosis.

Strangely, the Soyjak and Gigachad meme has its antecedent in Soviet propaganda about cuckface factory bosses and Gigachad communists. However, the muscle-bound Gigachad is a sort of Right-wing masculine ideal, although a cynic might suspect that most of the people posting these memes have a stronger resemblance to Soyjak (just a wild guess).

Some of the memes are funny and imaginative; “Should have let us grill” pays tribute to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matters protesters trespassing on their estate. It’s a play on “grillpill”, a Left-wing meme about babyboomers and their “I don’t care about politics, I just wanna grill” mindset. The McCloskey meme, in contrast, laments a hellish progressive world where everything is political and no one can be left to grill in peace without being bothered by ideological fanatics. Those ideologues now seem to be in control, which explains why so many popular memes come from the Right; hence the popular expression “The Left can’t meme” – which is a meme itself.

If this is the first art form since the late 19^th century in which the Right has dominated, that only reflects who is in control of culture, and particular its taboos; it’s the very willingness of meme-creators to upset these taboos that the likes of the EU Commission find so disturbing, since without them all sorts of social norms might break down.

Yet that is what art has often sought to do. While writers, playwrights and artists from the late 19^th century increasingly saw themselves in moral opposition to the establishment — the monarch, the church, even to bourgeoise sexual morality — since the 1960s progressives have taken over the commanding heights of culture both in the United States and Britain, meaning that much of the art world has lost the place of opposition in which it feels most comfortable.

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Revolutionaries in the past have faced a similar problem. The EU report looked at the possibilities of “attempting to counter extremist humour with a form of alternative humour”, which it concedes is very difficult, and this is indeed what was attempted after the revolution in Russia. There, political jokes were banned as “anti-Soviet propaganda” and were replaced “with their own brand of dull official humour, which they disseminated in satirical magazines”, in the words of Ben Lewis, author of Hammer and Tickle.

These new official jokes were often about peasant stupidity, or when they made fun of the system, it was because it wasn’t being properly implemented by local officials; the beliefs behind that system were sacrosanct. As a result “there were now two kinds of humour: official and unofficial – the written and the spoken, the public and the private. In the censored void, a culture of the spoken joke would develop, a collective satirical work produced by the whole population”.

A similar pattern occurred in the West when, following our cultural revolution, new taboos replaced old ones, but mainstream humour failed to maintain its role of undermining them. Satirical comedy stopped laughing at prevailing ideas but instead, with Michael Moore and then The Daily Show, began making stupid peasants – older, rural Republican voters – the punchline.

The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power; following the American lead with Wojak-like conformity, British clapter-comedy such as the Mash Report, where the audience applauds rather than laughs, has made the political out-group the butt of jokes, while avoiding the sort of unspoken, absurd truths that make political humour bite.

The same is largely true of consciously “anti-woke” comedy, much of which is very poor quality; or, if I were to be charitable, is aimed at older people. Perhaps it is because it employs a similar tactic to clapter, using a political out-group as a punchline, without in any way hitting a taboo. Memes, in contrast, are more provocative and darker, coming from a place of genuine contempt and despair.

Whoever the people making it, anything that grinds away at taboos is going to be at least mildly funny; laughter is a release from social norms. When I was a child, there was still the great British tradition of schoolboys drawing pictures of penises on religious figures in books, an almost instinctive desire to shock and mock; it’s funny because of the reaction it would provoke. Today even publicly desecrating Christ barely registers, yet when a pissed Man City fan drew a willy on a Marcus Rashford mural it led to a public meltdown — and even a vigil — because of a fear it had broken our number one taboo, race.

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It’s not that the Left can’t meme, it’s just that Left-wing beliefs don’t trigger taboos, even quite extreme Left-wing beliefs, so there is no need for them to employ the memetic equivalent of criminal cant to conceal their views. The sort of internet culture epitomised by 4chan aims to shock, and as the prevailing culture has become more progressive and censorious, it has grown more outrageous in blaspheming that new moral code.

If the likes of Wojak are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs. Humour, especially arcane, coded humour, is an escape.

Offensive as these memes are to polite society, the idea that Pepe and Wojak are going to normalise extreme-Right politics, or even centre-Right politics, is outlandish. Much of the time they are shared to provoke, or as a joke, but it’s also the case that much of the online Right is play-acting anyway, whether pretend trads or fake fascists – they’re all the children of liberalism. The problem is that, like the Russian revolutionaries before them, the post-1968 progressives now find themselves no longer rebels but rulers, and facing the difficult task of policing social norms and keeping the peasants in line.

In August 1991, while the USSR’s reforming General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed in his Ukrainian dacha, a group of hard-liners seized power. Gorbachev, under house arrest, turned to the BBC to find out what was going on, since in the Soviet Union nothing the media said was true unless the party said so. He learned that, in the centre of Moscow, Russian Federation president Boris Yeltsin courageously stood in front of the city’s White House in defiance of the plotters, surrounded by supporters brandishing the old Russian flag.

Perhaps what wasn’t clear to everyone was that Yeltsin was drunk for much of it. The true extent of his alcoholism became more apparent in the years after he dissolved the communist state a few months later and became president of an independent Russia, although he already had a colourful reputation for drink-related antics.

The plotters, it turned out, were also mostly legless. Having began a cack-handed coup that they weren’t prepared to kill for, the ringleaders appeared on television looking ashen-faced, some shaking nervously, their insides rotting from vodka. Most of all, though, they just appeared old, old and old beyond their years, the face of a fading empire based on a faith no one really believed in anymore.

By this stage, the Soviet Union was itself dying of alcohol, and attempts to treat it proved fruitless. One of the biggest mistakes made by Gorbachev — a very moderate drinker, which is why he’s alive and his rival Yeltsin is long dead — was to raise the tax on vodka, as part of a drive to tackle the country’s catastrophic problem with drink. Russian humour is famously bleak and sharp, and this led to a joke in which a boy asks, “Papa, and this means that you shall drink less?” “No, son, this means that you shall eat less”.

Alcohol played a central part in the demographic collapse that pre-empted the political fall of the USSR. It was back in the Seventies that people first noticed that in the Soviet Union people were starting to die younger. The decline in life expectancy affected not only the old, but the middle-aged. There was no famine, no foreign invasion, no natural disaster; instead people were drinking themselves to death out of despair. A country in which life is getting shorter — and worse — for its citizens has no future.

Russia’s birth rate had long collapsed, too. Two things drive higher fertility in wealthy countries — religion and affordability. All the major religions promote childbearing, give prestige and status to women who have children, and men who stick around; on top of that, attending a church, mosque or synagogue is associated with a number of measures of wellbeing that breed optimism.

The second factor is money. If both partners in a couple must work in order to survive, fertility is going to be severely depressed. The Soviet Union had extensive day care provision for mothers, but it was nowhere near enough to make up for the shortfall caused by mediocre wages. Back in the 1970s, Russian women marvelled at how their American equivalents could afford to leave work while they had children. As the New York Times reported, they “express astonishment when they learn that an American father can support a family of two, three or four children without his wife’s working. Many are also surprised that American women would willingly have more than one child.” For them, it was a huge struggle to raise just one.

The Soviet Union’s main adversary in the Cold War was also defined by ideology, to some extent. Many western nations had embraced liberalism, but no other was created with the words of John Locke enshrined in its foundation. Yet liberalism, too, faced its challenges in the late 20th century, not from the obviously failing Soviet Communism, but from rival ideas within the democratic tradition. Starting in the 1960s, a new way of thinking began to predominate in the US that was not really liberal, although its opponents confusingly still referred to it as such.

This new way of thinking was more hostile to freedom of speech, and its adherents began the process of chasing deviant thinkers out of academia that began in the late 1960s and would massively reduce political diversity by the 21st century; it supported not just personal sexual freedom, as did liberalism, but radical ideas about sex, including hostility to the family; it was anti-religion and would become more so when religion clashed with sexual rights. As for freedom of association, the “master freedom” in Christopher Caldwell’s words, this was also incompatible with a worldview that prioritised equality over liberty.

This new way of thinking — progressivism is probably the fairest term — is far less tolerant than liberalism. Indeed, in its hostility to freedom of speech, its Manichean worldview, its suspicion that its opponents are fascists, and the belief that politics should be inserted into everything — from science to children’s books — it is closer to the totalitarian tradition. American progressivism is not communism, obviously, anymore than its opponents are Nazis; the market is perfectly capable of achieving most progressive goals, and America has become more culturally Left-wing as Right-wing economic policies have dominated, globalisation being the common theme that links the two.

But globalisation came with a price, with millions of jobs lost after the 2001 trade deal with China, made two months after George W. Bush had followed the Soviet example by invading Afghanistan. It was in those former industrial heartlands where people first began to notice an epidemic of drug-related deaths that now constitutes one of the greatest social disasters in history.

Four decades on from its superpower rival, the United States had now become a country in which people were dying younger, driven by overdoses and suicides. That this epidemic took so long to register may have been the solitary and often legal nature of the drug problem; unlike Aids, it did not affect too many celebrities, Prince being the exception. But it could also be who the victims were — predominantly rural white Americans, neither powerful themselves nor championed by powerful supporters.

Like the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a system in which some social classes and races are officially favoured, and some are disfavoured, reflected in post-war legal innovations like affirmative action.

Affirmative action was originally introduced as a counter-measure to segregation, either of the official or unofficial variety, but as with many things its purpose evolved as bureaucracies grew. Today, government interference in private institutions is aimed at the goal of equality — not the liberal concept of equality of opportunity, but the more ambitious equality of outcomes, or “equity”.

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Under this theory, each racial group should have equal representation in elite institutions, which means that, depending on their race, Americans must achieve different scores to attend certain colleges. Equality is achieved through inequality. If this sounds illiberal, indeed un-American, that is because it is not unlike the “nationalities policies” created by communist revolutionaries, and under which the Russian majority were officially discriminated against in certain positions.

The Soviet nationalities policies allowed minority groups a certain degree of self-rule and recognition, while also ensuring that their elites remained utterly under the control of the party. Sometimes other nationalities would be disfavoured because they were seen as too anti-communist or otherwise disloyal, as happened to Ukrainians, Tartars and Jews at different times, but only Russian identity was actively discouraged. Stalin condemned the “Great Russian chauvinist spirit” and the Soviet Union saw majority nationalism as by far the greater evil.

This did not lead to a brotherhood of man, amazingly. The ethnic spoils system benefited the party, and minority members within it especially, but it is also a zero-sum game. The benefits of diversity, like the benefits of liberalism and capitalism, are supposed to be non-zero-sum, and often are: migrants benefit from moving to a richer or safer country, but the host population gains from their skills or cultural niches. When your migrant neighbour gets rich — and even richer than you — not only will it not harm you but you may well benefit.

Equity is similarly a zero-sum game: someone has to lose, and if one group is feted, in some cases even sacrilised, then others have to suffer, whether with tangible matters like college places or simply status and prestige.

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Today America’s thought-leaders are obsessed with white nationalism and regularly denounce white supremacy as a lethal danger to the nation, in what is probably history’s least ever white supremacist country; a country in which the majority  is officially discriminated against by certain institutions, and where membership of the group is considered so tainted and wicked that the media has regular denunciations of whiteness, and where numerous people avoid this taint by faking their ethnic origins.

There are other resemblances to the older empire. At the heart of Soviet thinking was the blank slate, the idea that life outcomes are determined entirely, or almost entirely, by social forces rather than genes. As Mao said of the peasantry, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it”.

Likewise, American progressivism today is entirely built on the blank slate, and as in the USSR, where belief in Mendelian genetics led to internal exile, American social scientists offering any sort of genetic explanation for outcomes face ostracism. Privately, lots of people will agree, but they’ll lose their job if they speak out, or their publisher will drop them, or it will only embolden the party’s enemies and harm the noble goals of progressivism.

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

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America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

June and July are when the horse racing calendar reaches its peak, carnivalesque events which illustrate one of the great curiosities of English life: how so many social patterns are U-shaped — popular with the toffs at the top and the plebs at the bottom, with not much interest in between.

The most eventful day in the racing calendar is Ladies Day at Ascot, a term that dates back to an anonymous poem written in 1823 which declared: “Ladies’ Day… when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine.” Although this is the sport of kings, Ladies Day tends to be best known for the various drunken fights between women in expensive dresses, often while their menfolk lie passed out on the grass. This has become so frequent as to be almost part of English culture, like the Friday before Christmas where people are allowed to have a punch-up.

Horse racing sums up the point once made by the great Billy Connolly when he said: “The proper serious upper class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks. What I found when I was in the pub was the rich and the successful from millionaires’ row mixed very easily with the council house people — and it was the V-necked jumper Volvo mob who had the problem. They wondered why [the upper class] were talking to them fucking scrubbers.”

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The Army is the classic example of an institution popular at both ends of the social spectrum, with public school-educated Ruperts in the officers’ mess and squaddies in the ranks, still heavily recruited from poorer areas. Except during two world wars, no one in my family, bred by hundreds of years of reading-related short-sightedness and bourgeoise cowardice, has ever considered the military. It would be almost inconceivable for someone in the middle of the English class system to do so.

But that has always been the case. The late medieval satire Le roman de Renart le contrefait observed that: “When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

Fighting was the original role of the aristocracy, and it was not until the 14^th century that rich merchants like Michael de la Pole — whose father rather vulgarly made his money in wool rather than stabbing someone while riding a horse — began to enter the highest ranks. Even in modern conflict the nobility has made an outsized sacrifice, with the great public schools losing hugely disproportionate numbers in the First World War. (Old Etonians suffered twice the average casualty rate.)

Big families are another marker of class, with those at each end of the socio-demographic index having the highest fertility. True aristocrats, just like true proletariats, are also more likely to spend a great deal of time with family members, and they are both more likely to give their children wacky names, whether it’s Prince, Rara or Zenia.

Their surnames are often hard to tell apart, too. During the recent European Championship, Birmingham MP Jess Philips tweeted: “My youngest’s question for tonight ‘why do footballers never have double-barrelled names?’”

It was interpreted as being a statement on the England heroes’ proletarian origins, yet it was a strange thing to write without checking — because countless English footballers have double-barrelled names, to such an extent that it’s a cliché. Double-barrelled names are a classic example of the class U-curve.

Today horse racing remains the great class uniter, but once upon a time there were a whole variety of “sports” — essentially animal torture — enjoyed both by toffs and peasants. As Ian Mortimer recalls in his entertaining book on the Regency period, the Westminster dog pit, where hounds would rip various other animals to pieces, was tremendously popular with both the upper classes and poor; when Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, the future tsar, came to London he absolutely loved it.

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Boxing was also a very upper-and-lower class sport, and fashionable gentleman known as “the Fancy” would attend London pugilist schools alongside scrawny cockneys. Poet Robert Southey said that “a boxing-match settles all disputes among the lower classes, and when it is over they shake hands, and are friends”, while the upper-class went for duelling instead.

Some aristocrats liked fighting so much they sought out the company of rough working men to give them a good scrap, among them Regency rake and eccentric, and Tory MP, “Mad” Jack Mytton. Mytton, a member of the Shropshire squirarchy, had attended Cambridge, where he drank 2,000 bottles of port and failed to graduate, before going on a Grand Tour and joining the Army. The perfect aristo.

Mytton was a great enthusiast of hunting, another popular sport among both ends of the spectrum, and when on one occasion a Welsh miner got in his way while out enjoying his favourite pastime, he dismounted and challenged him to a fight. The two men punched each other continually during 20 rounds of bare-knuckle boxing and when the Welshmen surrendered the Tory gave him 10 shillings for his trouble. A fun day was had by all.

Similarly, tattoos have historically been popular among aristocrats and the urban poor. Edward VII had a cross and George V a dragon, which he got while in the Navy, while Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake on her wrist. Tattoos are now ubiquitous and classless, but people’s social status can often still be marked out by fashion, an area where working-class men in their 20s have often aped the aristocratic look; the most famous case of this is Burberry, the brand which went from being a very Sloane Ranger/Country Life outfit to ubiquitous among football hooligans at one point.

But then perhaps the most obvious — and largely forgotten — product of upper-lower class cooperation is football itself. In Beastly Fury, his account of the birth of the national sport, Richard Sanders wrote how the football came about from a mixture of (extremely violent) public-school culture and peasant folk traditions. The game had been popular in medieval England, repeatedly banned as it invariably ended with disorder, until the custom was largely suppressed in the early Victorian period. (Remnants of the old game are still played in a few villages in England, if that’s your kind of thing.)

The aristocracy tolerated these anarchic events but the new industrialists were hostile, as were the trade unions, one union leader denouncing football as “barbarous recklessness and supreme folly”. They especially disliked how upper-class men would stand on the sidelines cheering it on as all great fun, one complaining “Your ‘Betters’ have been foremost in this fête, hallooing you like brute dogs to the strife”. Shrovetide football, often accompanied by widespread violence, was banned by middle-class campaigners who disliked the “barbarous and disgusting play of football”, as one called it.

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But the rural poor loved it, as did the toffs, with variations of football surviving in the great public schools where “the ancient folk sport was given a new lease of life in the mid-nineteenth century when it came close to dying out among the common people”.

From the late 1830s there was a football scene at Cambridge University, the only problem being that all the public schools played different rules, some vastly so (Rugby especially). Football came to be pioneered by the likes of former Harrow schoolboys John and Charles Alcock, yet the real hotbed of the game was in Sheffield, home to the world’s oldest surviving football club; Sanders suggests that this was because the local folk game had lingered in this part of Yorkshire in the hill villages of Penistone, Thurlstone and Holmforth. “Association football was now essentially a fusion of the Charterhouse/Westminster-influenced game played in London and the more folk-influenced game that had emerged from Sheffield.”

Eventually football would become a heavily working-class sport, only becoming truly classless from the 1990s, but its origins lie in Connolly horseshoe theory. Unlike rugby, however, football didn’t split along class lines, because the upper-class FA were willing to accept professionalism, whereas the RFA refused, leading northern teams to form the Rugby League. Significantly, Sanders attributes this to the aristocratic confidence of football’s founders. “It may well be that this reflected the newer, lower-status public schools many of the men running rugby had attended,” he wrote, “they were less secure socially than the Eton and Harrow men who ran football and therefore less comfortable compromising.”

And this has always been the case. Aristocrats and poor can act like each other, dress like each other or indulge in the same pastimes, partly because no one is going to mistake them. As Scott Alexander explained in his seminal essay Right is the New Left, most fashions try to signal that someone is a notch above their real status, while avoiding giving the signal of being the status immediately under.

But you’re never going to be mistaken for someone several notches above or below. A few children now have double-barrelled names but one reason it has not proved so popular among progressive middle-class parents may be the signal; if you’re the first person in your family to go to university and you’re now middle class, no one is going to mistake you for a double-barrelled aristocrat who lives on an estate; but they may mistake you for a double-barrelled struggling single mum who lives on an estate.

We also tend to resent or dislike those closest to us in the pecking order. Despite the folksy image, Jess Phillips, like many prominent Labour MPs, comes from the comfortable ranks of the bourgeoisie, her mother having been a senior NHS administrator. Their hereditary class enemies are the traditionally Tory-voting members of the aristocracy and squirearchy just above them — the double-barrelled brigade — and many a political or journalistic worldview was formed by class resentments at Oxford and Cambridge, against those toffs from the Bullingdon Club. 

But while people are more likely to feel hostility to people immediately above or below them on the social spectrum, those more distant may feel either irrelevant or a curiosity. We don’t compare our lives to people unlike us, nor feel our status threatened. That might explain why people across the country continue to vote for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, almost caricature Old Etonians, because they feel that like them, they are properly fucking nuts.

There are various reasons, not least that spouses physically look after each other and once alone, a widow or widower might not care much any more. But there is also the psychological impact of grief, the broken heart and the feeling of not wanting to go on. Death is, in this sense, contagious — but, then, almost everything is. Perhaps after a tortuous year and a half in which everyone has learned about infection and “R values”, we should start to appreciate this more.

Today we exit lockdown after 16 difficult and strange months, a period that began and ended with two of the most watched television programmes in British history: the Prime Minister’s television broadcast to the nation, and the 2020 European Championship final.

In between those two events, the British public were forcibly locked into their homes, pubs were closed, casual sex was made illegal and parties were banned — it was the most popular policy in living memory, and a huge swathe of the population seemed to actually enjoy it. Indeed, a large section of the public wants lockdown to last forever, with almost one in five favouring a permanent 10pm curfew.

What some people liked about lockdown was the feeling that everyone was was in it together, all in the same boat: no one had a social life, everyone was isolated and scared, and that felt somehow more communal. And while the fetishisation of the NHS can feel strange, the Clap for Carers and the weird cult of Captain Tom was the closest thing we’ve had to common rituals for a long time — and people need common rituals.

The British obsession with the Second World War is often misinterpreted as being about triumph, but it’s actually related to the sense of common purpose people felt, especially during the Blitz; humans are much happier when they’re part of something, which is why suicide rates fall during periods of intense group feeling, a trend first noted by Durkheim.

When the virus first hit, Boris Johnson was slow and reluctant to act because he is, by nature, a classical liberal, a philosophy that holds individual liberty as the central good. It is deeply inadequate in such a crisis, because we have no individual choice during an epidemic — our risk of getting sick depends not just on our behaviour, but on the behaviour of those around us.

That is partly why the poor suffered higher death rates (that feeling that we were all in it together during lockdown was largely false). It was not only that most manual workers continued to go into sometimes dangerous workplaces, or that the poor have higher risk of ill-health and live in denser areas — it’s also because the people in their social networks were more likely to be infected to start with.

Yet the same is true of everything. Almost every aspect of life depends on contagion in some way, fixing the odds against those in the wrong networks. We are ultra-sociable as a species, unusually so for mammals, to the extent that E.O. Wilson even described humans as “eusocial apes”. Compared with our relatives, we like to live in very large groups, socialise with strangers, and imitate them. It is for that reason that plenty found lockdown unbearable.

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Because humans live in such large groups, and are also so unusually influenced by culture as well as genes, it’s not just viruses that are contagious within human populations, but ideas and behaviour. One of the first recognised “contagions” was suicide, a problem called the Werther effect, after the Goethe novel The Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774. A story of unrequited love, the book was blamed for a string of suicides, with copies found beside the body in some cases.

In the Fifties it was first noticed that, whenever a prominent celebrity suicide was reported, there followed a spike in road fatalities. It turned out, as insurers soon cottoned onto, that a great deal of car accidents are disguised suicides. Copycat suicide has been found repeatedly in various studies across countries, the most prominent recent British case being the Bridgend epidemic. Multiple studies show that people are more likely to commit suicide after a friend or acquaintance does, mostly using the same methods. It is why the media has very strict rules about reporting suicides, probably the only rule that British newspapers have assiduously stuck to down the years.

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Suicide is not unique, though. Marriage is contagious, as is non-marital cohabitation, divorce and pregnancy. If a woman becomes pregnant, the likelihood of her friends becoming pregnant rises over the next two years.

Yet the contagion effect is largely ignored in political debates. One of the big issues of the Nineties and Noughties was whether out-of-wedlock births and fatherlessness had a negative impact on life chances, and what the state’s role was in this trend.

It’s hard to disentangle cause and effect, nature and nurture, but it now appears that what affects a child’s life outcomes is not just whether he has a father at home, it’s whether the other kids in the neighbourhood have a father at home. One US study found that “Black father presence at the neighborhood level strongly predicts black boys’ outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present or not”; another that “Children of single parents have higher rates of upward mobility if they grow up in a neighbourhood with fewer single parent households”.

Boys from more comfortable backgrounds, whose own fathers were absent, were much more likely to have other male role models in their social network, where family break-up had not reached epidemic levels. It takes a village, as the saying goes, but you need men in the village.

The debate has largely disappeared with the sharp decline in teen pregnancies across a number of countries, and while much of this is down to greater contraception uptake, another is that girls are just much less likely to get pregnant if none of their friends do. The huge increase in teen pregnancies in the late 20th century was in part a contagion, and it’s burned out.

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Similarly, corruption, according to a meta-analysis of 137 experiments into unethical behaviour, is contagious, as are bad ethics. When a prominent steroid user joined baseball team, his teammates started cheating too. Drug taking, the biggest scourge in American life, is certainly contagious, and gun violence maybe, although people disagree about how much.

Likewise, happiness is contagious, as is sadness, so that “each person in your network who became happy increases your chance of becoming happy by 9%, an unhappy person drops it by 7%.” One of the reasons social media is depressing is because it’s just full of unhappy people writing about how miserable they are.

During the height of last June’s protests, leading health experts in America were justifying support for Black Lives Matters rallies by saying that racism was actually a deadly contagion, so this was actually a health matter. Obviously, it’s more sophisticated sounding than saying “I’m an abject moral coward and don’t want to go against the prevailing ideology, however obviously stupid it is”, but it is true that ideas have certain epidemiological traits.

That is, political beliefs are contagious, which is why students often adopt their roommate’s ideology.  University attendance makes people more Left-wing, not because students are being indoctrinated by academics, but because they’re copying their peers, just as they would if their peers smoked, drank or declared themselves non-binary.

Better technology means that ideas can spread through human populations more rapidly, so that the arrival of the iPhone caused the Great Awokening just as printing led to the Reformation. If the last year has often been odd, it’s partly because we’ve been both cut off from our regular networks, and at the same time subjected to the most contagious medium of viral spread.

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The internet, as at least one paper has suggested, is to our minds what the transition to cities was to our bodies. When people moved to the first urban settlement, novel diseases like measles, TB and later plague were able to spread rapidly among these eusocial apes; the same is arguably true with ideas and lifestyles in the 21st century, with technology imposed on a species uniquely vulnerable to contagion and imitation.

Many people have no more resistance to the insanity spreading out of US academia than our ancestors had to viruses carried by cattle or pigs. Humans are viral creatures, and if the Covid era has taught us anything, it’s that our life outcomes really depend on those closest to us and that everything, from the misery of illness to the mind-melting memes of June 2020, is contagious.

Humankind’s eusocial nature was almost perfectly summed up 400 years ago by another victim of infectious disease; John Donne, reflecting on life and death after a bout of typhus, afterwards wrote the immortal words that still bear true today: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.”

So happy “freedom day”, but remember: we are not as free as we suppose.

Southgate is the sort of footballer who, in team photos from the early Seventies, would have been the last one to sport a short, back and sides when everyone else was looking like Charlie George. A haircut to set your watch to, as Grampa Simpson put it.

That someone like Southgate would support England players taking the knee, the gesture associated with Black Lives Matter, is telling, then, about how far social attitudes have changed in the last few decades. Although Southgate felt the need to write an elegant defence, it’s perhaps more surprising how little opposition taking the knee faced, and how even most critics proclaimed to support BLM’s aims, if not methods. Indeed, it’s arguable that there has never been so little doubt in public life about what is morally wrong and right, at least in our lifetimes.

The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.

The year 2020 marked a convenient end to the cultural revolution, because of the vastly different nature of the protests that took place that summer, compared with 1968. In the late Sixties, student radicals were protesting against the system. American academia itself was politically mixed; there were around three Democrat professors for every Republican — it’s now about 15 to 1 — but the higher echelons of the Ivy League were quite conservative. The Boston Brahmin elite were still pretty traditional, as was big business (although, not coincidentally, far more egalitarian than it is now). The Army was obviously very Right-wing, and one of the causes of student protests was the prospect of being drafted into a war to defend the honour of a conservative American establishment.

In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.

The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.

During those decades of social change, the problem of Left-wing “moral relativism” was often a complaint of conservative commentators, but look today at the young protesters demanding that  “Rhodes must fall” or “black trans lives matters”. They certainly aren’t moral relativists.

Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.

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Before the Sixties, book publishing was restricted on grounds of obscenity; I still have as a family heirloom, an early copy of Ulysses published in Paris because it was too obscene to be printed in London. It’s in fine condition, being unreadable.

But book censorship began to break down with the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial; there were still a few obscenity cases afterwards, but this was seen as the end. Most famous of all in the public imagination were the prosecutor’s comments about this not being the sort of thing you’d want your servants to see, a comment so laughably out-of-touch that it made a mockery of the old ruling class – and no ruling class or moral order can survive being openly mocked in that way.

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Yet liberals demanding a permissive society in the Sixties were pushing at an open door, with an establishment that was often sympathetic. At the time of the case the Bishop of Woolwich had argued, in pure Thought for the Day-ese, that “what Lawrence is trying to do is to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred… in a real sense an act of holy communion”. It’s hard to see a leading voice of morality today defending a play or novel that was seen as obscenely close to racism or homophobia.

But the British and American establishments of the late 20^th century were historically quite unusual in allowing themselves to be mocked; from the mid-Sixties onwards, television regularly made fun of the habits and beliefs of the powers-that-be, with Monty Python — the most prominent product of the satire boom — pointing fun at the people who ran the country. Their 1979 film Life of Brian even mocked the beliefs of that old establishment. Two of the Pythons debated an Anglican bishop and Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge, but no one serious tried to stop the film.

Life of Brian couldn’t be made 20 years earlier, and neither could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upsetting Muslim sensibilities, which it’s fair to say people have become slightly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene pointing fun at a man who, absurdly to the filmmakers and audiences, identifies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021.

It’s sacred in the sense that its believers have captured the moral citadel where the most powerful ideas are protected by taboo, achieved either by emotional argument or intimidation (and both can be effective).

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20^th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.

No one would satirise the transgender movement today; no one would dare point fun at BLM, or Pride month; no one would dare joke about George Floyd, because like the publishers of Gay Times in 1977, they might face jail for blasphemy.  Instead leading satirist Sacha Baron Cohen makes a living making jokes at the expense of the little people. Indeed the only satire made now pokes fun at the old establishment, like punching the corpse of a once-ferocious zoo animal, or the people who still hold the old beliefs; the elderly, the less educated, the rural and provincial. The powerless.

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The Nineties and Noughties were a time of outstanding comedy partly because so much of public morality was up for grabs, and in transition; it was a period in between two quite rigid societies.

A sign of how the environment has changed can be seen in the changing tone of the word“controversial”. The term once had a neutral, or even positive, undertone, to denote cutting-edge artwork that challenged us. Now it is used entirely by the media to denote a policy or position they disapprove of, and which you are therefore supposed to disapprove of. It means something beyond the pale of acceptable opinion, a pale that has shrunk as the cultural revolution has ended, illustrated by neologisms like “problematic”.

The MeToo movement was to some extent an end-of-cultural-revolution moment. Janice Turner made the point that the Seventies and Eighties were the worst periods for abuse because sexual freedom had been achieved but not yet sexual equality. It was an ambiguous, revolutionary period, always fun times for abusive men, but that can’t last; someone has to police sexual behaviour in a species in which males have 40% more upper body strength than females. The stricter sexual atmosphere since then reflects that revolutionary period ending.

Revolutionaries who establish themselves in power inevitably start thinking about firming up that power. They have a vested interest in making the times before seems worse than they really were, which is why contemporary films or plays set before the Sixties must always show it as racially prejudiced or portray traditional marriages as unhappy. Revolutionaries also need to start thinking about public rituals that imitate faith, something the Soviets, Chinese Communists and Jacobins all imitated in various ways. Rituals in particular attract children and adolescents; just as young people across Europe once dressed up to celebrate Corpus Christi, run riot on Shrove Tuesday or flirt on St John’s Eve, now Pride month and the other new feasts of the calendar are increasingly popular with children, spread through TikTok and other social media.

The religious nature of the 2020 protest has been much commented on, with strange outpourings of hysteria and feet-washing, and with Floyd becoming an icon.

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Perhaps the most powerful, and obviously quasi-religious, symbol of the new order is taking the knee. Indeed, intelligent people have even argued that taking the knee before games or displaying the rainbow flag at stadiums are not “political” acts, when critics have pedantically pointed out that they clearly are; because when you doubt your politics so little it barely registers as politics anymore. And to believers, something like racism or homophobia is non-negotiable; there is no moral relativism allowed.

Before the cultural revolution, public morals were patrolled by volunteers, believers in the dominant religion (Christianity) and typically women, Mary Whitehouse being the archetype of the disapproving great-aunt. Now the revolution has ended, public morality is patrolled by volunteers, believers in the public religion (and typically women, although gender differences are one of the taboos of the new age).

The way in which the Left had taken the role of the Right was best summed up by Scott Alexander, who asked what happened to the stodgy old conservatives who used to enforce public morality in the Fifties. Where would they be now? Of the archetypal disapproving great aunt figure, he said, it’s hard to argue she is “not a proud leftist by now, still chattering about how scandalous it is that people read books with the wrong values, still giving her terminally uncool speeches to the school board about how they had better enforce her values on the children”.

The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.

Klinsmann had become much loved in England since his surprise move to north London, instantly charming the nation with his self-mocking diving celebration — but then football is the means by which many English people come to know the Germans. It has also brought out our worst instincts, the England-Germany fixture leaving many trapped in a permanent state of Second World War nostalgia. Players and officials have once again pleaded with fans not to sings songs about the war when the teams meet today, and while some probably will, things have improved since the days when Klinsmann played.

The story of Anglo-German football rivalry mirrors the real-life relationship off the pitch, with England’s great inferiority complex towards their cousins across the North Sea and an often-embarrassing obsession with past military glories.

“A year’s work improving Anglo-German relations can be undone by a single England-Germany match”. So said British diplomat in Berlin to the Observer back in 2001, as the two teams were set to meet for a World Cup qualifier in Munich (which, as every Englishman knows, we won 5-1).

The previous few years had seen an intensification of the rivalry, often becoming very ugly; fans from both countries had behaved horrifically in the 1998 World Cup in France, and two years later had used the European Championship in Belgium to organise a fight, like some bizarre inversion of the famous 1914 Christmas Truce football match in No Man’s Land.  The same year that Klinsmann arrived here, a friendly had to be cancelled because the date — 20 April, Hitler’s birthday — might attract Right-wing extremists from both countries. Throughout the previous decade the English tabloids had used increasingly hysterical language, referencing the war and using crude national slurs.

Yet this Donner und Blitzen idea of every Germany game being a rerun of the conflict was not a product of the immediate post-war period, but grew up later, and had more to do with England’s general sense of failure in the last third of the 20^th century. It wasn’t those raised in the shadow of the war who became obsessed with it, but those raised in the shadow of its cultural legacy, the countless war films, comics and comedies that comprised British culture life for decades.

It was in the 1880s that Anglo-Saxon missionaries brought the game to their continental cousins, just as their ancestors had once brought Christianity. One British teacher in Germany, with a bit too much optimism, declared at the time that the game will provide “an education in that spirit of chivalry, fairness and good temper”.

Despite various unofficial tours, the first international only took place in 1930, a 3-3 in Berlin. When the teams met again, in 1935 at White Hart Lane, it was played with an air of sporting chivalry, despite protests by anti-Nazis. An English journalist, insightful as ever, observed: “Football is a game more suited to the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton than to the Latin race.”

Far more controversial was the game in Berlin held three years later, when the Foreign Office forced the England players to give the Hitler salute. Stanley Matthews afterwards said that they were “livid” about the gesture, with full-back Bert Sproston adding that Hitler was “an evil little twat”. England won 6-3, but the return match scheduled for late 1939 was never played, for some reason.

After the war, the English FA took the lead in setting up a lot of West German football infrastructure, and organising Anglo-German youth tournaments. Stanley Rous, head of the FA, was awarded the West German Grand Cross of the Order of Merit.

Yet the fortunes of the two countries went in opposite directions, certainly off the pitch. Despite the devastation of Germany, Britain ended up exiting rationing four years later, in 1954, well into a trajectory of economic decline and stagnation, while Germany enjoyed an economic miracle. People naturally equate sporting success with national greatness, so West Germany’s 1954 World Cup win against the favourites Hungary is seen as an apt representation of their phoenix-like return.

As the war receded in time, so its psychological importance in England grew, and German Culture Minister Michael Naumann would reflect accurately at the turn of the century: “There is only one nation that has decided to make the Second World War a sort of spiritual core of its self-understanding and pride.” He meant us, of course.

Before the 1966 World Cup Final, The Sun had joked that “as the Fatherland are embarrassingly aware, England have never lost to Germany — at soccer either.” That was extremely mild compared to what was to come, as England went into national and footballing decline, the country missing two world cups and mired in power shortages, industrial disputes and the Heath-Wilson terror. In the 1980s, English tabloids became obsessive, with Germany always equating to “war” in their own personal Rorschach test. When the sides met in Spain in 1982, the Sun declared: “Achtung Stations”. For a friendly five years later, it was “The Battle of the Krauts”. When England drew Germany again, in the 1990 World Cup semi-final, the paper urged “Help Our Boys Clout The Krauts”.

We didn’t clout them, although the match was probably the most influential in English football history, Gazza’s tears seen as the start of the embourgeoisement of the game. (Indeed, no tears in history have been worth so much.) Attendances rose, stadiums got fuller and safer.

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Six years later came the thrilling Euro 96, a tournament dominated in the memory by the defeat of Holland, Three Lions (which also became very popular in Germany) and the revival of the St George’s Cross, until then almost unknown except on church buildings. It was a wonderful atmosphere and there had been very little violence — although partly because the world’s worst travelling supporters were at home.

Yet when England and Germany’s paths met things were inevitably soured by the media’s almost demented obsession with the War, immersed in a national culture obsessed with it.

I grew up in the Eighties playing with Second World War toy soldiers as kids, but older cousins would have read Commando, the hugely popular, absurdly bloodthirsty comics of the Seventies in which the Hun are portrayed as ruthless killing machines shouting “Gott im Himmel” as the heroic Tommy machine-guns them down. At the same time, few British people holidayed in Germany; not many children were taught German, something that declined even more in the Nineties. There was, and is, a strange lack of curiosity about the place, which is not reciprocated.

War films were still a huge part of the very limited televisual schedule, so much so that the genre was ubiquitous enough to be parodied; one famous, funny advert showed the boys of the 617 Squadron attacking a dam with bouncing bombs, when much to their surprise, the German soldier saves each in turn, leading one to comment, “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label”. (Perhaps the most offensive thing about that to a German now would be the idea of drinking Carling.) Television still had plentiful reruns of Dad’s Army and Allo Allo, because invariably the war was a subject of comic relief here, when it wasn’t a matter of now-tedious gloating.

So when the two teams played almost exactly 25 years ago,The Mirror ran their famous headline “Achtung Surrender, for you Fritz ze Euro 96 Championship iz over”, with a picture of Stuart Pierce and Paul Gascoigne wearing Tommy helmets. Meanwhile The Sun gave us “Blitz Fritz”, while the Daily Star warned “Watch out, Krauts, England are gonna bomb you to bits at Wembley,” with manager Terry Venables done up as Lord Kitchener. Even at the time I remember thinking: isn’t this a bit weird? We obliterated whole German cities in living memory! Tens of thousands of civilians died.

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Yet The Mirror had badly misjudged the mood — the paper received 900 written complaints from readers, and issued an apology, sending a Harrods hamper to Jurgen Klinsmann. It reported this with the headline: “Peas in our time”. The paper also abandoned its proposed next stunt — a Spitfire flypast over the England team hotel. (Why stop there? Why not hire an old Lancaster bomber for a flypast over Dresden? It’d be hilarious banter.)

The German media found this all completely baffling. “The fatal defect in cows’ brains seems to have transferred to the two-legged inhabitants on the island,” the Cologne-based Express suggested after the Mirror’s outburst.

Most English football fans, I imagine, agreed, and were embarrassed by the tabloids, especially as the German players and fans had been perfect guests in Cheshire. After they won the tournament, the German FA put out full-page adverts in the newspapers thanking the people of England for their hospitality. The Queen of England gave a genuinely warm smile as Klinsmann lifted the trophy.

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Perhaps it was a turning point, although the German-bashing didn’t stop after that, with subsequent headlines such as “Hun-Bearable”, “Hun-canny!” and “Hun, Draw and Slaughter!” The Sun were still at it in 2005, and following a complaint from the German Embassy about Sun columnist Jeremy Clarkson’s comments on Top Gear, published a list of German war jokes, with a reference to a certain wartime leader. Clarkson had said the GPS on a German-made Mini would “only go to Poland”.

That same year the FA commissioned adverts with leading players asking the fans not to mention the war, and a message about anti-German songs was also sent out with each ticket. That was 60 years after the war ended; now, 16 years later Harry Kane has repeated the appeal, urging fans not to sing “Ten German Bombers”.

Will it stop the chants? Probably not, but it doesn’t mean that things haven’t changed. Something like The Mirror’s Achtung Surrender headline would be unlikely now, and when a Tory MPs raised the analogy during the Brexit negotiations he was met with widespread derision and contempt. It would be nice to suggest that this is the product of some new-found national confidence, but the obvious, boring explanation is that my generation, the last raised on re-runs of Dad’s Army and comics called D-Day: Fight or Die!, are getting middle aged. Finally, for the English, ze (obsession with ze) war is over.

“Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Nation
Strong Britain, Great Na-a-a-tion”

The lyrics do rather make it sound like it could have been an anthem from some Balkan or central Asian country which has repeatedly suffered military humiliation over the past centuries. (Although to be fair, it was written by a group of primary school children so I don’t want to get too Simon Cowell about the whole thing.)

Since OBON day got the support of the Department for Education, the idea of children singing the country’s praise attracted the usual measured response. Some compared it to North Korea, while others, inevitably, reached for the only historical analogy that every Tory initiative reminds them of. “One country? Sounds like EIN REICH, Read this article on ‘14 signs of an upcoming fascist takeover’.” One Scottish nationalist MP compared it to Soviet imperialism in the Baltic.

There were few fans, and just as Orwell observed that Britain could never become fascist because we laughed at military parades, so today we could never become nationalists because any official attempt at unity would make everyone cringe.

Sure “Strong Britain, Great Nation” is not quite “La Marseillaise”, but then the cynics are hardly sympathetic. In particular, I have little sympathy for complacent ageing liberals who guffaw that such things are “Not British”; a lot of things that happen in this country might once have appeared very un-British, and you didn’t do anything to stop those. Times change.

Indeed, our historic lack of flag-waving reflects the confidence that comes from having an ancient political history, the kingdom of England being almost 1100 years old; it comes from being a country which until the mid-20^th century had little racial diversity and no memory of foreign rule. A country like that didn’t need its schoolchildren to sing about the dream of unity; it went without saying.

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Multicultural countries in contrast need to shout about what they have in common, which is why the United States made such an effort to enforce a secular national faith, making children salute the flag and forcing poor southern European immigrants to deny the obvious superiority of football and instead pretend to enjoy America’s incomprehensibly boring national sports. Multicultural Britain needs to do something similar, rather than relying on ancient cynicism and irony.

Unlike most modern patriotic movements, which tend to be funded by big Quaker organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Trust, OBON is authentically grassroots, organised by a Yorkshireman called Kas Singh, who arrived in Britain at the age of six and rose to become a police inspector.

With the unjaded patriotism often found in immigrants, Singh aims “to create a spirit of inclusion with a collective purpose and a common future where we all seek to eliminate hatred, intolerance and discrimination of any kind so that all our people can feel and develop a strong and shared sense of belonging in order to showcase their pride, passion and love for our great nation”.

Rather than being a Tory creation and a sign of the upcoming fAsCiST taKEoVER, One Britain, One Nation dates to the later Blair era, when the idea of teaching “British Values” in order to unite the nation was first proposed. It had became a government concern when it became clear in the early 2000s that significant numbers of second generation Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons held views well outside the mainstream on gay rights, anti-Semitism, terrorism and the role of sharia. What was most concerning was that the younger, British-born generation often seemed to have more hardline opinions than their parents, a reversal of the expected pattern of assimilation.

Yet the whole idea faced contradictions right from the start, namely that Britain was still in the midst of a cultural revolution that was completely overhauling its own values. The most obvious absurdity was the claim that gay rights were linked to British Values. It was only in living memory that Iran was more tolerant towards same-sex couples than Britain, while France and Italy legalised same-sex relations over a century before us.

True, the Sixties might seem a long time away, but some schools even list “combatting transphobia” as a core British value, something that wouldn’t even make sense to someone during the Blair era. Last year British home cinema channels began issuing trigger warnings before films, stating that they reflected the values of their time — including films made in 2019. How can such a society teach values when its own values evolve more quickly than Covid?

What British Values tended to mean, and this wasn’t exactly an accident, was liberal or progressive values, ideas that plenty of people of all backgrounds might feel completely alien to them. Beyond that the things they emphasise — tolerance and respect — are worthy, and something we’d like to teach our children, but they’re not particularly British.

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But the main problem with all these programmes is that this is not how nations are forged. Countries don’t have values, they have characteristics, which can also change; before the 18^th century the English were famous for their melancholy, while since then they have been characterised by their sense of humour (and very low suicide rate).

A country’s characteristics are a product of what does make a nation — a history, and a common narrative. And here, at least, the idea of writing a song is closer to the mark than previous attempts. Nations are stories that have been told about a people, often a story of struggle. The first thing that nation-builders do, after trying to enforce a common language, is to create a narrative history; in France, which before the Revolution was a hugely diverse place in which only 10% of people spoke French, this was far more deliberate. “Our ancestors, the Gauls” was a policy of unification to a group of people who spoke 55 different languages.

In Italy, where statesman Massimo d’Azeglio famously said that L’Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani — “now we have created Italy, we must create Italians” — a conscious attempt was made to turn the medieval Tuscan poets into national bards. Italian nationalists saw that if Italy were to become a nation, it needed a Shakespeare, a storyteller who helped write English identity.

Irish nationalism owed huge amounts to song, in particular rousing tales of heroic military defeat at the hands of the English, such as “The Rising of the Moon”. In opposition to this, Ulster Loyalist identity was passed down through tunes such as “Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne”, tales of defiance and courage. You don’t have to have a favoured tribe in that interminable conflict to find these anthems rousing, because that human desire to love the homeland, and to make sacrifices for it, is universal.

Similarly Scottish nationalism has been hugely spurred by narrative, in particular Braveheart, a film that did more to promote national identity than a million campaign groups, and, arguably, the folk music of The Corries. (Nationalists always have better song than unionists, I’m afraid.)

If the rulers of multicultural Britain wish to forge a nation, then songs and stories are far more powerful than ideas about values. The problem is that liberal democracies tend to be weak at nation-building, because the principles of consensus and tolerance do not provide the oxytocin necessary for group solidarity. That hormonal high is only triggered by a sense of out-group threat, and the subsequent desire to defend — and make sacrifices.

A few years back an anti-extremism programme for schools instructed teachers to watch out for Muslim boys who expressed a belief in dying for what they believed in or defending their honour by force if necessary. These weren’t “terrorist values”, though, they were the same urges that inspired every nation-builder in ours and everyone else’s history.

That programme wasn’t aimed at fostering patriotism, it was aimed at crushing any potential forms of patriotism that conflicted with the state. There was no alternative offered, but then it’s hard to build a common narrative because the different peoples of Britain in 2021 don’t really have a common history. What little they do share is often unhappy and exploitative — and cannot possibly be taught in a way that satisfies everyone. That explains the meteoric rise to prominence of Mary Seacole, a woman who lived an extraordinary life but has become a bizarrely overly-important historical figure in schools. All history is about the age in which it is written, and so it is with Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse who has become a 21st-century construction.

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Alternatively, there is the desperate and inane idea of “progressive history”, featuring a parade of losers from the Levellers to the Chartists. But if a 14-year-old in a London comprehensive isn’t inspired by Nelson bleeding to death after destroying the French fleet with massive cannons, do you really think listening to Tony Benn talking about the Putney Debates is going to do it?

Historical narrative is limited by nature — collectively we can only remember a few stories at a time, which is what people forget about when they complain that they weren’t taught at school about the Benin Empire or the history of French colonial rule in Gabon. There is only a limited amount of history that can be taught in schools, yet still it’s noticeable that the organisers behind OBON Day seem to have chosen a completely random date. They could have shifted it by just a week or so to coincide with Magna Carta Day, a genuinely central event in our national history, and one that shaped who we are.

Future governments are going to have to wrestle with this issue, to teach a new idea of Britishness for a new nation. Songs are not a bad start, sneering aside, but they need to tell us something more meaningful if they’re going to move us. They need to tell a story, of heroic failure and victory, of hope for the future, and the nation united in wanting to win. It’s just a shame that we can’t use the obvious, but sadly too English, choice: “Three Lions”.

So reads the introduction to the famous Edwardian children’s book Our Island Story, a work that exemplified a certain idea of Britain. It was a country that was unique, blessed by God with a destiny, the narrative drawing on mythical ideas that went back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famously implausible 12^th century history of the island. Britain — or, more specifically, England — was different.

Just as the 17^th century Puritans saw England as the new Israel – indeed some took it further to suggest we were the Israelites — so the Victorians had come to think of the country as unique, a new Athens in glorious isolation. Britain was part of Europe, but not of it, and instead destined to rule the oceans and its great dominions overseas.

British exceptionalism was a seductively ego-affirming idea, but then if you belong to a smallish country that ends up ruling a quarter of the world, you’d probably start to conclude you were special, too. Today, the empire is no more but the British are still exceptional — although perhaps not in quite the same way.

Five years ago this week the country’s thought-leaders were given the shock of their lives when the electorate voted against all advice and apparent common sense to leave a trading bloc on which their economy was dependent. The decision seemed to lack any reason, an act of wilful self-harm, “shitting the bed” as one comedian called it.

Unable to explain this idiocy, journalists and academics came to the conclusion that it could be explained by British, or more particularly, English exceptionalism — a deluded belief that the country was somehow special.

It was a common theme that the English – the most Eurosceptic of the home nations – considered themselves somehow exceptional, unique, which became the subject of numerous articles, academic papers and treatise.

One scholar traced this British exceptionalism back to the Napoleonic Wars, when the country’s elite constructed an idea of an island story. Another even even linked Brexit to Our Island Story, suggesting that “Support for this seemingly innocuous children’s bedtime story should therefore be understood as an important ideational element in a predominantly English Eurosceptic disengagement from the EU and a re-engagement with the Anglosphere amongst Conservatives”.

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A columnist warned how this dangerous ideology, with its “tawdry jingoism, the faux-patriotism, the cynical use of the flag to exploit the people’s belief in ‘British exceptionalism’”, could even be to blame for the country’s disastrous handling of Covid.

Yet in Europe at least the British are exceptional in a completely different way, not in feeling themselves special or above the rest. England – not Britain – is unique in being so uncomfortable with itself, so filled with self-disdain.

In no other country are symbols of nationhood so likely to provoke such disgust or mockery, to be considered either distasteful, vulgar or actually hateful. In no other country would a front-bench politician slyly mock a voter for flying the flag. To a certain section of society every defeat for England is cheered, every victory lamented. This was the problem at the heart of the debate five years ago, the real British exceptionalism.

In this we are strangely unique, since neither the German nor French Left feel discomfort with national symbolism in the same way as the British. French intellectuals are down on their country — they’re down on everything — and Germans are ashamed of their past. Artists everywhere tend to be more self-critical than the population at large. But among European countries only in England is there such revulsion and cringe at the symbolism of the nation, and the people who celebrate it.

This autoAnglophobia was epitomised by the actress Emma Thompson, who during the run-up to the referendum described her homeland as “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, I mean really, a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island”.

Thompson, who more recently flew from Los Angeles to London to attend a climate change rally, could not have better personified her caste; raised from old theatre stock in Hampstead, attending one of Camden’s elite state schools and then Cambridge, she described herself as “European”, but for a certain type of Briton that means less an identification with the inheritance of Rome and Greece than membership of a community of belief. It means being internationalist, open-minded, progressive, university-educated… just not British.

The English are exceptional in their “oikophobia”, as Roger Scruton defined the “need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ours”.  Scruton argued that it is “a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes” but which is common among intellectuals and artists of all sorts. The English are the worst at it.

None of this is new; the British intelligentsia has hated the country for at least two centuries, to the extent of supporting opponents far more sinister than the EU.

Yet while such disdain was once confined to small literary circles, today its association with education and high status has allowed it to mimetically spread through the institutions. Today even august bodies like the National Trust are dominated by people who find patriotism just a bit distasteful, and would be horrified to promote it. In what other countries would the publishing industry have a whole genre of books devoted to denigrating the country’s history, showing that actually we’re the worst at everything; that every victory wasn’t really ours; that our heroes were monsters.

It is also a strangely parochial belief, this idea that Britain is somehow uniquely bad, as if everywhere doesn’t have similar problems, often worse. But then British internationalism is one of the most parochial belief systems in the world; we laud the NHS as the finest moral legacy of mankind, while in the rest of Europe it’s a laughing stock. Our commentariat bemoan that our country is going down the dark path of nationalism because our PM once made an off-colour joke, while across the Channel politicians compete to appear the most hostile to Islam. Indeed, Britain is unusually liberal for European standards, and of most social issues has become noticeably more liberal since 2016.

For all that it was about Europe, and the world, the referendum debate was really about two competing visions of what it meant to be British; even the Remainer identity, with its EU flags and affected xenophilia, was a particularly British tribal allegiance, dominated by Thames Valley Liberal Democrats who are nice people and like Radio 3 and the Proms.

For a certain type of progressive, British patriotism or nationalism is nothing to celebrate, and always contains something dark within, the neanderthal and skinhead just waiting to emerge. A recent article by a former Labour MP warned that “although we British have long been prone to outbreaks of nationalism, until recently obsessive flag waving was by and large confined to small far-right parties, Northern Irish Unionists and a bunch of Hooray Henrys and Henriettas at the Last Night of the Proms. But the Brexit referendum and its aftermath has ushered in a new era. Something fundamental has changed. With the coming of Brexit the nationalist genie is out of the bottle and will not easily be put back.”

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Next year France may well elect Marine Le Pen as president; in Rome the Brothers of Italy party is surging ahead, while everyone’s favourite liberal paradise, Denmark, has an immigration and asylum system that would have British Tories, let alone liberals, in fits.

When ministers suggest government buildings might fly the British flag, rather than the Pride colours or trans flag or whatever the liturgy dictates this week, there are howls of outrage from people who seem uninterested that this is normal everywhere else in Europe. It’s seen as some unprovoked “culture war”, as if the Left hasn’t been engaged in a forever culture war for decades. Wanting to fly the flag is not exceptional; thinking the British are above flag-waving is the exceptionalism.

So what is different about England? Much of it has to do with the country’s main class fault-line, between a socially liberal haute bourgeoisie and a conservative petty bourgeoisie (apologies for my French, fellow patriotic Britishers).

Explaining why he found Radio 4 so irritating, the novelist Tim Lott once explained that the liberal middle class “is the voice of the upper echelons of the BBC” and they are in conflict with Middle Englanders, “essentially people with nice homes and decent incomes and a commitment to abiding by the law and even a sense of patriotism. The LMC see them as retrograde and primitive – those damn Daily Mail readers.”

Auto-Anglophobia is defined by a disgust of a certain idea of England. When Thompson made her comments it was leapt upon immediately by the Daily Mail, which asked “Why DO so many leftie and luvvies loathe this country”, which is a legitimate question, although it might also be said that it’s not exactly the country they hate but YOU, the Middle Englanders.

No recent book better summarises this fault than the Harry Potter series, where each of the villains represent different archetypes of the Liberal Middle Class’s enemies, from the small-minded suburban NIMBY Uncle Vernon to the future Bullingdon boy Malfoy.

The AutoAnglophobic intellectual isn’t against nationalism per se; they fawn over the Celtic variety, that earthy, authentic love of country, and when did Celtic nationalism ever kill anyone? Some proclaim how they long to be Scottish, just as once they might have claimed Irish or, if they were clutching at straws, Cornish ancestry. Some even dream of a separate Scottish nation, a British version of Vermont, progressive and egalitarian.

Similarly, “flag-shagger” as an insult almost invariably comes from people with flags in their Twitter bio – Palestine flags, EU flags, gay flags, trans flags, any flags just as long as they’re high status rather than low — the Union Jack and, worse still, the prole’s apron that is the St George’s Cross. You might see the latter in a middle-class areas during the later stages of a football tournament, but otherwise Rod Liddle was right to say that in north London you’re more likely to see the Palestinian colours being flown.

The conservative response to this disdain is often disingenuously defensive of the nation and its people, when indeed there is lots to dislike about England. The bone-headed officiousness of many in authority, which has come out to the fore in lockdown. The yobbishness, which is far more noticeable than in other European countries. The fact that you have signs in theme parks telling men to keep their tops on. We aren’t the world’s biggest drunks, but we’re probably the most unpleasant. Although much improved, England football fans can be horrible in the flesh; thuggish, racist and intimidating.

Visiting Holland always brings out my inner Remainer, because the people just seem like a better version of the English; the Germans are more cultured and take serious things like opera seriously; Italy is dysfunctional but Italians are intrinsically more civilised than us, and the Scandinavians run things in such a fairer way. And the French; well, I’m sure they have their good qualities, too. (Joke! I love the French.)

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Likewise, much of the urban liberal critique of the British establishment is entirely justified. Our class system is not unique, but no one else really has such a divide between the private and state school sectors, for instance, nor such domination by one school in producing a lot of quite mediocre national leaders. The absence of revolution or war has been a blessing, but it has allowed us to avoid reform where it is needed.

And England is exceptional in some ways. The biggest event in our history took place ten thousand years ago when Doggerland was flooded. It is hard to invade an island, and so the country remained unaffected by the rule of Napoleon, or Hitler, leaving different legal and measuring systems, and a different psychology.

That silver sea has made us a happy breed of men, but it has also made us a complacent breed – the perfect conditions for oikophobia. In countries which have been trampled over by armies down the years an artist who disdained the ground where his ancestors had been starved or raped would be tiresome; in an island which had not endured foreign occupation or tyranny for centuries it’s indulged.

It’s an ancient tradition, going back at least to the late 18^th century. The French Revolution was cheered by many in Britain, but many of those continued cheering even after it had descended into bloodshed, and war with Britain. Many of Britain’s intelligentsia praised Napoleon as “the Great Man of the People of France, the Liberator of Europe”, in the words of one radical MP. Charles Fox praised the French dictator, Britain’s arch-enemy, as “the most stupendous monument of human wisdom”. The great polemicist William Godwin – husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley – wrote that Bonaparte was “infinitely more dear to the people of France” than ever, even after it became clear he was a tyrant. William Wordsworth, once enthusiastic about revolution, had after France invaded Switzerland in 1798 lamented of his home country “Oh grief that Earth’s best hopes rest all with thee!”

Among the most enthusiastically self-hating were the Unitarians, who felt that Britain was uniquely immoral. One Unitarian minister, Ebenezer Aldred, said that Britain was the real Beast of Revelation, “guilty of imperialism, slave trading and sodomy”, in Robert Tomb’s words.

The intelligentsia’s disdain for the country that had nurtured them became more pronounced in the 20^th century as Britain’s prestige declined, much of it influenced by a class disgust of the newspaper-reading “clerks”. It began at Cambridge University, where around the time of the First World War Lytton Strachey’s brilliantly timed Eminent Victorians marked the start of a cultural shift, after which the intelligentsia would always hate Britain.

The Bloomsbury set were the most notorious, among them Virginia Woolf and EM Forster, who combined following an egalitarian creed with snobbery for the ordinary British. A Room With a View, his novel about English tourists in Italy, is filled with contempt for the Brit abroad, who sophisticated English travellers have for centuries looked down on.

In fact back during the days of Grand Tour, the Whig Earl of Chesterfield told his son “You are not sent abroad to converse with your own countrymen… among them, in general, you will get little knowledge, no language, and I am sure, no manners… Their pleasure of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very often (as they well deserve) broken bones”.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

The mindset became starker in the 1930s; in the famous 1933 Oxford Union debate, the country’s future leaders voted that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country” by 275 votes against 153.

Orwell accused the country’s intelligentsia in the 1930s of “chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British”. Unsurprisingly, when he wrote Nineteen-Eighty-Four, he saw that if there was hope against the new ideology, it would lie with the proles.

Intellectuals like Virginia Woolf didn’t understand why the workers continued to love their country, despite everything. Even during the darkest days of the War they refused to give up hope: on 17 June, 1940, Home Intelligence found a mood of “gloomy apprehension” to be most common in “the middle classes and women”. Working-class men, despite what the experts believed, thought we would win, and that even if we didn’t — we should fight anyway.

Since then, disdain for the country has spread from a small circle at Cambridge to the entire upper echelons of society; it has become a mark of status. It was noticeable after Brexit that many of those claiming to speak for “the 3 million” EU citizens here (who turned out to be 5 million) argued their case by insulting Britain, saying that a lazy country needed them.

This might seem ungrateful, but it was really a sign of integration, doing what the Brits do. (Just as high-status Asian-Americans talk about white supremacy because that’s what high-status Americans do.)

In fact, this has long been a mark of fitting in. Before The Satanic Verses affair, Salman Rushdie had ingratiated himself with the British cultural elite by comparing the country to Nazi Germany for Channel 4; more recently, foreign-born British journalists and cultural figures attack Britain for being racist; what looks like ingratitude is just newcomers imitating a society’s high-status beliefs. Two hundred years ago they might have joined the Church of England; now they join the Church of Hating England.

Bohemians are good for society; it needs them. But when bohemian mores spread too widely it can start to turn into universal cynicism and distrust, and eventually populism.

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Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The disdain that many people feel for Britain certainly didn’t help Remain’s cause. In the weeks leading up to the vote, a bunch of bankers would come up with important but rather boring forecasts of just how skint we would be if we left; then some idiot would tweet that they’d lose their nanny if we left, unaware of how much that was the point, to punish an urban elite who enjoyed the full privileges of globalisation without the social contract that comes with being part of a national community. Perhaps the abiding image of the campaign was Bob Geldof, do-gooder par excellence — and a genuinely decent man by all accounts, who has done actual good — sticking two fingers up at British fishermen during a rather bad tempered, but comical, day of protests.

After the referendum, another social media trend was for people to post pictures of themselves on skiing holidays, looking sad because they were saying goodbye to Europe. Some posed with themselves eating continental food, because now they sadly never to eat a croissant again. This was done without any self-awareness, and the abiding message was “look how much I despise you all”.

The problem for Remain, and for progressives generally, is that everything is now so out in the open. Back in 2004 Thomas Frank wrote in What’s The Matter with Kansas? his polemic on working-class conservatism, that Right-wing media had created a fantasy where “all-powerful liberals who run the country… are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it.”

Yet since then, social media has proved the conservative fantasy to be obviously true, and it’s possible that nations, like families, need the little white lies to keep things going; if we all knew what the people around us really thought about us, things would fall apart very soon. And in Britain it became obvious that large numbers of the cultural elite really do hate the country.

It is that disdain for Englishness that partly explains Brexit. People will often put up with being ruled by people who cheat them, or lie to them, or who mismanage the country — as recent polls illustrate. But they won’t put up with being ruled by those who openly despise them.

To circumvent this, they projected all that patriotic feeling, all that flag-waving and ceremony and ritual, onto one family — who weren’t even British originally. So instead of days commemorating national independence, or great military victories against rivals, which would all feel a bit foreign and vulgar, they celebrated the birthdays, weddings and funerals of this one family, who they both venerated and sort of tormented (their loutish media even hounded a princess to her death). What a strange country.

It’s testimony to the British monarchy’s continual survival and relative strength that the decision of an Oxford College common room to take down the portrait of the Queen feels significant.

While it’s sad on the one hand, it also seems strange and archaic that they even had a picture of the Queen in the first place. It would be like finding out that real-life prison crime lords had pictures of Her Majesty in their cells, like Noel Coward in The Italian Job. Or that they were still playing the national anthem before gigs, as in the Beatles’ day. A cultural revolution has swept the country, and the monarchy remains the last vestige of the old order.

Despite our common disagreements over life at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the monarchy has so far largely avoided entanglement in our culture wars, possessing a fairly impeccable record on race and espousing a more general British Niceness that covers most ranges of opinion. (It’s telling that the Queen’s removal was spearheaded by an American student, unironically protesting “colonialism”.) Yet that will start to change, and as we live through the final chapter of the second Elizabethan era, more trouble lies ahead for the Royals.

The monarchy’s great skill is to build a narrative, in particular to preserve the fiction that the nation is an extended family, with the Windsors as its representatives. Their life cycle is celebrated as the nation’s, their joy is our joy, their sorrow is the same as the blows and hardships we endure.

Royal weddings become a symbol of the nation’s hope and optimism, and the family’s most recent high point was the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Even I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the day, watching with four generations of in-laws; because modern life so unnaturally starves us of the endorphins produced by group activity, it can feel exhilarating when things are done together.

It even got me ruminating on the meaning of monarchy and its role within a hyper-social species such as ours, as well as the importance of ritual. Although in fairness, I had started drinking at 11am on a Friday, which might have had something to do with it.

Even in my area, one of those pleasant London inner suburbs where luxury beliefs are the norm, there was a pile of unsold Guardians the next day while all the copies of the Mail and Express had gone. (The only other time I’d seen that in Haringey was after the riots that summer, reflecting the most basic of human instincts – venerate the chief and protect the tribe from violence.)

More recently, we shared in the family’s sorrow at the funeral of Prince Philip, who would have turned 100 today. As well as his work with charities and the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, much of the funeral television coverage featured married couples who, like the Queen and Duke, had enjoyed or endured decades of marriage together, and so the royal union came to represent their own. The Royal Family’s suffering was theirs, just as their joy was, which is why Britain’s small band of eccentric republicans always have such a hard time not appearing mean-spirited.

Yet the royals are not ordinary people; indeed, in some strange way they are throwbacks to the pre-Christian world where the separation between divine and mortal was ambiguous. It’s well known that Prince Philip was worshipped as a god on one island, but as a reader on The Rest is History podcast pointed out, Philip was the closest modern equivalent to a hero from legend. Like Aeneas he had to flee his homeland following a war in the land of Ilium, and came to wander the sea like Odysseus; he fought heroically in war, was a great chariot racer (he was even a pilot) and married a foreign queen before achieving divine status.

This is Britain, though, and unlike the ancients we don’t like boasting about great deeds of war and renown. So he just became known as Phil the Greek who liked insulting foreigners.

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Philip, Prince of Nowhere

By Ed West

The thing is, we aren’t at all like these people — which is why the system works. Meritocracy is, to mangle Churchill’s famous quote, the worst system except all the others. It’s better we reward people for gaming the Oxbridge system or making a pile in finance rather than for their ancestor’s ability to swing a sword on horseback. Yet it also creates numerous problems of its own, some of which are eased by monarchy.

Chiefly, there is the quite serious problem of runaway status-anxiety, which manifests itself in all sorts of problems, ranging from mental health to over-spending to political radicalisation.

Royalty takes the pressure off. Prince William is roughly my age, but I am never going to compare myself to him, nor feel like a failure in comparison. In contrast, I might compare myself with that pillock from school or university who goes on to become far more successful than me.

Meritocracy also wears down the sense of noblesse oblige, the idea that elites have a duty to care for those less fortunate, and to feel humble and grateful. There are now almost no mechanisms for suppressing the ego and narcissism of the ruling class, and so the Royal Family are almost a freakish exception in this regard.

The rituals associated with monarchy may seem arcane and even absurd, but they provide a function in drawing prestige and splendour away from the powerful. The unchanging nature of ceremony removes the individual ego, and where people in power innovate, they also reflect their own glory. Tradition is about sublimating narcissism, why is why non-traditional ceremonies — secularised weddings or “naming ceremonies” — make everything about the individual.

The Blairite love of abandoning tradition was a symptom of an extreme lack of humility. When the boss changes the ancient dress-code he may be being nominally progressive, but he’s also asserting his dominance; the new rituals reflect the new lord’s worldview.

The Royal Family remain far more liked and respected than the people who would replace them, but that is the nature of modern democracy, a degrading popularity contest which inevitably leads us to feel contempt for those in charge, often quite rightly. It’s why more democracy is not always a good idea.

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Who destroyed Prince Harry?

By Ed West

There has, in recent years, been quite a bit of research showing the benefits of monarchy in raising social trust and even increasing economic growth. It partly explains why monarchies are associated with political stability, and account for seven of the 10 least corrupt nations on earth. If you were going to live in any country on earth and all you knew about this mystery place was whether it was a republic or monarchy, you’d obviously go for the latter. The worst outcome would be Saudi Arabia; in contrast the depredations possible under a president are limitless – Syria, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan… the list goes on. If you were to expand that test to the last 200 years, then the contrast only becomes more extreme.

Yet all these arguments are essentially utilitarian; that the monarchy has proved its “historical utilitarianism” just as with Chesterton’s Fence. Yet fences may still rot, and all ancient institutions, whether of monarchy, Church or nation itself, depend on some myth-making and targeted amnesia. Like Tinkerbell’s fairies, they only exist so long as people believe in them. If people still think the Church plays a useful role in social capital but don’t believe in the Resurrection, the Church will still die; likewise, with the monarchy.

Few people believe the coronation represents God’s choosing of the monarch, and not that many even care about the national church she leads, but more importantly, few really buy into the myth of their being the nation’s guardians, or that their sovereignty and higher status is somehow natural or justified. Perhaps more seriously still, the 2019 proroguing controversy removed any doubt that the monarch is utterly powerless. The idea that Her Majesty was a check on overmighty politicians may have been a myth, but it was one we all pretended to believe in.

Without that shared belief, the monarchy lacks the moral support it needs to face some rough years ahead, not just with the scandal of Prince Andrew, the fall-out with Meghan and Harry, and the damage to the next king from The Crown. It is quite seriously unpopular with younger people, an age divide that, like many things, is relatively recent.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Despite all this, the Royal Family is in ways well-suited to 21^st century politics, in particular the recent fact of multiculturalism. Monarchies are historically more tolerant, and Daniel Finkelstein’s grandmother’s saying, “While the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central”, reflects a real historical truth.

The polarisation problem, too, favours our Queen. The monarchist argument used to be that without her, we’d get President Blair, but more likely Britain would have a presidential figurehead – like in other former monarchies such as Germany, Austria and Ireland – and it would be someone like David Attenborough.

Yet whether even Attenborough qualifies anymore for that role, modern societies don’t produce “national darlings” anymore, neutral figures beloved by the collective nation. Almost no public figure is apolitical today, just as few areas of life are apolitical, because we are going through something akin to a reformation.

That is bad news for the royals, since monarchies have usually found great religious divides difficult because, from the time of the Emperor Justinian onwards, they have sought to be neutral yet often ended up antagonising everyone. At some point the House of Windsor will need to decide on which side of this cultural divide it stands, because a more general British Niceness won’t do anymore. Their predecessors the Stuarts faced the same question – and they chose the losing side.

Likewise, if a civilisation has suffered from a uniquely appalling trauma, then anything that vaguely resembles its early symptoms will cause people to fear it’s all happening again. Just like real health anxiety, political hypochondria is spread by the internet, with commentators and activists the equivalent of those dubious American health sites warning that your headache is going to kill you. But instead of cancer, we have fascism, a disease the commentariat can diagnose everywhere.

As with health anxiety, political hypochondria has risen with the invention of the iPhone, reaching a new intensity after Donald Trump’s secured the Republican Party nomination five years ago. After that, and his subsequent election, America’s commentariat whipped themselves into a hysteria that the country was on the verge of a fascist takeover.

Trump’s presidency produced a booming literature in fascism-is-coming literature, among them Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, Cass Sunstein’s Can It Happen Here? and How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Entertainment also ran with the idea, with HBO’s adaptation of The Plot Against America imagining what a fascist United States would look like.

But while Trump’s political demise has caused a collapse in his symbiotic media haters, the fear of fascism will remain a constant, especially if, as he warned last week, he returns in 2024 (or, who knows, maybe earlier).

Just in the past few months Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and highly-respected historian of the Second World War and Holocaust, warned in The Road to Unfreedom about growing threats to freedom in the West, while Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works focused on the ideology, its evocation of a mythic past, victimhood and use of scapegoats.

Britain’s Paul Mason also has an upcoming book, How To Fight Fascism, in which he warns: “The core of fascism’s belief system today is clear: that majority ethnic groups have become the ‘victims’ of migration and multiculturalism; that the gains of feminism should be reversed; that democracy is dispensable; that science, universities and the media cannot be trusted; that nations have lost their way and need to become ‘great’ again; and that there will soon be a cataclysmic event which sets things right.”

Mason is a veteran of Left-wing political activism from the days when the Anti-Nazi League had punch-ups with Britain’s extreme-Right. He writes, with a great sense of urgency, that we’re replaying the terrors of the 1930s; but then he’s been saying this for years, and the Lupine Vigilance Committee declaring the imminent arrival of the wolf is not startling news for most of us. Yet as we head towards the French elections next spring this fear of fascism will no doubt grow, helped by gains for populist parties in Italy, Spain and elsewhere.

It would be easier to take these warnings more seriously if they hadn’t been made so often before. Before Trump, George W. Bush was also routinely accused of undermining American democracy and having a plan similar to Hitler’s, although this has all been forgotten now that he’s recast as a cuddly imbecile who draws nice pictures of immigrants.

Those fearing Bush’s anti-terror legislation to be a modern-day Enabling Act were spurred by the sensationally popular 2003 article listing “Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism”. Author Lawrence Britt identified symptoms such as “Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause”, a “Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism”, “Disdain for the importance of human rights”, “Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts” and “Obsession with crime and punishment” as signs of fascism. And it all sounded eerily like what was happening.

The fear grew after the financial crisis of 2007, because we all know that Hitler’s rise began with the Wall Street Crash — and indeed, the rise of national populist parties across Europe seemed to confirm all the old fears that fascism might return.

Yet sometimes the lump is just an unexplained lump. Or maybe it’s something unpleasant, but it’s not going to kill you.

National populism is not the same as fascism. It’s a particular response to recent, unprecedented levels of immigration, populist support correlating with rising diversity. While fascism is expansionist, violent and consciously elitist, populism tends to be defensive and democratic, even egalitarian. Fascism was youthful, the product of a young society, espousing vigour, action and the nobility of youthful sacrifice.

Populism, on the other hand, is focused on welfare benefits, the product of an ageing — and in places like the former East Germany, dying — population. Today’s western world, with a median age now well over 40, is just too old for fascism, and also too rich, Weimar Germany having a GDP per capita of around £3,000. We’re all too fat to fit into size XXL black shirts, and a country in which 36% of adults are clinically obese is not going to march anywhere any time soon.

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Who destroyed Prince Harry?

By Ed West

There are fascist parties today in Europe, such as Golden Dawn of Greece, and Jobbik of Hungary, but not many. As for Right-wing street protest groups, English Defence League marches gather literally tens — sometimes ones — of people. Even an ageing Paul Mason could probably take them on. Sure, there are fascist organisations and groups, just as there are groups dedicated to shoe fetishes or translating great works of fiction into Klingon, but in countries comprising tens of millions of people it’s not especially noteworthy or frightening that a few thousand people are interested in a dead political cult.

In cognitive behavioural therapy, you are taught to avoid the tendency towards seeing the worst possible scenario, something I’ve always done. I can’t get on a plane without picturing it blowing up in mid-air and all my fellow passengers being plastered over the papers underneath the headline “TRAGEDY OF DOOMED FLIGHT”. In politics, we have an entire industry set up to do just that, equating every move away from runaway globalisation as being the start of Au Revoir Les Enfants. We saw it during the Brexit debate, when some of the hysterical reporting clearly frightened people into thinking they were going to get deported.

Much of this political hypochondria stems from the work of Theodore Adorno and his “F Scale” test, which was used to assess fascist personality types, asking questions about obedience, sexual relations, lifestyles and so on. The F Scale was tested in post-war America, where it was found that fascism was latent everywhere. In the 1950s Adorno warned that fascism was the real danger to America — despite that whole Communism thing — and was convinced that fascism was finding “a new home” there. Soon his prophecy turned true, and America famously fell to fascism, with the Civil Rights act, Flower Power and Woodstock.

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What the F Scale was measuring was not fascism but conservatism, and to a political hypochondriac it’s easy to mistake them: conservativism is, after all, parochial, drawn to attachments that are local and national rather than global. Conservatism is defined by more traditional gender norms, a greater respect for parental authority, a harder line on crime, and it has a certain disdain for intellectuals — which is unsurprising when you consider the insane ideas thought up by intellectuals.

Labelling all conservative politicians as fascist is a political tactic often used by Communists — they even called the Berlin Wall the Anti-fascist Protection Rampart — but this isn’t the main reason for the proliferation of this phobia.

One of the curious things about the Trump era was that so many American journalists seemed to fear a fascist dictatorship that they actually desired it. They longed to be part of a heroic struggle against the forces of darkness, one in which all doubt and anxiety and everyday blandness was washed away — ironically like so many bored young men of the Belle Époque.

Everyone needs to be the hero of their own narrative, and it’s far more comforting to imagine you’re Indiana Jones battling Nazis when cheering someone being punched in the street, or the ousting of an academic you might disagree with. The truth, that we’re living in a free society and that the path to heroism has been cut off; that we have nothing greater than the worries and regrets of our everyday life, is too much to bear.

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By Michael Tracey

And so Trump’s opponents retreated to a world of fantasy, citing quasi-mythical modern folk tales in which good vs evil is binary and uncomplicated; on the one hand Harry Potter, and on the other Star Wars. This fantasy caused people to refer to themselves, without any irony or embarrassment, as “the Resistance”, a reference both to the Lucas space opera and to occupied France. But the point about being part of the “resistance” is you can’t openly talk about it; otherwise you’re not really resisting, you’re indulging yourself.

Trump was a bizarre, unpredictable figure totally unsuited to the role; his embarrassing time in the White House ended with the outgoing President inciting some of his followers to march on Washington, a dangerous and deluded finale to a four-year ego trip and personality cult. But it was never going to be a “coup” any more than his regime was going to be the Fourth Reich; the clown act turned deadly in the end, but it was still a clown act that never seriously threatened a 250-year-old constitution.

In my experience, the only way to avoid hypochondria is to just stop worrying and focus on other things, and maybe something else will kill you in the meantime. The same, I suspect, is true of our civilisation.

It’s the same with historical events, which are digested and then usually followed about five to ten years later by serious works of fiction and history offering an interpretation of what happened. The more traumatic events might take longer, and those “dreams” may change the collective view of what happened; the popular interpretation of the First World War was only really established in 1929 with three different plays damning the conflict, quite different from how it was viewed at the time. The Holocaust took even longer, and it was only from the late Seventies that it became a subject replayed over again in our minds.

We have yet to collectively dream about the awful events of 2020. The history of how Boris Johnson handled Covid is still to be written, and today’s opinion polls tell us little. For that reason, I’d be wary of dismissing too quickly the impact of Dominic Cummings’s testimony yesterday.

The Cummings narrative, of grotesque incompetence and a shambolic, lazy hack of a Prime Minister, will almost certainly have no impact on the Government’s commanding lead in the polls, and Boris Johnson will continue his satanic lucky streak.

Most people don’t seem to mind that the Prime Minister is lazy and dishonest, and none of yesterday’s revelations will “cut through” to ordinary voters, at least immediately. When it comes to Johnson’s performance the people have spoken. The people think he did a good job. And yet maybe the people are wrong. Maybe we ought to care more about what the elite think.

Five years ago we started hearing a lot more about “the people”; on one side some talked of the referendum being “the will of the people”, while others demanded a “people’s vote”, as if the first referendum had been decided by geese or ducks.

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Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

It’s not encouraging. Pretty much everything in history with “the people” in it has tended to be either murderous, stupid, disingenuous or just incompetent, from the People’s Crusade (an orgy of religiously-fuelled mob murder of Jews followed by humiliating defeat by Muslims) to the various terrible regimes that have “people” in the name. (Or “the people’s vaccine”, for which read: no vaccine.)

Yet here were Tory politicians invoking “the people”, something far closer to populism than conservatism.

Conservatism is built around institutions, the framework of social organisation — monarchy, church, family, social organisations, legal and government bodies, even sports clubs. Robert Peel said in a famous 1838 speech: “By Conservative principles, I mean … the maintenance, defence and continuance of those laws, those institutions, that society, and those habits and manners, which have contributed to and mould and form the character of Englishmen.”

Populism, in contrast, is built around the sovereignty of “the people”. Populists tend to disregard institutions because they feel little connection with them, partly because they have become dominated by their political opponents and international elites. There is a particular danger with conservatives becoming disenchanted with shared institutions, because they are psychologically best suited to maintain them, being overall more conscientious and sticklers for rules.

In a world where shared institutions are crumbling, conservatism will morph into populism, which doesn’t base political legitimacy on such civic bodies but on “the people”. If Boris Johnson has the support of the people, if none of Cummings’s revelations makes any difference in the polls, then it doesn’t matter — the libs are owned.

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By Freddie Sayers

The Johnson Government is not populist, it is what someone described as a Whig oligarchy with a populist vibe. Johnson is a right-wing liberal but he has the personal charisma usually associated with populists, as well as the dreadful record of consistently lying.

The voters don’t mind, because there is also a vague feeling that he supports “people like me” against remote elites, yet it is not spelled out. On another characteristic populist trait — the belittling of expert authority — Johnson’s government is hardly Trumpian, either. While political leaders in France and Germany have behaved appallingly with regards to vaccines, the British Government has always followed expert advice throughout the epidemic — it’s just a shame the experts got a lot of things wrong.

And yet, the Johnson Government’s raison d’etre seems to be that, so long as it has the support of the people, aka the median voter or Red Wall, that’s enough. Which is not the way we end up with good government.

Even if Cummings’s revelations don’t matter to the Red Wall voters, it’s still disastrous that the Government completely failed to respond to Covid. It’s still disastrous if, as Cummings alleges, the Prime Minister was distracted by a book he has to write to pay for a divorce caused by his philandering. It’s still disastrous that the Cabinet Office is “terrifyingly shit”.

Most voters have a view regarding how competently the country is run, but they don’t consider it their role to be the watchdog of political morals; that used to be the job of that dreaded word no one will admit to being part of — the elite. John Profumo spent four decades living a life of shame-induced public service not because it “cut through” with voters but because he’d disgraced himself in the eyes of his peers.

The norms of British public life stated that you didn’t lie and cheat, but once that norm was broken, it was impossible to put back together. Norms are far easier to destroy than to build.

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Most people are not that interested in politics and are mostly apolitical, which in effect means small-c conservative. They don’t tend to notice the everyday rigmarole of Westminster, and what does “cut through” isn’t necessarily important. For example, Cummings driving to County Durham so that his family might care for his son if both he and his wife became ill did cut through with non-political voters; the fact that the Government incompetently shunted Covid patients into care homes and in doing so killed thousands of people hardly made an impact.

Does that mean that Conservatives are supposed to view the former as more important? Sometimes “the people” are wrong, sometimes we shouldn’t care so much whether an issue cuts through with the public because it is actually important in itself, to the country’s elites who are supposed to ensure good government. Conservatives have forgotten how to even articulate this point because, since June 2016 at least, their core self-justification is that the people is sovereign.

The politically apathetic or semi-interested often have sounder political instincts than the university-educated because they suffer less from biases and groupthink. The more people learn about a political subject, and become more vested in it, the more extreme they tend to become and the more tribal. It is the job of conservatives to protect the country from such people.

But the politically apathetic also don’t write the narrative, and while they might not be aware of the day-to-day political rigmarole, they are still subject to the same historical memory. Yesterday’s revelations might not affect the polls now or even next year, but if the Cummings narrative — of incompetence, laziness and callousness at the hands of a dishonest and disorganised prime minister — builds as a historical memory, then it will start to break through, not just into opinion polls but into the history books.

Even if yesterday’s revelations make no impact on the polls, it may well affect the longer cultural memory, the REM of British life. John Major’s government had given us 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth by the time of the 1997 election, but at that point, the memory of Black Wednesday had seared itself into the collective memory. The same might happen with Covid.

Few blame the Government right now for how they dealt with Covid, just as few in 1919 doubted the wisdom of fighting Germany. But history hasn’t been written yet, and when it is, historians won’t be as forgiving to Boris Johnson as “the people”.

This is supposedly to do with the country’s history of serfdom, collective ownership and general misery and oppression. Even before Communism, life in rural Russia was very communal, and late tsarist attempts to introduce private ownership into the Russian village failed miserably. This, combined with the country’s hugely stratified social hierarchy, meant that most Russians had little chance of making it rich. When they did, their neighbours resented it and assumed that they must have done something nefarious and unmerited. Why should Ivan win a million when I’m stuck here?

In America, by contrast, audiences whoop and cheer when Hank or Chuck gets the question right because, even if they’re poor, they think that anyone can make it and maybe they will too. Historically, it’s not untrue.

The Russian view of other people’s financial happiness has its equivalent in the West today with other people’s romantic and sexual happiness. It’s a phenomenon I call “toxic validation”, because the more people make the wrong decisions in their life, the more the audience cheers.

It’s a very modern phenomenon because it’s only recently that we have seen the development of a sort of ambiguous class between celebrities and “civilians”; influencers with a medium-sized social media following who build a relationship with their audience so intimate that they one day might even control aspects of their lives.

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But even people who are not influencers still routinely go online for life advice, and the life advice they receive is invariably terrible. The most popular responses will always be the worst, but more toxic still is the way that people receive validation through social media engagement.

Here, the most popular lifestyle declarations, in terms of retweets and likes, are almost always the most disastrous. They’re the ones where people tweet about breaking off workable romantic relationships over quite minor problems; ending a relationship with a family member over politics; pursuing a conflict with employers that don’t need to be pursued; even self-mutilation — all while being encouraged, praised and applauded by thousands of people.

In many cases, the validation has a political aspect, in particular with regard to sex-positivity: such as when an exploitative narcissist uses ideology to undermine his girlfriend’s natural reluctance, and she tweets “Now he’s introduced me into a polyamorous relationship and although I felt uncomfortable at first I’m doing the right thing and am so happy!” Right?

The correct answer – the American audience answer – is “WRONG! Ditch him!” The social media applauders tell people quite the opposite:  obviously not what you’d advise a loved one.

But while ideology plays some part in this bad advice, the main problem is that these sites give people an audience, and audiences rarely have our best interests at heart; sometimes they are swayed by fashion and sometimes they are just bored and want drama.

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Why monarchies are more tolerant

By Ed West

And this danger of toxic validation also applies to genuine, high level celebrities, too, especially if political fashion is involved. Just weeks after his Oprah interview, in which he basically denounced his family as racist, Prince Harry was at it again, talking about his upbringing: “I don’t think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody… but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I’ve experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I’m going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don’t pass it on, basically.”

Prince Harry was obviously referencing the fate of his mother, but her relationship with the media was far more like that of predator and prey, although also symbiotic; the son, instead, receives toxic validation from sections of the commentariat for opening up, for tackling important mental health issues, for being modern.

“You know what, that happened to me, I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen to you,” he said of his own troubled relationship with his parents. And he’s of course right, I’m sure. It wasn’t a hugely loving environment, but then the royal family isn’t exactly famous for the whole lovey-dovey thing.

Charles’s own parents went off on a royal tour of North America when he was three and upon their return at Euston a camera caught the young Queen speaking to various family members before briefly patting her son on the head as an afterthought. There is no question that a lack of parental affection continues to hurt right into adulthood, but is Harry benefiting from the validation he gets here? The wisest advice anyone could give him would be to avoid the media as much as possible, never say anything about his relationship with his family, not mention political subjects and instead concentrate on uncontroversial good causes. Every time he does any of those things, he gets validation and becomes slightly worse off; more unpopular, more divisive, less likely to rebuild happy relationships, more likely to feel guilt and self-disgust later in life.

And yet he’s cheered on by an audience that dislikes the royal family, that dislikes the sort of people who are anti-Meghan and who believe public displays of inner turmoil are in society’s best interests. I doubt they are, but they certainly aren’t in Prince Harry’s interests — this is a Russian audience voting, not an American one.

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The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

So why do people validate other’s destructive lifestyles? One reason might be a need for chaos, but another is probably the need to rationalise their own life decisions. This is why, I suspect, so much bad advice is given out by journalists and social commentators — articulate, intelligent people who are often very bad at making life choices, and have been since the days of Rousseau and Paine.

Rousseau wrote a sort-of lifestyle guide to raising children while sending his own poor children to certain death in an orphanage; Paine wrote two of the most influential tracts on human affairs while pissing away his own life on drink. Journalists tend to have chaotic personal lives filled with debt, disastrous relationships and a desperate need for popularity, which is why you should never let them near the levers of power.

And people living distinctive lifestyles feel the instinctive urge to evangelise for that lifestyle, to gather cultural support around it, to encourage others to do the same. No one ever says: “I’ve decided I’m now X or doing Y or living with Z but I don’t particularly want to talk about it and don’t expect anyone else to go along with it.”

In the marketplace of cultural ideas everyone is selling, creating a competition in which values are inevitably changing rapidly. When social norms are ambiguous and up for grabs toxic validation can only flourish, because in the game of life no one is entirely sure what the right answer is to anything. Every question is worth £32,000 and the audience doesn’t necessarily want you to win.

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Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

To return to Russia’s cheery history, after the revolution broke out, the Bolsheviks enacted the first great sexual revolution of the 20^th century. Determined to break the bonds of family, Russia’s rulers encouraged young Communists to publicly denounce family members for opposing the regime, to the approval of their peers and society’s new elites. This same thing happened in Mao’s China, where they were lauded with approval for their fervour in this time of revolutionary moral uncertainty.

Later, when it all sank in, the same people were overcome with guilt, shame and horror at what they had done. They had made a terrible choice. But then people, especially the young, seek validation from the most influential and powerful in society, not from the wisest, or those with their best interests at heart.

The Bolsheviks wanted children to turn against their family members because they saw the family as a rival to state power, but the family was also the source of common sense and folklore, the cumulative wisdom of the ages. It is a rival source of affection, and a genuine one, as Christopher Lasch called it, “a haven in a heartless world”. And it really can be a heartless world — which makes it all the sadder that the toxic validators cheer when a young man denounces his own.

People might not understand why Israelis and Palestinians are firing rockets at each other, but that doesn’t stop them choosing a team. “Mark likes Israel, I’m Palestine” — as Jeremy in Peep Show pointed out, it’s much more interesting if you pick sides, and the western world is not short of People With Opinions About The Middle East.

The modern stereotype of western partisanship is, on the one hand, someone with a US flag and/or a crucifix in their Twitter avatar protesting that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where gay pride is allowed. And on the other, you’d have someone like gender studies professor Judith Butler, who once described Hamas and Hezbollah as being “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left”.

Yet it wasn’t always like this. As Jeet Heer wrote a while back, American conservatives were once sympathetic to the Palestinians. Right-wing publisher Regnery, for instance, “published a steady stream of books championing Arab culture and sympathetically describing the plight of the Palestinians”. In 1956 the National Review called Israel “the first racist state in modern history” while “James Burnham, the most important and influential foreign policy analyst at National Review, was very critical of Israel, constantly berating the state for inflaming Arab passions by mistreating Palestinian refugees and its internal Arab population.” The conservative science fiction writer Poul Anderson mocked the Left for ignoring the Palestinians — something you couldn’t accuse them of now.

Among certain English conservatives was a strong affinity and natural sympathy with the aristocratic Arab world, while most of the Zionists were radicals, socialists and feminists of various kinds.

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How Hamas became so deadly

By David Patrakirakos

So why did Left and Right swap places? After 1967, the two sides did become more aligned along Cold War lines and so to be pro-Israeli was to be pro-American, and vice versa. But Heer argued that conservatives like power, and that their perception of a weak Jewish state changed following their heroic, spectacular victory in 1967: “After that, conservatives, like nerds attracted to a strongman, decided to sidle up to Israel.” That generalisation of conservatives is not entirely untrue, of course; Right-wing views in men tend to correlate with higher upper-body-mass and after the Six Day War Israel became a gym-bro’s dreams. Its military victories, as well as its famous special forces and intelligence agencies, are genuinely impressive in a Boy’s Own sort of way. That Israel operates as a sort of modern-day Sparta while also being ultra-libertarian does push all the right buttons for conservatives.

Then there is religion. In the Seventies, Israeli politicians built relationships with Evangelical leaders, who increasingly referred to “Judeo-Christian” values and gave Israel a solid support base in the US far larger than its Jewish minority; the one tiny downside was that Israel’s victory would ultimately bring about the end of the world, but this was a mere detail.

Israel, most recently, has also become much more religious, and therefore conservative, due to its Orthodox population having higher birth rates; indeed, it has become more religious at a time when religion is in freefall not just in the United States, but in the Arab world too.

The western Left, in contrast, carries with it an overriding interest in the power of victimhood, a legacy of some obscure sect that flourished in that part of the world 2,000 years ago. They also strongly identify with what Jonathan Haidt called the Care/Harm Foundation — the desire to protect the weak — but this is often only really triggered when they can in some way identify with the person doing the harming; that is why Syrian atrocities against Palestinians get as much attention as police shootings in Jamaica or Brazil.

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Why Israel erupted

By Shany Mor

But another, better suggestion for the Right’s identification with Israel might simply be anti-liberalism, so that when the Left adopted the Palestinian cause after 1967, conservatives supported Israel just to oppose them. Much of the modern Right is really only defined in opposition to the Left; if progressives went back to supporting Israel tomorrow, the Right would probably all add little Palestinian flags to their Twitter profiles. As the Balfour Declaration famously put it: “a home for the Jewish people, to own the libs”.

That won’t happen, but there are lots of instances where partisan groups switch sides en masse for purely tribal reasons. Before 2016, Republicans tended to be much more free trade than Democrats, and more hostile to Russia. Post-2016 that has reversed, to such an extent you might assume it was just the natural state of things.

The Left’s fondness for the underdog has often led intellectuals to side with “social movements that are progressive” who were also bloodthirsty maniacs. During the Cold War, many went off to support Leftist guerrillas in Cuba, Vietnam and various parts of Africa, but as Communism faded they found other underdog-murderers to support, and stumbled on Islamic radicals and revolutionaries. Michel Foucault famously had a weird infatuation with the Ayatollah Khomeini, calling him an “old saint” and referring to the Iranian revolution as “the most modern and the most insane” event. He meant “insane” in a good sense because Khomeinism transgressed western notions of rationality, which indeed hanging gay people from cranes certainly does.

Islamic fundamentalists, unlike communists, have little in common with western progressives, but that didn’t necessarily matter. While there are lots of different factors that determine a person’s political stance — personality type, moral flavour, our view of gender roles — the real primary motive is: who hates whom. Who is on your side?

Butler’s argument was that, since the likes of Hamas define themselves as anti-imperialist, and are opposed to US dominance, then they are on the Left. Of course, many on the Left get furious at this argument, since if Hamas were white, they would be defined as so right-wing as to be off the spectrum. Indeed the Right-Wing Authoritarian test has been done on Palestinian subjects and, unsurprisingly, Hamas supporters turned out to be pretty Right-wing and authoritarian.

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Political posturing won't save Israel

By Giles Fraser

And yet if they were white reactionaries, they would not be anti-western, nor therefore “anti-imperialistic”, so it is not an illogical rationale. If the Left defines itself as being against the United States’ global hegemony, then Hamas are indeed on the Left.

This is also the logic of the Right on Israel — that not only is it a liberal democracy, but it is somehow on their side in a civilisational sense. In some ways that’s true; visiting Israel, it does feel western in many respects. But neither is that wholly true, and it is certainly not helpful for a country which needs the acceptance of its neighbours for long-term survival. Indeed, it only vouches for the narrative that Israel is a colonial state.

In From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik interviewed some British-born Muslims fuming at the Zionist entity, and observed that none of them could point to Palestine on a map or mention a single fact about it. But the same is true of most culture warriors on the issue, who all see it as a proxy for a debate closer to home.

The Right is just as bad: during the 2016 presidential race, Ted Cruz was addressing a group of Arab Christians when he proceeded to tell them that they have no greater ally than Israel. Perhaps as a great surprise to him, they didn’t agree and he was booed off stage. But then Arab Christians don’t tend to be especially Zionist, funnily enough. And why should they be? It’s not a civilisational battle between West and East.

A century ago, up to a third of Palestinians were Christian, a group whose existence was famously summed up by the story of an Anglican visitor who asked a local which missionary had converted his family: “Paul”. Many of the leading PLO activists in the 1970s were Christians, as were the founders of Ba’athism. Indeed, rather than Israel being part of the West, the majority of Israelis don’t come from a European Ashkenazi background; over three million are Mizrahim and have always lived in the Middle East; to Europeans many if not most Israelis appear indistinguishable from other Middle Easterners.

But then many people who take an interest in the conflict see it as representative of something bigger. For conservatives, Zionism long ago became a way of signalling civilisational patriotism, opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration in the West, as well as a way of isolating the anti-Semites who have often dogged the Right and toxified the brand. On the other side, Palestinianism is part of a broader struggle; today America’s young progressives are as pro-Palestinian as their European equivalents, conflating it with America’s racial dynamic in a way that displays almost world-beating levels of solipsism.

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Political posturing won't save Israel

By Ed West

Yet I wonder how this will last. The region will always have explosive potential, but it might not hold the same symbolic importance it once did. The Religious Right is in serious decline in the US, and the conservatism replacing it is more secular and more nationalist; it is less keen on foreign adventures and less invested in Israel or the Middle East. Americans as a whole have largely given up on the idea that they are in some existential, civilisational clash with radical Islam because they’ve realised that, whatever their issues with the Muslim world, they hate each other more.

Most of all, the whole narrative around the Holy Land was in many ways a proxy for our view on the United States in a brief unipolar moment — and the rise of China will once again flip political alliances in ways we can’t entirely predict. The one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever horrors the Beijing regime inflicts on the world, some western intellectuals will be on hand to justify it as part of the global struggle against western oppression and colonialism. Some things are even more timeless and unending than war in the Middle East.

We’ve always sided with the defeated of 1066. Losing liberates you from the labours of history and allows the vast freedom of what-might-have-been and happy myth-making. And, indeed, Anglo-Saxon England has often been portrayed as a happy place of flowery meadows and rainbow skies and rivers made of chocolate.

The ideal of the Anglo-Saxons as freeborn lovers of liberty is one of the most persistent throughout English history, and long before Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. During the Peasant’s Revolt Hertfordshire villeins threatened the Abbey of St Albans with ransacking unless they handed over charters from the time of King Offa proving that serfdom had not existed in those halcyon days. In the Civil War, radicals such as John Lilburne and Gerard Winstanley railed against the Norman Yoke; Thomas Jefferson wanted Horsa and Hengist on the presidential seal, “the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed”.

It is the oldest of class myths, trusty yeomen against an aristocracy who, even today, have a disproportionate amount of Norman blood. Yet a myth it was; the ancestors of the peasants of St Albans indeed weren’t serfs in Offa’s day — they were slaves. Among its many horrors, Anglo-Saxon England was rife with slavery, an institution effectively abolished by William the Conqueror.

Marc Morris is no naïve freeborn Saxon; his previous book, The Norman Conquest, brilliantly laid out the complexities of that fascinating and frightening people; rapacious, cruel and intolerant, yet often opposed to capital punishment and with a new form of politics called chivalry in which captured opponents were spared. The last decades of Anglo-Saxon England, in contrast, were like the depths of George R.R. Martin’s darkest nightmares, with numerous blindings, betrayals and brutal murders and a court culture devoid of any mercy.

Morris’s eagerly-awaited and equally enthralling The Anglo-Saxons covers the much longer preceding period, and throughout this epic narrative is the continual theme of England’s semi-detached relationship with the continent. The story begins with the destruction of one, Latin-speaking, continental empire, and ends with England’s absorption into another — this one dominated by speakers of a bastardised descendent of the Roman tongue.

In AD402 the last Roman coins appear and at some point the Romans depart, whether with the approval of the Romano-Britons we can’t entirely be sure. This Rexit proved rather unsuccessful, and here we enter the mythical origins of the Saxons, with three ships arriving from across the North Sea to Kent, led by the brothers Horsa and Hengest.

This is the traditional tale told by Gildas, a depressing sixth-century monk living in Brittany and a sort of proto-conservative newspaper columnist warning that the country was going to the dogs because of immigration (he happened to be right, though). Yet Gildas got some basic facts wrong (no change there) and Morris is confident that these are merely common tropes, three ships and brothers with alliterative names being a common theme in origin stories.

Little is known of this earlier period, but light emerges in 597 when Pope Gregory, who turned the ruined city of Rome into the beating heart of a new spiritual Roman empire, sent an emissary to convert the heathens. This began what was for a millennium a close and intense relationship between the English and the Church of Rome.

The Church brought the country back within the European mainstream, literacy re-emerged, and it proved strongest in the north. So begins that great moment in history, the Northumbrian Golden Age, where on the banks of the Tyne and Wear a new civilisation burst forth, producing some of the most beautiful artwork of the middle ages and early renaissance men such as Alcuin and, most importantly of all, the Venerable Bede.

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Perhaps no one other than Shakespeare did as much to create the English narrative; this remarkable monk, who never left his native North-East and yet had a vast imagination encompassing every subject imaginable, largely wrote the first chapter in our national story, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

History, of course, is told by the winners, and Bede was a Christian. The greatest warrior of the time was Penda of Mercia, who killed no fewer than three kings of East Anglia in the endless tribal wars that marked the period. Yet even after pagan Mercia had defeated Christian Northumbria, the latter’s defeated king, Oswald, came to be immortalised, a saint with his image portrayed across churches as far as Germany.

Penda disappeared into historic nothingness and his son, the even more unfortunately name Peada, accepted the inevitable and became Christian. Morris suggests that Penda’s defeat in 655, at the hands of Oswald’s successor Oswiu, might be the origin story of the most exciting archaeological find of recent years, the Staffordshire Hoard, which dates to around the right time.

“If this wasn’t the war gear of Oswiu and his fellow warriors, it was exactly what their war gear would have looked like,” he suggests. As with all of this period, we have to let our imaginations do much of the work, but what a rich seam for the imagination! Perhaps, the author wonders, it was carried from the battlefield by a Mercian warlord surviving the massacre, or it was like the scene in Beowulf, when an unnamed individual, the last of a defeated race, buries their treasure in despair:

“Now, earth, hold what earls once held
And heroes can no more; it was mined from you first
By honourable men. My own people
Have been ruined in war; one by one
They went down to death, looked their last
On sweet life in the hall”.

Beowulf is a lament for an age of warriors already gone; by now it was the age of clerics, as the Church’s bureaucracy grew across the kingdoms. The most influential Saxons were now not the kings but the men and women of the church, such as Wilfrid, Hilda and Boniface. Again, England’s strange relationship with the continent would prove central; Kent had been converted by Italians, but Northumbria had been converted by the Irish, and the Celtic Church had developed its own rituals and rules, the biggest dispute being over the dating of Easter.

For two whole decades, King Oswiu and his wife Eanfled celebrated Easter at different times of year, and this situation obviously couldn’t last. The nationwide dispute was resolved at the Synod of Whitby where Bishop Wilfrid made a very Remainer-sounding argument for following Rome. “Do you think that a handful of people in a corner of the remotest island is to be preferred to the universal Church of Christ which is spread through the world?” The liberal elite won the day and England fell in with the continent.

The most influential priest was Theodore of Tarsus, a Greek from what is now Syria who had been appointed to this utterly distant, alien, barbaric land well into his sixties. As Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore more than anyone established the hierarchy of the English Church, much of which still stands today, and cracked down on such strange local customs as mothers putting their daughters on rooftops to cure fevers. When one of his clerics, Bishop Chad, refused to get on a horse because he wanted to show (a rather impractical) humility by walking everywhere, the 69-year-old Greek cleric heaved him into the saddle. Bede said Theodore “was the first of the archbishops whom the whole Anglo-Saxon Church consented to obey”.

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What England owes the Irish

By Tom Holland

The mid 8^th century saw an uptake in international trade around the coasts of northern Europe, an inkling of the North Sea area’s future economic takeoff. Yet the cities evacuated by the Romans had been left untouched by the Saxon invaders, who called them the enta geweorc – the work of the giants. Even the largest, Londonium remained empty, and yet a couple of miles to the west the Saxons had set up a trading post – a wic – which became Lundenwic. Bede in 731 described it as “an emporium for many nations, who come to it by land and sea”.

Trade flourished, as did the monastic economy, but the monasteries would also prove to be vulnerable to a darkening presence in the distance; in 793 horror came to northern Christendom when Lindisfarne was raided by “heathens” — Vikings.

Norse armies were able to attack coastal towns at will, and in 851 even stormed the old Roman walls of Canterbury. But the crisis became a catastrophe in 865 when the Great Heathen Army overran the kingdom of Northumbria, killing its king, and then doing likewise to East Anglia. When Mercia collapsed, the story of the Saxons may well have ended. The last kingdom was ruled by the old king’s youngest son, a man of 20 who had been destined for the Church, and even sent to Rome as a child. His three elder brothers had died in succession and the young man, plagued by — possibly psychosomatic — illness now faced terrible odds. His name was Alfred.

For all the propaganda involved — Alfred wisely employed his own biographer, Asser — his epitaph is certainly justified; he defeated the Vikings in battle, made literacy a national priority, built the burhs that would become many modern towns and in 886 re-founded the Roman city of London, where he was accepted as king by those Anglo-Saxons not under Danish rule, with the approval of “all the counsellors of the English race” — ealles Angelcynnes witan.

When Alfred’s children and grandchildren forced the submission of Viking rulers further north, the kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria would not return. Instead, after his grandson Athelstan united the country in 927 it was said that “this Saxon-land [was] made whole” — ista Saxonia perfecta. Athelstan, defeating a coalition of Scots, Welsh and Viking rulers at “The Great Battle” at Brunanburh, now went by the title “King of the English”.

And yet the glorious triumph of the House of Wessex was not fated to last forever, and a series of disasters in the following century led to foreign conquest — in 1016. Unlike the more famous invader of 50 years later, the Danish Canute did not decapitate the country’s elite, and ruled justly; chroniclers also observed approvingly that with his North Sea empire, Canute was able to remove tariffs for English traders on much of the continent.

The conquest of 1066 was, in contrast, catastrophic for the natives: of 1,000 major landowners recorded in William’s 1086 Domesday Book, only 13 were English. And yet the same record showed that the unfree population had already fallen by a quarter and by 1150 slavery was effectively gone. A chronicler of 1130s recalled that “In this respect the English found foreigners treated them better than they treated themselves”. Many such historical cases!

The Normans destroyed much of Anglo-Saxon culture although they conserved the works of Bede, Asser, Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and the lives of English saints like Oswald and Ethelwold. Yet they also brought England again into the continental mainstream; we all meet plenty of Williams and Henrys in our daily lives, but not many people called Ethelwold or Oswiu and certainly not Peada.

“And yet,” as Morris says: “although their buildings are mostly gone, and their myths have been dispelled, a great deal of the Anglo-Saxon inheritance remains. The head of the English Church is still based at Canterbury because it was the principal city of King Ethelbert when he welcomed St Augustine over 1,400 years ago. Westminster is the political heart of the kingdom because Edward the Confessor added a royal palace when he rebuilt its ancient abbey. The shires of England, although tinkered with in the late twentieth century, are essentially the same as they were at the time of their creation more than 1,000 years ago… Roman Britannia, despite the grandeur of its ruins, lasted barely 400 years, and was over by the mid-fifth century. England is still a work in progress.”

How else do we explain the Prime Minister’s incredibly good fortune, which now seems likely to carry him to another election victory in a couple of years’ time? Barely 12 months after almost imitating his hero Pericles by dying of the plague, Boris is unassailable, credited not just with the successful vaccine programme, but more bizarrely, ending the European Super League, thereby making him the saviour of English football on top of everything else.

But fortuna has most favoured Boris with his timing; he’s leader of the Tory Party at a time when political changes beyond his control are acting to make it invincible. Ten years ago, its primacy wouldn’t have been possible, and neither will it be in another ten.

While the Government has no doubt benefited from the vaccine effect, the underlying cause of last week’s Hartlepool result is the Great Realignment of politics: in short, the political divide is no longer about economics but values.

There are various reasons for this shift, but globalisation is the central theme; a process that has been speeding up since this epoch began in December 2001 with China’s admission to the WTO. That Hartlepool, or Blyth Valley or Don Valley are now to be found in the Conservative camp isn’t inevitable, but it is highly probable; neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Keir Starmer nor Attlee himself could have stopped it.

Following last week’s results, UnHerd featured voices from the three wings of the former Labour coalition, which you might call the Corbynite, Blairite and Blue Labour factions. This realignment is taking place partly because the latter has dropped out of the coalition, or been pushed out; as Paul Embery argued, the two other wings essentially have a great deal in common, as much as they like fighting on social media.

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Is Labour dead?

By Ian Birrell

They are a logical coalition, broadly sharing an internationalist and socially liberal worldview. The problem is that, without Blue Labour, they don’t have enough voters to win, a problem aggravated by the fact that progressives tend to self-segregate geographically, which is extremely unhelpful in a first-past-the-post system.

On top of this, the radical Left, often too interested in politics and their own moral purity, are very off-putting to a large number of voters and bad at compromise and coalition-building — more fortuna for Boris.

Yet if current demographic trends continue, these two groups will have enough voters to win. Not by the next election, but maybe the one after. For despite Johnson’s victory last week, Labour now has a coalition designed for winning in the Britain of 2040. They have strong support among the young, unmarried, renters and ethnic minorities — all the groups which are demographically ascendent.

In particular, the age gap is the most worrying thing for Conservatives. The idea that most people start off as excitable socialists who want to change the world and darken into cynical conservatives is historically exaggerated. Thatcher did very well among 18-24-year-olds, for instance, and the under-30s aren’t anywhere near as rebellious as popular culture wants them to be. Most in fact tend to be quite conformist, following the prevailing culture noises around them – which is exactly what should worry the Tories. Crucially, their values aren’t shifting as they age; unless that changes, then at some point the demographic balance will tip towards Labour, and quite heavily.

This was the underlying theme of my book, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, published with rather unfortunate timing just months after Boris’s huge election victory. For the time being, however, this trend won’t win elections because it is concentrated among certain professions, the university-educated, and the metropolitan. That’s a minority of people, in an even smaller minority of seats, but history shows that populations tend to adopt the belief systems of high-status members over time. Twitter isn’t Britain, but in a generation or so it probably will be.

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Labour isn't working

By Paul Embery

I’ve often read the comforting argument that the young will rebel against the “woke wave” — but there is little evidence of that, except in small clusters. Few of us are naturally non-conforming or rebellious, because most of us don’t want to be unpopular and having unpopular political beliefs take a toll on wellbeing. Young people won’t rebel against wokery anymore than young people in late 4^th century Rome rebelled against Christianity. And the new religion is stronger and more powerful, so much so that it can successfully dictate what society’s taboos are, and what is beyond the pale to say. No ideology can compete with that.

At some point, the “woke” worldview which has come to the fore in the United States since 2013, will start to spread enough to become electorally significant in Britain, and there will be a tipping point where liberals and progressives together will win. This will happen not long into the future: just as the Tories won an overwhelming majority in the Tees Valley last week, and even made gains in Durham, so they lost Tunbridge Wells and Cambridgeshire, a sign of things to come as the disappearance of younger Conservative voters in the professions begins to turn south-east England red.

Yet while much of this is to do with values and identity, there are also more banal material explanations. Recounting the awful conditions facing Russia’s urban underclass before the revolution, Orlando Figes described in A People’s Tragedy how Moscow landlords were able to prevent the authorities from building more homes for the desperate workers: “Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent.” Only half their income, a twenty-something Londoner would complain, like the proverbial Monty Python Yorkshireman: When I was growing up, we paid 60%!

There is a noticeable link between high housing costs and voting for Left-wing parties, partly because affordable housing encourages people to start families, which makes them more conservative for a whole array of reasons: everything from a declining belief in the blank slate — a cornerstone of progressive thinking — to support for more traditional gender roles to economic conservatism.

Voting also maps on to population density; the more people per square mile, the more Left-wing people become on average. Meanwhile, urban people adopt more of the character traits associated with being progressive; they’re more likely to be mentally ill, for example, which correlates with liberalism, more likely to be sexually progressive, innovative and open to new experiences, and trusting of a wider circle of people.

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Starmer has proved the Blairites wrong

By Matt Zarb-Cousin

There is also the effect of people’s social milieus; if everyone around you believes something, most people come to adopt those beliefs. Anti-Toryism is almost a social norm for young people — something accelerated by housing costs — but at some point the social network becomes so anti-Tory that even home-owning does not flip a person’s politics.

The trend I’ve outlined is, of course, Londoncentric — for now — but then things are different outside the capital; for all the chatter about the North being deprived, the sort of people who vote Tory in the Red Wall (and even more so in the Midlands) are doing okay. They can afford their own home and car, with enough income to afford a decent holiday and gym membership, while their university-educated contemporaries in London are living in squalid flat shares in their 30s, without any prospect of affording a family, their politics getting redder and their hair bluer.

Both these cultural and economic trends are going against the Conservatives; house inflation continues to rise and fertility continues to fall — yet despite this Britain’s population is growing and therefore becoming more urban.

And here is another long-term advantage for the Left: immigration and its longer-term effects. While modern progressivism is increasingly repulsive to a lot of minority voters, in every western democracy the Left have a plurality or majority among non-white populations (although this varies from Canada at one end, where it has been very narrow, to France, where the gap is huge). This is because the Left-Right divide is essentially about the conflict between national and global identities, and there is little that conservatives can do to overturn that advantage (although they can, and should, reduce it by being moderate).

To put it simply, demographically Britain under 30 is very different to Britain over 50. It’s going to be more diverse, more urban, more single, more university-educated and more impoverished by rental prices. Its values are completely different.

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So, unless something is done about housing costs, this wave of disappointment will wash away today’s Tory advantage. So far, the best proposal has been Policy Exchange’s Street Votes, which would potentially create millions of new homes without touching the Green Belt, while also making lots of suburban homeowners immensely rich. That one idea, more than any other, might lay the ground for a future Tory home-owning majority.

In the meantime, as housing inflation sadly denies more people the chance of a decent life, we will see the Tory desert in overpriced London constituencies start to spread outwards. And when the time comes, Labour will almost certainly capture once-unimaginable areas of the Home Counties and Thames Valley, just as the Democrats win almost all the most expensive ZIP codes in the US.

But for now Boris can kick around and enjoy his great advantage, with an enfeebled opposition whose values repulse much of the country, knowing that he truly has the luck of the devil. But Mephistopheles, and demography, will come for him and his party eventually.

The Times was once the old establishment paper that effortlessly evolved into the voice of economic and social liberalism. The Telegraph, started by an army colonel as part of a grudge against a member of the royal family, has long been the paper of the squirearchy, Tory but bohemian and eccentric at the edges; the Guardian, founded by Unitarian Manchester businessmen, represented the non-conformist tradition that evolved into Left-liberalism, always activated by a keen sense of social justice.

And the Daily Mail? The Mail is purest distilled Middle England. It’s Harry Potter’s uncle Vernon and aunt Petunia; it’s social climber Hyacinth Bucket; it’s Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge.

The paper is 125 years old today, and for most of that time has represented the soul of a particular kind of England, read in the golf courses of Surrey, the semis of suburban Essex, the pub gardens of Dorset. It is the most popular paper in Britain — it overtook the Sun last year — and easily the most hated. It’s guaranteed to get a laugh, or a sneer, when a comedian mentions its name.

The Daily Mail is not exactly the conscience of Middle England, but it is certainly a guiding spirit, a collection of all its fears and hopes, although more of the former than the latter. It represents people overwhelmingly conservative in their cultural tastes while also having a prurient interest in other people’s sex lives and bodies, and in particular their failures.

The way it covers sex scandals is quintessentially English, with just enough information to both titillate and disgust, a dose of moralising and concluding the story with a description of the property in which the disgusting actions took place and an estimated market value. (“MP’s sordid sex sessions with rent boy in £600,000 maisonette”.)

This contrast with a central comment piece nicknamed the “whyohwhy” – as in, “why oh why have we allowed the PC brigade to do this/has Channel 4 allowed this FILTH to be shown/have we allowed the country to go to the dogs?”

It’s a winning formula, although it owes its success more to its breadth of interest. The paper was founded by Alfred Harmsworth, the son of a somewhat down-at-heel Irish barrister. He had first gone into the business with a magazine called Answers to Correspondents on Every Subject Under the Sun, and he brought that same reader engagement when he launched a national newspaper aimed at Britain’s recently enfranchised middle class.

The late Victorian era saw a period of rapid expansion in the newspaper industry due to a combination of rising education levels, helped by the 1870 Education Act, and wider involvement in politics after the 1867 Reform Act. Just as Benjamin Disraeli  “discerned the Conservative working man, as the sculptor perceives the angel prisoned in a block of marble” so Harmsworth found the small-c conservative newspaper reader. The Mail was a huge success, but early on its popularity rose especially when it appealed to its readers’ belligerence, and circulation shot up during the Boer War to one million.

There was a darker side to this, and it’s argued that the growth of a newspaper-buying public also helped push the European powers into the disaster that was to follow. In Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark wrote that “In Britain…. a burgeoning mass press fed its readers on a rich diet of jingoism, xenophobia, security scares and war fever.”

The Daily Mail in particular was accused of warmongering afterwards, including the series of rather hysterical pre-war articles by journalist Robert Blatchford about the Hun and his dastardly plans to invade England. Sales went up to 1.6m a day.

The Mail’s owners, famously, were less keen on war with Germany the second time round. After the Munich agreement Alfred’s brother Harold, the 1^st Lord Rothermere, sent a telegram to one of the protagonists, congratulating him on avoiding war with the words “My dear fuhrer… I salute your excellency’s star which rises higher and higher.” That didn’t age well, as they say these days.

Its most notorious headline, of course, was “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, a fact wheeled out every time the paper provokes progressive England, which is often.

The Mail languished until 1971, when Vere Harmsworth, the third Viscount Rothermere, brought in David English as its editor, relaunching the paper as a tabloid. Under English and his successor Paul Dacre — in football terms the Alex Ferguson of newspaper editors — it cemented itself as the voice of Middle England.

It achieved this position by understanding its readership. While its opponents take comfort in the paper’s supposed ability to sway the public, in reality the Mail reflects its readers’ desires and fears. No other paper understands them better – their health, weight, love life, dieting desires and dating concerns, and moral worldview. It is censorious about sex but has more female flesh than any other paper. Whether it’s celebrity cellulite, or the slappers of Cardiff and Manchester drinking themselves to excess, it is almost always disapproving. Esquire magazine called it Britain’s “purse-lipped mother-in-law” and there is something in that.

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It also understands what a story is and what angle interests people; the “public schoolboy gone bad into crime and drugs”, for example, is one of its favourite morality tales.

Then there are other staples; rubbish winter wonderlands, sad-looking local councillors pointing at potholes, little ducks that think they’re puppies, cats that look like Hitler, houses that look like Hitler, and cancer. Everything causes cancers or prevents cancer but cancer is all around.

Likewise with crime. The Mail’s overarching theme is one of social breakdown, helping to popularise the catchphrases “broken Britain” or “the broken society”. It reflects the anxiety that social norms are falling apart, an underlying fear of barbarism at the door, an idea that forms a central part of conservative psychology.

For its opponents on the Left the Daily Mail is simply there to stoke fear, a feeling which has only intensified with the internet and hate-sharing of columns by Sarah Vine or Jan Moir (who wrote the most notorious column of recent years). Someone even invented a device that allowed people to read the Mail, presumably working themselves into a parallel frenzy of indignation, without giving the paper the clicks. Others have tried to pressure companies to withdraw advertising.

Mehdi Hasan summed up the common feeling by describing it as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting”. In response the Mail released a grovelling letter Hasan had written to them begging for a column.

A paper so conscious of its own moral vision inevitably attracts humour as well as bile. Viz once featured a strip called “Robin Hood and Richard Littlejohn”, in which the outlaw’s sidekick is the prominent Mail columnist, up in arms that Sherwood Forest now has a problem with gay men cruising, encouraged by the politically correct Sheriff of Nottingham. “The Sheriff of Bottingham, more like.”

Charlie Brooker’s satirical TV Go Home had a spoof TV show called Daily Mail Island where a group of ordinary people are stuck in isolation with only Britain’s most influential middle-market tabloid. Within a few days the only gay man has been murdered and “Pervert” scrawled on his door.

But most anti-Mail comedy is predictable clapter, Mash Report levels of unfunny: Single mothers! Immigrants! House prices! HA HA the Daily Hell, the Daily Heil amirite. The Harry & Paul sketch “Panel Show” featuring “Oh my God the Daily Mail” as a punchline is basically correct.

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It’s tempting to overplay the snobbery element but there is certainly a class angle, the Mail the voice of Middle Englanders against the Radio 4-listening Liberal Upper Middle Class on one side and the feral Underclass on the other.

Sure, the Mail is obsessed with house prices, but for many people their home is their nest egg; immigration has added millions to the population and isn’t without difficulties; we do have a huge problem with inadequate sentencing in the criminal justice system; a lot of modern art is terrible and/or needlessly coarse, while many members of the cultural elite do despise the rest of the country. Because the Daily Mail believes something doesn’t make it untrue, although it might not always be entirely scrupulous about the details (and it’s not the worst).

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There is of course a certain Spiderman-pointing-at-Spiderman aspect to the Mail-hate; the voice of Middle England is disapproving and sanctimonious, and often hypocritical, but then so are its enemies in the Liberal Middle Class. Both fear the country is slipping away from them: we want our country back v I want my country back. Both are snobbish, in different ways.

But its worldview is more nuanced than its opponents believe. Unlike other Right-wing papers, it opposed the Iraq War. It regularly campaigns on civil liberties issues or the environment; Dacre, a true conservative, took a huge dislike to ubiquity of plastic bag litter. It dislikes open-door immigration and people taking advantage of the system but it has often spoken up for individual immigrants who are mistreated. It has a strong idea of fairness and decency, one reason it campaigned for Stephen Lawrence’s family.

While often accused of misogyny, it has by some distance the highest proportion of female readers; while critics lament that women would read a paper that likes to take down other women, that rather suggests their own ideology-induced alienation from human nature; competitive newspapers can’t afford such delusions. Likewise, its complex attitude towards the role of women in work, celebrating it but also recognising that the feminist goal of having it all is only really possible for the wealthy — which is largely true.

Yet it is hard to deny that its form of conservatism has a very uncharitable edge; you don’t have to be a drooling, wet liberal to find its focus on benefit scroungers often mean-spirited, targeting people who aren’t paragons of virtue but are nevertheless struggling. Likewise, as with all tabloids, its behaviour while chasing stories could be appalling during the worst excesses of the 1990s and 2000s.

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The Leveson Inquiry, and attempts to regulate the press, weren’t a response to an overmighty fourth estate, but a symptom of its declining power. The internet had been slowly strangling the newspaper industry for two decades, while also empowering those it once terrorised. Hugh Grant, at one point the Daily Mail’s nemesis, now has 630,000 Twitter followers, only half of the paper’s circulation.

Similarly, the Mail’s brand of social conservatism is, whatever the government in power, on the losing side. The things it complained about once — the excesses of political correctness and the loony Left — are now basically mainstream. It may sell four times as many copies as its antithesis the Guardian but the Guardian is read by the people who put on the Today programme, and the people who control education, who dominate the charitable sectors and lobby groups, and who make the plays, films, novels and television programmes that form the cultural memory. The Mail can influence and scare 300-odd Tory MPs, but they don’t write the narrative.

Yet while the newspaper’s power is waning, it has now opened up a new chapter beyond, with the Mail Online having just overtaken the New York Times to become the most visited newspaper site on earth, drawing over 50 million unique visitors a month.

The Mail is particularly successful in the US, where it has found a niche among mainstream news sites that are both dreadfully boring and ideologically dishonest, so deliberately cryptic that you have to be a Bletchley Park veteran to actually understand what is being reported. The Mail is popular with many Americans because, in contrast, it tries to tell a story – which is, after all, what journalism should be about.

Every year American police kill about 40-50 unarmed civilians, of whom just under half are black, and while many have become well-known since the rise of Black Lives Matters in 2013, Floyd was the first to have become an icon. Murals were painted across the world and those who mocked him went on trial for blasphemy. His is one of the most recognisable faces of 2020.

The murder triggered a month of protests characterised not just by looting and violence but by strange and bizarre scenes such as the washing of black feet. As Niall Gooch put it at the time: “I am beginning to understand what it must have felt like to be alive in the Middle Ages when one of those hysterical outbreaks began and everyone in your village started quacking like a duck or refusing to wear clothes.”

At the same time, the trend among conservative and classical liberal commentators of comparing American progressivism to a religion accelerated. Certainly the influence of Christianity and, in particular, Calvinism has been well documented, by me included.

It is easy to compare social justice politics to religion because there are so many superficial similarities; it is also fun, because many of our opponents despise religion and prize rationalism. Yet it is also unfair to religious believers and the faiths that inspired them.

Right now, hundreds of millions of Muslims are fasting for the month of Ramadan, during which time they will raise huge amounts for charity — quietly, dutifully and without informing their Instagram followers. They do that because the Abrahamic faiths demand great self-sacrifice and selflessness.

In contrast, political ideology mostly offers only rewards — status, popularity and often jobs and money. While big corporations have been pressured to support social justice campaigns since last May, it’s questionable who will benefit the most; the campaigners certainly won’t be out of pocket.

Religions also inspire great art, while the Great Awokening won’t leave us with a Last Supper, Chartres Cathedral or Shrine of Fatimah Masumeh. We have some murals, yes, but there is nothing transcendental, nothing for future generations to marvel at and to cherish. Most significantly, though, there is no possibility of redemption or forgiveness with today’s political religion. What is often referred to as “cancel culture” is the absence of forgiveness in public life, even for things people said in their youth.

At the height of the Great Awokening last year, 14 of the 15 bestsellers on the New York Times list were about race, racism and the means by which white people could be better “allies”. Yes, there was Christian guilt there, but the phenomenally successful White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism offers no redemption or hope at all. There is really nothing that white liberals, Robin DiAngelo’s target audience, can ultimately do — except to recognise their privilege and feel guilty, because they benefit from the system.

Religions at their most anthropological offer people a means of rubbing along, through the ideas of justice and mercy. There is none of that in the political ideology of our time; it is far more a clash of wills and a battle for supremacy; there is certainly no sense of sacrifice.

The ultimate sacrifice, for Christians, was Jesus’s death on the cross, and Christ accepted his death to save mankind. George Floyd did not; he was not a martyr, he was a victim of murder. Of course, the veneration of Floyd is indisputably Christian in flavour; Jesus himself was a criminal, and the religion turned the moral hierarchy on its head by idolising the despised. Yet the religious fervour of our age is better described as cultish rather than religious — and the differences are important.

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The term “Political Religion” was coined by the German philosopher Eric Voegelin in his 1938 book of the same name, which made the point that totalitarian political movements strongly resemble faiths. He later called all modern political movements “ersatz religion” and argued that after the Enlightenment people began to see their own activities as sacred, including their politics.

Which seems prophetic, if that’s not the wrong word.

This was followed after the war by Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book that was talked about a fair bit as last summer dragged on. Cohn looked at various millennial Christian movements that had sprung up during the late medieval era and following the Reformation, his historical account having one eye on the tragedy that had just hit Europe. Most of the movements Cohn described shared certain characteristics, including a veneration of the poor and hatred of the rich, a belief in the inevitability of a future earthy paradise — “the Third Age” — and a division of the world into good and evil.

“These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche” and the “armed bohemians of National Socialism”, he wrote of one such group, the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

The Brethren believed in “a quasi-mystical anarchism — an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation”. In order to come closer to God, they first had to engage in group sex and surprisingly the group didn’t have much trouble attracting recruits, until the Church cracked down on them.

More disturbing were the Flagellants, large groups of people who would proceed from town to town and whip themselves into an agonised, bloody fury, accompanied by weeping crowds. The flagellation movement had started in Italy in the 1260s, during a period of great stress, with an epidemic and a civil war, but over the decades had been taken up by the Germans, who made it far more extreme and violent, and also adding uniforms.

When the Black Death struck in 1348, it led to huge Flagellant processions and hysterical scenes wherever they went. But on top of spreading the disease, the group soon turned violent, possessing an angry, quasi-revolutionary element and a hatred of clerics, the rich and, most of all, Jews. Horrific pogroms followed, despite the Pope’s condemnations.

The Flaggelants had spread all over Germany, France and the Low Countries although strangely it never took off in England; a group arrived in London where they set up shop outside St Paul’s, proceeded to whip themselves and cry… and were met with stony, embarrassed silence. They soon left. The Flaggelants were eventually suppressed by the Church — bizarrely, its leaders were taken to Rome and publicly beaten, which surely can’t have been a terrible punishment.

The period culminated in the most extreme event of all, the Münster rebellion of 1534-5, when a group of Anabaptists created their own proto-communist paradise. It ended — incredibly! — with mass murder. The Münster rebels believed in equality, a dream of many Christian cults and one which in Cohn’s lifetime had also led to millions of deaths. It is an unachievable goal, but it still inspires believers today, even if the focus has moved from the individual to the group.

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The leader of the Münster rebellion was an actor, a reliable force for evil throughout history. He had used the moral anarchy of the Reformation to charm, bully and sexually exploit — also a characteristic of cults throughout the ages, and one that distinguishes them from religions (a fuzzy difference at times). The political cults of today often have similar psychological dynamics.

Cult members are expected to give everything, body and soul, and this means keeping away from non-believing friends, and even denouncing family members who oppose the cult’s goals. One of the most disturbing trends of 2020 were videos of teenagers denouncing older family members for their racism or “white supremacy”. One teenager crowed on social media when her mother was punched at the Capitol for her opposition to BLM.

There were echoes of Soviet Russia and Mao’s China, both of which encouraged young people to denounce anti-communist family members. Many of the children who did so then suffered psychological traumas in later life as the enormity of what they had done dawned on them. But, then, the lure of peer popularity is incredibly strong with adolescents.

Cults enable bullying to flourish, endorsed by the ideology. Being a vehement believer in a cause, locked against powerful and malignant outside forces, is the perfect vehicle for anyone with sadistic or even violent tendencies; it has been seen throughout history, and it is quite obviously on display in many of the social justice causes of recent years.

We live in an age of changing social mores, and the speed of moral change was illustrated last year by the warnings Sky Cinema issued about old films reflecting the different social values of the year they were made in. One of the movies featuring this warning, a remake of Aladdin starring Will Smith, was made in…. 2019.

This kind of moral confusion is the perfect environment for bullies and sadists because it is far easier for people to be punished for using the wrong language, or having the wrong opinions, and for many it is a ruthless competition to reach the top. Most of the nastiness is mercifully online, but we had a taste of the medieval at one point when a latter-day mini-Münster — the CHOP — sprang up in Seattle.

The victims of that utopian experiment, not being part of the litany of the saints, have been largely forgotten, but the underlying violent energies of the social justice movement shouldn’t be. George Floyd the man is dead, and his family have received the justice they deserve, but George Floyd the icon will live on, a powerful symbol for the faithful as they strive to build a third age of racial equality.

No other nation knew its past as entertainment — not even America — and it is one of the reasons for England’s cultural power, drawing in millions of tourists to breathe in the air where Bolingbroke toppled his cousin, where Hotspur fought Prince Hal, and where monstrous Richard III murdered his nephews in the Tower. They don’t come for the weather or food.

Among the many American tourists visiting the country back in the 1980s was George R.R. Martin, already an established author who at 13 had read J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings, set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon England.

Here Martin visited Hadrian’s Wall, and as the darkness drew in he looked north and wondered what it must have felt like to be a Roman legionary, many of whom came from old cities bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Here they stood, staring into the darkness of Caledonia, not knowing what terrors existed beyond in the vast cold wastelands. What if, he wondered, it wasn’t barbarians they faced, but something altogether more frightening?

Centuries ago the people who lived by the ruins of that wall did fear such things. The walking dead were a part of northern European folklore, across Britain and Scandinavia; the Vikings talked of draugr who would rise up and attack livestock and people, ripping their bodies apart with their sheer brutal strength, and killing their victims so they, too, turn into draugr.

These ancient myths would form part of Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones, an idea first laid out in a letter to his agent in 1993. He called the book, which would be published three years later, “a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the Iron Throne of the Seven kingdoms as the ultimate prize.”

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A further four books in the A Song Of Ice and Fire series followed, and by the fifth Martin was being called the “American Tolkien” and had sold tens of millions of copies; meanwhile Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Films film trilogy had provoked renewed interest in fantasy and the medieval. Two more books in the series are expected… at some future date.

When the first episode of Game of Thrones aired ten years ago this week, it was an instant hit, critically and commercially, seen as one of the greats from the golden age of television, beginning with the Sopranos in 1999 and taking in The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

It was the most epic of epic productions and each episode could be as expensive as a film; indeed, some battle scenes cost as much. The cast of characters, even with huge chunks of George RR Martin’s vastly complex epics cut out, felt enormous; Martin’s novels are so complicated that he sometimes forgets what has happened to a particular character and has to email a superfan in Sweden to remind him if the poor guy has been killed already.

The line-up of mostly British actors, both greats of stage and screen as well as up-and-coming talent, was unprecedented. You can’t watch any television series without spotting “that guy who gets beheaded in season 4” or the “man who has to eat molten gold” or “poor Theon, who, you know…”.

It was hard not to feel a certain love for characters like Sandor Clegane, the scarred monster capable of remorseless violence and cynicism, yet also a man with a certain sense of justice, and who forms a bond with Arya. “Lots of people name their swords,” she tells him, as they open series four righteously killing some low-born rapists. “Lots of cunts,” he replies.

Or Bronn, the loveable mercenary, in the spirit of Rhett Butler and Hans Solo; he doesn’t care for any cause and is quite nakedly in it for himself, but he’s not venal or cruel. Yet unlike previous examples of that archetype, he’s not going to turn good. As he later tells Tyrion Lannister, when refusing to fight the monstrous Mountain on his behalf: “I like you, pampered little shit that you are. I just like myself more.”

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Tyrion was, of course, the figure we were most drawn to, a character who possessed a sense of pity and empathy. Tyrion is a letch and a coward, but he is humane and educated (not always qualities that went together in real late medieval history). “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards and broken things,” as he tells that other outcast, the bastard Jon Snow.

When asked by some gormless backwoods cutthroats how he would like to die, Tyrion replies: “In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden’s mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty.”

It summed up the show’s excess, both in the violence and sex, with scenes so gratuitous that porn actresses were used; indeed I wonder if, like 18^th and 19^th century editions of Shakespeare where King Lear has a happy ending, much will be excised as society’s moral wheel turns again. I hope so, from a purely selfish point of view; I’d like to watch it with my children one day, boring them silly by talking about all the historical analogies.

Yet despite this moral excess, George R.R. Martin and the show’s creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were able to escape both the traps of genre fiction and popular culture by plugging deeper into England’s folklore and tradition.

The comparisons with Tolkien are made because, while Martin covers so many similar themes, he inverts (or some would say perverts) almost all of them. While Tolkien drew on the Arthurian tradition of chivalry, Martin turned it around; here the knights are tortured monsters like the Hound, closet homosexuals like Loras Tyrell or, in the case of King Joffrey, the very opposite of Prince Charming.

Lord of the Rings has a strong Christian theme; Game of Thrones exists in a Christless world, Ross Douthat once describing the sinister fanatic High Sparrow as “the ghost of Christendom in G.R.R. Martin’s otherwise more pagan/stoic vision of medieval Europe”.

Similarly Game of Thrones reimagines the English national story, inverting the Henriad by giving it a Northern accent. Ever since Athelstan of Wessex united all the Angles and Saxons in 927 the South of England has dominated. Many medieval kings would never venture beyond the Trent, and when they did it was with an army at their back. Yet Martin’s epic often tells the story from the Northumbrian point of view, facing overmighty southern kings on one side and the wild men of the north on the others.

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Game of Thrones begins with the House of Stark in their rocky, harsh homeland, Ned Stark administering justice for the North. The southern lords are essentially treacherous and conniving, the southern capital of King’s Landing a pit of snakes; the North is poorer and has its dangers but it is a place where people show loyalty to each other, and its rulers look their people in the eye.

In reality the House of Percy played a similar role as Kings in the North. The Percy home of Alnwick, like Winterfell, was perfectly placed to hold the North, which the family had done for generations, winning the loyalty of northern men who would come in their thousands to fight for Percy but had little love for the king in Westminster. Indeed, at one point during the War of the Roses the House of Percy ran the North virtually as a separate kingdom; their story is largely forgotten, because the national story came to be written down by the banks of the Thames.

British history is defined by the geographic gap separating the island; it is further from the rich markets of mainland Europe, that stretch of land  from the Netherlands to northern Italy that has been the continent’s richest and most productive for almost a millennia. No amount of levelling up can defy that geographical destiny.

During the late medieval period on which Game of Thrones was loosely based, numerous chroniclers observed how much poorer the north of London was. The border land was said to consist mostly “in wast grounds and ys very cold hard and barren for the wynter” and it “bredyth tall men and hard of nature”.

When Ned Stark arrives in King’s Landing, he’s asked whether he wants to wear something “more appropriate,” his clothes appearing rough and coarse to southern eyes. At the time, Northern aristocrats in London really would have looked far poorer and less elegant, and with much cheaper horses.

Far poorer than the Southern counties, the North could never hope to win in any trial of strength, and when the Reformation triggered the last Rising of the North in 1569, led by the House of Percy, once again the South was the victor. It always was.

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The Northern leaders not only suffered death and defeat, but their story never came to be told, while Queen Elizabeth became a central protagonist in Our Island Story. In Shakespeare the Percys become proud and foolish, ultimately getting what they deserve by going against the rightful southern king. Even though through the prism of fantasy, it’s taken an American novelist, and two American screenwriters, to retell that story with a Northern voice.

The final series of Game of Thrones came out two years ago and ended with great disappointment, in fact so much so that millions of people demanded that it be remade (which perhaps says something about how mundane our problems were before 2020).

Yet although all those people who called their daughters Khaleesi are probably regretting it now, the show’s finale at least told a certain truth. The attraction of Game of Thrones, compared to most historical fiction, is that alt-history allows its creators to tell an almost purer truth about history and human nature. As amoral as some of the characters are in Westeros, they behave as people would have done in such a situation, devoid of modern idealism or comforts.

Daenerys, the queen over the water, is the only true idealist among the contenders for the throne, and campaigns to end slavery in Essos before liberating her homeland. And yet when she arrives in Westeros she turns out to be far more murderous and oppressive than what went before. Likewise the ancien regime, terrible that it was, had nothing on the horrors unleashed by modernity, which contained far greater lies than the world of chivalry.

Like with so much in the show, it was true to life, and we would have expected nothing less. As the cheerful psychopath Ramsay Bolton once put it: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

He had fought with great courage in the war; he was regularly rude to foreigners, which was obviously a bonus; he liked to ride and sail and shoot things and he was unsentimental and uncompassionate almost to a comic degree, which felt reassuring at a time when a new-found emotional incontinence made many feel uncomfortable.

This cult status was only heightened by his legendary gaffes, of which there are enough to fill a book (indeed there is a book). There was the time that Philip accepted a gift from a local in Kenya, telling her she was a kind woman, and then adding: “You are a woman, aren’t you?” Or the occasion he remarked “You managed not to get eaten, then?” to a student trekking in Papua New Guinea. Then there was his World Wildlife Fund speech in 1986, when he said: “If it has got four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane, and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Well, he wasn’t wrong.

Outrageous to some but endearing to others, he was the sort of man you’d want to go for a pint with, perhaps the ultimate compliment that an Englishman can pay to another Englishman. Yet of course, Prince Philip wasn’t an Englishman in any real sense. He was born in Corfu but grew up outside Paris speaking French; ethnically he was mostly German although he considered himself Danish, his family originating from the Schleswig border region.

He was also, despite his demeanour of Royal Navy officer briskness, a citizen of nowhere in an age of movement. From a very young age he was a stateless person, nationally homeless. Indeed, Philip was an outsider in a way that even Meghan Markle wasn’t; at his wedding in 1947, his three surviving sisters and two brothers-in-law were not permitted to attend because they were literally Britain’s enemies, having fought for the Germans. A third brother-in-law had even been in the SS, working directly for Himmler, but had been killed in the conflict.

That he was able to transform himself into the quintessential “Greatest Living Englishman” is testimony not just to his personal determination but also to the powerful cultural pull of Britishness. That the Prince of Nowhere became its figurehead was more than fitting for a great age of migration and transition in which the Royal Family survived and even flourished.

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Even his religion was slightly exotic. He was Greek Orthodox until he converted to Anglicanism on marrying Elizabeth — what with his wife due to become supreme head of the Church and everything — but his ties with eastern Christianity remained. His great-aunts Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine and Tsarina Alexandra are both martyrs of the Russian Orthodox Church, having been murdered by the Bolsheviks; Philip’s mother went on to become an Orthodox nun and a “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation of Greece, spending much of her time in squalid poverty. More well known is that Philip himself is considered a god in some parts of the world.

Due to his great longevity, Philip’s life came to span a period of social change that is almost unprecedented, and almost no one in history viewed such a transformation from the front row.

His parents were part of the largely German extended aristocracy who ruled almost all of Europe before it all came crashing down in 1918. When he died on Friday morning, aged 99, it marked a near-century in which all the great ideological struggles had been and gone; he had been born before the Soviet Union but outlived the Cold War, the War on Terror and — almost — Covid-19.

The world that Philip was born into was a far more violent and dangerous place than ours. In the year he was born, Irish rebels were still fighting Black and Tans; over the course of 12 months the Spanish and Japanese prime ministers were assassinated, there was a coup in Portugal and race riots in the United States. Germany was rocked by violence from the far-Left and far-Right, while in Italy a brutal new political movement, the Fascists, secured 30 seats in parliament, led by a trashy journalist called Benito Mussolini.

The worst violence, however, took place in Greece and Turkey. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, what remained of Turkey was marked for permanent enfeeblement by the Allies. But much to everyone’s surprise the country’s force were roused by the brilliant officer Mustafa Kemal, who led the Turks to victory. Constantinople was lost to Christendom for good and thousands of years of Hellenic culture was put to the flames in Smyrna.

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The Greek royal family, north German imports shipped in during the 19^th century, bore much of the popular anger for this disaster. King Constantine fled to Italy, and his brother Andrew was arrested and only escaped execution through the intervention of his relative Britain’s George V. Andrew’s wife Alice, their four daughters and infant son Philip fled to France, completely impoverished but with the one possession that ensures that aristocrats are never truly poor: connections.

Philip had a traumatic childhood. The family had no money, his parents’s marriage was falling apart, and his four sisters were all much older, and were soon all married to German aristocrats (the second youngest would soon die in an aeroplane crash, along with her husband and children). He got through it by making a joke of everything, and by being practical.

This is where, I think, his “Legend!!!” status came from; in the 1990s there was a great divergence in how we dealt with mental anguish. We were now supposed to open up and show our feelings, even if we didn’t want to. Nothing better illustrated this great emotional divide than the tragic death of Prince Philip’s daughter-in-law Diana, after which the Queen and Duke’s emotional restraint felt dangerously out-of-touch; the tabloids demanded they cry publicly, to join the wailing crowds outside.

Yet many of us felt that this was not emotional liberation but emotional tyranny; some people get through hardship and trauma by a very public display of emotion; others do it by focussing on the practical. It doesn’t mean they’re not hurting, necessarily. From an early age, Prince Philip endured his fair share of grief — he just got through it by making plans and doing something useful.

The future Greatest Living Englishman had first attended school in England when he was seven, but two years later his mother, who went deaf and suffered from schizophrenia, was sectioned. His father had gone off to the south of France to live with his mistress in true aristo-bounder style.

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And so, through a connection via one of his sister’s husbands, the poor, lonely boy was sent off to a new school — in Nazi Germany. Which was as fun as can be imagined.

Schloss Salem had been co-founded by stern educator called Kurt Hahn, a tough, discipline-obsessed conservative nationalist who saw civilisation in inexorable decline. But by this stage Hahn, who was Jewish, had fled to Britain, and Philip did not spend long at the school either, where pressure from the authorities was already making things difficult for the teachers. He laughed at the Nazis at first, because their salute was the same gesture the boys at his previous school had to make when they wanted to go to the toilet, but within a year he was back in England, a refugee once again.

Here he attended Hahn’s new school, Gordonstoun, which the strict disciplinarian had set up in the Scottish Highlands. Inspired by Ancient Sparta, the boys had to run around barefoot and endure cold showers, even in winter, the whole aim of which was to drive away the inevitable civilisational decay Hahn saw all around him. To 21^st century ears it sounds like hell on earth, yet Philip enjoyed it, illustrating just what a totally alien world he came from.

But what really set his world apart from ours is the idea of duty. Philip was a talented naval officer, and fought with great courage at the battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 when British and Australian forces had decisively beaten the Italians. He ended the war one of the Navy’s youngest first lieutenants. Some say he could have risen to the top; but he had fallen in love with Princess Elizabeth in the meantime, and the rest is history – and TV.

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Towards the end of his time on earth Philip came to have that rare, cursed honour of having his life dramatised in his own lifetime. The Crown covered the great social change of the period, but also reflected it. The modern monarchy had been established by George V, who with his radio broadcasts kept the House of Windsor on the throne by making them celebrities. Yet it relied on a culture of gentleman’s agreements and shame among editors and journalists.

By the 1970s that was collapsing, and the sense of restraint Philip had grown up with had disappeared. In season one of The Crown, Philip’s sister-in-law cannot marry for love because divorce was impermissible in the Church of England and their feelings did not come before ancient, sacred rules. By the end of season four almost all of the royal marriages have collapsed.

Indeed, the House of Windsor seemed stuck with the worst of both worlds, with an old-fashioned lack of emotional development and empathy, and a modern lack of duty.

Yet of all the institutions that have lost the faith of the public in this period — the Church, Parliament, the media, the police — the Crown itself has done better than most at surviving, curiously well-adapted to a period of moral change, even moral anarchy. The House of Hanover/Windsor, since their arrival in this country in 1714, have been noted above all for their ability to adapt. And just as they survived the Victorian age by transforming themselves into the bourgeoise, domestic ideal, so they have survived the new Elizabethan era, even if it is ending on another downward note with the estrangement of his grandson Prince Harry.

There was once a time when the Royal’s German blood was a punchline for comedians. Now it is the royals who are deeply British while the country itself is cosmopolitan and globalised. The census results next year will show a society that has seen greater demographic change than the preceding four or five thousand years combined, the second Elizabethan age being characterised more than anything by a transformational movement of people. Prince Philip, the Greek-born, Danish-German wanderer who came to become the Greatest Living Englishman, perhaps epitomised that era better than anyone else.

And, of course, she was right. I felt the same at her age, forced to endure the endless, boring ordeal of church; even the words “Mass has ended, go in peace…” still fires up a little dopamine rush in my head. Christianity lacks the glamour of the old gods, but then the world of the old gods was a brutal place and we often forget how strange our society now is.

Reims Cathedral played an important part in a story that began two thousand years ago one Friday, when the sun went down in an eastern province of the Roman Empire and the world was never the same again. A rabbi who had gathered a following in the troubled province of Judea had been condemned to death by crucifixion and suffered that agonising punishment reserved for the worst criminals.

On the Sunday, Jesus of Nazareth’s body had disappeared; soon his followers had, bizarrely, reported seeing him in the flesh and the cult grew and spread; official persecution, starting with the martyrdom of the Apostle Stephen, only made the group stronger.

Yet what might have remained one of many sects during this great period of religious fervour changed course two or three years after the death of Jesus when one of the men tasked with crushing the group, a Hellenised Jew called Saul, was struck blind while on the road to Damascus, and heard the voice: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

These dramatic events would transform the world like no other. Saul, renamed Paul, used his position as a Roman citizen and a Greek-speaker to spread the faith across the eastern Mediterranean.

The impact of the faith, and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular, would revolutionise the way humans think, and how they related to each other, in ways that evolutionary biologists and psychologists are only now beginning to explain.

Like with many things, it is only now that we are losing Christianity that we are starting to appreciate its importance. This century began with the New Atheism, an overtly anti-religious movement spurred by the events of September 11; an array of books in the 2000s made the argument that “religion poisons everything”, in the words of Christopher Hitchens. They won, which was largely why New Atheism disappeared. As America moves past the 400th anniversary of its founding by English Calvinists, its religious exceptionalism has finally ended. Atheism is making headway everywhere.

Imagine no religion… fewer than half of U.S, adults belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Gallup) pic.twitter.com/KsnNFVDZ5N

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) March 29, 2021

Yet paradoxically, as the sea of faith has retreated, more public intellectuals now take it seriously. In the field of political philosophy Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual repopularised the 19^thcentury French idea that Christianity was the wellspring of individualism, and that contrary to the belief that Enlightenment liberalism was a revolt against the medieval Church, it was a product of it.

Christianity’s revolutionary transformation of western society was then brilliantly laid out in Tom Holland’s Dominion. Holland told the story of how the new religion had upended our worldview, tamed the sexual prowess of powerful men, sanctified the weak and given the poor kudos and pity. The abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, even gay marriage and the current political radicalism emanating from US campuses, all were products of the Christian revolution.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind explored the positive role that religion has on social bonding; Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods looked at how deities became more moral and more universal as societies scaled up.

Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist, is also interested in the way Christianity has affected and changed the western mind. When his The Weirdest People in the World came out last year, America was still in the grip of one of its periodic moments of moral convulsions. Tens of thousands of people were frenziedly protesting against the evil of racism, with some seen washing the feet of people they viewed as sanctified by race. It was an undeniably Christian event, even if its practitioners weren’t conscious of it; blessed are the meek, the first shall be last. George Floyd, another criminal put to death by the authorities, was transformed into a Christ-like figure on murals, along with the various taboos and blasphemies attached.

Over the centuries Christianity has become so dominant that we assume lots of things to be human nature when, as Henrich points out, they are very unusual in the greater scheme of human nature. Universal human rights are a western concept and to most societies completely unintelligible. “We think nepotism is wrong, and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships and expediency,” he writes. People from countries ruled by the medieval Catholic Church, and countries founded by their offspring, are also “less inclined to distinguish in-groups from out-groups, more willing to help immigrants, and less firmly wedded to tradition and custom”.

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At least since the mid-14^th century, there has been an idea that medieval Christianity was a wrong turn for the West, that without monotheism polytheistic Greek-speakers might have sailed the stars, as Carl Sagan imagined. Yet as thrilling as ancient history is, and as remarkable as its achievements were, Roman society was very alien to us in a way that the medieval wasn’t.

A Roman father had total power of life and death over his children, and female infanticide was not unusual. Romans would happily watch an innocent man being torn to pieces by a wild animal for entertainment; slavery was ubiquitous and it was assumed that a man would sexually abuse his female slave; charitable giving outside the family was rare, and those who reached rock bottom in the imperial city would be left to literally die in the gutter.

This was Tom Holland’s realisation: that, although as a classicist he was fascinated by the Greeks and Romans, he couldn’t help but feel a revulsion about their worldview, one which almost completely lacked any pity for the weak. That was because he was a child of the great revolution that began on that Friday in Judea.

Like Holland, I previously imagined Christianity as being a fun-sucking succession of prohibitions, lacking the glamour and vitality of the ancient gods. I pictured ancient Valhalla as a sort of never-ending stag do, while the Christian Heaven appeared as an eerily quiet place where you sat having tea with some great-aunt who disapproved of everything. The Viking religion seemed like it was specifically designed by adolescent males, while Christianity was thought up by elderly women.

And there is a reason for that. Christ appeared that Sunday to his women followers, and, paradoxically for a religion that excluded women from senior roles, it was very female-dominated. Research from early Christian communities in Athens and Rome suggests that women may have outnumbered men by 5 or 6 to 1. The appeal of the new religion was that it domesticated men.

Men can be very idiotic creatures; our bodies start producing huge amounts of testosterone around the age of 14, which gives us the compulsive urge to fornicate or fight. Our brains don’t fully develop until 24 or 25 (and some of us don’t really grow up even after that). In that window between sexual and mental maturity the gender gap in every range of idiotic behaviour goes off the scale — car crashes, drink-related accidents, hospitalisation from violence.

Unlike the totalitarian quasi-religions of the modern era — including the one currently developing in America — Christianity had no naïve illusions about human nature. We are fallen creatures; young men in particular are barbarians who need to be tamed.

As Henrich notes, in bird species male testosterone rises as mating season begins and they prepare to fight other males. The world is cruel, and in both birds and mammals, males with higher testosterone levels tend to have more mates and offspring. Polygyny, the practice of a male having more than one mate, is also associated with higher testosterone, while monogamy comes with lower male testosterone — although in both cases the causal arrow goes both ways.

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So while low-testosterone men are more likely to be monogamous, the state of monogamy lowers their testosterone. So does childcare. As men are drawn into family life their testosterone levels plummet faster than those of their single contemporaries; that’s why many middle-aged men become obsessed with exercise in order to naturally up their T-levels.

Divorce acts as a form of de facto polygyny if powerful men are able to produce offspring with multiple women. It was standard practice in Ancient Rome but Jesus of Nazareth forbade it, seeing it as desertion. His followers opposed infanticide, which was largely initiated by men against females; they also prohibited men from having sex with anyone but their wives. For women this had huge benefits; for low-status males it was an even bigger boon, producing a sort of sexual socialism, or at least sexual social democracy.

From the late second century, Rome was struck by a series of epidemics that fatally weakened the empire. The Plague of Cyprian in the 250s also had a huge cultural impact; all of a sudden Christianity, a minority religion practised by maybe 5% of the population, was everywhere. Traditionalists would have been stunned by the sudden arrival of Christian processions, of younger relatives adopting this strange new faith, worshipping a common criminal. It would have been popular among women in particular.

The western empire was already in ruins by the time that the fatal blow came with the Justinian Plague in the 6^th century. That, combined with a war between the Goths and Byzantines and a freakish period of cold weather, left Rome a ruin of no more than 20,000 people and, like in many former Roman cities, the power vacuum had left the running of the city to the local bishop, who had long since adopted the title of Papa, Pope.

Catholic Christianity was not destined to conquer Europe; it might not even have triumphed over rival interpretations of the faith, such as Arianism. Its eventual dominance owed a lot to its adoption by one of the fiercest of the western tribes, the Franks. In 496 the Frankish leader Clovis, in the midst of a losing battle with a rival German tribe, the Alemanni, cried out to the Christian God who his wife followed; the battle turned in his favour, and in return Clovis was baptised in Reims Cathedral, along with his followers. And this was the fascinating tale I explained to my young children, who were obviously enthralled.

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Clovis’s wife Clotilde was from Burgundy, and was already Catholic, but her husband her previously resisted her demands for him to adopt her religion. Now he was persuaded, and it began a close relationship for “the first daughter of the Church”, as France would become; Charles X would become the last of Clovis’s descendants to be crowned at Reims cathedral, in 1825.

Clovis’s conversion also set about a series of events that would transform Europe; in 800AD the Frankish king Charles came to the aide of the Pope in his conflict with yet another German tribe, the Lombards. When he arrived in Rome in triumph, the Pope placed a crown on his head and Charles the Great — Charlemagne — was named Emperor of the West. Victorian academic Sir James Bryce wrote of this event that “From that moment modern history begins”, but Charlemagne’s empire was less interesting for the usual violence than for the sex, or at least the lack of it.

As well as gathering around him a group of scholars who arguably rescued western Europe from the Dark Ages, Charlemagne’s greatest legacy was in enacting the Catholic Church’s marriage laws. No man was to have more than one wife, no one was to marry a relative. This would have a revolutionary impact on western society, setting us apart from 95% of global cultures. Without cousin marriage, clans grew weaker as people married out; they saw themselves less as members of a patrilinear line and more as wider members of society. Church rules on consent were also vital too; marriage was a sacred institution, and no one could now enter into it unwillingly.

Soon the almost unthinkable developed, the idea of marrying for love, a process known as the “Romeo and Juliet Revolution”. Adult sons and daughters were no longer subject to the patriarch but were individuals in their own rights; increasingly they would set up their own separate homes upon marriage. They were individuals.

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These marriage rules were a way of taming men, in particular high-status men, and they brought huge benefits. Polygamous societies are racked by violence and turmoil, because large numbers of males are left without mates and inevitably cause trouble. The Vikings are the classic historical example, Scandinavia exporting its excess men to terrorise the British Isles, France and what is now Russia.

St Vladimir, who brought the Viking Rus into the faith, supposedly had 500 concubines before accepting Christianity and becoming an improbable saint. The Rus — the name probably means “rowers” — were Vikings who had sailed down the rivers leading to the Black Sea, creating a state that would eventually evolve into the world’s largest. The tenth century Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan had spent some time with them, calling them “Allah’s filthiest creatures”, an adventure which ten centuries later would become one of the biggest box office bombs in history.

Ibn Fadlan recalled how at the funeral of one Rus warrior a slave woman was sacrificed, having first been drugged and forced to have sex with the dead man’s friends, passed around like meat before her murder. It was once thought that a lot of similar tales about the Vikings were Christian propaganda, but multiple examples of human sacrifice have now been uncovered in graves, including in the British Isles.

The Rus had been a nuisance in Constantinople — no more than 50 were allowed in at the same time, like a cornershop next to a troubled comprehensive — and it was left to the Byzantine princess Anna Porphyrogenita to convert them by marriage to Vladimir, a prospect which naturally horrified her.

Her barbarian husband had initially been attracted to Islam, which permitted polygamy — and had the future rulers of Russia been Muslim history would have been very different. It was said that he changed his mind when his ambassadors walked into the Hagia Sophia and felt they were in heaven; the alternative, and perhaps more plausible, explanation is that Vladimir then heard about Islam’s prohibition on alcohol, and lamented that the Rus could never live without drink (“Ivan, call those other guys back in”).

Some Vikings took longer to abandon the old ways; King Canute, whose grandfather Harold Bluetooth had adopted Christianity, still continued the old Danish tradition of a handfast, or second wife. But he was the last officially polygamous ruler of England.

Today we barely notice how unnatural our norms are in a world where traditionally powerful men behaved with the brutality of Caesar or the libidinousness of St Vladimir. That all changed one Friday on a hillside in Judea. I sometimes wonder, though, what we will lose as church attendance continues to slide and, like Romans of the 3^rd century, we see our gods dying around us.

America has seen one of the most rapid de-Christianisations in the past two decades and the results so far are not good. What is left is not the rationalist paradise some naïve public philosophers were claiming at the start of the 21^st century, but a sort of distilled Christianity, which without the supernatural elements is far less rational: and so what results is endless moral panics, a world seen in stark black and white between good and evil, competitive sanctimony and the sentimental glorification of victimhood in which everyone wants the glory of being on the Cross.

I normally quite like mindless action films full of explosions but this time I just couldn’t get past the second episode. There was nothing wrong with it; I’m sure it was fine — I just didn’t want the protagonists to win. We were, of course, supposed to see what drove some Middle Easterners to hate Americans, one having lost a brother in an air strike as a child; American entertainment has moved beyond the “reel bad Arab” caricatures of the 1980s.

I actively wanted them to win, though, and found myself muttering “What are you even doing in their country?” at the Yankees as they ran around some forsaken place in the desert. Before last year I never would have felt that way.

My father was a refugee in the United States. His parents had sent him and his older brother to North America in 1940 because they wanted their children to grow up free. They spent Christmas that year in Manhattan staying with family friends in the Upper West Side, where they were doted on by all the neighbours and friends who came to visit and showered the two English boys with kindness.

But then America was a country famous for its incredible generosity, the welcome it gave newcomers; once you crossed that ocean no king, tsar or Führer could bother you again. Many enjoyed similar welcomes; a friend of dad’s remembered arriving around the same time and being picked up by a New York taxi driver who told him in a broad Nu Yoik accent: “Don’t worry, son, Uncle Sam’s gonna look after you now.” He never forgot that.

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To my generation, growing up in the Cold War, that sense of America The Protector still lingered. I remember as a child seeing US troops at Checkpoint Charlie and being aware that it was thanks to them that we didn’t have to keep our eyes down like the poor prisoners of East Berlin. As a British child, when you watched American films or American TV, you identified with the Americans against our common enemies around the world.

Like many people here, I considered 9/11 as an attack on us too, and not just because of the dozens of Britons killed; I was furious when the BBC aired a panel show a couple of days later in which various (mostly Muslim) guests and audience members shouted about how the Americans had it coming, in front of a distraught-looking American diplomat.

And yet a lot has happened since. There is now a feeling, and I suspect it is growing on the British Right, that America is no longer a force for good in the world — quite the opposite. “Civilisations die from suicide,” as Arnold Toynbee famously said, and the United States, or at least its Ivy League-educated elite, is the Rev Jim Jones of the West.

The overwhelmingly Atlanticist wing of the British Right is, I suspect, going to experience a long retreat — one that will slot right into the long history of anti-Americanism on the Right. America, after all, was a revolutionary society founded by Whigs, and the country’s Tories were largely driven out, to Canada or Britain.

Conservatism, as it began in France and England around the time of the French Revolution, was defined by throne and altar, and so some American intellectuals argued that the country didn’t really have an authentically native conservative tradition. Yet paradoxically America, while being a young country, also has the most ancient of constitutions, and the deepest political roots. It really has something worth conserving. For that reason, until now, it always resisted utopian and revolutionary ideas, while Europeans could never resist them.

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The European Right once had a strong anti-American streak, viewing it as a country filled with mediocrity and an absence of high culture. Those on the extreme Right disliked it as a land of racial degeneracy and Jewish influence; Hitler in particular hated everything the United States stood for.

But as America’s empire grew, however, it was the Left who came to see the US as the chief enemy of the wretched of the earth. Perhaps the lone Yankeephobe among senior post-war British Conservatives was Enoch Powell, who was deeply hostile to the United States, which he blamed for the downfall of the British Empire. Powell wasn’t totally alone, although anti-Americanism was largely on the fringe. The Right-wing Monday Club had been in favour of joining the Common Market because it was opposed to American influence. In 1967 it argued that the choice was between being “first-class Europeans” or “second-grade Americans”. Club chairman Sir Victor Raikes even made the case for the withdrawal of American troops from western Europe so that the continent could instead defend itself.

Yet this quaint nostalgia for the world before 1914 could not live up to a reality where western Europeans have been incapable of defending themselves and still rely on American support. And as the Common Market failed to become the alliance of independent states the Conservative Right hoped for, so the Tories became increasingly Europhobic. By the late 1980s pro-Americanism was imbedded in the British Right; the country’s Right-wing tabloids also became zealously pro-American, while continuously writing in derogatory terms about the Germans and French.

It had become a mantra among conservative commentators that everything America did was better. They believed in freedom rather than euro-socialism, they still cared about defending the West against its enemies. America was richer and technologically more advanced. It even had higher fertility, the highest sign of confidence in the future. None of these things are entirely true anymore.

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On the Left, meanwhile, a casual sort of anti-Americanism has long since been the norm, fed by Americans like Michael Moore who use their countrymen as punchlines for European audiences. It is assumed that most of the world’s problems are caused by the Great Satan, whether through the machinations of the CIA, FBI or capitalism in the abstract.

Yet the same liberal middle-class Europeans who despise “inauthentic” mass-produced American food also hold the most basic, globalised political opinions mass-produced in America. The most successful of these beliefs — the Coca-Cola of bad takes — is that America is a unique force for racism and oppression, exported by Americans who can make a living precisely because it isn’t true. But if European liberalism think America hegemony is oppressive, wait till they see what follows.

So while far more British people on the Right see themselves as pro-American, this barely makes any sense anymore. Certainly on issues of social democracy, relating to welfare and redistribution, most Europeans are more Left-wing than Americans, with the British somewhat closer to the US median. Yet on social justice issues — related to race, immigration, gender and sexuality — America is far more radical than the European norm. And in 21^st century politics, those latter issues are more salient to people’s voting habits.

It was once a rather fond cliché to say that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold, but that idea seems less benign now that America’s politics has mutated into something genuinely toxic and destructive. Its elites are aren’t just misguided, they are deranged and malignant. With the country losing its Christian faith, they are driven by a new religious moral fervour towards the utopian goal of “equity”, equality of outcome transferred from the individual to the racial group, a project destined to stoke hatred and conflict.

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And of all the people in the world, the British have the least immunity to these ideas, unprotected by any language barrier or recent cultural memory of utopianism. In France and Germany, American concepts at least have some linguistic hurdles before they come to spread and dominate; in central and eastern Europe, people recognise that purity spirals and cancel culture have obvious, dark comparisons with their own history. In Britain, however, we have an entirely naïve population.

Because our middle class desperately ape everything they read in the New York Times, or watch on Netflix, so America’s history and discourse is transferred onto ours, a form of cultural imperialism that our leaders are too conformist to resist. So we see nice, elderly Liberal Democrats voters in suburban Oxfordshire kneeling outside their homes in absurd imitation of American sportsmen protesting about a police shooting, the circumstances of which they are entirely, and wilfully, ignorant of. Would any of them protest police killings in Brazil, which dwarf the US rate? Would any of them care?

It’s not a thought-out belief with an understanding of the causes of a problem or the consequences of any proposed solution; it’s a meme, a fashion. It’s what anthropologists refer to as “prestige-biased group transmission”, when people imitate the fashions and mores of powerful groups without any understanding of whether these fashions will benefit them. It’s the same reason that my children are now being taught American history at school, the stories of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, as if it was theirs.

It’s tragic, because on a personal level Americans are still as warm and generous as they’ve always been; their earnestness and kindness sometimes shames me, coming from a country so filled with cynicism and nihilism-disguised-as-irony. But their political culture is poisonous, and America’s progressive fundamentalists are a bigger threat to Britain, and to Europe, than probably any other force on earth, bar climate change.

I still cheer for the Americans in the old films. But when it comes to the American religion being forced on us, I empathise more with the desert tribesman than with Jack Ryan: Yankees go home and get out of our lives.

Calvinism was an energetic and revolutionary creed which found its epicentre in Geneva. Here, as elsewhere, Calvinists showed themselves devoted to education, enthusiastic charity givers and generous to refugees.

They also proved to be violently intolerant, with Jean Calvin’s Geneva imposing extreme punishments for perceived sinners, including the death penalty for pregnancy out of wedlock. They also had a tendency to smash up statues and burn down abbeys, or anything else that was associated with the old religion. Perhaps most puzzling of all to religious conservatives, Calvinists saw the world being divided between the damned and the saved — and the doubt this caused in believers often led to extreme psychological stress, to the point of breakdown.

It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and so just over 400 years ago, a group of English men and women with Calvinistic leanings, feeling that their homeland wasn’t Godly enough, set sail to start a new country. This they did, pretty successfully, and today the new religion spreading from America displays that country’s strong Calvinist roots, and with the zealot’s indifference to local customs.

Today the faith is spread not by preachers, or even teachers, but through the institutions that wield the most power in the 21st century; corporations, and their Human Resources departments. For the practitioners of what is generally known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” are teaching nothing less than a modern form of political Calvinism, one that paints a pessimistic picture of humanity destined to be damned. And their strength is growing.

Our economy may be in deep trouble following the pandemic, but one area which is already enjoying a roaring 20s is the diversity industry, which has significantly increased its presence in many companies since the protests that followed the death of George Floyd. All around, in hushed tones, people in a variety of careers, from academia to medicine to finance, grumble about the increasing encroachments on their workplace by newly empowered D.E.I teams. And the grumbling is always private; no one wants to go on record.

For some it’s a mere time-wasting exercise, with occasional Zoom conferences adding to the day’s workload. For others it goes much further, with HR-led diversity teams now even deciding who can be hired for what role. But almost everywhere there has been a significant ramping-up since last June.

The usual pattern is that a well-meaning manager, bombarded with images of BLM and racial justice from every corner of social media, will suggest that the organisation needs to alleviate concern about racism. The company or department, aware that racism is seen as the number one social evil and that anti-racist courses might also act as insurance against any discrimination lawsuit, will hire a professional anti-racist activist from outside.

It is rarely initiated by human resources, but HR embrace it because it gives them a role as priests of the new faith. There is also a whole outside industry that benefits too.

A middle manager at a medical professional body told me how, following the summer protests in the US, “it was [considered] a matter of urgency that we ran a series of mandatory diversity and inclusion training sessions for our staff”. There hadn’t been any problem at the company, which was pretty diverse and had good morale.

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The sessions were run by professional diversity consultants, and were “quite different from previous E&D training I had attended at past jobs. Whilst those ones tended to focus more on how to avoid breaking the law, these sessions felt a lot more like an induction into their ideology.” They said that equality meant “treating people differently and acknowledging their race” and afterwards participants were told to research “ally behaviour” and “to educate ourselves about the British Empire”.

As with many of these courses, some very questionable claims were made: “We were told that high levels of diversity were in all cases a great thing and can only lead to good outcomes,” when numerous studies point to the opposite. They were told the gender pay gap was in large part caused by people using the word “girl” instead of “woman”, a claim that fails to take into account the overwhelming influence of child-rearing on the gender pay gap.

There was a talk about unconscious bias testing, even though it’s been shown to be largely bogus, and as with so many of these sessions, almost all the examples and talking points came from the US, “and there didn’t seem to be any kind of recognition from the trainers that these are two very different countries with very different histories”.

Many diversity and equality sessions instruct employees to read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, a runaway bestseller that has become the Little Red Book of the diversity industry. White Fragility is mainly tasked with teaching white liberals that the polite ways they talk about race to avoid offence are actually proof of their deep-seated sin. Whites, says DiAngelo, are able to “infuse their racial prejudice into the laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not”, and being unconscious of this racism is merely proof of how insidious it is.

In this world, greater white average wealth in any area is a priori evidence of this racism, even though over a dozen or so ethnic minority groups in the United States are wealthier than the white average. This central inequality, according to the book, “represents power and control by a racial group that is in the position to disseminate and protect its own self-image, worldview, and interests across the entire society”.

It is an incredibly bleak worldview, and as Matt Talibi said, “sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors”.

And this is what is being taught at workplaces across Britain, a new American religion proclaiming that, whatever we do, we are damned. It goes largely unopposed partly because the British are so unused to politics intruding in these areas of life, but also because workers are scared for their jobs; the rise of woke capital has given large corporations more power over their precarious employees.

One of the things I find so alien about the new religion is the absence of humour. So much of what is called identity politics is funny in its absurdity, because fanatics are intrinsically ridiculous — but only when they can’t get at you. But most people feel that they can, they can get them sacked or publicly humiliated, and so all the humour is told in DM groups or Slack channels. True believers certainly can’t laugh at themselves, and are determined to take the public realm’s sacred space for themselves.

There is also the difference between the totalitarian mind and the liberal mind; for the former, everything is about politics. What you do in your spare time has political implications, and so no area of life is free of political discussion. The traditional English cultural taboo about not discussing religion or politics in the pub reflected a deep-seated aversion to fanaticism; the idea that workplaces might be settings for political instruction would once have struck people here as positively demented.

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A friend who works for a Russell Group university in the north of England described how, since June last year, there have been “constant invitations to regular Race Equality sessions and Diversity and Inclusion sessions”. Even in department-level meetings on completely unrelated topics there are now talks “educating us about the slave trade” with videos and slides. She describes these as “just complete non-sequiturs since the majority of the meeting is about new research grants, new students in the department, recruitment for next year”. It’s not that it’s a great intrusion, it’s just that it’s…. weird.

They are also made to undergo unconscious bias training before being allowed on interview panels for new staff and students, and are told things which are either questionable or outright false. At one of the meetings a diversity and inclusion officer told faculty that “if you only have one woman on your job shortlist there’s statistically no likelihood you’ll recruit her”, and this went unchallenged, even though this is not only untrue, it’s obviously untrue. Strangest of all, they were also told to “start every lecture with a picture of a black scientist and say that they have a voice and that it’s being heard”. She finds it embarrassingly patronising.

Universities are particularly vulnerable to this sort of activism, because by nature they are political. Many privately despair, including academics who aren’t especially right-wing; whatever your politics, conformism can become intolerable in a workplace. Talking about politics all the time is tedious. And activists can be disagreeable people.

Another academic, working at a politics department, recalled that things ramped up after the death of George Floyd when a committee was set up to look at diversity and decolonisation. It ended with activists from outside the department hiring students to “review” their reading list and blaming the inclusion of John Locke and David Hume for the BAME attainment gap. The conclusion was the demand that they separate “colonial and non-colonial” political history courses, which meant in effect separate courses for white and non-white political philosophers.

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The strangest thing about all this expanded HR is that there is almost no evidence that diversity officers improve outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Indeed there is even evidence of the “pharisee effect”, that people made to recite a platitude about diversity and gender equality were less likely to hire a black or female candidate; it just made them feel like they’ve done their bit, a criticism that has been made against upper-class activism since Tom Wolfe’s day.

None of this stops it expanding. Even the royal family are on board, or as it was reported last week, “Queen to appoint diversity tsar”, one of those headlines that would truly baffle someone waking from a long coma. This will not improve the life of a single BAME person except for the actual tsar, or tsarina, who gets the job; everyone knows it, it’s just the royal family conforming to the state religion, just as their ancestor George I did.

The companies hiring diversity consultants probably aren’t improving people’s lives, and they aren’t encouraging tolerance, let alone “diversity”; quite the opposite. They’re doing what people in positions of power have done since the first states were formed, ensuring that their gods and saints are the ones being revered by the subjects they rule. As for the individuals who do not believe in the new faith, they do what people in totalitarian societies have always done – they keep quiet and retreat to an inner world where the intolerance and conformity of the powers-that-be cannot reach them.

France’s president has shredded his reputation more than any other person in the age of Covid (and with some competition). First Emmanuel Macron cast doubt on the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, calling it “almost ineffective” for the over-65s, the sort of reckless comment even Trump might have thought a bit excessive. Then, thanks to his lockdown policies, the Economist downgraded France to a “flawed democracy”, along with all the Visegrad bad boys and Modi’s India.

Now the country has, inexplicably, halted AZ vaccinations because of a miniscule number of blood clots, fewer than you would get with the contraceptive pill. But then perhaps it hardly matters, since France leads the world in vaccine scepticism, and conspiracy theories more generally. It is a country maddening in its strangeness, and that at least partly explains English antipathy to the place, which goes back centuries.

When Britain left the EU last year it followed decades of press hostility in which Francophobia was the strongest component, far more than hostility to the Germans. Perhaps the most famous example was the notorious Sun headline from November 1990, Up Yours, Delors. At the time EU commissioner Jacques Delors had become something of a bogey figure to the British Right, and after he had criticised Britain’s increasingly isolated position in Europe, the Sun chimed in by pointing out how “They tried to conquer Europe until we put down Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815” and “They gave in to the Nazis during the Second world War when we stood firm”. It called for all “frog-haters” to shout “up yours, Delors!” and that those on the south coast would be able to smell the garlic from across the Channel.

(Delors was not the only French politician to antagonise the English at the time. The following year, prime minister Edith Cresson stated her belief that one-quarter of “Anglo-Saxon men” were gay, to which Tory MP Tony Marlow replied “Mrs. Cresson has sought to insult the virility of the British male because the last time she was in London she did not get enough admiring glances”. Afterwards, the tabloids pointed out that Frenchmen kiss each other and carry handbags.)

Of course, the Sun might not speak for England, but it was probably speaking for a large section of its readers, because while England’s relationship with France is complicated, it is heavily tied up with our class system; the English middle class obsess over France, while the English working class have traditionally hated everything about it.

As far back as the French Revolution, well-bred radicals were excited and inspired by events in Paris, with Whig politician Charles James Fox crying “How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world!” when the Bastille was stormed.

Yet it was not simply that they favoured the revolution’s ideology; it was because it was French. And even as France descended into anarchy and then tyranny, Britain’s intelligentsia still sympathised with it. Fox’s nephew Lord Holland publicly supported Napoleon, while his wife Lady Holland even sent him books when he was sent to St Helena. William Wordsworth lamented of his own country that “Oh grief that Earth’s best hopes rest all with thee!”

In contrast, among working-class Englishmen there was virtually no support for the revolution and when volunteers were called up to fight France, the country managed to enlist 20% of all adult males, three times the French rate and a huge endorsement of opposition to Napoleon. It wasn’t just that they were fighting for English liberty against a revolutionary system. It was because it was against the French.

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Men were recruited into local militias, and when in 1804 the authorities organised a mock training battle in Wood Green, Middlesex, they got the Islington Volunteers to be the British and the Hackney and Stoke Newington Volunteers to play the French. However, the Hackney men so objected to having to even pretend to be French that a fight ensued with several people injured, one being stabbed in the leg.

That’s because they were cockneys. A middle-class volunteer militia would have revelled in playing the French, rattling on about the latest pseuds being venerated on the Left Bank and emphasising all the correct pronunciations like they were reporting for Radio 4.

Our relationship with France is, of course, formed by an inferiority complex stretching back to Norman rule, and perhaps a lingering suspicion among the proletariat that the toffs deep down are still French (and English people with Norman-French names are still richer than the rest of the population, even after 950 years).

This complex deepened with the French cultural domination of the 18^th century when Versailles court etiquette was imitated by English-speaking elites, and petit-bourgeoise English sensibilities were horrified by French sexual morality. Louis XV had over one hundred mistresses — including five sisters — which made even England’s leading royal philanderer, the half-French Charles II, seem emasculated in comparison.

There is sex, and then there is the food, a French obsession which is endearing and sort of baffling. As far back as the 15^th century, when the English ruled much of France, their power began to collapse after they held a coronation of the infant King Henry in Paris and overcooked the chicken; even the poor queuing up for scraps complained how bad it was. Within a few years, the French had rebelled and kicked the English out.

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Only in France would football fans protest that a local restaurant had lost a Michelin Star, as happened in Lyon two years ago. Only in France would an expedition to the Himalayas — of huge national importance — fail because it was weighed down by eight tonnes of supplies, including 36 bottles of champagne and “countless” tins of foie gras. And only in France would you get actual wine terrorists, the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, who have bombed shops, wineries and other things responsible for importing foreign produce.  This is a country which only reluctantly in the 1950s stopped giving school children a nutritious drink for their health, by which the French meant not milk but cider.

This is a country where mistresses are so much part of life that they can legally inherit, and where murder doesn’t really count if it’s done for love. One of France’s most famous socialites, Henriette Caillaux, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro just before the First world War and received just four months in jail because it was a crime passionnel. So that’s all right then.

France’s last duel, meanwhile, was in 1967, when Marseille’s mayor Gaston Defferre insulted another politician, parliamentarian René Ribière, calling him “stupid”. The latter was wounded, first emotionally and then literally.

It is all part of that sense of honour, which also manifests itself in its sense of national pride — probably the biggest cause of British frustration within the EU, when many felt we could have managed with the Germans and Dutch. Anti-French animus likely motivated some opposition to the EU, and certainly our otherwise dismal lives were cheered up slightly last year with the possibility of skirmishes between French sailors and the Royal Navy.

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But the truth is that France, “that sweet enemy”, has by and large been our closest ally. How many of those fighting at Waterloo could have foreseen that, when the guns fell silent, it would be the last time the two countries ever fought, and the start of 200-and-counting years of friendship, a military alliance far stronger than the supposed “special relationship” with the US? A generation later the British and French fought together in the Crimea, where Lord Raglan continued to refer to them as “the enemy”, and since then we have fought continuously side by side, in two world and many minor wars, from Suez to Libya.

This year we won’t be visiting France, and honestly, I’m really glad about that. I don’t write that in bitterness. I’m really glad I’m going to Bognor, which has got the third lowest rainfall in the UK. Why on earth would I want the Languedoc?

But we’ll be back, if not this year, then next, a line of cars heading down the A26 on that long, endless journey to the middle-class English Valhalla beyond the Loire.

Another company ship was sent to investigate, but neither vessel could find any pirates, and if this were a cinematic recreation, it’s at this point that someone would say: “That was no cannon”.

Indeed it wasn’t a cannon. Hundreds of miles away a volcanic eruption of earth-shattering proportions had begun on Mount Tambora, an explosion so large as to be rated as “super-colossal” on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The consequences for those in the vicinity were truly catastrophic. But the impact on the wider world and history would also be enormous.

For obvious reasons, when we think of historical disruptions and their cultural impact we tend to the think of plagues. Everyone now knows that Boccaccio wrote The Decameron following the Black Death and Shakespeare composed Lear during a plague lockdown, while 19-year-old Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity on a similar “lost” plague year.

Yet the volcano is a little-appreciated driver of history, and bumper explosions can have truly dramatic effects too. An eruption in AD536 brought about the coldest period in recorded history and sealed the final fate of Rome, while most likely playing a part (along with the Plague) in the rise of Islam; an Indonesian volcano in 1257 led to a famine in England that spurred baronial unrest and the development of Parliament. The explosion of Laki in Iceland in 1783 was followed by the French Revolution. And one of the most influential novels in human history came about from a lost year caused by Mount Tambora.

The Tambora eruption was 1,000 times as big as that of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and the sound could be heard 2,000 miles away — which is like an explosion in Cyprus or Lebanon being heard in Swindon. It left a crater 4 miles wide, and produced enough ash to cover Britain up to its knees; within 24 hours, the ash cloud covered an area the size of the continental United States.

Some 12,000 people had lived in the province of Tambora; only 26 survived, the rest killed by liquified rock at temperatures reaching 1,000 degrees. One village had simply sunk, and where it once stood was a lake 18ft deep. Almost all animal and plant life was killed, and geologist Charles Lyell wrote that “the darkness occasioned in the daytime by the ashes in Java was so profound, that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night”.

As the ash floated up into the atmosphere, it blocked out the sun, so that when spring arrived in the northern hemisphere the sun’s rays appeared alarmingly feeble. The rains came down in May and June 1816 at twice the normal rate. In Geneva, it was said to be so dark that candles were needed at midday.

Brown snow fell in central Europe; in Italy it was red. In England, the strangely-coloured skies were observed by JMW Turner, and would help to influence his characteristic style. The crops failed across Europe, the worst affected area being Germany, France, Switzerland and Ireland. In Wales, too, small armies of hungry people began to be seen, an echo of a previous time.

In the United States, still an infant nation nestled on the coast, people observed a strange “dry fog”, which made the sunlight red. There was snow in New England in the middle of summer, and widespread harvest failure, spurring rapid colonisation of the interior.

Some coastal states lost up to a third of their population to this exodus, one of the worst affected being Vermont. From the small town of Norwich, on the border with New Hampshire, the Smith family left for the better pastures of western New York, a region known as the Burned-over district because it had been so heavily affected by recent religious revivals. This new environment particularly affected their 11-year-old son, Joseph, who subsequently went through a series of religious experiences that would a decade later culminate with the Book of Mormon.

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The worst affected region of Europe was around the Alps, with desperate hunger suffered in France, Germany and Switzerland. In the Rhineland, one man became so frustrated with the problem of feeding horses that he began work on a horse-less form of transport. The result was Karl Drais’s velocipede, the prototype of the bicycle. (A few years later he also invented the typewriter.)

But the terrible conditions in the Alps failed to deter Britain’s leading romantic poet from heading to Switzerland on summer holiday.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a precocious young man, filled with great talent, self-confidence and terrible political opinions. Of all dead celebrities, Shelley would probably be the most popular — and annoying — on social media. He once suggested an alliance of “enlightened, unprejudiced members” to resist “the coalition of the enemies of liberty” ( 963  2.2K ) and declared of his fellow radicals that “You are many, they are few” ( 10K  21K ).

Like many political idealists, Shelley was an awful human being, especially to his first wife, and at this point had run off with the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a talent in her own right, hardly surprising when she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two great left-wing political philosophers of their day.

Sailing along the Rhine during their elopement, Shelley and Godwin had both been inspired by the “monstrous, inhuman appearance of several of the huge German labourers on board”, as Richard Holmes put it, as well as the schlosses they drifted by, one of which was a Castle Frankenstein. That summer their journey to stay at Lord Byron’s rented villa in Switzerland was marked by difficult weather, and impassible roads. Then, upon reaching their destination, they couldn’t row on Lake Geneva because of the rain and wind.

Byron, increasingly gloomy with the weather, was writing a rather downbeat poem at the time, called “Darkness”:

“All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured.”

And they were going to be stuck with him for weeks.

The freakishly cold weather forced the group, along with Byron’s doctor John William Polidori, indoors where they sat around a fire night after night and began to read German ghost stories. Then Byron suggested they each write one themselves.

Godwin agonised over her subject. The group had previously discussed the ideas of galvanism and Erasmus Darwin’s speculation on the generation of life. There was great excitement, and anxiety, at the time at the deeper questions of life and death, in particular the Vitalism debate, and the question of how life starts. Scientists such as Luigi Galvani in Italy and Franz Anton in France had experimented on animating dead animals with electricity.

Mary Godwin was fascinated by all this and its uncomfortable potential. When she was 14 her father had taken her to see the brilliant scientists Humphry Davy give a lecture on chemistry. Davy spoke of future experiments in which man would “interrogate Nature with Power… as a master, active, with his own instruments.”

A few days after the competition began she had what she described as a “waking dream” in the middle of the night in which “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Godwin began to write her story.

All the men dashed theirs off relatively quickly. Godwin, though, took 14 months. Three weeks before the birth of her daughter, in August 1817, the now-married Mary Shelley handed in the manuscript – Frankenstein. And when the book came out, almost nobody noticed. It sold just 500 copies, and most people thought it had been written by a man – most likely Shelley’s husband or father.

What a waste of her lockdown — or so she thought.

Among the other stories written in this competition, The Vampyre would have a huge cultural impact on the birth of horror. It was written by neither of the famous poets but by Dr Polidari — and yet when it was published, the magazine incorrectly attributed it to Byron. Eventually Frankenstein, too, would have a huge influence on culture, in this case in the realm of science fiction.

Although the book initially failed to have an impact, over the course of the 1820s, Mary Shelley’s creation grew more and more famous, pushed by often scandalous stage adaptations. One censorious newspaper begged its readers: “DO not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!!! – The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency” and called it “PREGNANT with mischief.” Obviously exactly the sort of publicity that will guarantee seats.

Shelley’s lockdown story would become one of the most influential novels in history, encapsulating mankind’s Promethean dilemma, our fears of boundless control over nature (not coincidentally, the novel used weather as a mood-setter). The plays, however, took huge liberties with the story, which came to have more of an influence on our idea of Frankenstein due to subsequent film adaptations. Frankenstein went from being an obsessive but idealistic figure, representative of the radical optimism of the age, into the prototype mad scientist muttering “the fools, the fools” in his lab while thunder and lightning raged outside. Likewise the Monster, an articulate and thoughtful figure in the novel who ruminates on man’s great inhumanity, became a sort of mindless Munster character with bolts on the side of his head.

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Two hundred years later, this story in all its incarnations still exercises a powerful grip on the popular imagination, still informs our fears about “playing God” in areas such as genetics and bioscience, and even our concerns about the things we do to nature in the wake of the coronavirus.

The explosion of 1815, and the lost year it caused, brought about all sorts of unintended consequences; just as our lost year will, too. How we live, how we work, how we treat our sick and old. Almost certainly, the huge focus on medical technology necessitated by Covid-19 will have beneficial knock-off on effects.

Millions of lives have been altered in ways we had no control over because of powers beyond on control, and pushed us to explore, and to think, and to write. And out there somewhere is the man or woman who has written the next Frankenstein.

Alas, the story did not have a fairytale ending. Sarah died, aged just 40, from tuberculosis in 1880 after travelling to Madeira to convalesce, Victoria by now queen of much of Africa.

It was not so unusual for the Queen of the Whites to play host to an African girl. As ruler and empress of much of the globe, Victoria saw herself as the benevolent ruler of a family of nations, of all shades of humanity; at the same time, millions of her subjects at home lived in abject poverty, and when Miss Davies was growing up barely 1.5m could vote out of a population 20 times that.

Most American men, in contrast, could choose their head of state, thanks to the revolution that had ousted Victoria’s grandfather. The creation of Jefferson, Hamilton and the other Founding Fathers had been a tremendous success, not just in terms of wealth and power but in fulfilling its high-minded hope that all men might be able to pursue happiness. President Andrew Jackson was raised in the Waxhaws, a backcountry region of the Carolinas, the son of Irish immigrants, and had gone on to the White House; Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and reached the very top.

Yet Sarah Davies could never have dreamed of dining in the White House. Although there had been black guests since the time of Lincoln, the first African-American to be invited to have dinner at the president’s home was Booker T Washington – in 1901. Even then, it caused such anger that it wouldn’t be repeated for decades.

Such a visit would have raised few eyebrows in Britain, where Queen Victoria’s circle hosted people from various backgrounds, as did those of her successors; George V, in particular, had views on race that were unusually liberal for the time. The House of Windsor, whatever their other, many faults, have always stood for what most regard as basically decency on the subject — which is why perhaps the most damaging revelation in yesterday’s Oprah Winfrey interview was Meghan Markle’s suggestion that Harry had heard “there were concerns and conversations about how dark [Archie’s] skin might be”. The Oprah interview has placed race at the heart of the royal fall-out, and, as a result, the British Royal Family has been cancelled by American progressives. The Windsor family fall-out has, unfortunately, become part of The Discourse.

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Obviously the royal family should be cancelled by progressives; hereditary monarchy is, after all, a very reactionary concept. Americans cancelled the monarchy in 1776. Yet monarchies have also historically been, paradoxically, more racially tolerant than republics.

The America that rebelled against Victoria’s grandfather came to be both more egalitarian and at the same time more racially conscious and prejudiced than Britain; it developed a “colour bar” and “one-drop rule”, ideas designed to separate races into a hierarchy (although these ideas were far more pronounced in the South). Most African-Americans, when given the chance, sided with Britain in 1776, as did pretty much every Native American, because they rightly understood that as racial outsiders they were better off with a monarch ruling an empire, rather than an egalitarian republic from which they were excluded.

But these American ideas about race did not develop back in Europe; they didn’t even develop in some other parts of the Americas. Modern academia, largely colonised by the American narrative, is obsessed with ideas of “whiteness” and race even though they make little sense in the context of pre-20^th century British and European history. At the end of George III’s reign, life expectancy among slaves in Trinidad was 17. For the working class in Preston it was 18, while in Liverpool it was 16. What on earth does “white privilege” mean in the context of 19^th century Lancashire? What does it even mean in 21^st century Lancashire?

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It’s an American concept, fitting the fact that Americans historically had far more antagonistic views about race. During the Second World War the behaviour of British people towards black soldiers — and the behaviour of British women in particular — shocked US soldiers stationed here. Indeed, it was the objections of US servicemen to sharing a hotel with a black man that led to British courts reaffirming that segregation did not and could not exist in England.

That racial attitudes in Britain were not as harsh as those in America partly reflected demography — there just weren’t many black people until the 1950s — but they were also the product of the hierarchical, class-bound nature of British society. In contrast to the awesome ascent of Jackson and Lincoln, Britain didn’t have a working-class MP until (arguably) 1874, 30 years after a mixed-race man of African heritage first sat in the Commons. The UK didn’t have a working-class prime minister until 1924. No one born in a Cornish mining community could have risen to the top in Victorian England. They certainly wouldn’t have been invited to dine with the Queen.

In Britain class differences were far more important than race and were often so highly formalised as to resemble segregation. When Blackburn Rover’s Jimmy Forrest became the first professional — i.e. working-class — footballer to play for England, he had to wear a different coloured shirt to his gentleman team mates. “Professional” players also had to have separate dressing rooms. That kind of open snobbery has always been anathema to the US, even if it had its own class system and elite schools.

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By Ed West

In contrast, various Indian cricketers played for England in the Victorian and pre-war period, five of whom had princely titles, men such as Iftikhar Ali Khan, the 8th Nawab of Pataudi. Of course, there was racial prejudice. Had the Nawab of Pataudi turned up in a Victorian pub, he might have been treated as an outsider in a way that Jimmy Forrest wouldn’t have been. But among important people who mattered, there would have been little doubt who came further up the pecking order.

Even monarchy itself is by nature multi-racial; whether or not George III’s wife Queen Charlotte really had African ancestry, royalty has always been mixed, since the earliest “peace-weaver” princesses of the early middle ages. Yet Harry and Meghan’s marriage was treated by an America-brained press like it was an earth-shattering event, when hardly anyone cared about the racial angle, another dog that didn’t bark for the media. And now, thanks to our own Americanised discourse, we’re forced to see everything through the narrative of race rather than the more salient issue of class — even the tragic self-destruction of a family the Americans decided a long time ago they wanted rid of.