Note too that “lively debate” means something different to statisticians from normal people. You would be unlikely to split your sides laughing at conversations about whether building a model to use clinical data to predict outcomes (a core statistical activity), counts as “doing” or “using” math.

Whatever: my undergraduate degree required a lot of math, and my PhD thesis made use of lots of algebra and calculus. I call myself what I am: a statistician. But I do think of myself as belonging to the wider mathematical brotherhood. I believe that the inductive (statistical inference) and deductive (mathematical) logics are all we need to explain — in the sense of “make valid claims about” — the universe. Mastery of these fields are among our species’ proudest achievements.

All of which makes me worried, I think is the word, to read of the impact artificial intelligence and machine learning is having on (at least some) academic mathematicians. Recently, AI has started constructing proofs for some of the trickier unproven theorems. Which leads to the question: if a machine can prove a theorem, what’s the point of trying to do it oneself?

Kirwin Hampshire, who is in the process of working on his own PhD at the University of Victoria (in the department of Mathematics and Statistics, ha!), has just published a Substack essay in which he confesses that the ability of AI to solve problems is causing nothing less than severe existential angst. He feels “a profound spiritual crisis” and, in his worst moments of paranoia, wonders if it be the “express goal of these [AI] companies to make me kill myself”.

His essay is beautiful. To do him the disservice of summarizing it in a paragraph, he argues that the process of learning and proving is as important as the outcome, and that a machine-generated mathematics is no mathematics at all.

That reminded me of music, and I might suggest this to Kirwin as part-antidote to his fears (though he won’t like much of what I say). I am very fond of the Bach two-part and three-part inventions and have multiple recordings of these by some of the ablest pianists ever recorded: Glenn Gould and Andras Schiff are favorites. 

Suggested reading

AI and the false consciousness trap

By Yanis Varoufakis

Nothing I fumble out at the keyboard (I’m a constant piano student) will ever touch the divine musicality of Bach’s genius or the technical mastery of my favorite virtuosi. But it really doesn’t matter. Because few things give me more pleasure than trying. Few things feel more satisfactory than to master a complex passage even though I know no-one will ever hear it other than myself — and that even I would prefer to listen to Glenn Gould doing it properly.

In my analogy, the existence of digital recordings of music are the AI machines in Kirwin’s nightmare: they obviate the need for the task which gives my life meaning (“I am a piano student”) and pleasure (“I need to hear this music”). If a machine can “do” Bach for you, why try and do it yourself? Yet the pleasure persists, as does the choice to practice. I cannot prove this, but I believe it: a robot will one day produce music that sounds Bach-like. I do not believe it will improve upon him.

I suspect some similar “behavioral” consequence might happen to much of mathematics. A machine will be able to do algebra at least as well as a human. But that won’t rob humans of their need to do the algebra for themselves, nor diminish the beauty of any particular proof.

To which Kirwin might reply: so what? You’re talking about a hobby. I’m talking about the pitface of human endeavor, about what it means to be a mathematician. As he says “Mathematicians are paid to prove theorems” and, if you don’t need them for that, do you need them at all?

I cannot comprehend — this might be a failure of imagination — how the answer to that question could ever be “No, we do not need them”, not while there are humans in the world and a human society about which to be concerned. Math is special because it’s universal; no other discipline — save, perhaps, music — comes close. It is true that a machine could prove theorems in such a way as to be understandable and useful only to other machines, but if we reach that point then not only mathematicians should worry about superfluousness. In the meantime, humans will need to understand what the AI is “proving” and I can’t imagine how that could be achieved were those humans not themselves mathematicians.

Back to my own early practice at math. The point of my thesis was to take a noisy, distorted picture of something important (like a remotely-sensed heart scan) and reconstruct an approximation to the real object. In Chapter 4, I ended a few pages of algebra with this melancholic sentence: “Unfortunately we have not been able to prove this Lemma [a proposition].” In other words, I couldn’t demonstrate whether Chapter 4’s “great idea” had legs.

Having read Kirwin’s essay, I wondered if an AI could pick up where I’d left off in 1993. I wish I hadn’t. Here is what Grok told me:

You correctly identified the obstacle. You tried to adapt Eggermont’s argument (his Lemma 6.1 and the subsequent KL + residual Lyapunov function). The natural ordered-subset extension leads to the candidate inequality (your Lemma). That inequality does not hold in general, and the extra diagonal projector, which “switches on” only the current subset, prevents the global residual from decreasing monotonically. Consequently the Lyapunov argument collapses exactly where you left it.

There was a lot more. TL;DR: you couldn’t prove it because it was obviously unprovable, and you should have known this. It was quite clear that Grok already “knows” more about image reconstruction algorithms and their associated mathematics than I could ever hope to master. I think I preferred feeling sad, to feeling both sad and inadequate. Which is, of course, a version of Kirwin’s point.

But in any case none of the work I produced in 1993 is even vaguely relevant today, because the field has moved on. Ironically, image reconstruction was one of machine learning’s early successes: trained models can make better guesses at true images than my Pooterish attempts in Chapter 4.

But even without machine learning, I doubt many people’s theses from 30-odd years ago bear re-reading. I could make a joke here about some more recent contributions to the sociological literature, but I’ll rise above that. (Almost.)

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Must data centres be so ugly?

By Tom Ough

As with Bach, so with PhDs: the process is what matters. Learning how to read literature; how to build a hypothesis and investigate it, mathematically and empirically: this is why we train people to doctoral level in Mathematics and Statistics.

And the more machines produce technology or any other solution to any other problem, the more, I should think, we will need men and women like Kirwin.

I did, though, have long dark nights of the soul during those PhD; years, in fact, when I felt overwhelmed with futility. I remember walking towards the Math building in University Gardens and then just sort of veering off at the last minute, because of the sick feeling in my stomach. Not because of a machine, but because of my inadequacy.

Most PhD students have spent nearly 20 years of school and undergraduate life being told: “This is what you need to understand in order to pass an exam,” and most of us are extremely good at that way of learning. The PhD environment in mathematics and statistics — no classmates, no solutions to tutorials, possibly no solution at all to the problem you’re investigating (see Chapter 4 for details!), no one to tell you if the roll of the dice you’ve just made for the next three years will have any outcome beyond failure — is very different. It would almost be bizarre for a young person in such a situation not to develop angst, an existential dread.

And yet the sun rises, and yes, the work has purpose. Kirwin, your abilities will be needed in the age of AI more than ever before. Maybe just switch off your computer and close your notebook for a while, and think of something else. It was in those long dark nights, I recall, that I first fell in love with Bach.

Everyone was partnered, successful and “shiny”. I — an Iris Murdoch-obsessed homosexual statistician — lay on the lakeside beach, dully hungry from the latest pointless attempt to lose weight, surrounded by the mountains about whose majesty everyone insisted. I saw nothing but rocks. No bildungsroman lurked, waiting to be written: just pointlessness mixed with failure.

That sense of being “outside, looking in” at what others took for granted and which they claimed was the obvious key to contentment at times became unbearable.

Or almost so. I moved back to the UK where I had my heart broken one last time, took a few years’ worth of SSRIs, got over the death of my father (the spark that lit the fire of my depressive proclivity), found purpose in work and salvation through exercise, and met Mr Keith.

I’m a good Conservative, staunchly lower-middle class, the class whose strongest and perhaps most biddable instinct is not to cause a fuss. If someone had said to me at certain points between 1998 and 2002 “Would you like us to help you kill yourself?”, I’m not sure how I would have replied.

“What would I have done?” is the thought I cannot banish since Parliament voted yesterday in favour of Kim Leadbeater’s “Assisted Dying” Bill. To be or not to be; that, it turns out, is not the only question. Of more immediate attention, thanks to Leadbeater and the 330 MPs who supported her, is a semi-corollary: if the answer is “not to be”, Parliament believes the NHS should be allowed to “assist” you. That is: the British state should be permitted to kill you.

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Why we need 'weirdos' like Dominic Cummings

By Graeme Archer

Be permitted to kill you “if you so desire and are terminally ill”, the proponents of the Bill would append. I am opposed to the Bill both in its own terms but also because I doubt the very clause “if you so desire” would survive three months of judicial activism.

While life has turned out better than I dared hope, there were those earlier points in time when it didn’t feel that way, and I owe it to that younger Graeme not to pretend that he never existed. A state with agents whose targets would be met by hitting their quotas for “assisted suicide” would have smacked its lips had I wandered into one of its clinics.

That objection is swept aside by Leadbeater. As currently drafted, the Bill is designed only for very strict cases where organic illness will end a citizen’s life in a short period of time. Depressed patients wouldn’t qualify. To which there are a couple of pertinent responses, the core of my objection. As Dominic Cummings puts it on X:

If struggling on assisted dying: wd you trust the Whitehall of 45 minutes, financial regulation, Iraq, Afghanistan, Brexit negotiations, ‘Online Harms’, covid & ukraine – with an NHS in meltdown & *already* encouraging families to put ‘do not resuscitate’ orders on healthy people…

— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) November 28, 2024

Quite. But if that’s too pithily expressed, then supporters of the Bill must answer the question: “Why would the UK be any different to other Western democracies which have enacted such legislation?”

Whether one looks at Canada, Belgium or the Netherlands, similar Bills all started off making it very clear that state-sanctioned death would be imposed only if a compos mentis patient asked for it, and only in close-to-involuntary-death circumstances; yet in every case it is documented that “mission creep” has now enabled cases I find too disturbing to describe in words. Even “cases” is a cowardly word. As the Bill supporters celebrate their “win”, how do they know that our fantastically activist-driven court system could not cause such outcomes here?

The analogy made with the euthanising of pets is telling, here. But not for the reason (“We don’t let our animals suffer, so why do we let our parents?”) they think. Two great wee cats, Dave and Kitty, spent nearly 15 years as our household gods and without shame I loved them. Both became elderly-cat ill (Dave — cancer; Kitty — kidney disease) and died within a year of one another. They were euthanised, by our wonderful vet who performs home visits to spare the animals stress in their final hours.

The argument in favour of the Bill proceeds to say “And why can’t we do that for humans?”

In fact, I believe in many cases we do, which I’ll return to below. But the point about my cats’ deaths is that they were loved. What about the animals which aren’t? What do you think happens to them? Kitty was incontinent for the last six months of her life. It made our house stink and we spent hours every week mopping up. We welcomed the burden. It’s the price of love.

Can we guarantee that this will apply to every incontinent, elderly human? I believe the moral case for the Bill fails if a single human were to be killed through spurious arguments about “burden of care”. (I am no utilitarian.) There is a statistical correlation between the propensity to commit cruelty to animals and to humans. Those who have no qualms about killing their “nuisance pets” will be able, I’m sure, to find forms of words that justify the same case for their relatives, especially those left in the arms of the state’s Care Homes. For how much would such deaths count in Parliament’s new calculus of suffering?

This dystopian calculus seems to sit perfectly within the age we inhabit. It’s like the country has accelerated into the Ballard novel I inhabited in the late Nineties, even as I’ve matured into something out of P.G. Wodehouse.

So it isn’t surprising that a state which sanctions Hate Marches in its capital thoroughfares, loud with chants for death; that rips down its built history (Smithfield is going! What next? St Paul’s?) and whose museums it permits to linger only that they may hector its citizens about the sin of their supposed racism… It doesn’t surprise me that such a society would eventually find its apotheosis in the form of this Bill. If the culture upstream celebrates its own extinction, why are we surprised that politics downstream finds a way to codify your own obliteration into law.

Welcome to the age of death: look at the adverts on the Tube, grotesque beyond the imagination even of P.D. James, whose Children of Men novel foresaw and described our childless pitilessness in many ways. Even she didn’t imagine that the “Quietus” would be represented by adverts showing an ecstatic young woman dancing around her fitted kitchen in joy that one day the state will kill her.

These adverts defy explanation, other than that we have reached end-stage nihilism. If we are presenting death as an aspiration, ours is almost by definition a culture that cannot be trusted with assisted dying procedures.

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There's no dignity in assisted dying

By Kathleen Stock

And, yet, there are already people that we can trust with ours. If you’ve had the privilege of being with someone at the end of their life you’ll know what “palliative care” means: the use of opioids to prevent pain, a side-effect of which is, eventually, the suppression of respiratory function. It is the greatest gift that medical professionals do for us. The crude mechanics of a Parliamentary Bill will rip apart the near-sacred, and sometimes silent, understanding between patient, doctor and carer.

Should I meet my end through a painful, lengthy condition like a cancer with no chance of treatment, I want that end to follow a conversation between myself and my physician — or my physician and my (power of attorney holding) spouse — and I want it to be about managing my pain, or my agitation. I’m completely aware of what that means and the very good reasons why it’s impossible to spell it out. With respect to Leadbeater, no MP has the right to insert their desires into that space.

Anyway, the Bill isn’t about palliative care, which is telling. It doesn’t guarantee that its extent won’t creep beyond the will of its writers. It represents one end of a slippery slope, in other words.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” I’d think to myself, lying on that godforsaken Italian beach. Either to myself, or to others. How tempting to slip under the water and stop being a nuisance.

But we’re all burdens — that’s the point of love. To the extent that we suffer pain at the end of our lives, then that pain must be ameliorated — as it can be — even should such amelioration shorten our existence. A Royal Commission into Palliative Care, and how to improve it, would be welcome.

That will not be the outcome of this Bill, should it become law. It will give power to Government to bring about your death, and for such a killing to be entirely legal. That’s not a state I want to be in and however much you’re suffering, I don’t wish you to be in it either.

“I  now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, ‘Can you read?’ — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”

CP Snow, of course; his famous Two Cultures essay. Snow’s view — that the world of the humanities (which dominates the British Civil Service) and the world of the physical sciences (which defined the era in which he wrote) had come asunder, and that this was to the disadvantage of mankind in general and British society in particular — is so well understood that we’re in danger of just accepting it as “That’s the way things are”. That tangible lack of interest in science is the background hum of the Establishment.

I say “we accept it”. Thank God that Dominic Cummings doesn’t. His advert for new advisers to join No.10 will be received with derision from the commentariat — almost none of whom are qualified to discuss its substance — because of his entirely sensible sideswipes at the grotesque horror of HR departments obsessed with the baleful dead-end of “[anything but cognitive] diversity” identity politics. But they are sideswipes. It’s the substance that matters: the possibility to disrupt the civil service with data science, to elevate policy-making, and govern the country better.

Snow’s best novels, in my opinion, are those that deal with the human-shaped fall-out from atomic research, like The New Men. Perhaps the mathematical rather than the physical sciences are more relevant to the 21st Century — I would say that, wouldn’t I — but we are beginning to perceive the human-shaped fall-out from a lack of ability in quantitative reasoning among that caste who set the rules for How Things Are. I described my own clash with an algorithm (over whether or not I should be prescribed a statin) some time ago at UnHerd. Do you qualify for a mortgage, will you get parole, is that a tumour in your spleen – increasingly guidance on these questions will come from algorithms embedded into software.

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The increasing power of computer programs to determine how we live (and die)

By Graeme Archer

Are you happy with that? (I think you should be.) But are you happy that the laws relating to that type of activity are being devised and voted on by people who couldn’t tell you the meaning of “prediction model” or “classification algorithm” any more than their predecessors could have answered Snow’s questions about mass and acceleration?

And if you accept my premise — that data science could power the next British industrial revolution — do you want the policies about (for example) which universities should be expanded, and where they should focus their research – do you want that left in the hands of the innumerate?

I’m not exaggerating. Remember the 2012 survey of members of Parliament that showed how few of them could reason statistically? Remember it, and shudder. Nearly a hundred MPs were asked “If you spin a fair coin twice, what’s the probability of two heads?”. Of Conservative MPs, 47% gave the wrong answer. Among Labour, that figure rose to 77%. (The answer, of course, is 25%, since the coin, on its second toss, doesn’t care on which side it landed the first time.)

So when Google’s chief economist said in 2009: “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians,” I didn’t join in the laughter; I was cautiously optimistic. In 2016, I spent a sabbatical year in the civil service, writing speeches for a cabinet minister, as part of his extended private office. It gave me first-hand experience of our political class, the elected and the ‘Rolls Royce’ civil service, which I cautiously (I am not as brave as Cummings) described in an article in 2017. It’s worth quoting a bit of it, because it remains relevant to what Cummings is trying to achieve:

A  few years ago, the then prime minister, David Cameron, wanted to improve facility with English among Britain’s immigrant communities. He was chastised by his Left-wing opponents for focusing efforts on women with (mainly) Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds.

In my teabreak one day, I looked up the official statistics which broke down English ability by ethnicity and geography-of-origin, and calculated the odds of lacking English in each of those categories, and compared these between women and men.

It did indeed appear that women with Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds were between four and five times as likely to lack any English ability, as compared to their menfolk. But I listened in vain to hear mention of such statistics in any political or journalistic commentary.

Government statisticians would have calculated any of those odds ratios for ministers, had the ministers asked for them. But my unofficial calculations took a few minutes prodding with an excel spreadsheet […]. The point is that such a basic facility with numbers should be taken for granted amongst the people who rule us.

Elsewhere in his blogs, Cummings has set out a vision — with references to real-world examples — whereby models to predict policy outcomes are embedded into ministerial ways of working. Thus “Implementing this policy will improve stakeholder outcomes with regard to fairness” — a pretty standard form of civil service submission to a minister — would be replaced by a live screen showing that “Implementing this policy is predicted with 95% probability to make X citizens better off by an average of £Y, plus or minus Z%.” The minister could adjust the policy and in real-time see the impact. Proper cost-benefit analysis could underpin major decisions.

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If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

I trained as a statistician and run teams of data scientists, so I have skin in this game. “We need more universities!” shout ministers. “Why? To do what?” aren’t questions they seem disposed to answer. But anyone trying to recruit data scientists into British industry could tell them what we need more of. Even though the universities have expanded like balloons at a children’s party, there aren’t enough young British people with the qualifications we need to find new biological targets to cure diseases, develop new medical tech to diagnose cancer quicker, continue to dominate the financial markets — you name it; China will be opening a university department devoted to it.

There are brilliant places, such as Bristol, whose Centre for Computationally-intensive Statistics and Data Science is investing in the methods the age requires, producing exactly the sort of doctorally-trained data scientists that British companies need. Three cheers to them — they’re not alone (Newcastle comes to mind too, as well as Health Data Research UK). That is the sort of work that government should be curating, expanding, investing in.

Left to its devices, will the civil service comply? Remember that question, when you read a snotty piece about Cummings in the Guardian. More power to his elbow: a data-centric civil service could enable better governance and underpin the industrial strategy the whole country needs. Data science really is as important as Shakespeare, and I’d rather a civil servant was master of the first, than well-read in the second (I’d rather she was both, of course). To build One Nation, dismantle that Establishment indifference to one of our Two Cultures.

But will it — Covid-19 — pass? Since the “-19” refers to the form of the illness first induced by the SARS-COV2 virus in 2019, then yes, Covid-19 will pass. But Covid-20, Covid-21? I suspect that those people who hope that the virus (and the deformation of ‘normal life’ with which we’re currently wrestling) will fade away are going to be disappointed. We won’t live in social isolation for ever, but neither will we be returning to ‘normal’ anytime soon.

In any case, historically speaking, it was the relatively un-pandemicked century between Spanish flu and Covid-19 that was the statistical oddity, not living with the risks presented by a fatal infectious disease. Human beings are great hosts for fragments of RNA that just want to live, baby! We need a new-normal, not a return to the prelapsarian days of February, 2020. How long ago February seems.

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We don't deserve our wretched media class

By Graeme Archer

So much of pre-Covid-19 world was oriented for the gregarious and extrovert, and was tolerated by the rest of us (people who need solitude to maintain equilibrium) because the dominance of the herd seemed impossible to overcome. Take the world with which I’m most familiar: the office. Here, the following norms were unquestioningly accepted:

• Open-plan hot-desking (every morning, hoik a box containing your laptop cables to any flat table in the office, and set yourself up for the day) leads naturally to synergistic interactions (“Hey! Let me, like, totally interrupt what you’re doing and tell you all about my ideas right now!”) These add value to the business.
• Global teams are better, because they increase diversity, and diversity always adds value to the business.
• Anyone leading a global team needs to travel incessantly, because physical presence among team-mates increases team cohesion (which is as important as diversity), and adds value to the business.
• Serious decisions must be made face-to-face, even if half the face-to-face meeting is in one video-conference suite in Philadelphia, with the other half in another room in London.

What have five weeks (I started early) of social isolation taught me? First, that hot-desking is dead, thank God. The idea that you should be forced to spend today at the desk where yesterday Eunice from Chemistry was hacking up her lungs (“Some sort of 24 hour thing”) will be illegal by the end of next year. Everyone who was part of the “abolish private office space” movement should be forced to march through the streets — at two metres separation — with a placard round their necks saying “Sorry for our unwarranted attack on human dignity”.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

Do we need offices, at all? I’ve found it easier, not harder, to keep leading my own global team. From 1-on-1 catch-ups, to management team meetings, to seminars and town halls and performance reviews: every aspect of managing a group of globally-distributed workers has been easier to conduct from the study at home than from a hastily-booked “meeting space” cubicle at the fringes of the open-plan hell. In my (pharmaceutical) industry, the only people who actually need to be on site are the lab scientists. The rest of us can work remotely. The company works fine.

It works better than fine, in fact; better than the old-normal. Once the curve has been flattened, and isolation officially terminated, the question will loom: why leave the house at 6am to travel to Stevenage on the train every day, when the same work can be done, more comfortably, from home? Why rush back to the old-normal, the Benthamite Panopticon hell, at all?

How will HR react, I wonder, post-Covid-19, if I tell them “I’m not flying to Philadelphia for work, anymore. It’s not necessary — this we proved, in Spring and Summer 2020 — and it therefore unnecessarily raises both my susceptibility risk for infection, and that of the people with whom such travel brings me into contact?” We’ll see.

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What will you do when lockdown is lifted?

By Various contributors

That’s fine for you, Archer, middle-class manager in your Barnet semi with its nice wee garden and the impossibly patient Mr Keith as companion. What about people who live in inner city flats. With children.

I’m not proposing that social isolation should be enforced forever, merely that we stop insisting on social mixing for the sake of it. More people are like me than you suspect, if you’ve read my enjoyment of isolation with horror. Many more. And if you give us freedom to be just that little bit more physically distant from now on, well, that just leaves more space for everyone else. (Robbie Gibb tweeted a survey that shows around a fifth to a quarter of us plan to reduce social mixing in the future.)

But what about those millions on whom you depend: the health-care workers and delivery drivers and postmen and policemen and soldiers and … the backbone of the country. People who can’t work from home. What changes for them in the new-normal?

As the cheering from our doorsteps every Thursday demonstrates, the value of labour and the dignity of the labourer has — at last — been re-valorised. If we care less about what the university-educated think about Brexit or immigration or anything in the next few years, then good. Having a degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish never made your opinion more important than that of the bin man; in cost-benefit terms, each bin man is worth more than a thousand psychology graduates from North London Tech.

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

I’m married to an electrician. It’s Keith’s experience of globalisation that has ever shaped my politics: transcontinental supply chains (so he can’t choose to buy parts from people he knows and trusts, because his company finds cheaper alternatives from strangers he’ll never meet in countries he’ll never visit); open-doors immigration (so anyone’s qualification from any EU country had instantly the same jobs market value as his own); the downward pressure on wages — in our household, hatred of Blairite globalisation was never theoretical.

If you’re a middle- or senior-manager in a MegaCorp, you’ll know the pressure to offshore and outsource, in putatively British companies, is real. I hope that the new-normal resets this a bit. It’s too much to hope that the Labour Party (a sack of anti-Semitic rats fighting enablers of anti-Semitic rats, both of them dependent on the votes of those psychology graduates) will change. But the Conservative Party has noticed: we are kept alive by the labour of those whose opinions are despised by Labour.

Meanwhile, there has been a collapse in trust between citizen and journalist — and no wonder. The political lobby, in particular, has behaved lamentably, clinging to their dreary, invented gotchas, and indulging in preening displays of scientific ignorance, even as the old-normal paradigm shifted from under their feet. They remind me of backbench MPs at the time of the expenses scandal: in complete denial that anything needs to change. “But this is how things are done, you see,” they puff, as the sandcastle of self-belief they’ve carefully patted into proud existence is washed away by reality’s tidal wave.

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We don't need 'gotcha' journalism now

By Douglas Murray

Not only the media’s deficiencies have been on daily display. The official from WHO pretending not to hear the question about Taiwan will haunt that intergovernmental quango. I signed a petition from the sort of organisation I’d normally avoid, demanding action against “wet markets”. I don’t think animal welfare will be left to student activists anymore, not when the link between global pandemics that kill millions and the torture of sentient beings for unnecessary meat is so startingly, unavoidably visible. SARS-COV2 wasn’t the first zoonotic jump; we all know who’s responsible. I don’t think we’ll tolerate either health quangos or corporations looking the other way any longer.

Not only geopolitical outfits and MegaCorps will change in the new-normal. More parochially, perhaps we’ll weigh up the costs of devolved assemblies. An email last week from Sainsbury’s CEO told me the company is ready to match up its customer lists with the database of English citizens felt by the government to be most vulnerable and in need of food deliveries, but: “We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.”

In the name of God, why are there four lists to do one thing across One Nation? “To give Sturgeon material for a press conference” isn’t a good enough answer — not with national GDP likely to drop by around 35%. Like asking a gynaecologist to take time out from visiting her multiple homes to give you advice on immunology, devolution is an expense whose cost cannot easily be justified.

My 74-year old mother is in Scotland and has the sort of lung condition that would make her death from Covid-19 a near certainty should she become infected with SARS-COV2. That she could have had food delivered safely, last week, from Sainsbury’s, if only we hadn’t spent decades indulging the psychological inadequacies of Salmond and Sturgeon, feels pretty fucking unacceptable.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Wishing viruses out of existence has been one of the hallmarks of my life, since HIV first reared its hideous head, but ‘wishing’ didn’t defeat HIV, any more than shouting GOTCHA! at a government press conference. Don’t die of ignorance warned Sir Norman Fowler, and while too many did, most of us didn’t, and not accidentally. Decades of pharmaceutical research and changes in (sub)cultural norms created a new-normal era that ran from the late 1990s until roughly four weeks ago.

You probably didn’t notice those changes, that coming-into-being of the new-normal, unless you’re roughly my middle-age, and gay. But the same focus on pharmaceutical research — on science, darling! — and effecting changes in cultural norms: that’s the way we’ll defeat SARS-COV2.

There’s nothing special about the virus; it just wants to live.  The universe co-inhabited by the viral and human genome couldn’t care less about the outcome, so shaking your fist in anger and insisting on the supremacy of the way we lived until February 2020 won’t, to put it mildly, be efficacious.

Instead, let’s start the conversation about what needs to change, to maximise the probability of human success. The fight for the (new) good life starts here. Don’t die of nostalgia for the old one.

The writers have no idea what is in the Prime Minister’s mind, or whether he indeed woke up this morning and mumbled “I’ve gotta try and wrest back control of this virus, Carrie” (to which “From whom?” would be the only reasonable response), but tell us his entire government (“No 10”) has been “stung by criticism” anyway. If I claimed to know what was in your mind and wrote it down as fact, how would you describe my behaviour?

That’s not the worst offence against decency in those 30 words. Look at the sentence’s end: the conjunction to link this intangible “criticism” with “the death toll rose to 35.” As though the death toll might have not increased, might been zero, had No.10 not been occupied by a man who drives a too-large proportion of the media into paroxysms of hatred.

When I gave up writing about politics and resumed my career as a statistician, lots of people asked me if I was sure what I was doing. The subtext: “If you just went for it harder, you could make it as a pundit. Why would you bury yourself in some faceless company doing that geeky stuff?”

It hit a nerve, because in 2017, at the end of a sabbatical year writing speeches for a cabinet minister, I did look at The Rest Of My Life, and asked myself the same question. Yet I made a deliberate choice to return to the pharmaceutical R&D outfit that had been my home since 1998. I’ve done well, becoming one of the company’s VPs for research-orientated statistics, and a large number of people depend on my strategic ability. So why was the media such an obvious wrong choice?

In 2011, I won an Orwell prize for my political writing. I never knew I could write, never had the desire, yet somehow I have a facility with words that sufficient people enjoy that makes the endeavour worthwhile. After the Orwell ceremony — the next day — I was offered a gig at the Daily Telegraph that lasted three years. Even when that ended (thanks for sacking me while I was on holiday!), I’ve never lacked offers for paid writing.

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Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By Tom Chivers

It was always obvious to me that the pay you get for a writing gig wouldn’t cover the mortgage. I asked my editor back at the Telegraph how anyone could possibly make a living from political writing. “You write a book,” he said – one of those books no-one reads, but which your friends in the Sundays review — “And you get a media profile.” The two are not unlinked.

So I tried that for a bit. I stopped ignoring the calls and texts from the BBC and so on, and turned up on Today and PM and tried to offer what I thought about issues like the licence fee and Scottish nationalism.

It was awful. I was awful, unremittingly so. I remember getting up in Brighton at 4am to do a BBC Radio spot about Scottish nationalism. It turned out that the BBC had also invited a former pop star who proceeded to shout whenever I spoke. I was furious, but because I’m a lower middle-class Tory I sat politely in the booth, listening to the pop guy screeching down the line from Glasgow. I picked my way back to our flat afterwards, avoiding the zombie-torpor of the early morning drunks and thinking “This is no way to live your life”.

But it is a way, a way of life for anyone who wants to make it as pundit. All those talking heads on TV, opining on this or that: a pop star screeching at them wouldn’t be a debasement of intellectual rigour: it would be an opportunity! He’s got a profile! Think what a Twitter-spat would do for your Likes! The singer himself tried to “reach out” to me on social media later on the day of our “interview”, fake-pretending to wish that our intercourse had been of more value. If he were less of an onanist he might note the irony; perhaps even write four rhyming lines about it to chunter over in some out-of-season caravan park on his next “tour”.

So don’t ever believe those talking heads are speaking for you. They prioritise themselves, always. Another Telegraph memory: I got off the Brighton train at Victoria, it was pouring, I saw a young intern from the paper. I offered to pay for a cab to a political meeting that I knew we were both attending. Ten years later, that intern, now a successful pundit, used my Toryism as an example of partisan stupidity in a blog. The kindness I showed counted for this much: it provided a name to use for political point-scoring.

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Coronavirus will break down our social bonds

By Polly Mackenzie

If this were just a time of Brexit, or the last election, my disdain for the British media might matter, but not that much. It matters now, because a virus is trying to kill us.

There is one useful group of people to talk to about coronavirus. They’re epidemiologists, cousins of statisticians. They’re careful and thoughtful and combine medical insight with statistical modelling to make predictions upon which policy-makers — such as the Prime Mininster — have to rely.

No epidemiological model is trivial and not one is obviously “right”. Uncertainty persists (the statistician’s maxim), and good modellers — of the sort I’m sure are advising Sir Patrick and Dr Witty — will make politicians aware of that. Those politicians then have to work out how to share that complex, dynamic message with us.

How much of that simple fact has been made apparent to you in the columns you’ve read this last week? How many epidemiologists have been given space to write columns, or front pieces on the BBC, or Sky?

In contrast: how many un-science columnists have written anything useful about anything? To what extent has their evident immunological ignorance modulated the authoritative tone in which they tell you what to think? “Who’s up? Who’s down? We decide!” At the best of times I find this reduction of politics to soap operatic cod-psychology irritating. At the dawn of this virological hinge-event, it should be unacceptable.

For shame on the media class of this country, incapable of raising its game, unwilling to change its politics-as-sport behaviour, more interested in rehashing its Boris-hatred than educating its readers about epidemiology and immunology: for shame. It’s true we get the government we deserve. But surely we don’t deserve this wretched media class, the blue-tick conspiracists who prefer paranoia to fact, factionalism to evidence, hot-takes to science. Coronavirus is a terrible threat to our health, but it’s the daily output of the British media that sickens me right now.

“It is a new dawn, is it not?” Boris in victory couldn’t help himself, regurgitating the 1997 remark with which Blair proclaimed his own era. Laughing at Blair’s messianic pretension, throwing it back in Labour’s shocked, defeated faces.

Boris has a talent, shared by no other politician, of being able simultaneously to poke fun at his overblown Churchillian rhetorical style, without undermining the seriousness of its message. It’s (one reason) why he drives his opponents to insanity – did you see that sliver of malice, Alastair Campbell, snarling about “Johnson” on Friday morning? He hates that we think of the PM as “Boris”. Snarl away, Campbell, for all the good it’ll do your shrivelled, impoverished politics. Snarl right off, in fact, and close the door behind you.

Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

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How Boris can cement his new coalition

By David Goodhart

The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.

Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.

Suggested reading

Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?

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Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?

Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.

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How pessimism is poisoning our politics

By James Bloodworth

The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet. Not quite what Hardie had in mind, but there you go. I love Keith, of course: I’m only just beginning to understand why.

There’s so much more to be written – how to deal with Sturgeon, the BBC, the re-centering of power out of London and into the North, how to renew our misdirected Academy … but that’s not for today, and probably not for me.

Today, I’m just a guy who’s feeling humble, but proud. Proud to live in a nation where working-class and middle-class, North and South, stood in solidarity against a common threat.

Humbled to be married to a man called Keith, who saw Corbynism for the wicked filth it is, and so did what he does every day of his life: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. To keep Barnet, our home, safe. Keith (who will be mad at me if he sees this) would probably call it his “duty”; an inability to comprehend that word is just one more reason why Labour deserves its extinction.

Her former Party shames itself, so Ms Berger has taken back control of her political future. At least she has that. She could stand as a TIGger, an Eyore or even, one day, a Labour candidate again – don’t ever forget the moral force with which she delivered her exit speech. She has control.

Control matters; without it, little else does. At work, the other day, in a Skype meeting – you know, you’re all in different places but you’re working together in a virtual ‘meeting room’ on your computer – William (on the other side of the world) said, “Can I just add [some text] on this page?”. As he clicked his cursor onto the menu, the message “Do you want William to take back control?” flashed up on mine. I said: “My favourite phrase!” and everyone laughed.

I say “everyone” and “laughed” but it would be more correct to note that the responses divided us neatly in two. The Leavers (I guess) laughed heartily. Others – Remainers? – were more nervous. More a polite cough, as though I’d said something controversial, like “Women are adult females”. Take Back Control was a genius brand for Leave, and Continuity Remain, or TIG, as it’s styled itself, has noticed.

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Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

Control of the narrative: that’s what TIG is about, and it’s why I feel sorry for Luciana Berger. Because her important message to the planet – look what Labour has become, and shudder, in horror – has been lost in the TIG’s principal narrative choice: that we must stay within the EU, and that it is reasonable and open-minded to do so, regardless of the referendum. That’s why Chuka, and not Luciana, is TIG’s de facto leader: as shiny a pro-EU Blairite as you could hope to find. 

I’d always reckoned that a Blairite, pro-EU, pro-“human rights”, pro-Identity Politics grouping would be electorally toxic beyond a few metropolitan enclaves: those relatively small geographies whose denizens are rich enough to be protected from the consequence of their voting behaviour. I’ll admit to having daydreamed about watching Gina Miller taking her case to the voters of Sunderland, or Harlow (for example) with something approaching glee.

Wrong again, Graeme! Who needs elections? They cause trouble, foment division. I forgot that, however unpopular, pro-EU Blairites need appeal to a single constituency – basically, the BBC – to assert their power over the narrative. That’s why Anna Soubry was all over the airwaves last week, insinuating that the PM has “a problem with immigration” (who’s dog-whistling now?). This is a claim about the PM that lacks credibility, to put it politely.

Never mind: make it anyway. It’ll stick. That’s what matters, isn’t it? To be virtuous and to prove it, by smearing.

Suggested reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

Since the referendum, the cries of pain from a section of the losing side have been loud. That pain is getting louder (search #FBPE on Twitter, if you don’t believe me). The only way I can understand this dynamic – everyone’s side loses elections from time to time, everyone is sometimes in the minority – is that the initial shock of losing control has atrophied into a solid, determined attempt to take it back.

The worldview of the TIGgers, and most of the media – a globalist, open-borders, fashionable identity politics worldview – has been dominant for decades. At first it must have felt like a bereavement, to see Utopia rejected by a majority of the people who constitute your audience and your electorate. Weren’t the deplorables listening?

Since electorally the game is up, power must be reclaimed by other means. So rapidly and smoothly has this happened, that if you blink you’ll miss the latest example. Here’s an editor at Sky News casually asserting that being a Tory who supports Brexit makes you “far Right”. Here is the endless sequence of articles, instructing you to accept Begum’s return to the UK (it’s easy to support her return to Bethnal Green, if you rarely step outside Hampstead). Here’s David Lammy, claiming that “beyond all reasonable doubt” Mrs May is “a little England suburban xenophobe”.

“Problems with immigrants”, “far Right”, “suburban” (Lammy is channeling Jonathan Miller and his hatred of Thatcher’s “odious suburban gentility”) – it’s not hard to discern the picture the ultra-Remainers are painting. The campaign is to make “I usually vote Conservative, because I believe in fiscal sanity, and I’d like to respect the result of the Referendum” cognate with having a swastika tattooed on your forehead and hanging a “No dogs no Irish etc” sign in your net-curtained window. All from a continuity ‘centre’ which is so adept at leadership that it let its own movement be taken over by Jeremy Corbyn.

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How politics is poisoning the truth

By Graeme Archer

They might get away with it. The values I worship – be neighbourly but not nosy, don’t spit on the street or throw litter, don’t make bus journeys intolerable for others through naked, brutal selfishness, don’t socialise customs which glamorise violence – are irredeemably bourgeois, irredeemably suburban, irredeemably unfashionable. I’d hazard a guess that the suburbs are also, mostly but not uniformly, opposed to having ISIS supporters in the country and in favour of leaving the EU (or at least of respecting the result of the 2016 vote).

The virtual meeting room of our politics is underway, pulling us together from our various locations. There’s an empty page on the screen, the cursor is blinking, and it’s time to write a vision for the country’s future. Starting with a blank page is always frightening, but usually worthwhile – and there is space here for voices who aren’t normally permitted to be the author, to be in control of the pen.

Or…. What’s this? We could just reload the version we junked yesterday? Someone – Chuka, Anna, David – wants to reprint their just-deleted version onto the page. And the system is asking: “Do you want them to take back control?”

Please: click “No”, before they shut you out of the room forever.

Remind you of anything? I mean, take your pick, but this weekend a clash of demonstrations in America convulsed an already polarised nation. The face of Nick Sandman has been everywhere, as has that of Nathan Phillips. Mr Phillips approached Mr Sandman, and sang a song and banged a drum. Mr Sandman smiled at Mr Phillips. An astonishing proportion of political discourse now pivots on the interpretation of that smile.

Off with his head! One American journalist was quick to explain Mr Sandman’s psychology to her seventy-odd thousand readers. In what feels to me like the opening scene of a novel, she looks at the video of Mr Sandmann and Mr Phillips, then generalises outwards about millions of people she’ll never meet and never know:

“There was always one of them in every class. The guy who whispered to his friends when I lectured. […] Of course, that guy was also the guy with the gumption to ask for extensions. To miss class and email asking “what’d I miss?” To plagiarize. To get a C and come to office hours and try to flirt his way to a better grade. The gall of his mediocrity never ceased to surprise me. […] His accent and major might change but the fundamentals of his identity did not: he was white, he was male, and — at least as far as he performed it — he was straight…”

If this passage really were from a novel, I’d read on; but the “he”, I think, is intended to be universal: “he” is the straight white boy in “every” class, who flaunts his power in the face of the weak. Sentence – lots of sentences, all castigating straight white boys for their supposed privilege – before verdict, indeed. That’s a lot of meaning to build on one short video.

To say that the initial narrative turned out not to be entirely the whole story would be an understatement. Here is how it looked to me. I saw Mr Phillips, singing and playing a drum, harmlessly approaching the boys. At first the boys lark around in bemused response, before joining in, in an unthreatening fashion – I’m not saying they look charming, but neither do they strike me as frightening.

In the background, by the way, another group of activists is apparently hurling homophobic abuse at the boys, and had been doing so for some time; “heteronormativity”, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder these days. I can’t hear anyone chanting “Build a wall”.

Suggested listening

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

The reaction of Mr Sandman is eventually to stand still, and smile. He claims he was trying to defuse a situation which he didn’t understand, which seems feasible, at least. Maybe he’s smirking? But maybe he isn’t, and it is surely possible that his facial expression has nothing to do with the psychology that identity politicians would like to force into his soul. The width of that possibility – no matter how narrow – should be taken into account.

Maybe that which was so quickly determined (sentence before verdict! Off with his head!) to be a smirk might merely have been nervous politeness, like the smile I wear when someone is boring me to tears at a party. “How do I get away from this,” I think, “without causing offence?”

And so I stand, and nod, and smile. God knows what I’d look like on film: heteronormative? Privileged? Smirking? If the other person started to dance, I’d probably join in, and I have on many, many (Brighton) occasions pretended to find drum-banging something other than dreary (“Gosh, how, um, expressive.”). Copying other people is a way of signaling one’s harmless intent, after all.

Suggested listening

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

That’s my take on the video, but it’s just that: a take. I’m projecting into the boy’s mind; I could be completely wrong. But at least I retain awareness of the potential for error, and of the gap between my explanation for a parcel of reality, and that which might be its truth.

Many journalists and actors and politicians, however, with social media readership in the millions, were happy to plump for a single potential narrative as the only possible truth – that the boy was a smirking racist, an emblem of everything wrong with Trump’s regime.

The unfortunate case of Sandman and Phillips is hardly unique. From HSBC’s insistence that islands stop being islands when banks say so, to activists who attempt to erase from public life anyone who claims that women are adult females, to Labour politicians unhappy that Diane Abbott isn’t met only with wide-eyed awe and admiration and who insist that criticism of her is always motivated by racism: we are everywhere confronted with an insistence that reality is whatever the activist-Left wishes it to be.

Suggested listening

Bayes should be the face of the new £50 note

By Graeme Archer

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?” runs the overly-quoted John Maynard Keynes. JM meant you should revise your opinion in the light of accruing data.

How dead, white and male (if only occasionally heteronormative) can you get? So the modern Left subverts Keynes: When the facts emerge, my opinion doesn’t change – my “truth” is the only one that matters. It’s an anti-Bayes theorem: the modulation of reality to suit the politics of the day.

And so the age of the pathologically subjective dawns; the time of the adult-infants, who can neither discern the difference between their political desire and the truth, nor permit such a gap to exist. “Look, you can criticise Diane Abbott without being a racist,” you’ll say, in your mild-mannered fashion. “Off with your head!” they cry. Ask Fiona Bruce.

Even O’Brien, in 1984, held out the hope of (temporary) rehabilitation to Winston, should he admit that 2 and 2 added up to whatever the Party desired. But O’Brien isn’t the avatar of the age; that role does indeed belong to the Queen of Hearts, happy to destroy people without due process, for the “crime” of not seeing the world as she insists it must be seen, even when her claims are laughable.

We used to call work such as Carroll’s “nonsense literature for children”; literally, and horribly, it has become the model for the nonsense politics of those who claim to be adult. Smiling is, indeed, an inappropriate response.

The ticket inspector comes through. Lilac puts his feet on the floor and shows his ticket. “Surprised he’s got one,” I think, smugly, holding up my season card. The inspector doesn’t acknowledge my smile: few people do once you hit middle-age, I find. Or maybe she read my thoughts. But what’s this? “I like your hair!” she trills at Lilac. He grins, and I see him, properly, for the first time, and realise: in another life, I would have found him beautiful.

But not in this one. What’s going on? Leave this middle-aged scowling fool for a while. We’ll come back to him, but I’m hungry now, so let’s grab something to eat.

How about a Gregg’s? Sausage roll, yum yum. Except I’m vegetarian, and don’t eat (porky) sausages. (Insert puerile joke here). But on Tuesday Gregg’s launched a rather nice-looking sausage roll that’s free from any animal products. A bona fide vegan roll is on the High Street: Listen To Your Belly Groan!

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How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray

Surely, in a country ripped apart by Brexit, on a planet choking in its plastic waste, lost in its unimportant corner of a coldly indifferent universe: surely the arrival of a sausage roll that vegetarians can eat is a simple Good Thing.

No. Because: vegan. Plant-based foods invoke the same reaction in many that lilac-dyed hair does in me: a sign-based trigger, and on social media (where else?) all hell broke loose. Piers Morgan: “No-one was waiting for a vegan sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” Danny Baker: “Call it a vegetable extract mush roll”. The kerfuffle over the insertion of processed soya into a puff pastry blanket led UnHerd writer Julie Bindel to remark, caustically: “This is a major atrocity and human rights violation.”

Choices we make, about hair colour or food or many other things, have developed a meaning that transcends their actuality. This is very, very weird, if you think about it: the food I eat should have literally zero bearing on my views about politics. Your hair colour should contain literally no information about your vote.

But the statistician in me, who looks for patterns and imbues them with meaning for a living, won’t accept that. It’s simply not true that a randomly-selected vegetarian is as likely to be Tory Graeme as he is to be Labour Jeremy; the vegan activists who annoy Brighton’s restaurant customers are hard-Left ‘social justice warriors’. Equally, I’d be pretty confident that while the link between dyeing one’s hair pink and choosing to march through central London screaming about “austerity” would be weak, it would still, however, be positive.

Suggested reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

We all do this – imbue meaning to signs – what’s more, we must, because without them you can’t draw a map to navigate life, and without learning the meaning of the signs on the map, you’d just be blundering around in a life-long game of blind man’s buff. Willfully to understand nothing beyond immediate sensation, and never to recall similar sensations from the past, is never to learn from experience.

But it’s gone wrong: a vicious circle has taken hold. Because of the mild correlation between signs and politics, irrelevant facets of our make-up are fashioned into the armour of our caste: signage as tribe. I’ve heard myself in recent years apologising to guests for my diet, not because I worry they’ll dislike lentils, but because of what I fear they’ll infer about my politics.

I’d call this the age of semiotics, and it has terrible consequences. As more and more signs are tribalised, so the deconstruction of signs – semiotics – has become our chief political diagnostic: Pink hair? Vegan? Probably a Corbyn supporter, so probably anti-Semitic. Safely hated. Or: England flag in window? White working-class? Probably a Leave voter, so probably a racist. Safely hated. I haven’t even mentioned the hijab. Or the saltire. It’s like looking at a street sign and deliberately believing that name tells you everything about the infinitely-varied human life on the street itself. Everything.

Suggested reading

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

When signs become politics, everything suffers, including – of course – art. What Sarah Phelps, the writer of ‘The ABC Murders’ this Christmas, seems unable to understand is that it’s not her politics that enrages (most of the writers I revere are of the Left), but her lazy signage, that ahistorical projection of Brexit onto 1930s fascism.

Agitprop writers aren’t angry young men kicking against the class system for its iniquity and waste of talent, in the hope of changing society, as in the 1950s. Rather, they’re complacent middle-aged men and women, flagging their politics for the adulation of everyone else in their tribe, and to hell with the rest of you. That’s not art; it’s political painting by numbers. (Read Niall Gooch’s superb review here.)

The solution to this isn’t ‘big’, but it does require courage. Once, in a more innocent time – all of thirty years ago – my father was driving me down Great Western Road to my student digs in Glasgow, and we passed a green-haired girl pushing her bike up from the Kelvin river-path (to feel the city air rush past her body, in the words of the beautiful song.) Isn’t it great, mused my dyed-in-the-wool Conservative father, isn’t it great that there’s a space for everyone to be themselves?

Even at the time I knew he was speaking to me and about me, his newly gay son. My father had the ability to note signs but not to be skewed by them; to see them, but never to assume that life is no more than its visible surface. He never reduced me to the sum of my labels.

No more should the rest of us. Look up from the rolling countryside outside, Graeme. Look at the man across from you on the train, and smile. Who knows? Maybe you can share a vegan sausage roll. Next stop: Stevenage, where this train terminates. All change, please.

Consider this very modern problem: I have given a test drug to 20 patients, and 15 of them responded positively. That’s a 75% ‘response rate’, in the jargon, in this sample of patients.

But common sense will tell you that 75% isn’t the drug’s true response rate (would you expect exactly 15 patients to respond out of every further 20 who were exposed to the treatment? Or sometimes 14, sometimes 18, and so on?) So: the observed response rate isn’t the truth. But – and again, applying merely to common sense, and with the supposition that I didn’t rig the trial in some way – surely a response rate of 75% is more probably the true response rate than, say, 25%?

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why the Unabomber's Manifesto is essential reading

By Jamie Bartlett

To peer at the truth about a theory concerning the world (in this case, the true response rate of the drug) usually requires an act of inductive inference: from experimental observation (“We observed a 75% response rate in this study”), to statement about the truth (“The true response rate is more likely to lie between 50% and 90% than it is to lie below 10%”). You’ll never know the truth (shades of Jack Nicholson) – you can’t expose every possible patient throughout the Earth’s history to the drug, and count how many of that infinite set would respond – yet you can still make valid claims about it. Roll that thought about your head a moment, and then tell me Statistics isn’t sexy.

That there exists an inductive logic that more or less works is thanks in part to the Reverend Thomas Bayes, whose simple inquiry in the 18^th century provides the answer to what I called a “very modern problem”.

Here’s his version, posthumously published by his friend Richard Price, in 1763:

Other than f-for-s, this is essentially the “what is the probability that the true response rate for this drug lies between 50% and 90%, given that we’ve observed a 75% response in this trial?” question with which we opened.

Bayes answers like this: we have some hypothesis of interest; in this case, perhaps it’s “The true response rate for this drug is higher than 50%”. Call that hypothesis H. Before the trial, I must have some positive belief that H is true: call that Pr(H). Pr(H) must lie between zero (H is impossible), and 1 (H is certainly true) (and if Pr(H) didn’t lie between zero and one, there could be no justification for the experiment).

After the trial, the evidence – that 15 out of 20 patients responded – must alter that belief to an extent warranted by the observed results (else why do any experimental science at all?). “All” Bayes’ theorem makes plain is how you should modulate your pre-trial belief, Pr(H), into your post-trial belief, Pr(H, given that 15 out of 20 patients responded). Mathematically, it’s almost trivial. Inferentially and scientifically, it’s a revolution.

Almost every bit of tech you use pivots on his theorem – every Google auto-complete, not to mention the search algorithms themselves; Turing’s work at Bletchley; astronomical investigations of far-flung galaxies; medical imaging; genetic markers for disease predictions; nearly everything with the modern label “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning”: all of these and thousands more exercises in human ingenuity make use, explicitly or otherwise, of the theorem which carries his name.

In one of those dead-ends to which civilisation can sometimes be prone, however, early 20th-century Statistics turned its face against Bayes: theories are either true, or false, and so to discuss them in terms of probability – worse, in terms of “your” probability – was an unwarranted intrusion of the subjective – of the self – into science, which (as every fule kno) is supposed to be entirely objective.

Further reading

Don't fight dirty with statistics

By Tom Chivers

Ronald Fisher, geneticist and statistician – a genius, a giant, but occasionally totally wrong – wrote Bayes out of the statistical universe, by inventing most of the methods that are taught to undergraduate scientists to this day, all of which pivot on “falsificationist” notions. As Popper held a theory to be scientific only to the extent to which an experiment could prove it false, so Fisher attempted an inductive logic by which data could “reject” a hypothesis.

Statisticians were aware of the limits of Fisher’s pseudo-objective approach (it often doesn’t work, it’s incoherent and, ironically, it is also unavoidably, enormously subjective), but continued to teach it – in four undergraduate years at the University of Glasgow, I received nine hours of Bayesian lectures, against heavens know how many hundreds of hours on ideas that flowed from Fisher.

Further reading

How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

I don’t have space to deal with Fisher’s issues here; suffice to say that Bayesian subjectivity isn’t an excuse for the post-modern relativism which is destroying the social sciences and nor does it imply that “there’s no such thing as the truth”. The biggest roadblock to Bayes wasn’t philosophical, but mechanical: for all but the simplest problems, the maths required to make the Bayesian machine work in practice is too “hard”.

And then the second Bayesian revolution happened. I started my PhD research just as that revolution picked up pace, in the early 1990s, with the “Gibbs sampler” publication of Gelfand and Smith. I’m blessed now to count among my direct colleagues (and friends) Professor Nicky Best (this year honoured by the Royal Statistical Society) who, along with coworkers David Lunn, Christopher Jackson, Andrew Thomas and the brilliant David Spiegelhalter invented BUGS: Bayesian inference using the Gibbs Sampler.

Gibbs sampling allows the statistician, no matter how complex his or her mathematical model – his or her representation of the theory under investigation – to draw simulated observations from that model’s idea of the world and to use those simulations for valid inference.

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

“Given this noisy, blurred MRI scan of your brain: what is the representation of your actual brain that has highest probability? Which areas are most likely affected by stroke?” – my PhD questions were identical, mutatis mutandis, to Thomas’s 1763 “PROBLEM”, and in theory could be answered by application of his theorem. Prior to Gibbs, however, this was practically impossible: afterwards, it was (almost) trivial. Suddenly, every scientific problem that had a perfect Bayesian solution in theory almost always had nearly perfect Bayesian approximate solutions in practice.

Statistical science was rescued from its obscurity not by Fisher’s dead-end significance tests, but from a mechanical solution that made Bayes’ 1763 theorem relevant and applicable in almost any setting. Without doubt, the portrait for the new 50-pound note should be of Thomas Bayes, a truly Great Briton.

Two highly readable books by philosopher Ian Hacking also shaped my understanding of how, in his words, the “quiet statisticians have changed our world”: The Taming of Chance explains how the concept of statistical “laws” came to rival those of the physical world in terms of their impact on human affairs. And An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic is a great exposition of probability and the ideas of both Fisher and Bayes (and others). Probability, the language of uncertainty, is the thing that everyone (including undergraduate statisticians) thinks they “get”, until they think about it carefully and realise they don’t.

If you’d like to read more, Howson and Urbach’s Scientific Reasoning is magisterial. In the same year I wasn’t being taught Bayesian methods by Glasgow University’s statisticians, Peter Urbach’s partner, who headed the Drama department, gave me a copy of this book, and it changed my life. I recommend it to everyone; Howson and Urbach were philosophers of science, not statisticians, and it’s very readable. For completely un-mathematical friends I’ve been recommending Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram.

His assertion to Andrew Marr incurred much derision on social media, and since I loathe Mr Burgon’s politics, I was happy to giggle away. My favourite retort came from Patrick Wintour, the Guardian journalist:

“The age of the experts is over” declares Labour MP Richard Burgon. In Burgon’s case it never started, an expert replies. Sad that any front rank politician celebrates ignorance.

— Patrick Wintour (@patrickwintour) November 25, 2018

But I come not to bury the hapless Mr Burgon, and if I can’t bring myself to praise Burgon either, at least let me admit “I know what he was on about”.  To prove my point, let’s start again.

As an expert in human genetics and functional genomics (how changes to the genome can affect the human phenotype, the observable traits of the human animal), and on the day we read claims that a Chinese researcher has successfully engineered twin girls with a disposition to be resistant to HIV, my views on gene editing are naturally of interest.

If this be true, and reproducible, we stand on the dawn of a new age of genetically-engineered health. Ethical objections to these techniques are born from ignorance, often religiously-derived ignorance, and should be tossed aside. Increased government funding should be directed towards this research as a matter of urgency.

Further reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

See what I did there? All the authority for my instructions on how you should think, and act politically (overcome ethical concerns, spend more of other people’s money), is derived from the paragraph’s innocent-seeming – encouraging, even – opening five words. “As an expert in functional genomics”. My views on ethics and public spending, however, are no more nor no less important than your own.  (And, for the record, I’m no expert in genetics but I do work with some clever people who are.)

Be wary, then, of any sentence which begins with “As a…”, and its intrinsic claim to authority derived from personal expertise. As a gay man, I object to homophobia and support the increased penalties for such behaviour enshrined in hate crime legislation. What does the opening subordinate clause add to the weight of the follow-on principal clause’s assertion? Nothing. It’s just an attempt to tell you – if you’re not an expert on life as a gay man – to “stay in your lane”, shut up, and nod along with my views.

Were you to disagree, now, with the whole apparatus of hate crime, you’d not only be arguing against the principle (that penalties for otherwise identical crimes should be differentiated with regard to an arbitrary aspect of the victim’s make-up), you’d be arguing against me, my very being, my grievance-mongering identity. What are you: some sort of a beast? From expertise to political shut-down: all with one glibly attractive phrase.

Further reading

Why do the elites despise the 'aspidistra class'?

By Graeme Archer

On this issue, then, I’m closer to Richard Burgon (and certainly, to Michael Gove) than to any Tory MP who feels the need to advertise his training as a GP on his Twitter handle.

“As a doctor and an MP, I believe we need [yadda yadda yadda]”, wrote Philip Lee, the Conservative MP for Bracknell. What Phil believes you need isn’t important (he wants you to vote again, until you agree with him about the EU, basically); what’s shocking is his (I’m sure) unthinking and reflexive call for you to obey him because he’s an “expert” (he was a GP before entering Parliament.)

Medics who become politicians are particularly prone to this “expertosis”, which I define as the pathological endpoint of the political corruption of “expertise”. It occurs when an expert conflates his or her technical knowledge about a topic with downstream political actions. There was an epidemic of expertosis, of course, during the EU referendum.

Indeed, that outbreak continues to crackle – Philip is hardly unique – with some Remain experts so certain in their assertions that predictions subject to uncertainty (about GDP, about the NHS, should Brexit take one form or another) are presented as observable facts which only irrational fools would query. The talented musician Howard Goodall is an expert on music. This allows him to assert that Brexit will “sacrifice” the “booming British music industry” on “the altar of Brexit xenophobia”.

Not one mention of music in May's WA or PD, & only a few sentences of vague uncertain waffle about mobility of talent. Our jobs-creating, revenue-earning, forward-facing, booming music industry sacrificed on the altar of Brexit xenophobia. Put it to the people.

— Howard Goodall (@Howard_Goodall) November 25, 2018

Read the responses to his claim – the slavishly devoted nature of those who want him to be correct is alarming.

This matters, beyond the psychology of those who think music, air and water will stop, should we no longer be part of the EU. There are plenty of surveys showing that the younger generation in particular has less of an attachment to democracy than one would have hoped.

It’s at least a theory that the exposure of young people to overly confident “experts” might explain their fondness for a whole set of controversial political opinions.

“If he says it, it must be true, because he’s an expert” is dangerous: just a slip from revoking the universal franchise. We’re skidding about that edge now: Dambisa Moyo argues here that voters should pass an (expert-derived) test, before being allowed to vote. Would you bet against the popularity of that proposal in Remain-voting areas?

Expertise within its locus is a human triumph: the uses to which I put my PhD in statistical inference, the work with equally skilled colleagues in many scientific disciplines (including the geneticists and genomics experts) – all this gives me more pleasure than all the joy in Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. And were you to enquire about the logic of the scientific method, I’d deploy my expertise to influence you as much as I’m able.

But political deference to “experts”, when their opinions stray from their technical discipline, leads ineluctably to restrictions on political freedom. You can trust me on that – after all, as I may have mentioned: I’m a doctor.

Until recently, my own version would have been just as predictable. But with Verity Lambert, Doctor Who’s first Producer at the top of the list. Today, though, thinking of the people with whom I’d most like to sit down with for a conversazione, I noticed a startling phenomenon. Here are my dream dinner-party guests:

 Julie Bindel, Peter Tatchell, Janice Turner, Linda Bellos, Claire Fox, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian.

Further reading

CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

Startling? Certainly from my PoV: they’re all on the Left. God in heaven: am I becoming Left-wing with age?

No, I’m not “on a journey” from centre-Right to radical-Left. Cut me in half and I bleed the same suburban lower-middle class Toryism that pooterishly informs all the pieces I write for UnHerd: I am aspidistra-man! Come, sit quietly on the bus with me, and let’s keep ourselves to ourselves, shall we?

But it’s nothing as basic as party (or even class) allegiance that conjures my imagined affinity with a heterogeneous but definitely Leftish group of activists, thinkers, writers and academics.

It’s their commitment to intellectual rigour; their willingness, even if it costs them abuse from fellow members of their tribe, to use words as clearly as possible to describe the world as best as rational people can manage.

Further reading

Aristotle's answer to identity politics

By Henry Olsen

Janice writes for the Times – without doubt, that newspaper’s best writer, by several orders of magnitude – often about the Gender Recognition Act, documenting the actual violence committed against actual women by some of the GRA’s most vociferous advocates. Just recently, she produced a column that took on what elsewhere I’ve called “wordcrime”, the practice of some activists to equate any stated doubts about gender self-identification with physical violence against transgender people, and to use this pseudo-equivalence to shut down debate.

Whence comes the self-righteous fury of the activists, such as those who resigned from the judging panel of the Comment Awards in fury that Turner’s name was included in a short-list? What gives activists the intellectual heft to pervert a thoughtful question from a government minister about the rise in gender reassignment consultations for young people into accusations of an actual crime? 

Academia does this odious heavy-lifting, of course. Pseudo-academia, anyway, and I can only apologise for the ubiquity of that prefix in this piece: it’s simply too apposite to ignore. One of the Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian papers, accepted for publication, recommended “experiential reparations” for “privileged students”, reparations that included “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over”. When academics believe such ideas worth publishing, then they must (one assumes) be teaching similar obscenities to their students.

Further reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

Thus the generation of that most lethal form of activist, the campaigner whose self-righteous desire to criminalise your thoughts is justified by appeal to “theory”. The social ills my dinner party companions are fighting draw their toxic liquor, I think, from the poisoned well of grievance studies in the University.

There was much talk this summer about the need for a new “centre” party, talk that quickly evaporated as the motives of the leftover Blairites and unpopular Conservatives involved became clear. We don’t need a new vehicle to provide income and pensions for endless squealing about the EU referendum.

We do need a movement to take on and defeat modern identity politics, however, wherever it raises one of its Hydra heads. Such a campaigning movement needs the active participation of the centre-Right too: this is the “radical centre” that Britain needs.

So forget the dinner-party; this is more important than wondering with whom it’d be fun to share a prawn cocktail. I’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone ready to take on the baleful wrath of the identity politics demon. Even those whom in other circumstances I’d be campaigning against, and who (I’d guess) would cross a busy street to avoid having to be polite to one of my political hue.   

If you added up the voices of those opposed to the Gender Recognition Act’s outrageous proposals, or those who are sick of being told that to voice any misgiving about redefinitions of gender is equivalent to violence – add up the gay voices with the straight, the male and the female, Labour with Tory – then I’m pretty sure the outcome would constitute a clear majority.

Further reading

Don't be so quick to laugh at the 'grievance study' hoax

By Tom Chivers

Let’s not have a new party – neither for dinner, nor for politics. But a new movement, indifferent to how its supporters vote in general elections, to turn the tide against the pathologically selfish leaders of the ID political movement.

Tories can’t leave this battle to the Left, and intervene only when there’s a chance to make short-term political capital. The demon of identity politics doesn’t care how you’ll vote at the next general election. It’s whispering, now, in the minds of your children; your taxes are funding its teacher-priests in the pseudo-academy. 

If we allow identity politics to reshape the permitted contours of political discourse; if we look the other way when good socialists are attacked for defending intellectual rigour and political liberty, then within two generations there won’t be a good society left for any mainstream politician, Tory or Labour, to defend.

In our Barnet garden we have lemon trees and chilli bushes and geraniums and broad beans, but (metaphorically) towering above them all is the aspidistra. Nice people live here, our aspidistra signals. Yes, they do, our neighbour’s plant replies. Could you keep your voices down? comes the murmur from next-door-but-one.

Nice people live here. Quiet, suburban nice people, who don’t spit on the street, sodcast on buses, or require access to illegal drugs. Who give up their seats on the tube, and frown at loud and public swearing. Nice people who are disgusted at Cambridge students’ rejection of Remembrance Day, who are reflexively but unshowily patriotic, who wouldn’t dream of having a tea-towel with the Queen Mum’s face on it, but who are able to enjoy a Royal wedding without the need to simulate irony. Whose lips curl in distaste when yet another Left-wing comedian signals his horror at finding himself in a cab driven by a Brexit voter.

https://twitter.com/RealMattLucas/status/1051997548196564993

The lower middle-class aren’t the sole guardians of public civility and private decency, of course; we’re the close comrades of the ‘respectable working classes’, since most of us have parents or grandparents who originated there. My grandmother was in service. My parents worked shifts and open-before-dawn shops, so that I could have the luxury of university.

From birth, these people inhale the aspidistra law: you’re not fashionable. You are the butt of the joke. Oh, and you pay for everything that the oligarch spivs slide out from funding, either through your income tax or through corporation tax, whose bounty for the Exchequer is financed by your labour.

While the country depends on you, its elite will deride you: seared in my mind is Jonathan Miller’s hatred of Thatcher, her “odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy”. Those idiot commuters, those suburban patriots – that’s my class Dr Miller was sneering at; I’ll take our values over his any day.

So I cheered when Mrs May stood in Downing Street and said: “If you’re from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you worry about paying a mortgage.”

Further reading

The tragedy of the ‘gammons’

By Peter Franklin

Maggie was back! I wrote an optimistic piece for ConservativeHome that urged Mrs May to use the aspidistra as the party logo and, well, to smash the cultural hegemony of our class enemies.

Rarely has my judgement been so wrong. Recent hate crime incident statistics, suggest that in “a trend that has now lasted several years”, British people have become more hateful to minorities in the wake of terrorist incidents. The inference is clear: we’re a panicky nation, ready to lash out spitefully at anyone who’s not the full Gammon, unable to differentiate between Islamic terrorists and people who aren’t.

Except, of course, these are hate crime “incidents”, not cases taken to court which result in a conviction. We know that police forces advertise widely to encourage people to report anything horrible, whether or not it’s a crime. Are we quite so horrible to one another as the newspaper headline and the Home Office commentary make out? I don’t mean that unpleasant people don’t say and do disgusting things. But are matters getting worse?

Not according to the Crime Survey, whose more reliable figures “indicate a drop of 40 per cent in hate crime incidents in the past decade.” To which evidential source would you give most credit? And how would an aspidistra government react?

Further reading

How the powerful are perverting the truth

By Graeme Archer

An aspidistra Home Secretary – who’d probably look a bit like the current Attorney General – would address Parliament thus:

“I’ve no idea why police services waste money advertising for people to ring in with unsubstantiable complaints, and I’d recommend that voters signal to their Police and Crime Commissioner that they wish the practice to stop. The reliable Crime Survey indicates an overall continuing increase in the ability of British citizens to live well with one another. Of course, there are specific crimes whose existence we particularly abhor, such as acts of violence and intimidation against members of our religious communities, and these we will continue to prioritise and crack down on. We will investigate, for example, why Jewish communities require to have guards at their schools, and I’m pleased to announce today an enquiry into the worrying signs of religious extremism in the prison estate.”

What actually happened: the enquiry into prison radicalisation blocked. The hate crime ‘statistics’ were used as evidence that more hate crime laws covering more topics are needed.

At every opportunity to diverge from the New Labour approach to identity politics and its associated values, Mrs May has instead taken the opportunity to double down on it. The Gender Recognition Act is a particularly egregious example; not “How can we protect the dignity of transgender citizens?” (a worthy objective), but “Which lobby group’s policies should we implement wholesale, regardless of their connection to our values?”

Voters with working- and lower middle-class values aren’t automatically Tory; they can and do vote for any party: but the party which secures their support would be on to a winner. At the moment, such voters are completely unrepresented by the mainstream: the LibDems obsessed with Europe; Labour a disgusting mixture of hard-Left creeps and robotic Blairite leftovers. We looked to you, Mrs May. And you turned your back on us.

The Prime Minister’s failure to unwind the Blairite cultural settlement will be part of her political obituary, and the entirety of her political tragedy. The class enemies of working- and lower-middle class Britons are winning, still; that they are winning by default is all the more depressing.

I’ve had a go at dissecting the Labour soul before, so it seems only fair to apply the same scalpel to the Tory id. Why am I (and millions of you) Conservative? We could argue that it’s important to control inflation and public spending on the one hand, while maximising personal liberty on the other. Those priorities map to Britain’s Conservative Party, more or less, and so they determine our vote.

That wouldn’t be a lie, but neither is it the (whole) truth. The truth is more about disposition: Toryishness feeds an addiction to something I want. Every movement has a defining politico-psychological sin. What is the Conservatives’?

Conservatism isn’t ideological, no matter how many actors-pretending-to-be-teachers crawl on to Liverpool podiums, heave themselves on to their hind legs, and squawk about neo-liberal wars on the poor. I’m a Tory for anti-ideological reasons: I will vote for whichever candidate and party is best placed to defeat socialism. Is that an addiction? I don’t think so. Conservatives shouldn’t – mustn’t – abandon the war against socialism.

Further reading

The political centre is not where liberals think it is

By Peter Franklin

Tory history is long and punctuated with reforms that hit the country like a meteor from the heavens, both in the scale of their impact and because they’re so unexpected (Conservatives? Reforming?). Think about Peel and Catholic emancipation, or Peel again, and the Corn Laws. Think about Thatcher, whose (hugely subsidised) right-to-buy policy was among the single largest transfers of wealth from the middle to the working classes. But this isn’t an addiction (as the post-Thatcher party proves only too well).

Modern Conservatism also inherits Disraeli’s paternalism. There’s a reason every generation of every party’s leadership – Left and Right – lays claim to Disraeli’s One Nation mantle, and not only because he worried about the impact of industrialisation on ‘community fabric’, making him one of Britain’s earliest SJWs. And not only because the coalition of working- and middle-class interests Disraeli fashioned has been the Tories’ most powerful ‘secret’ weapon in that ongoing war against the utopians.

No. One Nation is potent because to adopt it as a guiding principle is to reject the sectarianism on display from Labour since Blair was banished by Brown. You can govern in the interests of Britain or you can govern as the plaything of McCluskey and Stop The War. You most certainly cannot do both.

But the Tory mission is at risk, and for a reason that transcends specific policies. We’ll get to a solution for this in a moment, because it’s linked to our defining sin. What is Conservatism, stripped of all that history? Conservatism as disposition, not as a manifesto commitment. It is a sense of loss.

By the same author

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

When I get on the 26 bus to traverse the Hackney Road, and no one else is thinking in English: I feel loss. When I have to interrupt a conversation in Turkish conducted on the shopkeeper’s mobile phone, a shopkeeper who neither speaks to me nor makes eye contact while I buy the cats their tuna fish: I feel loss. When I read about the diminished size of our military, or when I shrivel to my minimal physical volume in a tube carriage stuffed beyond capacity: I feel loss.

Such a sense is uniquely Tory, I think, and as alien to George Osborne as it is to Jonathan Portes, which is why urban liberals, of whichever party, dismiss such sentiment as ‘nativism’. They’re wrong, calamitously so for liberalism – the feeling that we’ve lost something good which we once took for granted – is nothing to do with dislike of individuals. I don’t want to return to the 1950s, however much I yearn for more civilized public transport; but I would like back something of the ‘common sense of belonging’, an attribute of cultures that are more homogeneous than Britain in 2018.

A heightened sense of loss has its uses. It blocks reckless reform (“What if this new paradise you seek to build, comrade, what if it’s not worth the crushed bones and smashed dreams, and ultimately leaves us, you know, less happy?”)

But the near-tangible air of loss which colours the Tory soul has toxic electoral consequences: the sense that we’re looking backwards to a Britain which has gone prevents the party from speaking to the people, and being heard by those people – the Britons whose families arrived here in the waves of immigration since the Second World War – whose support is required to protect the anti-socialist mission into the future.

I say: “I regret the loss of homogeneity in the town where I live.” A black neighbour might hear: “You wish my family hadn’t moved here.” I say: “One Nation is my guiding political principle.” A colleague whose grandmother was born in the Indian subcontinent might hear: “That’s just cover for nativist prejudice, mate, turning a blind eye to institutional injustice.” This is a problem for Conservatism that won’t go away without positive action.

By the same author

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

So take some. The party that had the first Jewish leader, the first female Prime Minister, the second female Prime Minister: such a party knows how effective the right leader can be in changing perceptions of our movement. So the next Tory leader, and the next British Prime Minister, should have a non-white ethnic heritage.

I’m not talking about tokenism, still less about positive discrimination, which remains discriminatory, unfair and wrong, whatever adjective is applied to it. No Tory association would select candidates as talentless as Dawn Butler and Diane Abbot, for example, still less put them in the shadow cabinet.

Choosing a non-white leader would be a tactical response to the problem of the anti-Tory cultural hegemony. Conservatives used to ‘own’ institutions; now we are those same institutions’ top political target. Too many Corbynite lecturers and BBC dramatists and Church of England vicars whisper in the ears of their audiences that Tories are backward-looking, nativist, illiberal towards people who don’t look like modern Britain. I don’t believe this to be true. But it is the narrative reality.

Politics is downstream from culture. The culture has it that Tories have a problem with newer Britons. Our addiction to nostalgia makes this caricature hard to shake off. This is translating into a political headache which increases the probability of the worst and most socialist administration the country would ever have seen.

By the same author

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

So defy nostalgia, and elect a leader who makes that defiance clear. Change the political narrative about Conservatives and modern Britain, and not only would Corbyn’s rancid pack of sectarian haters be crushed; some of the ‘upstream’ damage in our institutions to the long-term health of the centre-Right would be unwound.

As I write, news is breaking that Shaun Bailey has been selected by London Tories as our candidate against Sadiq Kahn. That won’t be an easy fight, but the election just got interesting, and a large part of Khan’s campaign strategy – the narrative he would tell about his Tory opponent – just vanished into thin air. (The attacks on Bailey from Labour will be disgusting – the odious Emma Dent Coad MP already referred to him as a “token ghetto boy”, a phrase racist enough for all but a Corbynite to be expelled from public life. The Left’s hatred of black Tories, like its hatred of gay Tories, is instructive.)

Now imagine what Sajid Javid could do to Jeremy Corbyn in a general election. Colour-blind meritocratic Tory instincts about candidate selection have led to a parliamentary talent pool that could destroy Labour’s inimical narrative about our party with a glance. We will not be defined by our sense of loss. Look at the sky; the air is fizzing: one of those rare Tory meteors may be about to hit the earth.

In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing. Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire. Report it and put a stop to it #HateHurtsSY pic.twitter.com/p2xf6OLoQZ

— South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) September 9, 2018

This tweet from the South Yorkshire constabulary – to which we’ll return – reminded me of something I wrote for a scientific journal in 1996:

“Most of us are critical realists, in that we believe the Universe exists and that we can learn something about its mechanisms by measuring observable phenomena.”

At the time that felt uncontroversial; now it makes me laugh aloud. Not because I no longer believe in the Universe, or the importance of using language as precisely as possible to describe it, in order to produce valid conclusions about the laws that govern (biological, psychological, cultural) existence. I laugh because I no longer believe that “most of us” think any such thing.

“Most of us” – most of those with power, anyway, about whom I’m most concerned – “most of us” seem to believe that the Universe exists only as an extension of our own desires, and that its reality is nothing more than anything we care to assert at any given moment in time.

To such pathologically subjective people – path-subs, let’s call them – simply to declare “This is a fact” is sufficient to turn “this” into a fact; no more evidence about the nature of “this” is required, and any evidence that is produced, which appears to contradict the claim, can – and must – be dismissed out of hand.

Further reading

Bezos and his offensive, self-serving philanthropy

By James Bloodworth

Once you accept that powerful people and institutions have adopted this path-sub worldview, then a lot of what at first seems crazy about modern life begins to make sense.

Don’t believe the world is round? Just say “The world is flat”, and pancake-like it becomes. Look what happened to Angelos Sofocleous when he tweeted “Women don’t have penises”: hounded from the philosophy magazine he edited. (Let’s take a second to note the delicious, beautiful irony of Mr Sofocleous’s name.)

You can dismiss the suffering of Sofocleous as mere student idiocy. Until you remember the British state’s definition of hate crime:

“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, from whose site I’ve copied that definition, goes on to say:

“There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

I’ve bolded the overt insertions of path-sub thinking in those definitions. For a hate crime to be committed, it’s sufficient for me to assert that it has. End of debate. I don’t even require to have witnessed the incident to which I’ve decided to apply the label. And that criminal offence itself might have been motivated by “unfriendliness”. Remember that, the next time you stand on my foot on the tube, and don’t return my friendly greeting.

To be clear: I’m temperamentally opposed to the concept of hate crime, since to my boring old Tory mind it is the crime that matters, not its motivation. Ian Baynham died from the kicking he received from a pack of homophobic scum; Alan Greaves was battered to death by non-homophobic scum. The deaths of Ian and Alan don’t weigh differently, to my mind. I couldn’t care less about the motives of their attackers.

However, I can accept that society might take a different view. I can see why its politics might say, “The motivation for some crimes is so abhorrent that we label them as hateful and judge their protagonists especially harshly.” You and I can disagree about this; nothing bad would follow.

But the path-sub perversion of the hate crime definition does matter, because it distorts reality. It leaves the critical realist – the man or woman who requires evidence to back-up assertions about the state of things – at the mercy of the path-sub activist, who can change reality (“That was a hate crime”) at the tap of a keyboard. And once we grant permission to the path-subs to create the reality in which we all have to live, we are at their mercy.

Further reading

Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Especially in South Yorkshire? Before pushing the path-sub envelope with that interesting take on hate crime, exemplified by our opening quote, South Yorkshire constabulary turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of hundreds of South Yorkshire girls, over a period of years. Professor Alexis Jay, who investigated this atrocity, concluded that police “gave no priority to child sexual abuse, regarded many victims with contempt and failed to act on their reports of abuse”.

This, um, flexible approach to applying path-sub rules about hate crime strikes people as bizarre. South Yorkshire police want to know if you’ve done anything mildly unpleasant; that same force declined to investigate the objectively hateful. Similarly, you can be arrested for saying “Excuse me, do you realise that your horse is gay?”, but the Metropolitan police won’t lift a finger while you subject a Conservative MP’s children to what anyone reasonable would call vicious psychological abuse. Even if they’re standing next to you while you do it.

Isn’t that a contradiction? Surely, think Tories and liberals across the centre-Right spectrum, surely this obvious contradiction will cause the whole path-sub house of cards to collapse?

Dream on, matey. The contradiction isn’t a problem; it’s an inherent and deliberate attribute of the path-sub architecture. While old-fashioned types like myself worry about the incoherent stances adopted by various institutions in hock to path-sub thinking, the path-sub activist rejoices at our confusion. Path-sub politicians and activists couldn’t be happier that I’ve spent a few hours trying to unravel their contradictory ideas: that’s two hours a Conservative didn’t spend rallying the electoral base to fight back. That’s two hours when they were out there, bending reality to their will.

From universities, to our criminal justice systems, to our politics. Path-sub is the mindset of the Corbynite – you can see their spiteful toddler “deductions” all over social media: “Because all Tories are evil, there is no level of abuse to which they cannot be subjected.”

This week, Rupa Huq, a Labour MP from west London tweeted an image of the gates at Downing Street:

They rejected calls to create nationwide ones outside abortion clinics but Tories *do* support buffer zones to protect *some* women… Thatcher had these gates erected in 1980s now Theresa “my way or the highway” May lives in splendid isolation behind them pic.twitter.com/a8mTXXrNo4

— Rupa Huq MP (@RupaHuq) September 18, 2018

The gates, of course, were put in place to protect our democracy from terrorist attacks. Let’s not forget Rupa Huq’s party leader’s interesting history with regard to the progenitors of some of those terrorist campaigns, for example being arrested at a demo organised to show sympathy for the Brighton bombers.

Huq knows this. She knows that you know that she knows this. But neither the grotesquely offensive nature of her tweet, nor the overt rewriting of history by a former sociology lecturer matters a damn. Huq says: (Female) Tories have gates to protect their splendid isolation, and that becomes the truth.

Everything real is contingent to the path-sub’s political desire. If reality is contingent then the truth is subjective, or, more accurately, the “truths” are subjective, from which it follows they can be put into a rank order.

Truth A – that Thatcher had security gates installed because terrorists were trying to kill her – can be held in the hands of path-sub MPs, and measured against Truth B – that Thatcher was a Tory, Tories hate and fear the people, so Thatcher installed gates to keep the virtuous mob from the door. Guess which “truth” the Corbynite university lecturers are whispering in the ears of your children.

By the same author

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

Back in 1996, I wrote that we can’t understand the universe, in any useful way, without accepting that it exists beyond our consciousness. Throughout my adult life I’ve believed that words matter, as they are our thoughts made (metaphorical) flesh, and so are also real objects in that same universe they are attempting to describe. Words are real things, with power.

Increasingly, and terrifyingly, only the last sentence of that paragraph holds water. Words have power, all right, but their actual meaning (define “hate crime”) no longer matters. Facts don’t matter. Biology doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever the pathologically subjective declares it to be.

Such wordcrime is strong enough to destroy institutions (see our police service and universities for details). Liberals and Conservatives must stop ignoring this. What would happen, for example, were a pathologically subjective Corbyn-led government to assert that “There’s no such thing as a good Conservative”? What reality do you imagine would follow from that?

By the same author

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer

In Boucher’s story, murders are taking place on a mining craft — a Christie-esque setting, claustrophobic, closed-off, so the murderer must be among the assembled and isolated cast, who are being bumped off, one by one. One character, Poul, forced to confront the hitherto literally unimaginable concept — that the for-granted robot crew, which numerically dwarfs the humans on board by orders of magnitude, may contain the culprit — has a complete nervous breakdown.

He suddenly sees the robots, not as an indivisible, near-invisible mass of hidden-in- plain-sight workers, but as… people. Almost-people: Boucher’s robots are humanoid, stylised, calm: they look like ‘us’, but they are (clearly) also not-us. It’s therefore narratively convincing when Poul begins to scream about “the walking dead”, and collapses under the weight of his dread.

That this 1977 masterpiece was for an episode in a Tom Baker season of ‘Doctor Who’ partly explains the programme’s longevity. Every so often it produces drama that qualifies as art: science fiction, on the surface about some silly made-up society a billion light years from Earth and impossibly far in the future, but which yet compels the viewer to re-examine things we take for granted: what does it take to be human? What are the minimal requirements for entry?

Before you scoff at my childhood fondness for a science fiction murder story with ‘impossible’ robots and an invented phobia about them, consider this highly contemporary and entirely non-fictional scientific investigation, by Horstmann and co-workers, into what humans do when confronted with something that, while clearly un-human, exhibits human-style behaviour.

In the experiment, participants were randomised to a set of tasks with an obviously toy robot under a number of different conditions (sometimes the robot was chatty, sometimes formal, that sort of thing). After a lot of deceptive faffing, the participants were asked to switch the machine off. Sometimes the robot would “object” to this (“No! Please do not switch me off! I am scared that it will not brighten up again!”), sometimes it wouldn’t utter a damn thing.

Further reading

Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Surprisingly — unless you watched the Robots of Death as a child, when ‘obviously’ would be a fitter adverb — surprisingly/obviously, participants were less likely to switch off the robot if it first objected. It’s enough for a machine to resemble a human being, in cartoon-like fashion, making no pretence at synth-like behaviour beyond having a metal head, a basic face and an electronic voice, for human beings to project human need onto its smoothly impersonal surface. The walking dead they may be: but they’re sufficiently like us to elicit an emotional response. I wonder how the participants felt, the ones who switched off the machine even as it babbled about the dying of the light? A Poul-like sense of dread, would be my bet.

If a robot tells me its feelings are hurt, then I respond accordingly (“Alexa! Do you mind if I switch you off, and talk to Siri instead?”). I anthropomorphise, and ‘see’ the object as sufficiently human to warrant compassion (or terror, once they outnumber us). It’s the act of seeing which imbues an artificial construct with an agency that its base material doesn’t warrant. This must be happening at a limbic level: ironically, conscious awareness of a machine’s lack of consciousness cannot prevent the attribution of consciousness onto its creepy mechanical face (in The Robots of Death, the doctor’s companion calls robots “creepy mechanical men”).

Anyone who’s ever felt a spasm of pity at the ‘plight’ of a stone, picked from a beach, examined carefully, considered for a home decoration but then tossed aside, will understand this, I think. It’s recognition that, however loudly one’s ego insists on one’s uniquely important attributes, from a very small distance one is almost completely non-differentiable from the rest of the human race. We’re all just biological machines, neuronically and neurotically fizzing away, loudly insisting that ‘I’ am so very, very different from ‘you’. While I might be just one pebble among billions, yet I’m still somehow special. And not ‘you’. You are like-me but not-me.

Further reading

Should we care that the sex robots are coming?

By Kate Devlin

The miracle of humanity isn’t that we’re alive, move around, copulate and die: the miracle is that we can perceive the tiny differences between ourselves at all, when we’re biologically and aesthetically and psychologically so entirely similar: I expect when the Martian finally arrives it’ll struggle to tell us apart.

It’s in those tiny differences that love must exist: else why have the emotion at all? (Why choose one rock over another?) All that laser-like energy required in order to see the other: it has to go somewhere; it’s the most powerful force in existence. And thus the problem we’re going to have with robots, the ones that are like-us but not-us: we won’t be able to choose how we see them either.

In Dan Mangan’s 2010 song Robots, a spurned lover likens himself and his former bed-partner to automata (“Your robot heart is bleeding out” — more shades of Poul’s hysteria). Indeed, the singer seems to suggest that being “robot boy” is the best defence against pain. But this doesn’t work, and “that little voice in the back of your mind” eventually admits that “Robots need love too. They want to be loved by you. They want to be loved by you.”

The song makes me cry, every time I hear it. Like I’m pre-programmed – like I have no conscious choice in the matter. The fear of lovelessness isn’t “a flaw in the design”, as Mr Mangan wonders, it’s part of being human. I’m so worried that the light won’t come back. Robotically — without volition —  I make myself ready for love.

And since we’re building this new breed of intelligent robots in our own image, what do you expect they’ll sing when we switch them on, and how do you think you’ll react to their song? The robotic laws of life, of ‘seeing’, won’t care whether the object of your gaze is fashioned from flesh, or metal. We’re human, which means, I’m afraid, that we’ll want to be loved by them. Just like the robots we are.

Gay Tories are traitors.

Yes, there are many individual members of the Conservative party who support LGBTQ rights in some form or another, but the party as a whole has always stood in the way of queer liberation.

Just felt the need to say that in the run up to London Pride.

— Jacob Trueman (@TheJacobTrueman) June 26, 2018

Tempting, but insufficient. The propaganda from the Left against gay Tories is relentless (remember Munroe Bergdof?), and it means something, way more than simple disagreement over voting choice. My intuition is that the origin of the “you can’t be gay and a Tory” propaganda — and the rationale for its viciousness — is to be found in the linked propaganda against the words “lesbian” and “gay” themselves.

Don’t believe me? Visit the homepage of Pride in London and do a search for “lesbian”: no matches. Gay men and lesbian women are being written out of the official transcript of 21st-century homosexual British life. It’s not wrong to wonder “why?”

I’m aware of the potential irony, here, in a gay man complaining about usage of the word ‘gay’. The point is that the word itself is being deleted, along with the noun to which it refers; ‘LGBTQ’ is not a new synonym for ‘gay’. I am a gay man, not an ‘LGBTQ’ one; ‘LGBTQ’ is a political identity, not a sexual one (and ‘queer’ is a word I’d recommend not to apply to me, not within earshot.)

To understand why this is happening, ask any woman — gay, straight, Left or Right — who queries the demands of some transgender lobby groups that gender no longer be defined as anything to do with innate biology. (Note: my ire is aimed at lobby groups, not people, all of whom deserve dignity and respect.) Such pressure leads at best to the farce of charities targeting their cervical cancer campaigns at ‘human beings with a womb’, rather than ‘women’; at worst to the abomination of rapists self-defining as women in order to be moved from male to female prisons. And the women who question this are monstered, de-platformed, vilified, censored: the attempt to silence their (very mainstream) opinions is as alarming as it’s informative.

And so the propaganda; thus the sly elision, between transgenderism and the quite distinct psychosexual construct, homosexuality. Attach the ‘T’ to the ‘L’, ‘B’ and ‘G’ and hey presto: a ready-made vehicle to drive at anyone whose perspective on gender doesn’t conform to the lobbyists’ insistence. Because fail to conform and by re-definition you’re homophobic, even if your best mate’s gay and you cried when he finally got married.

If my theory is correct, we also have an explanation for the special fury with which gay Conservatives are treated by the Left-wing LGBTQ ‘community’. Let’s get personal. The most important day of my life was indeed my wedding. Viewed from within my head and my heart: the universe exploded, scattering stars across the heavens, where they collided and fell back into singularity, all at the instant he said “I do”. From the outside, however: nothing out of the ordinary happened. Two guys got married, like millions of couples do nearly every day of the year.

Liberation, at least for this Conservative, has been about normalisation. All those decades I marched, I chanted, I refused to pretend to be that which I’m not, I pushed however hard I could against whichever dickhead said I couldn’t, all to change society so that society could, more or less, stay the same.

Other gay people have different objectives; that’s fine. We’re no more politically homogenous than any other random sample of citizens. Or, at least, we oughtn’t to be. With the rise of the new bigots, however, fuelled by lobbyists who’ve hijacked the normalisation success achieved by gay people, in order to push an agenda we may or may not share, the drive to conformity is strong.

Well, not in my name, buster. You don’t get to write my politics because you know that I sleep with a man, and you don’t get to erase my sexuality because my politics don’t align with your own. But watch out: gay people, like Jewish citizens, are the canaries in any liberal society’s mine. Freedom’s enemies always, always, come for us first. (“Use the back door, Smeeth” is from the same style-sheet as “Gay Tories are traitors”.) Once we’ve been dealt with — once our political identities have been strangled to death — whose turn do you think will be next?

How often do you watch the news and think “Why on earth are they doing that? Why don’t they do [insert favourite hobby-horse] instead?” We all have a seductive inner tyrant, whispering the charm that things could only get better, if only you were in charge.

Some inner tyrants achieve fleshly power. What was Blairism, other than “Do what I will shall be the whole of the law”? I find it telling that the loudest recent cries for “realignment” — for a government of all the talents (that is, one led by Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna) — should come from the dispossessed-Blairite, column-writing, centre-Left.

It’s not enough that their icon wanders around, urging sinners (Brexit voters) to repent; his last bastion of potency (those columnists) gobble away that “if only good people [i.e. politicians who agree with them about the EU] would throw aside their tribalism, we could stop this madness [i.e. inflict our political will on an unwilling electorate].” You could call it Unpopularism, I suppose, a political fetish loudly to be deprecated.

Well not me! And not my new Not Blair party, which I’m proposing as a vehicle for political realignment. Vote Not Blair, and we promise we won’t smear victims of train disasters, or hijack funeral services to “give” our quivering-lipped Mark Antony impression to the nation. We won’t hire ex-pornographers to thuggerise the management of the news cycle, and we won’t hang about with spivs on yachts.

We will never, ever give Keith Vaz any responsibility whatsoever, not even to buy the office a washing machine. We won’t snigger up our sleeves and lie to you about immigration. And we’re basically sceptical about wars; just as a default. Certainly we won’t send working-class men to be killed by savages, for reasons no one can ever satisfactorily explain.

Further reading

Why the so-called 'somewheres' hold so tightly to tradition

By Graeme Archer

But being Not Blair is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for our new movement. The Not Party is against a much longer list of things than merely Tony Blair. I’m grateful to UnHerd for giving me this opportunity to launch the Not Party’s manifesto.

We’re not for building houses on suburban fields, for example, certainly not in outer London boroughs, because whatever those wide-eyed 20-something lobbyists insist in their endless think tank reports, there are too many people in southern England. Of course we need more homes — hundreds of thousands of them a year — but as far as possible these will all be built in Sheffield Hallam, as the concreted-over thanks of a grateful nation to its voters, for putting Nick Clegg on the national stage for so long, only finally to replace him with something worse.

In education, the Not Party is against university expansionism, and instead will close any institution that fosters Marxism, or has banned Germaine Greer from speaking, or which ever employed Baroness Chakrabarti. We’ll just have to struggle on without the LSE, and the late Colonel Ghaddafi’s relatives will have to find other places to award them their PhDs.

The Not Party will proscribe various terrorist organisations, and HR. “Suppression of wages and deflection of tribunals” departments will still be allowed to exist, but there will be zero tolerance for dressing this up as drivel about “shared company values”. Anything with mission statements about “social mobility” will be terminated; the Not Party will meritocratise the professions by making unpaid internships illegal, a simple but effective policy to stop the offspring of rich Left-wing people from running everything.

David Lammy will be asked to set up a taskforce to investigate the scourge of identity politics, which the Not Party disfavours, but will only be allowed to share his findings in public once he’s passed a foundation course in Deductive Reasoning. We’ll book the hall for you and everything, David; don’t rush it: Marie Antoinette didn’t discover radium in a day.

You see the problem: try to create a new party and too easily you end up with something ghastly, fashioned from your id’s self-image. “Realignment” is a chimera, and wishing for it a displacement activity from engaging with the world as it is, and the political institutions which exist.

You can long for an un-Corbyn, pro-EU Labour party as much as you like, for example, but Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour party: tackle that, if you want to change Labour, rather than wasting Sunday afternoons imagining what might have happened had Blair not resigned. The most important lesson for democratic politics was issued from those luscious Jagger lips back in 1969: You can’t always get what you want.

To which I’d add: and nor should you. Demanding that the world conforms to your inner vision, else foot-stamping fury, is the mental state of toddlers, terrorists – and the leadership of the Labour Party. The country doesn’t need my Not Party.

Further reading

Identity politics is a monster. Connection is how we kill it.

By Graeme Archer

But let’s see the game to its conclusion, for the game itself is instructive. The party Britain needs would be broad; unfussed by internal contradictions; with just enough motivating ideological force (to oppose socialism, to support economic growth, to side, instinctively, with messy liberty over tidy oppression) to give it a focus, without such ideology ever being allowed to over-ride managerial competence and an awareness that choices mean losers. (We really do need hundreds of thousands more homes in southern England, however fearful that renders my leafy suburban soul.)

The party for which the country cries for would be honest when dealing with complex issues: Brexit is boring and tedious and will take decades. Whether strongly pro or strongly anti, anyone who says otherwise is lying. Leave them to the lunatic fringe and the House of Lords. (A party defined by Brexit — in either direction — is about the most destructive construct I can imagine.)

The party I have in mind would draw its leaders from any background, without fussing over which ethnic heritage, religious tradition, marital status or chromosomal disposition such leaders possess, and it would be sensitive with reform, neither rushing headlong into changes that could unravel communities, nor lying about any necessary steps to secure a future common good. It’s probable, in fact, that such a political organisation wouldn’t be designed by anyone, but instead would be the outcome of centuries of exposure to lived human reality.

Such a party is a dream, of course, an impossibility in the vicious dividing-line identity-shrieking (r)age we inhabit, but if it could be willed into existence, it would require a name.

The “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find you get what you need” Party is a bit of a mouthful, so how about we call it The Conservative Party. Do you think that could ever catch on?

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And please use the “HAVE YOUR SAY” button above if you have any views on what you’ve read – or if you’d like to publicly nominate another ‘Free Mind’. 

Look at the picture above this text. (Just for a second! Then come back and keep reading.) How does it make you feel?

Some of you will think “meh”; a very small number of British readers will think “police communication in the 1960s”. By far the largest single category of you, however — whichever words come to mind — will feel: happier. The sight of a battered old police box makes life better.

Whenever I pass the one on Buchanan Street in Glasgow I feel a near irresistible urge to push at the door. So Doctor Who — the blue box is, of course, his time-and-space machine, the Tardis — seems a useful device for an investigation into the appeal of the maverick.

I learnt two facts about “maverick” from Google. First of all, its American tang is authentic: the noun comes from Samuel A. Maverick, (1803-70), a Texan ranch owner who refused to brand his calves (so the link with UnHerd is strong.)

Secondly, according to books.google.com, the usage of the term has increased over the last few decades, and that also feels correct. We didn’t really talk about “political mavericks” in the 1980s, except possibly as an obituary-synonym for “failure”.

But the rise of populism, on both Left and Right, is by now well-documented on both sides of the Atlantic. Setting abuse to one side, or one’s well-founded distaste for their individual policies: for which noun would you reach, to describe Trump as well as Sanders, Boris as well as Corbyn? These men — we’ll come back to the gender — are all mavericks. (The other word often used to describe their appeal is “authentic”, and we’ll come back to that too.)

One of my dogmas is that truth lies in fiction. To understand a culture, examine its art — by definition, a novel, or a play, or a television drama, is fiction, and therefore a lie, but it’s also where the inner working of the human mind is laid bare. Because I’m middle-brow, the art I enjoy is lightweight and popular. Back to Doctor Who.

It must mean something, after all, to be one of the longest-running television dramas in the world, now 55 years old. Every generation, British and American children fall in love with the Time Lord, and their fondness for him persists into adulthood, quite unlike infantile fancies for Enid Blyton or talking trains. You don’t last that long without being an archetype.

We know he is a “renegade”, who left his home planet because of his people’s refusal to interfere in the deeds of the universe. Confusingly, he both ignores and lives by this norm. In the programme’s masterpiece, Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor draws back from exterminating the exterminators: he has the chance to prevent the evolution of the satanic machine-creatures, but refuses to do so. A refusal to alter history’s path, a faith in the future to deal with present ills, even the expulsion of humans from a pre-lapsarian Eden after experiments in re-creation (the Daleks are what happen if you listen to a serpentine “Man is now God” character): remind you of anyone?

His politics are as childish as they are appealing: he is instinctively on the side of the oppressed, and were he British, he’d definitely vote for Corbyn. Armies are always bad, though it’s somehow important to protect the weak. Goodness will deliver that protection, without the necessity for weapons. Anyone who’s felt the appeal of Quakerism knows what’s going on here.

And what are the character’s regenerations than a reflection of Christianity’s appeal? Each time the Doctor rises from the dead he is washed clean of past transgressions. Everyone deserves a second chance, and sometimes we get things wrong. To ask for forgiveness, and to receive it; to acknowledge one’s imperfections, and to be renewed as part of that process — these are precious human inventions (or theological gifts, depending on your disposition). They’re central to Doctor Who.

And “he” is now a “she”. If a Time Lord can become a Time Lady in an instant, what’s all this fuss about gender fluidity? On the substrate of a television programme our hopes and fears play out.

I’d argue that the programme’s longevity is evidence of our persistent longing for that which the character represents. We’re conditioned by our psyche to feel fondly towards blue boxes (bigger on the inside; aren’t we all?) that break us free from the daily grind, and the mavericks who fly them.

However strongly your conscious mind rejects his binary (good/evil; us/them) worldview, the maverick’s refusal to compromise his values — his authenticity, in other words — appeals. We are attracted by the very quality we know to be untrue; we hate compromise, even as we realise its necessity. So by failing to seek popularity, the maverick becomes popular. By refusing to admit complexity, complicated problems are diminished.

Thus the Doctor. But thus, too, Corbyn or Trump. And there’s the danger: it’s one thing to recognise our subconscious desires represented in fiction; quite another to elevate such desires to power.

Corbyn offers a “new kind of politics”: he means socialism. Trump says he’ll “make America great again”. We know perfectly well such phrases are just invented machines — blue boxes of words — that promise a universe rid of difficult decisions. Desirable; impossible. All you’ve got to do, children, is close your eyes, and believe.

But should he be pensioned off, as the uber-rationalists and the “Oh why do we have any faith schools at all” brigade would wish? And not only because: “Let’s close down CofE and Jewish and Hindu and Sikh schools, because Trojan Horse” is the best example of displacement theory known to man.

I think there is an argument to be made about God’s utility, quite beyond any religious argument. This is from the British Museum’s current exhibition about God [1. ‘Living With Gods: peoples, places and worlds beyond’ is at the British Museum until 8 April 2018]:

Seeing how people believe, rather than considering what they believe, suggests that humans might be naturally inclined to believe in transcendent worlds and beings … This in turn helps to make our lives well-ordered and understandable.

It’s not that we don’t know about the dust to which we’ll return; of course we do. It’s not that we can’t accept we’re just random bits of genetic material, clinging to a rock that’s roaring through space around one of the vanishingly rare points of light dotted throughout the cosmos.

It’s just that to maintain good mental health we require a myth that’s bigger than the quotidian, and eradicating that myth would be as wicked as the burning of any other work of fiction (in fiction lies the truth; the grand human irony).

The exhibition … begins with a remarkable 40,000-year-old mammoth ivory sculpture known as the Lion Man. Depicting a lion’s upper body on the lower half of a man, it is the oldest known image of a being that does not exist in nature. It is the earliest evidence we have of beliefs and practices, and shows humans’ unique ability to communicate what’s in our minds through objects.

OK, but before we give God a free pass: what about the people who didn’t believe in Lion Man? Were they free to say “While I’m engaged with the method by which you’ve turned fear of the long, dark night into an object that is powerful in its unearthly beauty, that doesn’t mean I have to worship Lion People, does it?” Or did they just smile, and nod their heads, avoiding eye contact.

Because the needs of the people who’d look at Lion Man and raise their eyebrows matter too. No faith-based assertion, by definition unprovable, should block the harmless desires of human beings. Some specific examples: practice your fundamental Christianity, sure, but don’t take a job as a registrar of marriage and get on your high horse when a same-sex couple turn up at the town hall. Follow whichever branch of Islam is your family’s heritage, but don’t dare forbid the rest of us from discussing its ideological consequences.

None of our carapaces is blank, and not only priests wish to carve their laws upon them. Sometimes I catch sight of demons: only from the corner of my eye, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

They grow stronger when we turn our back on the Good life. As Lion Man was an approximation to God, so God (it seems to me) is an approximation to the Good. Good is necessary, and real; as real as orange, as real as a circle, as real as the number ten — none of which you can touch — and it’s up to you if you wish to remove one of the “o”s and imbue that yearning for the unknowable-but-necessary with a personality, a back-story and a set of rules which combine the wonderful with the ridiculous.

It’s not the statues of Lion Man we need, or the rules invented by his priests about the appropriate forms of Lion Man worship. It’s our capacity to create meaning from nothing that matters; that Lion Man occurred to anyone is the miracle, and proof that the Good exists. Let there be light, we whisper in the night, in the dark. Nobody listens, and the universe doesn’t care. And yet: there is light.

Recommended reading

Why religion retains its relevance – even when belief in God wanes

By Peter Franklin

But then. Oh, then. A mist started to coalesce in the heavens — as much like the appearance of the creature in Night of the Demon as anything: something substantive in front of our eyes, formed from nothing. Some of the watchers screamed, and “Oh come on”, I thought again, it’s not that great,  just a bank of what could be a grey, pulsating rain-cloud, hanging loose and low in the dark sky.

But again: another convulsion! And suddenly the cloud snapped tight, like a sheet pulled taut, and everyone was screaming. We ran from one side of the field to the other, chasing the aurora’s flight and pointing, shouting aloud its movements. It swirled and reshaped itself, a non-verbal message to the planet: pick your eyes from the ground! Look at the sky, man! The northern lights danced their fizzing, silent dance for us; for a moment, just a moment, the universe noticed our presence, and told us: “This matters.”

We rolled back to Reykjavik in the bus, everyone silent. I thought: I will never waste another day of my life.

The next day I stared at the Íslendingabók – the Book of Iceland, which describes the 9^th century settlement of this astonishing country – in the National Museum. No matter that I can’t read a word of 12^th century Icelandic: the beautiful pages spoke to me. A touch of the aurora’s magic remained: “This [story we tell of ourselves] matters”.

It was a shock to return to London: noisy, messy, polluted, crowded London, a city which simply doesn’t work any more. Worse was to switch on my Twitterfeed. Here on social media is the Book of Our Land, a rolling screed of words, more words than the Íslendingabók every minute of every day.

And how do we choose to use them? To screech at one another, like ravens scrapping over a rancid sandwich wrapper. The first thing I read was that the Labour Party’s candidate for Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell — the ideological strongman of the Corbyn revolution, which has destroyed the moderate Left in the UK and threatens to become our government with every whimpering, pathetic half-measure of the May mal-administration — had been caught on tape. Mr McDonnell suggested, at a meeting of like-minded left-wingers, that a Conservative MP, Esther McVey, should be lynched.

Disgusting enough. But how to measure the disgust required to describe the BBC producer, who had this tape in his hands, but decided not to air it. We have reached the stage in our national discourse where a significant portion of the British population cheers a man who would hang his opponents by their necks, until they are dead — I don’t see anything in McDonnell’s demeanour or history to suggest this is a metaphor — and where the BBC is so terrified of its coming Marxist overlords that it cravenly suppresses the evidence. Esther McVey? She’s only a Tory, after all. Not quite human.

The difficult trick for those who cling to civilisation is to describe the horrors of the age — prepubescent children being lined up for gender reassignment surgery; talk-show hosts and their presidential ambitions (because that’s what Trump voters really want: Mrs Clinton with a better autocue manner); the tedious grind of trade negotiations between Britain and a sclerotic bloc of grey functionaries; the psephological insanity of our young (their bizarre, terrifying willingness to elect those Marxists-who’d-lynch) — to describe all this, without sounding insane.

The Book of Iceland tells a history of harshness, and savagery, and survival, and hope, but tells it with beauty and completeness. The Book of the West today, though — think how future historians will discuss us. They’ll read our electronic hate-diaries and wonder at our tales of harshness, and savagery, written by a people who seem to have rejected beauty in their built environment, in their “music”, and especially in their words, and who don’t even aim for completeness in their story-telling, but spew their venom within hermetically-sealed echo chambers. Night of the demon(s), indeed.

The internet is a magnifier of our meaner instincts

Can we survive this era of anti-social media?

By Douglas Murray

Our politics — the story we tell of ourselves — is drowning in demon-venom; hating each other seems more important than tending the scrap of rock that sustains us, and upon which our grip is so fragile. We can’t even get rid of plastic bags. Please, universe: take notice of us again. Send some light to illuminate our words, to remind us that there’s more to life than staring at our phones and waiting for death — either our own, or that of our opponents.

‘Why doesn’t a group of them just get together and sort out what’s best for the NHS/foreign policy/how to teach English in schools [delete as applicable]?’ is another manifestation of the same desire. ‘Politics’ should be removed from the process, because ‘facts’ — as agreed upon by an apolitical committee — will tell us the truth.

This lament speaks to latent beliefs which are widespread : (1) that political assertions (such as ‘We should remain within the EU’, or ‘Putin affected our election result’) can be logically interrogated, with reference to evidence (‘facts’), such that their absolute truth or falseness may be deduced, and (2) that ‘they’ should do this evidential sifting for ‘us’.

Neither belief is correct; adherence to the second is politically dangerous. That danger is no longer theoretical: the hysteria over ‘fake news’ has led to a new German law to fine social media platforms which don’t remove news deemed to be fake (as well as hate-crime-speak; but these issues, conflated everywhere, are not quite the same). President Macron of France — the ‘why can’t we take politics out of politics’ desire made flesh — is proposing something similar: to criminalise parties deemed to spread fake news during an election.

Even absent legislation, there are similar urges in the UK. During last year’s general election there was no arbiter more powerful than the Channel 4 News fact-checker. Statements by mere politicians could be verified or nullified with reference to the decision of the makers of a television programme. It’s not that great a leap to imagine the creation of a Truth Committee to determine the claims which may or may not be made in a British general election.

No-one asks about the political proclivities of these fact-checkers: facts are independent of politics, is the theory. I’m going to argue that the theory is wrong. Before you dismiss me as an anti-evidence, irrational conspiracy nut (“It’s Channel 4 News, guv! Out to get me!”) let me say that I worship evidence and facts (if not Channel 4 News), and explain how I teach statistical inference to the scientists and physicians with whom it’s my blessing to work.

Our work is drug development, and the basic hypothesis, with regard to any molecular entity in development, is this: the drug is effective in the treatment of a particular disease. Is that hypothesis either true or false? I ask the scientists. Yes, they say. So how do we determine its true-false status?

“We conduct clinical trials, and you guys do funny things with the numbers — the facts, the data — at the end. We want to know more about those funny things,” they say. “That’s why we’re on this wretched course.”

I then ask: Are all swans black? while showing a picture of a white swan. We deduce that the black-swan theory is false, based on the fact of one white swan. But deduction is rarely available to us in experimental science: I change the picture to a single black swan (All swans are black: true or false?), then ten black swans (True or false?) then ten billion black swans (True or false?). In other words: there is a truth about this swan/drug, but it will be forever outwith our deductive reach. I say:

Imagine the drug is held, behind your head, by a puppet-master. If you could turn your head you could see the truth directly: but sadly, you’ve been shackled to the ground, facing away from the truth, deep within a cave. The puppet-master is behind you, in the mouth of the cave. The sun shines through the entrance, and casts a shadow of the truth onto the wall. All you can see is that shadow.

In other words, I nick everything from Plato (minus the fire). The concept is that all we ever have are the shadows on the wall of the cave, and it is the job of statistical inference to induce, from those shadows — the data, the facts — statements about the relative plausibility of a theory, conditional on those data/shadows. We do the best job humanly possible, but this is never the same as turning our eyes directly upon the truth.

I think the political analogy is obvious? Consider a theory about fake news and the EU referendum, that the result is flawed because we were ‘lied to’. Various facts flicker on the wall in front of us: the amount of money the UK sends to the EU, the net amount once rebates are taken into account, the theoretical spending power of a British chancellor once the EU has been left.

We all look at those same facts: the facts are not the issue. But we look at those facts, by necessity, from different perspectives: if I’m shackled at the far left of the line of prisoners, for example, and you’re at the far right, isn’t it probable that we would look at the same facts but come to different conclusions about the truth? Neither of us is ‘wrong’ — we are both rationally using facts to update our belief — but there’s nothing in this inference-machine that says our beliefs must instantly cohere, even if confronted with the same set of facts.

Politics isn’t science. The puppet-master in drug development is a randomised clinical trial: the best machine to generate data about experimental theories. And scientific hypotheses, while complex, are simple compared to the ones with which we engage in general elections.

In politics there are lots of puppet-masters, and lots of different truth-objects from which to choose in order to illustrate a general point. Consider benefit reform, and imagine all the different ways you could describe the truth about a particular policy, each one a pebble of truth on the beach outside the cave.

The Guardian might pick up the truth-object ‘Change can cause harm’, and cast shadows/stories about terrible cases of hardship. The Daily Mail might choose ‘Current rules lead to abuse’, and show you enormous families of the work-shy. Neither The Guardian nor the Mail are misleading you (and how you react to the shadows will be a function of where you are sitting in the line of prisoners, remember).

It’s not The Guardian’s or the Mail’s job to pick up every pebble on the beach for your benefit. It’s not anyone’s job: it is a job which is literally impossible. This – and the issue of perspective, which must inevitably alter your response to the facts – you could call ‘the voter’s dilemma’.

It’s a dilemma not resolved by passing the buck onto a ‘fact checker’ or a French judge or a German criminal court. The least worst option is to look at as many facts as possible (within agreed parameters — I’m no fan of hate-speech) and not to restrict (are you listening, ‘Stop Funding Hate‘?) the variety of ‘puppet-masters’ (who see themselves as truth-tellers, after all.)

So: are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

In terms of the ‘voter’s dilemma’, all news is ‘fake’, even when it’s completely honest. Facts alone can never tell you what to believe about a political theory: response to facts is determined by the prior experience of this life to which each of us is shackled.

And asking a third party to determine which facts we may inspect is like rolling a boulder over the mouth of the cave and shutting out the sun, while wriggling deeper into the stifling darkness. Here is the news: a sore backside, followed by suffocation, isn’t the same thing as enlightenment.

The physician agreed (and wrote the prescription). So why did he begin with mild reluctance? Not an innate desire to avoid pharmacological interventions (else he would not have written the prescription.)

The conflict arose from a clash of algorithms. I had taken a statistical model to the surgery with me — a very informal one, but a model nonetheless; “Given the input of my family history, I believe my innate long-term probability of heart disease to be high, and wish to minimise that risk.”

Physicians tend not to think in terms of statistical model but the machines which sit on their desktops do. Dr P typed in various numbers (inputs) to describe me, which included family history, and various blood tests, and metabolic measurements, and lifestyle indicators… and the classification algorithm in his surgery’s software returned: “Medium risk.” The computer, in other words, said no.

On this occasion, and with this algorithm, the human discussants over-ruled its decision but with the rise of machine intelligence — a fancy-sounding name for “classification or prediction algorithms built on huge amounts of data” (to which Peter Franklin gives a very good introduction here) — the potential for conflict between the human users of the systems and the system itself, increases. And it’s not clear whose rights will take precedence.

Should you qualify for parole? An algorithm might determine that.

Should you be allowed to board an aircraft? An algorithm will determine that.

How should you drive from A to B?

Which irritating adverts will decorate your internet browsing experience?

Which film does Netflix suggest you watch next?

What insurance deal will the Halifax offer you on home contents cover?

Is it worthwhile spending money on a drug to prolong your life? An algorithm, increasingly, determines all of these.

Now in a sense there’s nothing new here. Statisticians have built classification models for aeons (slight exaggeration) but there’s a difference — morally, definitely and, surely, legally — between me (as a statistician) showing you (as user/customer/patient) the model I’ve built and you deciding whether or not you agree with its form and are happy with its predictive abilities — and a proprietary black box system, whose precise structure is not made available to you, deciding (for example) whether or not you should be sent home from court or locked up in a prison. You — as “user” — won’t have a say in how the model has treated your data. You won’t know how it combines the inputs; which inputs it rates most highly; the operating characteristics of its rule (how often it makes the wrong decision.)

What — morally, legally, culturally — should be done about this? It’s an open question. There’s a good discussion of the issue by Olhede and Wolfe¹ in Significance, the Royal Statistical Society/American Statistical Association co-publication[1.  Olhede, S. and Wolfe, P. (2017), When algorithms go wrong, who is liable?. Significance, 14: 8–9. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2017.01085.x].

Go figure, as the American statisticians might say. But figure it out quickly, before a machine-derived algorithm decides that it’s a waste of time to do so.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

Everyone has their own set (I hypothesise); there are three, in my case:

• Gosh, what do you eat at Christmas? (Not meat, you savage.)
• Heavens, were you the only Scottish Conservative? Ha! Ha! (This is asked less often post-Ruth, thank goodness.)
• And, time after time in the workplace: you’re a statistician … but you also write, about politics? Isn’t that … rare?

This last enquiry channels Doctor Johnson’s remarks about dogs on their hind legs. The miracle for a statistician is that you can communicate in English at all, is the subtext, let alone string words together well enough to have someone pay to publish them. Conversely, in the eyes of my (political) editors I often see a half-suspicion that I’m making up the statistics career. Either (words)/or (numbers), is our default setting. Competency at both is sensed as bizarre.

Here’s the first seeming-paradox. There is no “either/or” between words and numbers; at the same time, of course, there is. CP Snow’s two cultures exist, most clearly in the words/numbers dichotomy, but only because we structure them into existence through conscious decisions about how to educate our young. It’s a human choice, not a law of the universe. Good with words or good with numbers is a story we tell about ourselves, and like all stories it has its heroes, and villains.

Good with words, and you can read law or PPE, become a barrister, then an MP, then Prime Minister. Not your only option: good with words, and you can read novels for three years, become a TV producer, then commission dramas about how awful the politicians are.

Good with numbers, on the other hand (and therefore bad with words), and… well. You won’t need to worry about competitive sports, at least, and there’s always the solace of Bach.

How else to explain the fake-boasting. “I was never good at maths!”, they trill, while looking over your shoulder. They mean “Thank God I never wasted my time on that rubbish.”

Here’s the epitome of the either/or value system, Simon Jenkins, breathing his lofty disdain for the very concept of maths-at-school: “The prominence of maths in the curriculum is education’s version of Orwell’s imaginary boot, ‘stamping on your face … forever’.”

According to Simon, encouraging children to be good at maths is like a totalitarian regime that pivots on the destruction of romantic love. Beggin’ your ‘umble pardon, sir, an’ I knows I’s only a statistician, but I thinks you’ve misread your Orwell.

This matters, politically. A few years ago, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, wanted to improve facility with English among Britain’s immigrant communities. He was chastised by his Left-wing opponents for focusing efforts on women with (mainly) Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds.

In my teabreak one day, I looked up the official statistics which broke down English ability by ethnicity and geography-of-origin, and calculated the odds of lacking English in each of those categories, and compared these between women and men.

It did indeed appear that women with Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakastani backgrounds were between four and five times as likely to lack any English ability, as compared to their menfolk. But I listened in vain to hear mention of such statistics in any political or journalistic commentary.

Government statisticians would have calculated any of those odds ratios for ministers, had the ministers asked for them. But my unofficial calculations took a few minutes prodding with an excel spreadsheet: it shouldn’t require a government department to help guide ministerial or journalistic intuition. The point is that such a basic facility with numbers should be taken for granted amongst the people who rule us.

This widespread political innumeracy means that the numbers which do make it into the public domain are treated with awe, like holy relics in the age before Luther. “Never mind how poor you feel. Look at the GDP [and ignore the tails of the income distribution].”

In Britain, Gordon Brown took advantage of statistical ignorance to fight and win a useless “war” against poverty. He defined an arbitrary point on the income distribution as “poverty”, and spent shedloads to move people from one side of it to the other. If poverty is defined as “income lower than £10,000”, and your income is £9,999.90, and Gordon gives you 11 pence, you are no longer poor, according to Gordon.

Journalists (good with words not numbers) repeated his claims about the numbers of people “moved out of poverty”, without once, to my memory, asking for the average improvement in income for such people, or its impact on the shape of the income distribution. Lacking statistical ability, most journalists don’t even know how to ask such questions. Meanwhile, after Gordon spent all our money, the objectively poor continued to shiver in misery at the extreme left-hand tail of the income curve.

There are hidden costs as well as these obvious ones. If you don’t know how to interrogate data, you’re unlikely to know how to design studies to test policy efficacy (all those pointless “pilot implementation schemes”, that produce data unfit for decision-making, rather than prospectively planned, randomised trials). This increases the chance, obviously, of bad policy decisions (and is nothing to do with Left vs Right.) From educational methods to poverty reduction, lack of properly planned trials (with randomisation) handicaps the development of evidence-based politics. And few politicians or journalists even appear to notice.

The drug development industry is obsessive about missing data, because the things we cannot measure (think of patients choosing to leave a clinical trial, and count their reasons for leaving) have a fundamental impact on the assessment of drug efficacy and safety. Here, too, there is an analogue for the price we pay for privileging words over numerical thinking: as Henry Olsen wrote in his excellent piece recently, “nobody” saw the rise of populism coming, mainly because “nobody” who writes about politics lives in the areas that gave Trump and Brexit their victories.

All those nobodies would have done better had they applied some basic statistical reasoning. “Everyone I know supports Remain/Clinton. But I can see from the polls that a significant chunk of the country doesn’t. What am I missing?”

Statistical thinking, in other words — not expertise in complex methodological topics, but basic statistical thinking — should be a desirable characteristic of a well-rounded citizen, whatever their field of work. There should be no either/or, and though (I’m only a statistician, remember) it’s a cliché to say so, it remains true: the person who can’t interrogate data is as limited — perhaps more so — than the citizen who doesn’t “get” Shakespeare.

We have the politicians and the journalists we deserve, of course: a depressing thought. So here’s a game to take your mind off things. Imagine three doors in front of you: A, B and C – behind one of them, I’ve parked the car of your dreams; behind the other two I’ve left photographs of my beautiful cat. (She’s alive, whatever Schrödinger says – it’s just her photo, and this isn’t a trick.) All you have to do to win the car is pick a door — and I’m going to give you two chances.

You pick door B – it’s in the middle, why not, principle of indifference, right? I open door A, and show you a lovely picture of Kitty (awwwww.) And I ask you, now we know that door A isn’t the car: do you want to stick with door B? Or switch to door C?

Practically everyone — this is one of the most famous “paradoxes” of them all — says “It doesn’t matter whether I switch or not. There’s a 50:50 chance the car is behind door B or door C.”

In fact, the chance of finding the car increases, from 33% (before the first door was opened) to 67%, if you switch. Lots of people become angry about this. It’s not the imaginary car, really, that they’re angry about. It’s having been forced to choose either(words)/or(numbers) at far too early an age. There are too many obvious substitutes for “car”, after all, and the “game” is a bit close to real life for comfort.

If you think anger is an incorrect response to the unalterable laws of probability; if you agree that dismissing “all that numbers stuff” is a defect, not the mark of a civilised human; if you’re fed up with politicians rattling off statistics without journalists deconstructing them: then my request of you is small.

When your children are picking subjects for school, encourage them not to drop maths. For as long as they’re in education, in fact, encourage them not to drop maths. Don’t perpetuate the either/or myth (or look over my shoulder at parties). Statistical thinking is as important as the ability to spell — neither Alexa nor Siri will shout “sloppy reasoning” when they read out the morning news headlines. And if you disagree with my conclusions, then I’m sorry: but I don’t think your numbers add up.

Without stories, without the imposition of meaning onto pattern, all we’d have left would be a sequence of events, some predictable and others random. Patterns themselves carry no meaning: the irony is that fiction, literally a lie, is where we go for truth.

Not coincidentally, given what we’ll discuss below, one measure of the success for artificial intelligence would be for machines to pass beyond the pattern recognition that is their current limit. “You need to buy more cat food,” says Alexa, without explicitly revealing its logic: “because I’ve noticed that you previously ordered more cat food when the stocks of cat food were low, and they are low again, ergo you will want to order more.” This is a pattern recognition algorithm, the simulation of intelligence, not the real thing.

Only when Alexa — having emailed the order to the supermarket — follows up with: “That sentimentality you exhibit for animals… it’s the other side of not trusting people, isn’t it?” — then, and only then, I’ll start worrying that the robots are after my job.

So stories matter, and stories are good. But they remain fiction, and therein lies their danger. Computers are able to identity and record the patterns of near-uncountable many phenomena, which is how machine-learning works: they can build and discard explanatory models more quickly than we can, before honing in the “best” one (Alexa records everything you do but notices that the stock of cat food is predictive of your tendency to order more, while the number of baths you take per week is not.)

Humans, on the other hand, tend to become stuck in “comfort narratives”, stories that we’re used to, regardless of the explanatory power of those fictions. In the media, this tendency manifests itself as “chunkability”, treating complex, interwoven stories as simple and discrete.

There are three stories that have dominated the British media over recent weeks:

1. the antipathy of young people towards capitalism;
2. Britain’s departure from the European Union; and
3. the government’s new Industrial Strategy.

I’ve read countless stories about each of these; I don’t think I’ve read one which linked them together. But together they fit. Let’s have a go at making the narrative complete.

“Everyone knows” that the current generation of young people, caught in the pincers of both the great university mis-selling scandal and a lack of affordable housing, have turned against capitalism. So atrophied has the image of capitalism become that more than twice as many people under 45 in the UK believe Jeremy Corbyn is on their side as believe the same of Theresa May’s party.

Unless you’re happy to wait around until this cohort elects Corbyn, whose government would destroy your pension and ruin the country, then the centre-Right needs to win back the trust of young people. So far, most of the suggestions veer between the useful but reactive — build more houses; well, yes — and the fatuous (free railcards).

Now imagine yourself a twenty-something graduate, wondering what Britain will be like in two decades’ time. You switch on the news: Brexit-Brexit-Brexit and nearly all of it pictures of old white guys arguing about trade fees. On the table lies your unopened mail: student loan due, and a final demand from your rich-as-Croesus landlord. I think even Alexa would be able to predict your vote.

But, last week, in amongst this noise, these stories of Brexit and youthful anti-capitalism, there came a policy agenda which might just deal with both issues at once – by aiming for something more important than either.

Greg Clark, the Secretary of State for Business in Theresa May’s government, launched his industrial strategy. Greg isn’t a showy-offy type of man but is that rare beast, a genuinely clever politician with a PhD in quantitative methods. (Disclosure: I worked for him in 2015-16 — on sabbatical from industry — as a speech-writer).

The man is not independent of the policy…

Tony Blair’s industrial strategy was rock stars in sweaty rooms, to fan his Cool Britannia neuroticism…

The EU’s industrial strategy is to bugger Greece and protect Germany…

Jeremy Corbyn’s industrial strategy is the misery of Venezuela, with less agreeable weather.

Greg Clark’s industrial strategy is a narrative, thank God, rooted in reality, yet visionary in its ambition.

The white paper announces a sequence of “Sector Deals”, to cover construction, life sciences, the automotive industry… and Artificial Intelligence, where we came in. Britain’s at the front of the field in these areas, says the paper: so let’s maximise our competitive advantage and be the best in the world. Each sector is intellectually exciting, redolent of well-paid careers spent developing medicines and machines to improve life for people in need. (Britain is more than parasitical banks, is the not-very-silent subtext).

Those specific sectors may or may not float your boat, and the white paper itself (perhaps he’s lost a good speech-writer :-)) employs too much cliché about “innovation” (as though anyone ever stood up in a business meeting and said “Let’s not innovate”.) But it’s refreshing to read of government ideas about how the country might flourish after the EU’s clammy hands have been prised away.

More than refreshing, it’s vital. Maybe Greg’s strategy will change over time; perhaps AI will never move beyond the order-cat-food level. But the UK needs a vision for its future to match the revolutionary zeal of its young people, something more exciting than the old lecture on how socialism tends not to turn out awfully well.

I said humans need stories to overcome the paralysis of signal overload: neither young British voters, nor middle-aged Tory politicians, are exceptions to this rule. For the last two years, the British centre-Right has been paralysed by the dominance of the “Young people love Jezza” story on the one hand, and the “Goodness, isn’t negotiating with a bunch of horrible EU bureaucrats difficult?” on the other. Into the gap has moved the Left, spinning its yarns of utopian paradise; artificial unintelligence, you might say.

How do we save capitalism from electoral extinction? And what do we do after Brexit? Greg Clark’s industrial strategy is Chapter One of an exciting new book: The Future Is Bright. The Future Can Still Be Tory. I found it a compelling read, and think it deserves a wider audience. I hope there’s a second chapter, and soon.

So what’s not to like about Zoe?

A lot, it turns out. At least in Iceland, whose Naming Commission determines the propriety of baby Icelander appellations. A new baby arrived to a Reykjavik couple (congratulations), and they wanted to call her Zoe.

“Nei!” said the Reykjavik District Court in late October, upholding a Naming Commission ruling: “Zoe” can’t be integrated with Icelandic grammar. Since, according to Iceland Magazine, no native Icelander has ever been christened Zoe, the court declared it “should not be considered an Icelandic name.”

You can tell where I’m going with this, right? The whole “Naming Commission” thing, straight out of Orwell via 1970s Soviet Neighbourhood Commissars: what right does a government have to tell parents how to name their offspring? That Zoe “should not be considered an Icelandic name” is a mixture of chilling, and laughable.

Can you imagine a British court declaring, for example, that “Idris should not be considered an English name?” Idris Elba grew up in Canning Town (say “Tahn”, American readers). You don’t get much more British than Idris, ergo “Idris” is a British name.

Well, OK (and I hope Zoe’s parents call her whatever they damn well please.) But there’s still something here for our overtly non-judgemental culture to consider.

Like more than a million of you, next year I’m visiting Iceland (permanent population around 330,000). I’m excited at the thought of the hot springs, the bathing, the whales, the Aurora Borealis, the impenetrable, beautiful language. In short, I want to visit Iceland for all the reasons that Iceland is famous, for Iceland qua Iceland; not as diluted-Iceland, an Iceland that’s homogenised itself to look and sound like any other miserable, failing western nation.

Wish-fulfillment for tourists isn’t a reason for a country to hang on to its traditions, else Londoners would still be choking to death on Holmesian pea-soupers for the merriment of overseas visitors. But it’s a reasonable question: how much of a break can a nation make with its past, and remain, recognisably, the same place?

Fear of the scale and rate of change has political consequences, after all. It is certainly a viable theory for Brexit: no matter how shrilly our cultural intelligentsia screamed at working-class Britain that immigration isn’t a problem – Some sort of bigoted woman,” said Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown on meeting a Labour voter with the temerity to mention immigration to him at all. In the real world, millions of British voters watched Angela Merkel open the EU up to hundreds of thousands of incomers from non-European cultures and thought “No. No, sorry. Whatever Britain ‘is’, it’s not that.” They voted accordingly.

Such voters are “somewheres”, in David Goodhart’s phrase. The people who prefer the way things look now, even if they look a bit manky, a bit un-Shoreditchy (or rather, like the Shoreditch they grew up in, and not a hipster’s wet dream.) Like their Trump-ish American confrères, Brexiteers voted against the “anywheres”, with their theories of prosperity (for some) on the back of global capital and the free movement of labour.

Free movement of labour (let us call things as they are: a world without borders) means, among other things, that the names of your neighbours’ children will become unfamiliar – no big deal. Except that the language(s) you hear on the street will also change, until you reach 2016, when the Prime Minister is attacked for suggesting that your fellow citizens should share your native tongue.

The “somewhere” experience of globalism has been discombobulating. Before the referendum, liberal “anywhere” voters affected concern for their working-class compatriots, calling them the “dispossessed”. With good reason, it turns out, as “anywhere” behaviour post-referendum has made clear: ‘Who do these people think they are? It’s not ‘their’ land; it’s anyone’s who’d move here, but most of all it’s ours. Now shut up and get back in your call centre.’

However you feel about that “somewhere” territorial ownership instinct, built on an implicit relationship between land, history and behaviour (I vibrate with it, as a function of my upbringing, but I understand the limits of its political utility), it’s foolhardy to think that you can insult people out of it (hello Mrs Clinton).

As with Iceland and her Naming Commission, “somewheres” define themselves from the land to which they cling; that endless storm whipping at their backs doesn’t feel like an “anywhere” opportunity. The gap between breathing and drowning is dangerously narrow, and too easily crossed.

And in this context, where a political class casts about for answers to Brexit and Trump and Corbyn — casts about nervously, because it’s frightened of the answers — it’s no longer completely ridiculous for an institution of the state, like a Naming Commission, to insist, gently, that this, ancient and constant can sometimes be allowed to win out over the that, modern and new.

The old myths retain their power — I’m no longer referring only to Iceland, of course — and it’s not “populism” to observe people holding on in desperation, and to offer the reassurance of cultural continuity. No British Islander can regard subaerial Iceland, her volcanic-born people only just breaking the waves, and not feel a shudder of fear.

What if one day, the somewhere-voice asks, the waters start rising above your head? Where will you be, then?

Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.

Disraeli has a character respond thus: “You speak of — ” said Egremont, hesitantly.

You know how Gerard responds; he defines the two nations of England as being: “THE YOUNG AND THE OLD.”

Oops! Of course, Disraeli actually has Gerard say, “THE RICH AND THE POOR”. But the transposition of age for wealth makes the 19th Century Conservative the perfect guide to the political troubles of America and Britain and New Zealand, and likely Australia, in 2017.

Since the Brexit Referendum in the UK and to a certain extent the defeat of Clinton in the US, various theories have been floated to explain why the “wrong” side won. Most popular among them is that the young have been cheated by the old.

From grotesque internet memes (like this one, which laughingly imagines a Brexit voter Doris, who “died of old age 2 [sic] days after the vote”) to serious thinkers like David Willetts and his book The Pinch (How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back), the two nations within each anglosphere country are no longer the rich and the poor, but the old and the young.

Two nations: young people, most of whom have degrees, vs old people, most of whom do not. Young people, most of whom are forced to rent, vs old people, most of whom possess a mortgage. And so on.

The rise of the Left, whether Sanders in the US, or Britain’s resurgent yet morally disordered Labour Party, or New Zealand’s new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern; all are explained by this old/rich vs young/poor dichotomisation. Why would young people vote for capitalism, goes the cliché, when they don’t have any capital?

I don’t entirely disagree. For example, in the UK, to be born to a lower middle-class family in the southeast of England is to be a lottery winner assuming you eventually inherit your parents’ house. Not so, however, should you be born in a region without insane house prices. Thus: Inheritance sucks. It’s unfair. Let’s vote for someone who’d abolish it.

But if the young/old wealth differential is a necessary component of the rise of the Left that still doesn’t mean it’s a sufficient explanation.

The generational split originated with the cultural shift that began towards the end of the last century (and well before the age of austerity): the rise of identity politics, at the cost of the old-skool, values-driven stuff. Viewed through such a prism, the resurgent Left can be seen as a consequence of this deeper malaise, not simply the driver of one.

Of course, we always had identity politics: I’m a British unionist (I believe that Scotland and England are better in one United Kingdom), a position I didn’t adopt through a process of deductive reasoning but which I merely accepted, as one of life’s axioms. Being British meant, well, supporting the concept of Britain.

That — and the few other axioms which together defined what I think of as suburban, lower middle-class bourgeois morality (“It’s important to work”, “Families need fathers”, “Innocent until convicted, whatever Twitter says”) — have all been fractured, by the rise of postmodern identity politics, which puts self-definition, actualisation, realisation at the centre of a very empty universe. Who defines the common good, when no-one else’s opinion matters? “Common good”? Fake news, man (Trump is as much a consequence of this as Corbyn.)

In a science fiction story I enjoyed this week, the inhabitants of an alien world find themselves in the power of what they call a “monster god”, whom they are compelled to worship, even as it devours them. Identity politics is the monster god of planet Earth, and the name of that monster is solipsism.

To acknowledge this monster explains a lot. Is it any wonder, told to define their own truth, that the verbal communication of young people is dominated by the question mark? When they speak? Even when they’re not asking a question?

The monster god cares nothing for the confusion it generates in the minds of its adherents. Like all fake gods, it’s mostly interested in sacrifice, starting with all those bourgeois norms I took for granted. But its prize is greater than mere social decency. Monsters, of course, are creations of our id. And the ironic sacrifice demanded by identity politics is of self.

Because if identity can be anything, then identity is nothing. If you share your identity with no-one else, because you refuse to let anyone else’s views define you… then you’re limitless. But empty.

Which explains as well as any other theory the current fascination/confusion with gender. “It’s a social construct, and every other social construct you were given was bad,” whisper the taxpayer-funded lobby groups. “So abolish it. You are the gender or no-gender which you want to be.”

No matter that real transgender people may find such assertions unsettling: they are not you, and you are all that matters to the god of identity politics.

The monster god creates a vacuum into which race his eager demons, like John McDonnell, the real power in the British Labour Party. He sees an army of young people trained to reject bourgeois norms, educated to believe that their opinions are supreme, but doubtful as to the substance from which those opinions should be formed. Could there be a more perfect machine to deliver the violent extra-parliamentary “insurrection” (his word) for which Mr McDonnell so sweatily yearns?

Where is the opposition to this? In his description of the Conservative Party in Coningsby, Disraeli could have been describing the current British government:

A body of individuals totally unequal to the exigencies of the epoch, and indeed unconscious of its real character.

Didn’t you love that “hesitantly” with which Egremont asked the “two nations” question — one to which he already knew the answer? The solution for the centre-Right starts with dropping that hesitancy. Be conscious of the real character of identity politics: the monster god is, before everything, monstrous. Would it kill Conservatives to say so?

Then defend the basis for real liberty: faith in common axioms that define the good life. The strength of this suburban morality is its insistence that you are connected with others; so the opinion that others hold of you matters, and your behaviour should reflect this.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, accepting that we’re not each at the centre of large, empty, self-defined universes is the foundation upon which individuals can achieve true freedom. Only connect — yourself with others; everything else is void.

Lack of ADA causes immunological compromise (“SCID” is “Severe Combined Immunodeficiency”). Children without ADA are unable to combat the sort of minor infections which their peer group can shrug off. Their life expectancy is not good; their experience of life not much better.

In other words, Strimvelis isn’t “just another drug”, though I use the quotation marks for ironic purpose: there’s no such thing as “just another drug”. No medicine — nor any other therapeutic intervention, even those we now take for granted — is anything less than a hymn to human ingenuity, and their development is the scientific equivalent of building St Paul’s Cathedral, or writing Middlemarch, or formulating the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh: a human drama of great adversity, with success by no means guaranteed. Human ingenuity empowered — and human lives saved — by capitalism.

And here I must give a statement of “full disclosure”, which is both absolutely necessary but which will cost me credibility with, I’d guess, at least half the people who read this. But that’s OK; it’s the point of this piece.

Because Strimvelis was co-developed, and licensed for sale, by GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company. And I work for GSK; am a shareholder in GSK; indeed, for a time, managed statisticians who worked directly in support of Strimvelis.

This fact — that I work for “big pharma” — will be sufficient to discredit both my integrity, and my argument, with many readers. No matter that GSK doesn’t review or pre-approve a single word I write (and has recently announced a withdrawal from developing medicines for rare diseases like ADA-SCID): “big pharma” is by definition wicked, because it seeks to make a profit on the back of human misery, profit that it passes to its shareholders.

My politics are at least partially refracted through this capitalist career prism. So when I hear of Jeremy Corbyn’s desire for a “new kind of politics” — words echoed by New Zealand’s new Left-wing Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who this week described capitalism as “a blatant failure” — I don’t just snort with derision (since the “new way of doing things” seems to involve a curious quantity of anti-semitic tropes and twitter-mob bullying.)

Nor do I merely panic about Mr Corbyn’s eager promotion of massive renationalisation programmes, and the deleterious impact this would have on my oh-so-carefully built up pension savings (though I do panic about this, a lot.)

No: my greatest concern is with the fervently anti-capitalist tone of the New Left; that to be dismissive of capitalism — that is, the act of investing one’s money at risk, in the hope that the product developed with that investment will lead to a return — is the new norm, a semiotic short-hand of moral worth.

Capitalism, in the New Left schema, is a “dirty” activity, which good people avoid. Say “capitalist” to most people and their mental image appears to be a swirl of cartoon fat cats, puffing on cigars they’ve lit with a tenner nicked from your pocket, while a righteously-snarling Robert Powell overturns money-lender tables in the background. Way to go Jezza/Jesus!

It’s not a historical surprise that disdain for industry holds sway in a stratum of British society; lofty disapproval of the process by which value is added to materials has been present since the industrial revolution. It is mildly disconcerting to find the party of Labour as the muscular champion of such disapproval.

Now replace “medicine” with any other product you find necessary for the good life: in Venezuela, this now includes “food”.

This is a necessary defence of capitalism, but it’s not sufficient. Because there are too many fat cat spivs making a mint off the back of our misery. To travel from Brighton to London on the privately-owned Southern Railway, for example, is to understand the swing to Labour in the three Brighton seats at the last general election. Brighton’s commuting workers get up pre-dawn to be abused by an expensive train system that wouldn’t pass muster as cattle transport. Yet the train company owners are rich; rich as Croesus; rich beyond your dreams. And you want me to vote for more of this?

The user-experience of capitalism has too often become “the boss class does what it likes; I work another five years to pay off its mistakes.” The banking crisis of 2008 is only the starkest example: in the US, a few dozen bankers were imprisoned. The net total of industrial and political rebalancing in the UK: some guy lost his knighthood. And, er, that’s it. Back to work wage-slaves. Haven’t you got a mortgage to pay?

It doesn’t, to coin a phrase, have to be this way. But neither should the “way” be socialist.

To save capitalism, centre-Right parties must demand its reform, and not only via the mechanism of regulatory oversight. Conservative parties should stoke shareholder activism — should organise such activism: there’s no law of market economics which says that CEO incomes should accelerate so disgustingly far ahead of median corporate wages (and do so, moreover, whether the corporation is run well or not.)

Conservative politicians assumed that the anger expressed at all those marches in London and Washington wasn’t shared by their working- and middle-class electorates. This may well turn out to be the most expensive political mis-diagnosis of the 21st century. The rage of the working man and woman at their user-experience of the current system isn’t wrong; manipulation of that rage, as a tool to deliver socialism, is the psychological perversion.

I don’t want to be metaphorically trite, but our body politic wouldn’t be so open to infection by discredited socialist ideas were it not compromised by a Right-wing incapable of producing a coherent — or even experientially credible — response to the anger which underpins the rise of the Left.

All alone: even when I was a child, I’ve always known there was something to be frightened of … I can see it coming from the edge of the room, creeping in the streetlight. Holding my head in the pale gloom: can you see it coming now?

Florence Welch won’t be happy: not only was one of her songs used at the Tory conference, but the hoo-hah about her displeasure reminded me how much I love her work; so here she is again, being discussed (used) by a Conservative, quite without her consent. 

The opening lines are from Breaking Down, which would have been more appropriate for the conference, perhaps. It’s a song about the terror of losing control; the thin, thin line that separates reason from insanity. It captures me entirely while I listen to it, plucking my psychic awareness loose from its concrete suburban solidity, and tossing it into the eerie, frightening world that Florence describes, and which I find uncomfortably familiar. 

As a teenager I had a conscious discussion with myself: how simple it would be to stop the pretence of normality; give up the Robot Boy act (the carapace designed and worn as protection), and indulge myself in (what I saw as) the weakness of a breakdown. Stop not screaming, I thought, give it up and let go. This unkind world you didn’t ask to inhabit: you don’t owe it the cost of your sanity. 

These thoughts passed (of course) and I imagine are fairly standard for the adolescent. But surely Florence had a similar… experience. Her genius allowed her to transmute the fear (“I can see it coming from the edge of the room”) into a song of great beauty. 

You know the famous scene in Six Degrees of Separation, when Stockard Channing flips the double-sided canvas round and round: chaos/control. Chaos/control. The grip we have on the one depends on our ability to spin the other. 

And that “other”, that creature… “creeping in the streetlight”, as Florence sees it, or manifest as a demon, as Iris Murdoch might suggest, or “just” a psychic artefact, as a psychiatrist would put it, or even a sociological construct of structural inequality: of whatever matter it consists, it is, regardless, quite, quite real. We all have our demons, and spend our lives casting around for angels to save us. 

But some of us turn our back on the very concept (I can quite easily imagine a reader harrumphing at this piece). I would always argue that it’s psychologically unhealthy to ignore the creatures that live at the edge of your consciousness. But the political consequences disturb me as much. 

Whether you notice the demons that stalk your wellbeing is quite independent of how you vote, of course. Demons don’t care whether their targets are Tories or socialists (yes, I give the demons agency. So what?). But perhaps the manner in which we respond to the movement at the corner of our vision, the flicker that’s never quite in focus… perhaps this is Conservatism’s greatest failure. 

I mean our failure to provide an artistic response to the difficulty of being human. Is there — I’m making a theory here, not attempting to prove it — is there some element in the Tory disposition which shies away from any lyrical expression of fear, something which renders our approach to life — including politics — too literal, anti-artistic? Which is to say: inauthentic? 

That we are heartless is our critics’ greatest lie, but it’s a lie which has stuck. Why? My theory is that our empiricism has become too strong, our distrust of imagination too great. That we have prioritised “common sense” over the terrors which haunt human existence. If we insist on the lack of an inner life, how to fight opponents who claim we don’t have one?

Consider the standard Tory response to food banks — what a shame people have to use them; of course there are many reasons for their growth, not all of them negative; the important role for government is to grow the economy and create more jobs. All of that is true, of course, but it’s almost inhuman in its incompleteness. 

But imagine a minister who said this:

“When I was a child, a neighbour died alone and lay, unnoticed, for a fortnight. I’ve never forgotten the guilt I felt when he was finally buried, though I was in no way at fault; my parents couldn’t meet one another’s eyes. In an odd way — forgive me, I know the reasoning isn’t obvious — it’s because of that neighbour that I understand the terror of joblessness. We are all so close to oblivion.” 

That our perceived lack of empathy is a problem for the movement seems incontrovertible. Tories have lost control of the upstream to the extent that there’s barely an artist, an academic, an actor, a playwright, a television producer, a singer, a musician, a novelist who would be willing to stand up and say “I am frightened of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. The Conservatives have a vision for the country that is not only practical, it’s human-shaped.” 

For decades we’ve acted as though this doesn’t matter, that somehow artistic vision and socialism are related expressions of the same subconscious instinct. “Of course, she [an actor or writer of genius] is a terrible lefty.” An infantilising indulgence that can no longer be afforded, not when that entire “terrible lefty” culture is the principal medium in which our fellow citizens swim, breathe, love, and talk about their fear of demons. 

Impossible to push against the tide of an entire culture… and when that culture is intent on promoting, normalising and empowering characters as sinister as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, then the lack of Conservative cultural traction is electorally dangerous. Remember Stockard Channing and the chaos/control canvas: every suburban bourgeois norm we hold dear is now at risk, because you don’t get (support for) stability without admitting the (fear and presence of) chaos. 

Think about what Corbyn wants to do to the country. There is danger lurking, still just out of view, but it’s close. The armour of efficient “common sense”, fervently strapped on in youth, dismissive of the terror that jolts you awake at night, won’t protect you for an instant. The danger creeps closer, closer, closer by the day: can you see it coming now?