Then, on 25 September, residents along 50 miles of that coastline found that their beaches had become a charnel house. Thousands of dead and dying shellfish, their bodies twitching and convulsing, were piled thick on the sand. It was the first of several “die-offs” that left these seas barren and annihilated a centuries-old fishing industry. “Ecosystem wipeout,” Rennie calls it. 

To this day, despite two government inquiries, there is no official explanation for what caused this marine apocalypse. Finlay’s documentary, currently on release in selected cinemas, follows the region’s fishermen as they come to terms with their loss. This tragedy, it turns out, is about much more than crustaceans and lost livelihoods. It is intertwined with themes which have haunted Britain for a decade: the legacy of deindustrialization, the anger of the country’s left behind, and the false hopes offered by the political class. The North East has more neighborhoods classed as highly deprived than any other region in England, with Hartlepool and Middlesbrough ranking among the three most deprived local authorities in the country. 

Hartlepool sits by the mouth of the River Tees, an area that was until the Eighties one of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Teesside had a vast steelmaking industry, as well as power stations, chemical plants and shipbuilding facilities. Steel alone employed 40,000 workers. The rusted hulks of those factories loomed along the coastline where Rennie caught shellfish, painfully obvious symbols of a community in decline. 

Then, in 2021, the demolitions began. The Conservative government had earmarked the Tees estuary for a major redevelopment, to be overseen by the newly created Tees Valley Combined Authority and its Conservative mayor, Ben Houchen. It was to be the country’s first “Freeport”, a launchpad for Brexit Britain that would attract global investors with preferential tax and customs arrangements. By 2023, the government had committed more than £250 million of public funds for the redevelopment. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seeking to appeal to traditional Labour voters who had supported Brexit and then swung behind the Tories to deliver it. In the 2016 referendum, Leave won every borough in Teesside with at least 60% of the vote, and three years later, first-time Conservative voters (including Rennie, his wife and his daughter) had delivered Johnson half of the six Teesside seats.

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The plan was to clear Teesmouth, Europe’s largest brownfield site, to make way for the new development. The board responsible boasted that 10 years’ worth of clean-up work would take place in just two to three years. What the prospectus did not mention was that the old industries had for decades dumped their poisonous by-products into the landscape and the river itself. This symbol of regional rebirth was being built on something akin to the edge of a volcano. 

Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of Finlay’s film. The first government inquiry into the crustacean die-off suggested that the culprit was an algal bloom, an explanation that the fishermen regarded as absurd. They had their own ideas about what caused the disaster. In the days preceding it, a dredging vessel clearing up after a landslip had removed 150,000 tonnes of sediment from the riverbed at Teesmouth, depositing it three miles out at sea. The river estuary is regularly dredged — albeit not on this scale — and the ports authority maintains that the landslip was not caused by the demolitions then taking place. Nonetheless, the fishermen were convinced that dredged material had poisoned the waters, and raised funds to hire their own scientific researchers. 

According to these researchers, the evidence pointed toward pyridine, a chemical which had historically been used by industry at Teesside. They claimed that crabs exposed to pyridine respond similarly to those observed on the beaches; that samples collected by the Environment Agency contained high levels of the substance; and that computer simulations showed a spillage from Teesmouth spreading down the coast much as the die-off had. 

To the fishermen who suddenly found themselves unable to support their families, and the locals whose dogs became sick after walking along the beaches, it appeared that the truth behind their ordeal was being suppressed. Nothing could stand in the way of the totemic Teesside regeneration, a project that would, after all, involve a lot more dredging. Suspicions mounted throughout 2022 as a stench of malfeasance gathered around Houchen’s scheme. Reporting by Richard Brooks at Private Eye and local newspapers pointed to financial irregularities, misuse of public funds, and extraordinary benefits granted to a coterie of private developers around the mayor. In time, these would become allegations of staggering duplicity and graft, leaving the development corporation heavily indebted.

The resentment toward a distant establishment which the Brexit project had harnessed so effectively was now turned against it. “Anywhere else in the country, the government would’ve thrown every resource at this,” Rennie says. “Because we’re the North East, the back hole of the country, we’re just forgotten about.”

The remarkable thing, though, is that while the fishermen’s sense of abandonment is understandable, they were not forgotten about at all. They became an emblem of the government’s betrayal of the people it claimed to represent, eagerly seized upon by critics of Johnson and Brexit. The populists had become the establishment, so their opponents could become populists in turn. In June 2022, the Guardian’s George Monbiot wrote that “with every passing week, it looks more like a cover-up”. He condemned the government inquiry for failing to publish its data and promoted the pyridine hypothesis. Channel 4 took the same course. That autumn, parliament’s environment select committee invited Rennie and the researchers working with the fishermen to make their case. The committee demanded a second, independent inquiry to address the conflicting accounts, but that too was called into question before it had even reported its findings. Critics noted that it was appointed and overseen by government advisors, that some of its members were kept anonymous — to protect their independence — and that it refused to cooperate with the scientists behind the pyridine hypothesis. 

The experts assembled by that second government inquiry later complained that the idea that they — “politically independent scientists from universities, research laboratories and consultancies” — had “colluded on a fictitious report” was “preposterous”. This narrative was, they suggested, being fed by “mistrust in government” and “inaccurate media coverage”. Unfortunately, their reasons for rejecting the pyridine hypothesis were never likely to cut through this atmosphere of suspicion, as they involved technical issues such as the validity of the samples and methods used for testing, and the chemical properties of the pyridine molecule itself. Likewise, though they dismissed the first inquiry’s theory about the algal bloom, their own preferred explanation — that a novel and unique pathogen had killed the crustaceans — did not satisfy anyone as it was entirely hypothetical. 

There are still many question marks around the government’s response to the die-offs, and plenty of reason to think that, as Rennie puts it: “They don’t want to find the truth. They want to do the Freeport the cheapest option they can.” Despite the persistence of the shellfish deaths, the work at Teesmouth was not paused nor were proper samples taken of the riverbed. The government consistently hid behind a lack of evidence without making much effort to gather it. After the second inquiry, Conservative environment minister Thérèse Coffey announced that no further investigation would take place concerning the pathogen mooted as the possible cause. She also insisted that government agencies had received no further reports of die-offs following the initial incident in 2021, which came as news to the Teesside locals who had been submitting such reports regularly.

Nonetheless, the pyridine hypothesis is, in effect, a conspiracy theory. Its popularity probably tells us less about the cause of the disaster than about the paranoia that has penetrated to the heart of British politics in the decade since the Brexit vote. This is the most revealing aspect of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea: try as you might to keep an open mind about the facts of the case, you cannot escape the conviction that these fishermen have been wronged, that they are victims of a system which cares nothing for them. This impression stems from their brutal lack of political agency. Even as the machinery of democracy swings into action behind them, carrying them into parliament itself, their status seems to be little better than that of feudal subjects bringing a petition to their lord’s manor. They cannot navigate the state’s bureaucratic defenses, pause the Teesmouth development, or prevent Houchen being re-elected. They are hostages to historical and ecological forces beyond their control, and ultimately become just another set of protesters waving their placards. 

The image of paralyzed crabs washing ashore symbolizes the impotence of these communities, and their impotence, in turn, has become emblematic of a whole nation’s frustration that nothing, and least of all government, seems to work as it should. Hence the strange situation whereby these left-behind places have, on account of their powerlessness, become the most powerful source of moral legitimacy in British politics. Johnson, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage and Andy Burnham have all presented themselves as answers to the anger of Stan Rennie’s Britain — and their opponents have attacked them, above all, for betraying it. 

Teesside gives a sense of why the promises of politicians have so often turned to disappointment. Burnham’s big idea is to devolve power to local areas, but he is not the first to try this; the Tees Valley Combined Authority was created by the Tories in 2016. The allegations surrounding Houchen’s regime — prompting the government to announce a statutory investigation this month — suggest that far from bringing accountable authority closer to communities, devolution creates opportunities for charismatic local figures to indulge in cronyism far from the spotlight of the Westminster-centric media. None are better placed to play on local grievances than local politicians who can blame their failures on others, as when Houchen claimed that opposition to dredging in the Tees came from “local activists and Labour politicians” attempting a “stitch-up”, because “they’d rather see the area fail than us succeed”.

The crustacean die-offs also raise awkward questions for those who say that the key to British prosperity lies in less regulation and greater executive powers to force through developments opposed by pesky locals. Teesmouth offers a glimpse of what a more Chinese approach to “delivering” actually looks like: even when there is an unexplained ecological catastrophe unfolding, developers will simply plow ahead and vilify critics as the enemies of progress. Much criticism of excessive regulation is justified, but we must acknowledge that Britain’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme fragility and depletion, not least thanks to the effects of historic pollution and mismanagement like that seen at Teesmouth. Putting aside the pyridine hypothesis, the government inquiries into the disaster revealed that numerous toxic substances are entering the sea in alarming quantities. A tragic subplot of Finlay’s film concerns a local seal colony that is sick and emaciated, its pups dying in droves, due to a contaminated food chain. 

Environmentalists are always trying to demonstrate our dependence on the natural world, but nothing I have seen conveys the message more powerfully than the image of fishermen forlornly pulling up one empty net after another. “The pots are barren,” Rennie announces in disgust, wishing they were still full of “all the bonnie stuff we should be seeing all our lives”. Suffering from heart problems and non-alcoholic liver disease, he continues working for the sake of physical activity, burning through his savings in the process. The other fishermen are struggling to sell their boats and telling their sons to find a different trade. More than half of the Hartlepool fleet has gone since 2021.

The existence of this film offers some small consolation for the fishermen’s plight; Finlay says they feel “a huge relief in being seen”. For all the promises directed at places like Teesside in the last decade and more, it seems that this remains a rare feeling.

The controversy raised salient questions about the role of footloose billionaires in British politics. Must they meet some benchmark of commitment to the country before we consider their views? Or is their willingness to leave further evidence that we are not paying enough attention to the needs of business?

Over the past year, Britain has witnessed a succession of wealthy businessmen fuming at the mismanagement of the country and dabbling in politics, often from a position of opulent exile. The chemicals magnate Jim Ratcliffe, another prominent Brexit supporter who moved his tax residency to Monaco in 2020, has not been shy about criticizing his home country. Last month, Ratcliffe declared that Britain was “on the slide”. At one time, he recalled, “we had the greatest empire in the world, we were a great people. We won two world wars.” Today, by contrast, Britain suffers from high taxes, a “green eye towards wealth”, and a failure to control immigration and welfare spending. Above all, Ratcliffe has complained about “ridiculously high” energy prices, which have recently led his company, INEOS, to mothball three chemicals plants in Hull. 

These comments provoked a response from the wealth manager Peter Hargreaves, also a Brexit-backer, who started his company from a bedroom in the Eighties. Hargreaves quipped that Britain “isn’t on a slide, it’s slid… This country is never, ever coming back, it’s finished.”

Meanwhile, it was recently reported that David Reuben, the real estate tycoon who, together with his brother Simon, possesses Britain’s second largest family fortune, relocated to Monaco over the summer. The brothers tend not to comment on politics, but they donated £100,000 to Reform UK this year, having previously given just shy of £1 million to the Tories. This story has since been called into doubt, with evidence that David has already been resident in Monaco for over a decade, but there has been no shortage of super-rich individuals leaving Britain in recent years. Analysis of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index suggests that more than half of the country’s billionaire wealth has moved away since Labour took power in 2024. Hedge fund manager Christopher Rokos, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and shipping tycoon John Fredriksen have all left recently.  

It is naturally somewhat embarrassing for the government that successful businessmen are leaving the country like rats fleeing a sinking ship, in some instances taking hundreds of millions of pounds of annual tax revenues with them. Yes, Britain’s prosperity and public finances depend far more on raising economic productivity than on wealthy individuals, but insofar as a dim view of Britain’s prospects makes such individuals less likely to invest here, the two are not unrelated. Yet the problem of unhappy capitalists is surely priced-in by a Left-wing government, which can to some extent turn it to their own advantage. Look at these self-interested billionaires, they can say (making sure to utter the word billionaire with a sneer), they would rather abandon us than pay their share. 

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By the same token, since many of these truculent expats are either Brexit supporters or Reform and Conservative donors, their interventions pose a problem for the Right. For parties promising to put British people first, it is awkward to be receiving financial and rhetorical support from ultra-wealthy individuals whose commitment to the country often does not extend to actually living here. This reinforces what Janan Ganesh has called a “patriotism problem” on the Right: figures like Nigel Farage claim to love Britain, but have almost nothing positive to say about the country as it actually exists. Then again, that stance is what endears Reform to the section of the electorate that thinks the country is fundamentally broken. For those voters, the fact that billionaires share the same analysis may matter more than their tax residency does. Their decision to leave the country is, after all, a powerful confirmation of the narrative.

A greater contradiction lies in Reform’s attitude to the wealthy in general. Farage, whose career began as a commodities trader in the midst of the Thatcher revolution, speaks proudly about his ability to earn money, and to attract it. His party has received tens of millions of pounds — the largest political donations in British history — from another pair of expat billionaires, the cryptocurrency magnates Ben Delo (until recently a Hong Kong resident) and Christopher Harborne (who has acquired Thai citizenship). Both have now returned to Britain after Labour attempted to block their contributions. Over the summer, Farage defended his monied backers as “men who’ve gone off around the world as entrepreneurs and succeeded — the sort of people we used to admire over centuries”. Yet his party appeals to struggling blue-collar workers and lower middle-class sole traders and small business owners, many of whom feel the deck has been stacked against them and in favor of the rich. Last week, Robert Jenrick criticized the Conservatives’ proposed inheritance tax reforms as “offering handouts to multi-millionaires”.

Wealth, however, may not be as important as we might assume. Dyson is an intriguing figure in this context because he has long argued that Britain’s problems are tied to the character of its elites, who esteem knowledge work and cultural literacy above the hands-on business of technology, invention, entrepreneurship and trade. In 2004, he even stormed out of his post as chairman of London’s Design Museum, complaining that it had become a “style showcase” chasing visitor numbers with frivolous exhibitions about flower-arranging and designer shoes, rather than a place to promote serious engineering.

In many Western countries, there is now a prominent dividing line between, broadly, managerial cultures and entrepreneurial ones. The former are those employees in institutional settings — corporations, the public sector, NGOs, and what Dyson calls an “Oxford-Westminster bubble” — who value credentials, are fond of rules, and assume that the world is shaped by ideas and narratives. By contrast, those of an entrepreneurial persuasion are interested in the material facts of how things actually work, while chafing against rules and prizing innovation and individual ambition. 

Consider the coalition that voted for Donald Trump in 2024. It included people who work in traditional industries involving cars, machinery or oil and gas, as well as those who do business outside of corporate structures, such as family-owned enterprises and venture capitalists. These groups were united in their resentment of a professional managerial class, stereotypically inhabiting a world of yoga studios and DEI policies, which stifled them with regulations and liberal mores. 

The revolt of Britain’s entrepreneurs indicates that a similar tension has emerged here. Terms of opprobrium such as “lanyard class” and “the Blob” try to capture a middle-class, managerial ethos that now runs through the country’s institutions like a stick of rock. Its priority is not how the economic and material underpinnings of modern life operate, but ensuring that they conform to the appropriate standards mandated by equalities law, environmental regulations and progressive cultural etiquette. There is an utter disconnect between this worldview and, for instance, the cowboy capitalism of post-Soviet Russia where the Reuben brothers originally made their fortune trading aluminum, or INEOS factories producing nasty chemicals and spewing out carbon emissions, or disruptive and potentially dodgy technologies such as cryptocurrency.  

The important thing to note about this conflict is that, while it is primarily expressed as a fissure within Britain’s elites, it is fundamentally a question of attitudes and social environment, and can therefore provide the basis of a much wider division. Less privileged staff at managerial institutions are likely to absorb the dominant assumptions of those settings, while people of widely differing means and backgrounds can identify with a message of self-reliance, ambition and scorn for meddling bureaucrats. Seen in these terms, there is a political logic in Reform courting crypto-billionaires, fossil fuel-reliant industries and broader swathes of voters who sympathize with an anti-establishment sentiment. Likewise, there is a logic in parties of the Left treating these things as threats to be resisted. 

The fundamental problem for the Right is that, 10 years on from Brexit, it is no closer to a viable program for the dynamic, free-trading Britain envisioned by its entrepreneurial supporters. That would mean lowering taxes on business and wealth — paid for by welfare cuts — and deregulating everything from planning laws to wages and the financial sector. It would mean, moreover, explaining to the public that they must struggle for survival in a highly competitive global economy, something which only Liz Truss has attempted in recent years, and she only succeeded in making the idea less palatable. British politics has become increasingly insular in recent years, focused on domestic stability and reluctant to compromise with a wider world that appears to be largely a source of insecurity and danger. This suits the Right when it comes to territorial and legal sovereignty, with both the Tories and Reform converging on a platform of tighter borders, withdrawing from international treaties and curbing multiculturalism at home. Yet neither party has found a way to reconcile its business-friendly instincts with a public that still desires a protective state. 

Kemi Badenoch’s new Conservative manifesto, The Right Way, is at least somewhat forthright in its diagnosis, emphasizing the need for Britain to be “competitive” in the conditions it offers to businesses. Yet details are notably scarce when it comes to the goal of reducing strategic dependency on China, a rather large and complex caveat to the statement that “free trade should be the presumption”. More importantly, this return to the Conservatives’ free-market, small-state default, greeted with a profound sigh of relief from what remains of the party faithful, is essentially a concession of electoral defeat. It marks the end of Tory efforts to compete against Labour and Reform in working-class, post-industrial regions.

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But nor has Reform reckoned with the degree of state subsidy that rebuilding British industry in these areas will actually require, or how this can be squared with Farage’s belief that, vis-à-vis Brexit, “we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to deregulate and become more competitive”. The answer, we are told time and again, is that scrapping Net Zero taxes and cutting wasteful government spending will boost industry and the exchequer alike, yet this simple solution belies the complexity of the problem. Even if an anti-establishment coalition spanning billionaires and tradesmen can work electorally, it will soon come under pressure from the conflicting interests and power disparities within it. The prodigious sums donated by Delo and Harborne suggest that a Reform government would likely follow a similar course to the second Trump presidency, beginning with ineffectual support for blue-collar workers before swerving into the warm embrace of global tech capital. 

Strangely, it is Andy Burnham’s Labour Party that looks best placed to capitalize on Britain’s siege mentality. The party’s identification with multiculturalism, and its instinctive support for immigration, has left the residual impression that it is an outward-looking political force. In fact, Labour now trumpets its pride in a diverse Britain while viewing the wider world with a mixture of suspicion and apathy. Burnham is the most domestically-focused prime minister in recent memory. Though his desire to invest in the country’s economic foundations is welcome, his big-state program offers no meaningful role for business or entrepreneurship. Labour has many antagonists — Donald Trump, American tech oligarchs, Russia, Israel — but few real friends. Rejoining the EU is increasingly the limit of its global imagination, and insofar as that vision does not account for the bloc’s own serious economic and political difficulties, it is an imagined one. 

The irony is that Burnham’s comforting insularity is only possible thanks to the degree to which globalization is already part of the grain of British society. This is a country that can afford an expensive commitment to national decarbonization, driving away industrialists like Ratcliffe, because it has resigned itself to dependency on China’s coal-powered factories. It can fund its social expenditures because the markets, even if they charge an ever-greater premium, continue to buy its debt. And it can produce a leader like Burnham because, as the recent scandal at Manchester City FC has reminded us, his municipal fiefdom was regenerated with oil and gas money from Abu Dhabi. 

Clearly, this strange settlement cannot go on forever. The chancellor is preparing for a budget in two weeks where neither borrowing nor taxes can sustainably go much higher, while the need to control runaway welfare spending and ease pressure on businesses is becoming pressing even from a soft-Left perspective. It has been easy to ignore billionaires lamenting Britain’s lack of competitive drive when relying on others has been so easy. That may not be much longer. 

Andy Burnham is something different. Based on the evidence so far, he is a kind of idealist. He is driven by a vague but deeply-held idea of what Britain should be, namely a country defined by a spirit of solidarity and rooted in a strong and protective state. This vision bears the imprint of Burnham’s upbringing in a Northern milieu infused with strong local identities, a prominent tradition of working-class politics, and Catholic notions of social justice. Its aesthetics come from football and the guitar music of the Eighties and Nineties — the last eras when the nation shared broadly the same cultural consciousness. Its highest aspiration, perhaps, is to make community something more than a euphemism for an interest group. 

You can see this romantic and, in its way, rather conservative vision in most of Burnham’s stated priorities, from social care reform and public control of utilities to a defense of pubs as “working-class culture”. Bunrhamism is consistent in its enemies too: privatization, Thatcherism and the bond markets represent the undermining of state and society by the extractive forces of capital.

An idea of Britain is not the same as a credible plan, but it is welcome to see a prime minister who at least seems to grasp that a nation is a social entity held together by bonds of emotion and identity, rather than simply a receptacle for abstract values. Blair’s restless tampering with the constitution, his contempt for nationhood and enthusiastic embrace of globalization, laid the ground for many of our current crises. His managerial successors often seemed to occupy power like CEOs trying to boost a company’s stock price, or officials managing a civil service department. 

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There is, however, a reason that idealism has a bad name in modern politics. It was articulated by the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli during the Renaissance. More than the calculating ruthlessness that his name is associated with, what made Machiavelli a foundational thinker of modernity was his response to a world of dramatic and frightening change. Italy in the early-16th century had become a battleground for competing European powers, plunging the region into chaos. Its leaders had become fatalistic, Machiavelli observed, due to “the great changes and variations, beyond human imagining, which we have experienced and experience every day”. His conclusion was that such upheaval had turned principled leadership into a recipe for failure; what mattered was an ability to infer what the situation demanded. “One who adapts his policy to the times prospers,” he wrote. “One man proceeds with circumspection, another impetuously; one uses violence, another stratagem; one man goes about things patiently, another does the opposite”; and yet, success ultimately depended on “nothing else except the extent to which their methods are or are not suited to the nature of the times”.

The question for Burnham, then, is this: what good is a vision for the country if it takes no account of our historical circumstances? We are living in a Machiavellian moment, a time of “great changes and variations, beyond human imagining”. The immediate challenge is a looming economic crisis, as Trump’s Iran War and wider instability in the Middle East feeds through into surging energy bills, rising inflation and high interest rates. All of this is ramping up the cost of the government’s debt, meaning that six weeks out from John Healey’s first budget, the chancellor faces a struggle just to keep his head above water. 

Meanwhile, the tectonic plates of global politics are shifting around us. The unpredictable and increasingly hostile Trump administration has recently declared support for Irish unification. The EU could soon be upended by a Le Pen victory in France and the ascent of the AfD in Germany, imperiling, among other things, European support for Ukraine. Chinese technology and manufacturing power continues to steadily rewire the global economy. And that is before mentioning the wide range of transformative outcomes that could result from artificial intelligence.  

In other words, Burnham may prefer to focus on homelessness and vocational training, but he does not have that luxury. However compelling his image of Britain may be, his premiership will be defined first and foremost by how he responds to the challenges thrown up by a volatile world. There are already signs that he is floundering. The Treasury has told the Financial Times that Burnham and Healey did not realize how bad the public finances were, as though the subject had not been near the center of attention for the past two years. Last week, in an apparently off-the-cuff remark in the Commons, Burnham recklessly opened the door to another Scottish independence referendum, before rushing to close it again.

The deeper issue is that Burnham’s visions of Britain as it is and Britain as it should be are seemingly impervious to historical change. His judgment that the country has suffered under “40 years of neoliberalism”, implying a political economy that has remained relatively static across decades, is alarmingly imperceptive. Beginning with New Labour’s efforts to re-engineer the Thatcherite settlement for progressive ends, Britain has moved steadily towards a hybrid model in which privatization, the plundering of national assets by foreign investors, and the decimation of government services coexists with an expansive bureaucratic state that seeks to micro-manage the economy through regulation. The second half of the equation matters as much as the first, because the ever-growing expense of regulation, including that introduced by the current Labour government, has left British businesses especially vulnerable to rising costs and higher interest rates, forcing them to cut investment, hire fewer workers and, increasingly, to give up. To give one vivid illustration of these problems, 2025 was the worst year on record for housebuilding in London, with the number of new projects collapsing by 85% in a decade. Since much of Britain’s regulation is inflationary, it is also partly responsible for the government facing higher borrowing costs than comparable nations. 

In fairness to Burnham, his reductive framing of the country’s problems answers a public demand. Suspicious of politicians and beset by insecurity, voters want principled leaders and stories that explain in familiar terms what has gone wrong. As a result, the most successful communicators are those with beliefs that are both sincerely held and inadequate to the realities of the 21st century. 

This does not mean, however, that an idealist is necessarily unsuited to a volatile world. Modern history has been shaped by leaders who have pursued ideological convictions in times of flux. Such figures have a paradoxical power: their rigid commitment to their vision enables them to be flexible in reaching it. Understanding Machiavelli’s insights, they see that they must work with the tools and circumstances at their disposal. They concede that realizing a vision of society will never mean achieving a Platonic ideal, but at best, an ability to guide the process of change in a particular direction. 

Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman of the late-19th century, expressed this idea poetically when he spoke of “hearing God’s footsteps moving through history and walking with him some of the way”. Bismarck himself was probably the ultimate example of this type. Remembered as the master of Realpolitik, he was nonetheless a committed archconservative who worked to secure an old order for a new age. He unified Germany to buttress the power of Prussia, and he introduced universal male suffrage and the first modern welfare state to turn the masses from potential socialists into loyal subjects of the Kaiser. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, no less a doctrinaire Marxist than Vladimir Lenin proved endlessly adaptable in establishing the Soviet Union as the first Communist state. 

The figure in British history who most resembles this model is surely Burnham’s great nemesis: Thatcher. Though now often characterized as a liberal, it is truer to say that she recognized in economic liberalism the means necessary, at her historical juncture, to realize her deeply-held conservative vision of society, one based on personal responsibility, property ownership, and the slashing back of an over-powerful state. As with Bismarck, this meant building a coalition among parts of the working and middle classes, and pursuing a form of populism directed not at elites, but at the institutions of organized labor. 

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These precedents bear the lesson that principles and convictions are of little worth unless coupled with an ability to see beyond one’s own context, recognizing that what appears fixed and inevitable now will soon be revealed as transient. Boldness and risk-taking are indispensable, but can only succeed if they are informed by a clear analysis of history and an instinctive judgment. Burnham has shown some signs of grasping the nature of the challenge: his coup against Starmer was skillfully executed, and while it remains to be seen if No. 10 North is any more than a gimmick, his ambition to loosen himself from Whitehall’s deathly grip is admirable. He has the benefit of a public that has already accepted change in some form is coming, and numerous policy ideas which have been identified by others. These include breaking the 2024 manifesto by raising income tax, so as to begin easing the burden on businesses; means-testing pensions; balancing the renewable energy drive with more domestic oil and gas in the medium-term; and reforming the Bank of England’s role to help with government financing. 

These are merely a few of the avenues that Burnham could pursue towards his idea of Britain. More significant opportunities, and risks, could well emerge from domains that are still rapidly evolving, namely technology and international relations. Since any course he chooses will likely antagonize his party, and will take time to produce results for the electorate, the prime minister will need to keep his vision alive through political theater. Thatcher understood the value of a dramatic confrontation to demonstrate her principles and create sharp dividing lines with her opponents. Similarly, Burnham could seek a public showdown with the investors and creditors involved in the totemic scandal of Thames Water.

History shows that the politicians who orient themselves towards a particular idea of society — even a conservative or a moralistic one — can, with the necessary temperament, end up being more modern than the modernizers, more pragmatic than the managers, and more radical than those who set out to disrupt. Of course, history is also littered with figures — the Jimmy Carters and Jeremy Corbyns of this world — who have justified the common image of the idealist as the polar opposite of the realist. The danger for Burnham is that he owes his power to a likeable caricature he has crafted for the public. His idealism may therefore come to little more than clinging to the simple sentiments that have made him popular, until he is overwhelmed by events.

This demonstration, which took place on Saturday morning, marks a potential turning point in Britain’s anti-migration politics. In the social-media era, the most important aspect of protest is the image it presents to audiences watching elsewhere, and this was a spectacle designed to appear not just intimidating but, more importantly, organized and disciplined. That message was further amplified by the protesters managing to catch the authorities unawares, leaving them free to block a major port without the escort of high-vis police minders that tends to make such events look like futile tantrums.

What followed on Sunday night in Portsmouth was more messy. Another large group of demonstrators, apparently including a contingent of locals, tried to prevent the authorities from moving a newly arrived boatload of Channel migrants inland, leading to chaotic nighttime skirmishes with riot police. But here, too, there was a concerted effort to look organized and even official. Danny Thomas, the activist who appears to have orchestrated both protests, was filmed parlaying with police, making demands and requesting meetings with senior politicians. At one stage, he even read out a statement from a lawyer on a loudspeaker. In both Dover and Portsmouth, the demonstrators ultimately withdrew rather than escalating.

Having caught the country’s attention, Thomas has now burst onto the political scene. He describes his movement, Patriot Platform, as a “Christian patriotic army” which originated in a South London church (one of its slogans is “Christ is King”), and he claims it numbers in the tens of thousands. According to news reports, his previous career involved a number of manual and white-collar jobs, as well as a two-year prison sentence for attempting to kidnap someone at knifepoint over a drugs-related dispute. Besides his Christian awakening, in the past decade Thomas has been an associate of Tommy Robinson and has become a full-time anti-migration activist, traveling to the French coast to deter migrants from crossing.

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The most intriguing aspect of Thomas’s past, though, is his stint as a tank driver in the Royal Hussars. As the Dover protest suggests, he aspires to a quasi-military style of politics, nonviolent but muscular, masculine and regimented. As he told Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf in a public dialogue this week, “we have working-class men… who build the houses that you live in, they build the roads that you drive on”, and now “they’re standing up for their women and children”. Insisting that he had no intention of breaking the law, Thomas theatrically asserted that the goal was to forge a mass-movement which would deliver a political party to power at the next election: “we are building a voting bloc… and that voting bloc will go to the most suitable candidate, and to the most suitable party that is able to bring this country back into order.” He ignores the fact that a patriotic Christian voting bloc sounds very much like the sectarianism which mass-immigration is routinely blamed for.

It remains to be seen whether Thomas really has the authority or the motives he claims, but any degree of professionalization in anti-migration protests will be a significant change. Until now, participation by concerned locals and sympathetic groups such as the Pink Ladies has tended to be overshadowed by aggressive and inebriated men seeking out confrontation with the police. This has suited the Government and other opponents quite well. Their strongest defenses against such demonstrations are social stigma and a police force which tracks down and arrests wrongdoers after the fact. So long as protests are associated with hooligans, coke-heads and petty criminals making a fool of themselves in front of police cameras, their political impact will be limited.

A movement with a semblance of structure could present a more serious challenge, to the state and potentially to British society as well. Protesters backed by a considered legal and public relations strategy will likely be more difficult to contain than those who simply want to express themselves. But, more ominously, a lesson of the 20th century is that disaffected young men find uniforms and institutional discipline rather appealing. In times when manpower mattered more than technology, political movements of Left and Right, and indeed entire nations, organized themselves around the mobilization of men in clubs, unions, and other associations. Dressing up and parading around for a political cause offers a sense of purpose and belonging, something that is hard to come by in an atomized, economically stagnant society like our own.

There is something to Orwell’s notion that this tendency has been less pronounced in England than elsewhere: in response to Mosley’s Blackshirts, the Government in 1936 went as far as banning political uniforms in public, a law that some have suggested should now be used against Thomas’s movement. But the picture looks rather different when you include Ireland. Armed and uniformed supporters of the Irish Unionists marched through English cities in the 1910s, and paramilitaries were, of course, central to the carnage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties. That period of sectarian violence was the precedent that many observers reached for after Saturday’s demonstration in Dover.

The main reason for such chilling comparisons was the protesters’ use of masks and balaclavas, essentially a threat of anarchy in visual form. It is true that large masked crowds have been a feature of Palestine marches for years, and that masked adolescents on e-scooters have become commonplace in British cities since the pandemic. The latter may reflect the influence of drill music and its associations with gang culture, but generally speaking, masks are a natural consequence of the panopticon quality of contemporary society, where identification by the authorities or by online partisans is an ambient threat that can lead to entering a police database or being hounded out of employment. This was the basis on which Thomas defended the use of masks at protests. He will find sympathy from parts of the Right, where there is already a culture of online anonymity, presented as a necessary precaution for dissidents against a woke police state.

None of this changes the fundamentally threatening character of a group of men in masks. Whatever the intention, it is a gesture that communicates a willingness to act beyond the bounds of law and social norms. Given that our faces are our most intimate means of communication, it also signals a rejection of the public sphere as a place of political dialog. It is a sign of how powerful this symbolism is that it instantly created a divide within the broader anti-migration movement, with Nigel Farage and other Reform politicians denouncing the masked protesters in categorical terms. Farage has since gone further and proposed a ban on all face-coverings in public, including religious ones, on the grounds that “in a civilized soci­ety, people should be identifiable in pub­lic”.

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This looks like an obvious way for Reform to draw a clear line between itself and more extreme expressions of anti-migration sentiment, but in fact, a figure like Thomas is a nightmare for the party. To offer him any kind of backing would leave Reform open to the very real risk that his protest movement will unravel into violence and criminality. That would be a stupid bet to make; but not making it will drive Thomas’s supporters towards Reform’s rival on the Right, Restore Britain, whose leader Rupert Lowe has endorsed the masked protests as “perfectly reasonable”. Lowe is targeting a smaller and more radical section of opinion, and so has less to worry about in terms of reputational harm; but his base is already big enough to cause serious electoral damage to Reform.

Another clear winner is Andy Burnham, who has denounced the weekend’s events as “the politics of poison”, and who can now use the specter of fascist mobs to help him lure Left-leaning voters back to the Labour Party. The only way that anti-migration protests are likely to persuade a broader section of the public is through the participation of people who appear ordinary and non-threatening, but it is unlikely that Thomas’s outfit will be any-more attractive to such people than his scrappy predecessors were.

Still, much will depend on how a more organized protest movement, assuming such a thing actually emerges, chooses to act. The most instructive examples come, ironically enough, from Left-wing politics, which has had a far greater impact in terms of direct action in recent years. In one scenario, the migration protests could follow the lead of groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Defend Our Juries, staging provocations that are calculated to polarize the public and thus build pressure on political parties. Another possible outcome is suggested by Antifa in the United States, a movement which exudes chaos and violence to the extent that it is more likely to discredit politicians who fail to distance themselves from it.

Antifa, of course, is no stranger to masks and uniforms, and herein lies the starkest warning about this style of politics. Orwell hated aggressive military displays because he thought they represented the raw enjoyment of power, in the form of a laughable spectacle that one is not allowed to laugh at. But when this tendency seeps into the politics of the street, another danger emerges. Uniforms may suggest a degree of order and discipline, but they are more likely to produce chaos: they invite individuals to submerge their identities in a collective commitment to a cause, a radicalizing process which can rapidly become a conduit for reckless and unpredictable forces to emerge. Thomas thinks he can direct his anonymous foot-soldiers, but once you put men in masks and identical clothing, you have started something that you likely cannot control.

Few would argue that Britain’s social fabric is in a better condition today than it was in 2011. There have been further large-scale outbreaks of violence, like Belfast and Southport, but the spread of petty criminality is arguably as damaging. Consider, for instance, a recent analysis by Forecourt Eye, a security company, of the effects of the spike in fuel costs caused by the Iran war. The report claims that, in the five months since the conflict began, £200,000 worth of petrol and diesel has been stolen from British pumps every day. That figure is almost 50% higher than before the crisis started. No less striking is the variety of the people engaging in this theft. Forecourt owners say that, besides the hardened chancers and the black-marketers filling up jerry cans for resale, the thieves now include all manner of ordinary people, some claiming they can’t afford to pay. “It could be anyone,” a petrol station owner in Birmingham tells The Guardian. “They come right in front of you, because they have no fear.”

Three weeks into Andy Burnham’s premiership, it’s tempting to think that Britain is again settling into a strange kind of equilibrium. The country’s long-term problems continue to fester, but now that we have a prime minister with at least a basic degree of political skill, it already feels like the forces of inertia are reasserting themselves. Labour’s populist challengers appear increasingly unconvincing, and are duly subsiding in the polls. People have almost stopped noticing the boats. Some things will get a little better, others a little worse. There will be occasional hotspots of violent unrest, but no great conflagration. Burnham will keep releasing videos about pub snacks and football. And the country will move slowly, imperceptibly, down the path of managed decline, like a building which has partly collapsed but somehow remains habitable.

This impression is surely complacent. Like the recent epidemics of shoplifting and mobile phone theft, not to mention fly-tipping and fare-dodging on public transport, the sudden spike in fuel larceny raises the specter of an increasingly low-trust society, where a failure to observe basic norms undermines goodwill and turns everyday life into a kind of gauntlet. It also implicates trust in the state, which people are liable to blame for the unaffordability of basic goods as well as the failure to enforce its laws. Even if such trends do not culminate in a 2011-style blowout, they can turn into more gradual cascades. Why follow rules if others don’t? Why act considerately towards strangers if your generosity is rarely repaid?

But petrol-pump raids illustrate another, equally important, reason that a fragile society is unlikely to remain stable. We live in a volatile world, and exogenous shocks such as the Iran war will continue to pile economic strains on these vulnerable bonds linking individuals, society and state.

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Indeed, fuel theft could be seen as part of a much broader pattern of resource-related criminality — spurred by global disorder. In recent years, gangs have turned their attention to, of all things, the production of fake olive oil, meeting a demand created by crop failures and, ultimately, climate change. In 2024, Italian authorities intercepted almost $1 million worth of oil debased with substances such as chlorophyll, which was already being used in dozens of Roman restaurants. As the price of copper has been driven up by technological shifts, meanwhile, stripping, stealing and scavenging has surged around the world. In the UK last year, more than 100 incidents of copper theft from the railway network led to 130,000 minutes of train delays. Similarly, historic spikes in the gold price, a consequence of investors seeking a safe-haven from financial turmoil, have prompted outbreaks of illegal mining everywhere from Ghana to the Amazon.

These developments might lead one to conclude that the law is a weak barrier to the power of economic incentives. Yet history makes a mockery of the idea that criminal behavior can be straightforwardly tied to material factors. During the first half of the 20th century, the average British person was much worse off than today, yet Britain itself was remarkably law-abiding. The prison population of England and Wales hovered around 10,000 throughout the Thirties and Forties, compared with over 85,000 today. The overall crime rate may have nearly doubled during the hardships of the Seventies, but it had also doubled during the economic boom of the Sixties. On the other hand, anyone arguing that the decline of traditional morality was responsible for these negative trends may struggle to explain why most forms of crime have been falling again since the turn of the 21st century.

A study of 1,620 of those arrested during the London riots suggested that a combination of material and social factors were at work. The rioters’ neighborhoods were correlated with resentment towards police, poverty, and ethnic diversity (the authors posit that diverse areas are “less cohesive, and so adults are less able to prevent youth from rioting”). The rise of fuel theft alongside this year’s price hikes, or for that matter the shoplifting boom in the years since Covid, suggests that a similar cocktail of causes are involved in the recent rise of petty criminality. A useful concept here is that of “social crime”: an illegal act which people don’t in practice regard as criminal, or which is seen as a justified form of protest. As the historian and criminologist Clive Emsley noted, such crimes have a long history in Britain, and many involved illegally taking or supplying goods.

In 19th-century Manchester, before the arrival of domestic plumbing, people commonly helped themselves from outdoor taps without paying the requisite fees to the water company. Smuggling, too, could enjoy widespread consent when it circumvented unpopular taxes, such as the duty on tea in the 18th century. In Norfolk, one man sentenced for shooting livestock in 1839 delivered a memorable courtroom diatribe against the establishment of the day, complaining that “to such a state had they brought the poor of this country… that it was impossible for a poor man to live by honest means, and all this was to support big-gutted relieving officers”. (Some on the Right will be pleased to hear that this man was deported — that is, to a penal colony in Australia.)

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The morality of social crime is complex: it depends on the circumstances of the act and the nature of the law being broken. The point is that our sense of what is acceptable often diverges from the letter of the law. It seems that, to some degree, various forms of theft are now becoming social crimes: those committing them do not really think they are doing anything wrong, or have perceived that those around them won’t judge them very harshly for it. This is where the issues of trust and economic pressure meet, for it is the stories that people tell themselves about the unfairness of society which allows them to minimize their actions, and the sense of being hard up which makes those stories more compelling. A classic example is the casual shoplifter who, seeing prices rise, feels that stealing is justified given that the money is just lining the pockets of greedy capitalists anyway. Another is the self-employed person who works off the books because they feel they are taxed too much, and, in any case, the corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Rioting is another phenomenon which has often been assigned to the “social crime” category. Many reports of the 2011 riots emphasize the participants’ shared grievances, such as the account of one rioter in Hackney who said they were “angry about the phone-hacking scandal; angry about the MPs’ expenses scandal; angry about the bank bailouts; angry about police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers”. One policeman recalled many looters citing the Duggan shooting, leading him to wonder why they’d rob an electrical store because the police shot a man.

That’s shadowed by more recent examples. In April, The New York Times hosted a discussion titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”, in which the commentators Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker declared themselves, in Piker’s words, “pro stealing from big corporations”. In case anyone doubted her good intentions, Tolentino added that when she stole from Whole Foods (the term “microlooting” was mooted), she was buying groceries for a mutual-aid group.

One doesn’t need to subscribe to Kant’s categorical imperative to see how such reasoning can go awry. Anti-social behavior justified by the unfairness of the system does little to harm the fat cats. But it does create a depressing atmosphere of cynicism and anomie which undermines the basis of mutual decency in the public realm. In Britain, the Government itself has been guilty of encouraging that cynicism, opportunistically attacking supermarkets and petrol stations for the prices they charge (even though tax makes up a far greater share of fuel costs than forecourt profits do). This is obviously good politics, at least in the short term. At a time when hard-pressed consumers are making the political weather, who wants to stand up for big business? In any case, the populist Right has inconsistencies here too. Reform UK has long made the pacification of “Lawless Britain” one of its central campaign themes, yet the party’s own financial controversies are hardly likely to make the little folk want to play by the rules.

In the end, the problem of petty criminality cannot be fully addressed either by the “broken windows” policing model favored by conservatives — coming down hard on minor infringements that corrode trust — or the liberal alternative of showering love on gangsters and funding youth centers. It is true that paltry legal penalties and nonexistent policing have encouraged the rampant theft of everything from bikes and phones to diesel. But to argue that a harsher state will suffice as a solution is to invite a future where pervasive facial recognition technology merely conceals the evaporation of authority and trust. Conversely, a compassionate approach which treats crime as an expression of victimhood is unlikely to dampen the tendency to think that some law-breaking is morally justified, or indeed politically virtuous.

Economic stress, material scarcity, a loss of cohesion and social trust: these are all part of the problem, and an effective response must account for them. What we are less comfortable acknowledging is that there is also a moral problem here, which requires a moral solution. Perhaps it can begin with a particular idea of pride. We ought to be more willing to find self-worth in a determination that, even if the world around us appears unfair, corrupt or selfish, we will not sink to its level. The source of this pride is not one’s own purity, but commitment to a public realm that depends on trust.

Of course, none of us, least of all me, will ever be flawless in this regard, so there is no use being sanctimonious about it. Yet morality, like social crime, is also a matter of shared attitudes and expectations, and it’s difficult to see how a new civic ethos could be cultivated in the tumultuous Britain of 2026. Robert Tombs writes of the Victorians’ successful campaigns against anti-social behavior that “politicians, churches, charities, trade unions, schools, the police and ordinary people in their neighborhoods co-operated”. These institutions hold even less sway now than they did at the time of the London riots, and social media is hardly famed for its wholesome role models.

In political terms, the pertinent question is how all of this might play out if global events, in combination with our less-than-resilient infrastructure, deliver more shortages and price-increases over the years ahead. There are reasons to think that Britain would handle outright rationing with greater steadfastness than many other countries: consider the acquiescence with authoritarian measures during the pandemic, the popularity of price caps, the ongoing support for egalitarian and welfarist principles. You can already imagine the daily updates from a sober but sensitive Prime Minister Burnham.

Yet the rise of casual crimes like fuel theft makes one wonder if Britain still has the reserves of solidarity that its leaders claim. The more burdensome the sacrifice that people are asked to make, the more widespread free-riding will shred trust in society and the state. Let’s hope we never have to find out how fragile Britain’s equilibrium really is.

We are still in the era of “Take Back Control”, to cite Dominic Cummings’ winning slogan for the Vote Leave campaign. The various iterations of this message have shared a basic, underlying narrative, and it holds that people feel poor, insecure and disenfranchised because, at some point in the past, power that was once accountable and responsive to their desires was bundled up and removed elsewhere, whether to Brussels, the quangocracy or Westminster. The implication is that prosperity and a sense of agency can be mechanistically “returned” to the people by reforming the state. 

This narrative is not wrong, exactly — over time, far too much responsibility has become concentrated in the wrong places — but it is incomplete in ways that will render empty its promises of renewal. It does not reckon with the profound changes to society, and to our own attitudes and expectations, which have accompanied the flight of power to remote institutions. Taking that power back sounds desirable in the abstract; but we ought to ask if Britain is still able to govern itself in a more local fashion, and whether it actually wants to. 

Arguments about taking back power often rely on invocations of history, on the imagined textures and resonances of the past. Burnham’s pitch, delivered last month in the People’s History Museum in Manchester — where else? — is to reverse the legacy of Thatcherism, returning to a postwar golden age of social democracy in which local authorities still resided over powerful industrial cities and built masses of new council housing. This story is as misleading as it is seductive. It is true that Thatcher stripped power away from local government, motivated in part by the resistance to her policies of Labour-controlled councils, most famously the Militant Tendency in Liverpool. Yet by the Seventies, the processes of centralization were already well advanced. The 1945 Labour government had taken the biggest step by nationalizing municipally owned utilities (which Burnham now wants to return to local control), seizing control of key industries and displacing municipal hospitals through the creation of the NHS. 

During the Fifties and Sixties, meanwhile, the Labour leadership concurred with their Conservative opponents that, as the historian J.A. Chandler puts it, “a modern world was not based on neighborhood community but on communities at a distance”, and especially the new opportunities and connections created by mass car ownership, such that “localism was, therefore, becoming irrelevant”. These were some of the factors leading to the 1972 Local Government Act, which removed powers from many towns and cities to a new tier of regional authorities. Before there was Norman Tebbit telling unemployed workers to “get on your bike”, there was Harold Wilson encouraging them to buy a British Leyland car. 

The real golden age of local government came earlier, roughly between the 1870s and the First World War, and it had a very different character. During these decades, the councils of the great industrial cities of the Midlands and the North — not to mention Scottish cities like Glasgow — built what we now think of as the British state. They rolled out elementary education, dug expensive clean water and sewer systems, and bought up gas and electricity grids. They pioneered social housing, laid out parks and operated the first urban transport systems; by 1905, there were 161 municipal tramway services in Britain. And, of course, they invested in magnificent civic architecture: those town halls, law courts, libraries, concert buildings and art galleries, pompously decked out in neoclassical or Gothic splendor, which now present themselves so uncomfortably as symbols of lost greatness. 

If Burnham really wanted to summon a renaissance of local agency and pride, he could have walked down the street from the People’s History Museum and stood in front of the Manchester Town Hall, a grand edifice built during the 1870s, or even the glorious Tootal Buildings, erected two decades later, where he was based as Greater Manchester mayor. The problem is that the councilors, aldermen and mayors who enacted the marvels of the late-Victorian metropolis were not “the People”. They were, rather, the elites of industrial society: magnates, business managers, or partners of white-collar firms, who collected no salaries for their public roles on the grounds that civic leaders should be men of independent means. The archetypal example was Joseph Chamberlain, the energetic mayor of Birmingham and managing director of the West Midlands’ biggest screw manufacturer. Though held up as the father of “municipal socialism”, Chamberlain insisted that governing a town was like running a large business. 

By the early 20th century, local governments controlled half of all state spending in Britain, and raised three quarters of their own budgets (today they account for just a fifth of total spending, or less than a tenth when transfers from central government are deducted). They did this through taxation, but also through long-term loans and the profits of the services they provided. Whitehall was content to take the best policies the town halls came up with and encourage others to adopt them. 

How was it that Victorian capitalists pioneered the municipal model that, according to Burnham, represents the future of socialism? One answer comes from the “civic gospel” preached by nonconformist Protestant ministers such as George Dawson in Birmingham, and by “New Liberals” such as Thomas Hill Green in Oxford, which encouraged those with wealth to commit it to public betterment. Dawson argued that “a great town is a solemn organization through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature”. 

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But there was a good measure of self-interest too; or rather, overlapping interests between successful businessmen and the communities in which they were rooted. Factory owners benefited from cheap municipalized gas and electricity, not to mention a healthier and more educated workforce. Cities were essentially governed as oligarchies. Those grand civic buildings — which, revealingly, were often erected before the medical, sanitary and educational needs of the population had been addressed — operated as gentlemen’s clubs, where networks were maintained and commercial projects developed. 

The lesson here is not that capitalists make the best civic leaders, but that to achieve the kind of ambitious local government that Burnham yearns for, it helps a great deal if material conditions and cultural expectations are aligned in such a way that those with wealth and power wish to invest in their local communities. It helps, for that matter, if ordinary people are inclined to direct their own political energies within local horizons; the triumph of local government coincided with the expansion of the vote, and Britain’s first mass membership political parties emerged in a municipal context. In this era, power was local because loyalties, dependencies and reputations were local.

But the same economic and social forces which brought this world into being also ensured that it would be transitory. Why would an increasingly organized working class be content with oligarchic governance indefinitely? It is true that, during the interwar period, as the old Liberal Party of the industrialists waned, the municipal worldview remained strong in both Labour and the Conservatives. All three parties were on Manchester City Council in the early Thirties, for instance, when another civic landmark, the neoclassical Central Library, went up. But the logic of 20th-century socialism pointed inexorably towards centralized national government as the best vehicle for organizing industry and welfare provision, and this duly arrived in 1945. The religiously inspired philanthropic movements which had done so much to administer essential services likewise found in the growing powers of central government the most effective means towards their goals.  

As for the business elites, they soon outgrew their municipal framework. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, companies were growing and merging to become national entities, encouraged by governments who saw this as the only way for Britain to remain competitive. In the decades after the Second World War, big business transcended national boundaries. Organizations on this scale have little stake in the long-term prosperity of towns and local areas, which they are inclined to view as assets on a spreadsheet. It is now assumed to be the Government’s responsibility to invest in those assets, so as to create an inviting climate for them. 

Not all big businesses are so deracinated, of course. In Stoke-on-Trent, for instance, the Coates family employs thousands of people at their fabulously successful online gambling company, Bet365, while doling out philanthropy to healthcare, hospices and education in the area, to say nothing of John Coates’s ownership of Stoke City Football Club. By and large, though, the role of business in urban regeneration today tends to look more like Burnham’s Manchester. Gone are the stone facades with their columns and ornament, superseded by soaring glass apartment buildings whose rents flow to real-estate companies, private-equity firms and foreign-investment vehicles, the land having been granted for development on hugely advantageous terms. It is, ironically, a very Thatcherite model, and while it may bring economic benefits in terms of further private investment and jobs, it is unlikely to awaken the “growth in every postcode and hope in every heart” that Burnham has so mawkishly pledged. 

But perhaps the greatest blame for the ebbing away of local power and prestige lies with us, the voters and consumers who demand more of it in principle while resolutely ignoring it in practice. Already in the Sixties, surveys showed that people treated local elections as referendums on the national parties. That era saw the spread not just of cars but also of television, technologies that together drew people’s attention and ambition away from their immediate surroundings. Today even national politics and broadcasting seems parochial for the masses mainlining American podcasts and social media through their smartphones. Do people consuming TikToks about Palestine, or X videos about crimes in US cities, really want to spend more time parsing local policy platforms? Would they really want to navigate new layers of service provision and taxes? They might say they want to, arguably they should want to, but they almost certainly don’t. A recent poll found that, after more than a quarter-century of devolution in Wales, almost 70% are wrong or unsure about who has responsibility for policing (Westminster), while a third are unaware that the Welsh government controls health and education. 

The truth is that the over-centralization has taken place in our own minds as much as in the systems we inhabit, for the two are conjoined. The alienation that stems from having our lives arranged by remote, impersonal agencies, whether political, commercial or bureaucratic, is very real. It is a problem that we are forced to live under rules and processes which reflect the values of people who have little in common with us; and it does leave us unbearably impotent when those rules and processes become dysfunctional. But we have already been conditioned by this relationship to power. In politics as in everything else, we have become globalized consumers who expect our preferences to be met by obliging providers with minimal effort on our part. We surrender responsibility, and in return we feel entitled to complain, to nurse resentments, to demand equal treatment and to deny deference to anyone with pretensions to authority. At least until the centralized systems fail entirely. 

One only has to listen to the casual contempt of the average British person talking about “the council” to realize that, were local government given greater powers, it would invite the same resentments as Westminster does today. In these circumstances, the role of mayor is probably the one best suited to our political culture: a largely symbolic figurehead who answers a local desire for recognition, and gives voice to the strange combination of dissatisfaction and entitlement which marks our relationship with central government. It is a role that Burnham was well suited to, unlike the thankless task of devolving power to a body politic which has forgotten how to use it. 

Miliband, of course, occupies a uniquely hated position in the imagination of the British Right, akin to that held by Nigel Farage for the Left. But that is in large part because Miliband has been the most radical and effective minister in Keir Starmer’s otherwise pallid regime. And chances are, if Burnham’s government stands any chance of being as transformative as he has promised, Miliband will be the driving force behind it.

Over the past two years, Miliband has been unmatched in terms of political will and competence at working the levers of power. On two occasions, he fended off efforts by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s powerful chief of staff, to have him reshuffled to another department. Miliband not only persuaded the PM to soak up the criticism of his policies, but extracted large sums from a cautious Treasury to implement his energy revolution. He has overseen hundreds of thousands of solar energy installations, and commissioned hundreds of new wind turbines; he has loaded households and businesses with the costs of rapidly upgrading the electricity grid, and held open the door for Chinese EVs to flood the British market; he has subsidized new nuclear power and sunk money into developing carbon capture technology. It seems the notoriously difficult machinery of Whitehall poses few problems for Miliband.

Now he is reportedly helping Burnham’s team prepare for power. Though Burnham yesterday tried to dampen speculation about his pick for chancellor, his speech illustrated why Miliband is regarded as the favorite. Burnham’s stated goals of a massive social housing buildout, bringing down the costs of essential utilities, bringing those utilities under greater state management, and striving for “equivalent living conditions in all parts of Britain” are all consonant with Miliband’s politics. As for welfare reform, Miliband is likely the only candidate with the legitimacy among Labour MPs and the broader Left to see it through.

Above all, though, there is a yawning gap between Burnham’s pledge of “the biggest change in our lifetimes in the way the country is run” and the very broad, thin brushstrokes of his own political vision. The erstwhile Manchester mayor has so far relied in an almost Trumpian fashion on his supporters to project intellectual coherence onto his own intuitive style of politics. Only Miliband, it would appear, has the temperament, competence and ideas to actually deliver such an epochal shift to the Left.

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Regarding a Miliband chancellorship, a treasury official has warned Burnham that “you might as well be handing your premiership to him”. That may sound emasculating, but it is far from clear that it would be politically damaging. For if Miliband is feared by conservatives, he is also very much admired by progressives. That he struggles to connect with Middle England was made clear by his electoral failure as Labour leader in 2015; but that is where Burnham comes in. Between them, they stand a good chance of making Labour the first choice for voters who are primarily motivated by keeping out Reform UK, something Burnham has already managed in Makerfield. Given the country’s chaotic new electoral landscape, this could be Labour’s surest path to keeping power.

Whatever one thinks of Miliband’s politics — and as Badenoch’s recent comments suggest, his enemies have never quite been able to grasp him, portraying him as both sinister and ridiculous — he evidently has virtues as a politician. They include conviction and tenacity, the traits our current prime minister so conspicuously lacks, as well as a capacity for hard work and attention to detail. He first entered the Treasury in 1997, aged just 27, as an advisor to then-chancellor Gordon Brown. In 2008, when Miliband took charge of the newly formed Department of Energy and Climate Change, he set an eye-wateringly ambitious carbon target after just 13 days in the post, announcing that by midcentury Britain would reduce its emissions by 80% of their 1990 levels. (His elder brother David, the heir-apparent to New Labour who he would infamously deprive of the party leadership in 2010, had previously set a slightly more modest target of 60%.)

In 2009, when prime minister Brown decided to back a third runway at Heathrow, Miliband resisted fiercely, prompting Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood to ask, “why is this new minister holding up the wheels of government like this?” As the baffled Heywood later remarked, when Miliband managed to extract various climate-related concessions from Brown, “this just isn’t supposed to happen”. During his first stint as energy secretary, Miliband created the framework in which policy has developed ever since, including under the Tories. It was Theresa May, after all, who would set the still more ambitious goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050. Add to this the authority of experience which Miliband can claim today, and it’s small wonder that Starmer so often appeared to be in his thrall.

Then there is that most revered of political qualities — ruthlessness. In the grueling 2010 leadership contest, Miliband outmaneuvered not only his brother, the candidate of the party establishment, but also the domineering Ed Balls. (In fourth place out of five was a certain MP for Leigh, Andy Burnham.) For someone who learned his trade in proximity to Gordon Brown’s bitter, years-long struggle to wrestle the leadership from Tony Blair, the unseating of Starmer must have been a tea party.

Needless to say, Miliband also has flaws. Chief among them is a weakness for the feel-good politics of progressive activists and NGOs, which he has been immersed in since he first served as Climate Change secretary and, before that, as minister for the Third Sector. This is a comfort zone of blue-sky thinking and moral crusades, where idealistic academics imagine that the right combination of clever policies and exciting comms will induce the public to hold hands and strive for social justice. This dimension of Miliband’s thinking led to perhaps the most undignified moment of his career: the decision to prostrate himself before Russell Brand on the eve of the 2015 election, hoping that an endorsement from the comedian, then absurdly considered some kind of thought leader, would unlock a mythical youth vote.

Clearly though, Miliband’s ideas are not all vacuous, since much of his 2015 manifesto was subsequently implemented by the Tories, including an energy price cap, a higher minimum wage, stricter regulation of junk food and mandatory gender pay-gap reporting. The fact is that, beneath the Left-wing clichés and wonkish talk of “predistribution”, Miliband has a core insight which has proved basically correct: since the 2008 financial crisis, people have wanted a more active state to shield them from the effects of a globalized market economy. He is just unequipped to sell this message beyond a core of voters on the Left, something which Burnham might prove better at.

If Miliband does indeed become chancellor next month, his vision will probably include a strong element of “mutualism”, giving “ordinary” people a greater role in the running of companies, public services and local government. This has been a longstanding Miliband theme, present in his contributions to the 2010 manifesto through to his 2021 book Go Big, which championed policies like company wage boards and citizens’ assemblies. It is also where Miliband’s thought intersects with Burnham’s flagship idea of devolution. Mutualism has another proponent in Miatta Fahnbulleh, the MP for Peckham who worked with Miliband in the energy department, and who has allegedly become influential in Burnham circles.

But Miliband does, of course, come with big risks. Britain already has a high-regulation, low-growth economy — partly thanks to the kinds of policies that Miliband prefers — with much less financial breathing space than it had a decade ago. Like Rachel Reeves, Miliband would make a big show of committing to fiscal rules and stimulating growth through productive investment. But this may not be enough to placate the debt markets on which the state’s finances depend, and which are already suspicious of Miliband. Growth from capital investment in infrastructure and housing will take time to arrive, especially with Net Zero continuing to bear down on business through high energy costs, and with the further tax increases that will almost certainly be necessary. Financial constraints may end up trapping Miliband in an electoral no-man’s land, unable to deliver the radical policies that voters on the Left crave, while angering everyone else with regulation, taxes and unemployment.

Miliband will also face a dilemma in terms of Britain’s international orientation. The strongest case for his aggressive Net Zero drive is not an environmental one — as critics never cease to point out, Britain accounts for less than 1% of global carbon emissions — but a security one. Renewable energy, along with the electrification of the economy, will hopefully make Britain less vulnerable to the fossil-fuel price shocks that countries such as Russia and Iran have inflicted in recent years. It will reduce the tendency of energy prices to be set by the most expensive producers of natural gas, while ensuring that Britain has a stake in the technologies of the future. The Telegraph’s economics commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, hardly a raging Jacobin, is among those arguing that renewables will see Britain becoming an electricity exporter in a matter of years. But Milibandism has major vulnerabilities of its own.

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The most obvious is defense. Where, among all the spending commitments that would accompany his chancellorship, should Britain find the money to prevent its Armed Forces from sliding further into ruin? Britain’s energy security would be purely notional if its allies no longer considered it worth cooperating with, and if its infrastructure open to attack by hostile states. No less important, Miliband’s economic vision is highly dependent on China, whose cheap exports to Britain, including both Net Zero technologies and other products, are preventing prices from rising as much as they otherwise would. Yet China’s goal is to use its exports to prevent Europe from rebuilding its own industrial base; that is why the EU is increasingly building tariff walls.

This is perhaps the biggest source of potential tension between Miliband and Burnham. The latter has insisted that reindustrializing Britain is crucial for providing good jobs and broad-based growth, and has strongly hinted that protectionism will be necessary to achieve it. That would require Miliband to fundamentally change his strategy, or Burnham to choose a different chancellor.

Who else could it be, though? The fact remains that, if Burnham wants to deliver on his rhetoric of national transformation, his best option is to gamble on Miliband’s experience and determination. For better or worse, a Miliband chancellorship could produce an economic and social shift on a scale comparable to the Thatcherite revolution — and especially if it manages to consolidate the nascent anti-Reform bloc of voters, thereby securing a further five years of power. But the stakes are high, and the implications far-reaching. Labour can only hope that, beneath his platitudinous exterior, Burnham has grasped these realities.

That field now contains around 10,000 terrified migrants from various African countries, living in makeshift tents and hoping to find a safe route out of South Africa. After false rumors claimed that they were being given accommodation rather than deported, the camp last week came under attack from rioters, who had to be dispersed with rubber bullets.

Similar scenes have been unfolding across South Africa, where a grassroots campaign to evict and intimidate illegal immigrants has gathered steam since early May. Displaced foreigners — some of whom say they are in the country legally — have taken to huddling in large groups outside police stations and churches, or hiding in the bush and on remote mountainsides. Homes have been torched and businesses looted. Vigilantes have gone from door to door demanding papers. The protests are loosely fronted by groups such as March and March, led by the former radio presenter Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, and Operation Dudula, which has previously tried to obstruct illegal immigrants from accessing healthcare and schooling. The Zulu activist Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, who has more than 1.5 million Facebook followers, has donned traditional tribal garb to lead large crowds through the street.

The riots have so far left at least two dead — though the Malawian government claims the real number is five — while prompting other African countries, including Nigeria and Ghana, to evacuate hundreds of their citizens. In terms of death and destruction, the current unrest has yet to match some earlier waves of anti-immigrant violence, which have erupted periodically since 2008. Ominously, though, the vigilantes have declared a 30 June deadline for illegal migrants to leave South Africa. What they will do after that date is unclear.

In the past, Britain could look at such events with detached incomprehension, but it no longer has that luxury, given the incipient unraveling of its own multicultural regime. The riots in Belfast, where a Sudanese asylum seeker stands accused of a brutal knife attack, came on the heels of a furious response to the police’s handling of Henry Nowak’s murder by a young Sikh man, and against a backdrop of violent intimidation of British Muslims. Notwithstanding Andy Burnham’s opportunity to change the country’s mood following his victory in Makerfield — that mood became notably worse, after all, with the beginning of Keir Starmer’s ill-fated leadership in the summer of 2024 — there is a grim sense that it is only a matter of time until the next inciting incident turns the ratchet of civil strife a notch further.

Three years ago, when I argued in UnHerd that Britain was beginning to resemble South Africa in its institutional dysfunction and loss of social trust, I made an exception for ethnic tensions. “One only has to look at the frequent anti-immigrant pogroms in South African townships to see that, for all the anxieties over integration, British society remains a relative picture of harmony,” I wrote. Depressingly, the distinction no longer seems as obvious as it did.

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Commentary and debate surrounding the unrest in South Africa — which are generally described as “xenophobic” or “Afrophobic”, in light of the protestors and their targets both coming from black communities — has been uncannily similar to the recent discourse in Britain. In a speech on 7 June, president Cyril Ramaphosa attempted to walk the same tightrope as mainstream Labour and Conservative politicians in Britain, signaling attentiveness to popular grievances over immigration and crime, while portraying the aggressive expression of those grievances as alien to the nation’s values. Ramaphosa spoke of the “legitimate concerns” of South Africans being hijacked by “forces” seeking to “further their own personal, political, or criminal agendas”; he denounced “social media campaigns that spread misinformation, fake news and lies”; he emphasized the country’s legal obligations to refugees, and stated that immigration “is the reason for our diversity and contributes to our vibrancy”. At the same time, he announced measures to crack down on illegal migration and the illegal employment of migrant workers.

Ramaphosa has to attempt this balance because in South Africa, as in Britain, populist movements have sought to harness anti-immigration sentiments as a way of peeling off support from his African National Congress (ANC) party. With municipal elections taking place later this year, uMkhonto we Sizwe, the breakaway party led by former ANC president Jacob Zuma, and Action SA, a Johannesburg-based party that supports mass deportations, have both expressed sympathy for the protesters. Their relationship between these parties and the groups orchestrating the protests is opaque, but a source familiar with the political landscape in South Africa tells me that they are widely believed to be “connected somehow”. On the ground, meanwhile, interviews with anti-immigrant protesters in South Africa produce similar responses as those with disgruntled Brits on the high streets of market towns. They talk about pressure on public services and housing, a lack of jobs, and crime.

Obviously the differences between Britain and South Africa remain vast, and immigration is no exception. Most South Africans live with a degree of poverty still unknown to Britain, and the conditions in which they must accommodate newcomers — who come from still poorer countries — are therefore totally different. Migrants survive as entrepreneurs running small businesses in townships, often quite successfully, or meet a prolific demand for cheap labor in hospitality, domestic work, and agriculture. One farmer tells me that he fears losing his entire workforce due to the current protests. Anti-immigrant pogroms take place in the context of a society that is violent in general. Contacting a local politician in the Western Cape for his views on the recent unrest, I received an apologetic voice note explaining that he was busy because “one of our councillors has just been shot”.

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And yet, the scale of migration into South Africa has been far smaller than in Britain and other Western European countries. Whereas the latter have foreign-born populations comprising about 20% of the total, in South Africa the estimates are typically 4-5%, though the true scale of illegal immigration is difficult to assess.

These discrepancies make the similarities between the two countries all the more striking, and potentially instructive. Most obviously, the failure of the state to control or even to know who is crossing its borders has proven, in both cases, a uniquely potent source of anger and injustice. In South Africa, as with Britain’s Channel crossings, the governing classes have judged the management of an unwieldy border to be impractical as well as undesirable on ideological grounds, with the principles of Ubuntu, or solidarity and fraternity, playing a similar role in the South African context as the ethos of universal human rights in the British one. Just as protesters in Johannesburg and Durban demand adherence to proper legal processes and documentation, invoking the state’s duty to the safety of its citizens, so the British public consistently express far greater anxieties over the asylum system than over legal immigration.

But the problem of disorder goes beyond the border. In South Africa, fears over migration are amplified by endemic corruption — beginning with the routine bribery of officials for visas — which makes the country a magnet for unsavory characters and fosters a general sense of vulnerability to opportunistic outsiders. The same is increasingly true of Britain, even if straightforward corruption is less of an issue here than incompetence. Immigration and multiculturalism have become associated with a multitude of institutional failures, from two-tier justice and bogus asylum claims to universities operating as visa factories and the conquest of high streets by financially suspect vape shops and Turkish barbers. Such trends are bound to make people sensitive to evidence of migrant criminality, though it seems that this is not simply a problem of perception: even the Guardian has suggested that asylum seekers are likely commit crimes at a higher rate.

Moreover, despite their economic differences, both South Africa and Britain have used foreign labor to compensate for their failure to educate and train their own citizens adequately, and both have maintained porous borders at a time of economic stagnation and high unemployment. The upshot is large numbers of newcomers arriving in societies whose outlook is colored by economic insecurity, and by the stress of competing for scarce resources and opportunities.

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To be sure, the situation in South Africa is worse. Education outcomes are poor even by African standards, and more than a third of young people are NEETs — not in education, employment or training. Rigid labor market laws have made it more attractive to hire illegal workers, who, besides being often better educated and having a work ethic born of desperation, cannot summon the authorities to investigate their employer. South Africans are therefore much more likely than British people to say that immigrants are taking jobs that they could and should be doing. But the situation in Britain is not good, either: 13.5% of 16-25-year-olds — more than a million people — are NEETs, and almost the entire increase in employment among young people since 2020 is accounted for by foreign nationals. Recent polling suggests that, as well as a majority of Brits being concerned about the impact on housing, a significant plurality sees immigration as having a negative economic impact, and thinks the numbers coming to work are too high.

Perhaps the most revealing parallel, though, concerns the loss of faith in established political parties. The ANC earned immense loyalty for leading South Africa’s black majority to freedom, but not infinite loyalty. The party’s loss of its absolute majority in 2024 came after a 30-year reign when it indulged in corruption and personal enrichment while failing to lift anything like a critical mass of South Africans out of poverty. Like most political movements, the ANC also has ideological commitments which clash with the views and interests of its voter base. The party’s commitment to Ubuntu, manifest in its reluctance to tighten its borders with other African states, stems from the historic connection of the anti-apartheid struggle with an ethos of pan-African solidarity. On taking power in 1994, the ANC welcomed refugees to South Africa. Over time, immigration has therefore presented populist parties with a wedge to drive between the ANC and some of its traditional supporters.

This story bears a more than passing resemblance to the decline of Britain’s two main parties, and especially to the post-Blair Labour Party’s estrangement from its traditional working-class base. We’ve become so accustomed to Labour as a party of progressive graduates, public-sector workers and minorities that we sometimes forget its purpose through most of its existence was to lead Britain’s workers in their struggle against the power of capital. The Party’s attitudes to mass-migration and multiculturalism show its evolution from a working-class liberation movement to a liberal cosmopolitan one, pushing a bloc of formerly loyal voters to the Right. In terms of voting patterns and geography, the party of the old working class is now Reform UK.

The untethering of political culture from its traditional party institutions, both Labour and Conservative, has helped to lead Britain to its current precipice, where further violent unrest seems increasingly plausible. As the authority of those institutions has waned, it has created space not so much for a politics driven by populists, but an anarchic and volatile form of mob rule, in which would-be figureheads seek to outbid one another for the attention of utterly disillusioned and frustrated audiences. The main mechanism, in Britain as in South Africa and indeed elsewhere, is of course social media. Yes, it is foolish to pretend that anger over immigration and related issues is simply an artefact of online misinformation and incitement; but it is equally foolish to ignore the role of social media in bringing that anger to a pitch where violence is tacitly accepted as inevitable, or even secretly welcomed.

In this context, recent events in South Africa are most salient not as a parallel, but as a warning. If political violence and vigilantism cross the threshold of normality, British society will be irrevocably changed.

Yet this milestone comes with a bitter note. It is an achievement to have finished Gaudí’s great church, but we surely could not come up with anything like this today. It is simultaneously a work of soaring artistic ambition and a monument to the powers of mystical inspiration, neither of which seem very abundant in our banal and unimaginative culture. Commenting on the challenge that Gaudí poses to the blandness of modern architecture, the designer Thomas Heatherwick said that his own plan to put a “slight curve” along the top of a window caused a colleague to remark, “Wow, you’re brave”. The Sagrada Família is the antithesis to comfortable mediocrity, to the fleeting trend, and to algorithmic thinking. In November, Lego will release a 12,000-piece model of the church, its largest ever set. This is a charming tribute in its own way, but together with the rising numbers of “Afols” — adult fans of Lego — it makes for an unfortunate symbol of the meagerness of our cultural aspirations by comparison with those of the original. 

What inspired the Sagrada Família, and what animates its every detail, is the intense spiritual devotion of its designer: to the Catholic faith, to the project of Catalan nationalism, and to the vocation of architecture. In the panoply of houses, churches, parks, and pavilions that Gaudí designed, these convictions provide a framework for an inexhaustible individuality. There are living artists of passion and profundity, but to behold Gaudí’s creations at large in Barcelona is to realize the extent to which we have cordoned-off genuine artistic and spiritual expression from the daily round of life, much as we confine sickness to hospitals.  

During the Sixties, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur described the ambivalent effects of what he called “the phenomenon of universalisation”. For all that the world has benefited from the spread of science, technology, and modern forms of governance and commerce, the cost has been a “subtle destruction” of the “creative nucleus of great civilisations and great cultures”. Throughout the world, Ricoeur observed, “one finds the same bad movie, the same slot machines, the same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda”, such that “it seems as if mankind, by approaching en masse a basic consumer culture, were also stopped en masse at a subcultural level”. The implied contrast is between cultures of the past, which had depth and distinctiveness, and those of a homogenous modernity; but the tantalizing prospect manifest in Gaudí is of a civilization that is both modern and rich in beauty and myth. 

The irony of Gaudí’s legacy is that his genius is exalted by a world he would have abhorred. He was, at least from the midpoint of his life, every bit the otherworldly eccentric that one hopes a great artist to be: deeply conservative in his views (though defiant against the rule of Catalonia from Madrid), exuberantly original in his work, stubborn and fanatical in his temperament. He became so obsessed with self-denial and mortification that his physical comforts amounted to, as one biographer puts it, “sleeping in a cot with the windows open and eating nuts and lettuce dipped in milk”. During Lent in 1894, in the midst of a spiritual crisis, he fasted almost to death. When he was fatally injured by a tram in 1926, his bedraggled appearance led to him being mistaken for a tramp and taken to a pauper’s hospital. He died there after refusing to be transferred to a private clinic. 

Yet Gaudí’s buildings, reduced like Nefertiti or the Mona Lisa to the status of t-shirt and keyring-fodder, have helped to turn the city he saw as the sacred heart of the Catalan nation into a tourist trap. The Sagrada Família, initially funded by the donations of the devout, was brought to completion with the revenues of the tourist industry. 

Gaudí’s popularity shows that there is no shortage of people capable of appreciating great art; but that appreciation takes place within a culture of mass consumption which struggles to support creative expression of such richness and nonconformity. However deeply we feel the power of his work, as soon as we turn away we are back in a cultural universe centered on TikTok. Mark Burry, an architect who has been central to the completion of the Sagrada Família, has argued that Gaudí’s supple organic shapes anticipate Parametricism, a 21st-century computer-based school of architecture whose most famous practitioner was Zaha Hadid. It is a revealing parallel. Impressive though they are, Hadid’s buildings are pure spectacle and ambiance, anonymous expressions of engineering prowess to be plopped anywhere that can afford them. They possess none of the personality or conviction which radiates from Gaudí’s work. 

Gaudí’s career offers some clues as to the sources of our predicament. One is patronage. Many of Gaudí’s greatest achievements — such as the Casa Batlló and the Casa Milà, houses of stunning boldness built in the early 20th century — were funded by the Catalan bourgeoisie with the proceeds of the region’s buoyant industrial capitalism. Of special importance was Gaudí’s relationship with the textile magnate Eusebi Güell, who discovered the architect as a young man and bankrolled him lavishly over a period of 40 years. Back then, great art was provided for by great inequality; so why have the enormous fortunes of our era not yielded such fruit? 

The answer is that, as during the Italian Renaissance, a climate of patriotism and civic pride in Gaudí’s Barcelona motivated the wealthy to channel their craving for status into the Renaixença, a movement for Catalan rebirth. The super rich today, by contrast, tend to conceive of themselves as a caste apart, floating free from any particular context aboard their exquisitely designed yachts, seeking recognition largely from one another. They pour money into corporate architecture for elite institutions, or, at the behest of professional advisors, into a closeted art world which has come to function as another source of financial assets. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that they do not venture further: those who have committed themselves to public life, such as Donald Trump or Elon Musk, do so as proud philistines, purveyors of kitsch hotels and anime memes. 

Patronage is partly responsible for another important aspect of Gaudí’s career: he had time and space to mature. By contrast with most of those who enter the cultural arena today, he did not experience a crushing pressure to be constantly relevant, up-to-date, and engaging with the world. No one demanded that he have a personal story to sell. In fact, he wrote down scarcely anything at all, and since he lived for most of his adult life with only his father and his niece, most of the words attributed to him are hearsay. His mature work is incredibly daring, even shocking, but it is not mere novelty or gesture. Instead, it is the product of a long gestation in which Gaudí consolidated various influences into a unique style. Tracing his development, you can see him experiment with Neo-Gothic, baroque, Art Nouveau, and the Mudéjar style of Islamic craftsmen in Spain. Since he was working on the Sagrada Família for most of his career, all of these elements are present in that church, synthesized under the guiding principle of his aesthetics: reverence for a natural world in which there is a bounty of colors and forms, but no straight lines or right-angles. 

In this way, Gaudí demonstrates the irreplaceable value of unmediated human skill. Growing up in a family of copper-smiths, and coming under the early influence of the English Arts and Crafts movement, Gaudí marked his architecture with a close attention to materials, craftsmanship, and experimental modeling. Much of the lavish detail in his works owes to the artisans who provided their tiles, masonry, stained-glass windows, carpentry and ironwork, the latter being most wonderfully manifest in the seaweed-like balcony railings at the Casa Milà. 

Today, however, I hear from design teachers that students have become “material agnostic”: accustomed to working with software, the physical and aesthetic qualities of materials are an afterthought. Even if it is possible to replicate Gaudí’s arches and vaults with engineering programs today, the hours which he and his team spent painstakingly modeling these structures were an indispensable part of their creative development. The uniqueness of Gaudi’s buildings reflects his improvisational approach, starting out with a rough idea and working through problems as they arose. 

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Of course, we cannot reduce Gaudí’s achievements to these practical factors, as though creating the conditions for artistic genius were itself an engineering problem. There is a deeper cultural dimension. Gaudí lived and worked at a time of radical feeling in Europe, taking radical in its true sense of being concerned with roots. It is no coincidence that so much of the modern culture we call great came from the century after 1850, whether it be the novels of Dostoyevsky and Joyce, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Freud, the poetry of Eliot and Yeats, or the paintings of Monet and Picasso. This was an age when the foundations of modern society and culture were being contested: a time of class warfare, of national independence struggles, of religion’s rearguard battle against secularism, and of philosophical reckoning with the pillars of Western thought going back to Athens and Jerusalem. This sense of playing for the highest stakes — of determining what the character of the modern world could be — generated nuclear levels of cultural energy on which the arts thrived. 

For all its personal and regional distinctiveness, Gaudí’s architecture resonates with this time of conflict. He was a partisan in a battle for the future of Catalonia, taking the side of a mystical, Catholic reaction against the rise of liberalism and a workers’ movement inspired by anti-clerical anarchism. This was more than a culture war. The village he helped to design for Eusebi Güell’s factory workers, featuring a church crypt that is one of his most impressive works, was part of a project to relocate the business away from the dangers of insurrection in Barcelona. When that insurrection duly came during the “tragic week” of 1909, the rebels dumped the corpses of disinterred nuns outside the gates of Güell’s mansion, also designed by Gaudí. It tends to be discreetly overlooked today, but the Sagrada Família was conceived as an expiatory temple; that is, an offering to God to atone for the sins of modern Barcelona. 

We too think of ourselves as living at a time of radicalism, and there is no denying the strength of feeling that bubbles away in our societies today. Yet the “universalization” which Ricoeur diagnosed remains in place: the circuits of money, commodities and media continue to exert their flattening pressure on the world’s cultures, even as the human interactions they encompass become more fractious. Given the horrors that unfolded in the 20th century, we shouldn’t rush to restart conflicts that penetrate to the very roots of our world. But we probably won’t see the likes of Gaudí again.  

On defense, Starmer’s chutzpah has been staggering. He has burnished his image as a determined and principled leader, while doing very little to reverse the perilous decline of the armed forces. Like his Conservative predecessors, he has promised generous military support to Ukraine. He has demanded that Nato gird itself for a possible conflict with Russia, and since the start of the United States’ unpopular war in Iran, he has distanced himself from Britain’s most important ally. All of this might be commendable if it was backed up by action to improve British security and resilience, but it has not been. With the Treasury mismanaging an ailing economy and unwilling to cut costs elsewhere, it is unclear whether Starmer will even manage his target of spending 2.5% of GDP on defense by next year, equivalent to about a quarter of total welfare spending.

The condition of Britain’s armed forces is frankly terrifying. In March, when Cyprus came under attack from Iranian drones, the Royal Navy could summon just one destroyer to defend the island. It took three weeks to get there and immediately had to enter port for repairs. Despite much of the fleet approaching the end of its service, shipbuilding plans will likely be delayed to cut costs. The British Army still relies on tanks from the Nineties and armored vehicles from the Eighties. It is so short of equipment, weapons and munitions that General Richard Barrons, one of the authors of last year’s Strategic Defense Review, has said that it could only hope to “seize a small market town on a good day”. Various crucial capabilities can only be used with American sign-off. And this is before we reckon with the revolution in military technologies that is now underway, demanding much greater use of complex software systems, high-tech equipment and unmanned platforms such as drones.

The size of the defense budget is not, however, the only thing that matters here. In public discussion, a fixation with headline sums has crowded out the question of whether the money is well spent. The often unspoken issue haunting these debates is the Ministry of Defense’s procurement system, which has a less than stellar record of delivering equipment, and shows few signs of adapting to a fast-changing world. In 2023, a parliamentary committee described it as “highly bureaucratic, overly stratified, far too ponderous, with an inconsistent approach to safety, very poor accountability and a culture which appears institutionally averse to individual responsibility”. This system operates within a defense industry that is dominated by a small number of large, often foreign firms, known as “primes”, which win the lion’s share of government contracts, while controlling the supply chains in which smaller companies must serve as sub-contractors.

The results paint their own picture. Most notoriously, the MoD’s £6.3 billion program to develop the Ajax armored vehicle is running 10 years behind schedule, having repeatedly injured its crews during trials. The US-based company responsible for Ajax, General Dynamics, was nonetheless given a £330 million contract in 2016 to deliver a new tactical communications system, and that too has been mired in delays. Another big firm, Babcock, has come under scrutiny for its maintenance of Britain’s nuclear submarines. In one instance, broken bolts inside a reactor were found to have been reassembled with glue. Meanwhile, Britain’s drone capability, likely a central plank of any future force, remains small, beset by technical failures, and dependent on Chinese components. In 2021, the National Audit Office found that the delays forecast on 13 different programs came to a total of 254 months.

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One man who is clear about the scale of this challenge is Rob Harper, founder of Rowden Technologies, a British engineering company that specializes in information systems for the battlefield and other “edge” environments. I spoke to Harper at a nondescript industrial park on the northern edge of Bristol, where Rowden is headquartered. “I believe very strongly that the golden thread in so many challenges we face is that they are cultural,” the 38-year-old tells me. He is friendly but forceful, clad in Caterpillar-style boots with jeans and a fleece jacket. Chief among the cultural problems he has in mind is risk aversion, across both the public and private sectors: “so that’s entrepreneurs, founders, management teams, and it’s the people buying [for the armed forces],” he says. “We have very clear demand signals for the need for change, and we’re looking at an industrial base and a public sector who culturally aren’t necessarily ready for that. That underpins everything.”

Founded in 2017, Rowden works on the new cutting-edge of warfare, where the battlefield is permeated with sensors, autonomous systems and streams of data. Military equipment must run on software which can be updated constantly and linked together with networks relaying information from satellites. Rowden has won contracts from the MoD, and last month received £25 million for the National Wealth Fund to help with its ambitious expansion plans. At first glance, its spacious and immaculate facilities could belong to any tech company, were it not for the odd detail like a military manikin loaded with radio equipment. I am allowed to inspect a small black box sitting half-assembled on a workbench, its insides a maze of circuitry. This is a decoy device, which emits radio frequencies to confuse an enemy about the location of military assets.

Deeper inside the building, I step into a small room known as a semi-anechoic chamber, where pure signals are recorded to train AI systems. It is lined on every side by hundreds of carbon-tipped foam pyramids to soak up background noise. I am told that if you stand alone in here, you can hear your heart beating.

Rowden is seeking to disrupt the top-heavy structure of the defense industry, which Harper argues has produced too much tolerance for failure. In the MoD, the familiarity and procedural comfort of working with the big prime contractors has meant that they continue to win tenders even if their track record is poor. More importantly, an unwillingness to break with this model is preventing Britain from scaling up homegrown companies and developing new technological tools. Harper says he reached his conclusions after seeing the procurement system from a range of perspectives. He joined the military at 16, and served as a radio operator in the Airborne Forces, getting to know the equipment by “jumping out of a plane with it”. He then worked on acquiring communications equipment for the armed forces, before a stint in defense economics where he modeled big military programs. Realizing there were “weaknesses in the industrial base”, he started Rowden to fill the gap.

Harper is careful not to be cavalier in blaming the civil service for those weaknesses. “It’s easy to bash the system,” he says. He points to Rowden’s success in landing substantial government contracts, including work on the army’s Asgard digital-targeting network, to argue that the growing role of tech is already creating opportunities for new companies if they are willing to step up their own investment. Still, he describes the MoD as an “immune system” that instinctively rejects change, is suspicious of ambition and success, and looks down on people who lack the appropriate rank and length of service, not to mention accent and style of dress. He has apparently been asked “who runs the company?”, as though it could not possibly be a non-officer from the West Country such as him.

Elsewhere in the world, military innovation is being driven, in part, by new players tapping into growing defense budgets and a boom in private investment. In the United States, the rebranded Department of War is acquiring more of its high-tech equipment from “neo-primes” — companies which are young but also very large — such as Anduril, Palantir and Space-X, while creating additional room for start-ups in the procurement system. Besides the computing and weaponry, the Pentagon looks to such upstarts for speed and efficiency in delivering contracts. Europe has been nurturing its own crop of defense tech champions, led by Helsing, a software company turned drone-maker.

Britain has scored some successes too. Kraken, founded in 2020 by a speedboat racing engineer, now designs uncrewed vessels which can be deployed at sea for reconnaissance, transport, or kamikaze attack missions. It has already gained a presence in the US and continental Europe thanks to partnerships with major firms there. By and large though, Britain is best-known as a hunting ground for foreign companies to poach AI talent and promising start-ups. Meanwhile, parliament’s defense committee reported that, as of 2021, just 10 of the MoD’s 23 largest defense contractors were domiciled in the UK, and average British ownership across these companies was only 18%.

Harper is not alone in thinking that excessive caution and inertia is leaving the MoD flat-footed. According to one civil servant with experience of defense procurement, who asked to remain anonymous, “timelines are so long that we only seem capable of procuring things we needed 20 years ago”. Noting that “risk appetite is functionally zero”, she pins much of blame, ironically, on rigorous standards around spending taxpayer money, as well as an “obsession with being absolutely scrupulous and fair”. The MoD tries to treat every tender application on its merits. In theory, this should keep the field open to new entrants, but it also means that firms with a record of failure will keep being considered for new contracts. And if they are big firms with multiple revenue streams, they have a good chance of success, since the process takes longer than smaller competitors can afford to wait.

My source emphasizes that “we get amazing value for money” on many contracts. But this is thanks to an “algorithmic” approach which rules out explorative, trial-and-error development of new capabilities. That would require civil service managers to have the discretion to start funding a program without knowing exactly how much it could ultimately cost.

There are some big-ticket capabilities which only the big prime contractors can provide. In February 2024, for instance, the MoD invited bidders for a new medium-lift helicopter contract, but by September of that year there was only one left: Leonardo UK, the British arm of an Italian multinational. Leonardo then lobbied the Government privately and publicly to close the deal, backed-up by the Labour-affiliated Unite Union, warning that 3,000 jobs at its Somerset factory were on the line. A £1 billion contract was agreed this March. Clearly, such companies have enormous bargaining power. As John McDonald, co-founder of new defense tech start-up Blackmoor, puts it to me: “It’s not like you can go out to some promising young company and ask them to build you a helicopter.”

Macdonald, who previously gained an insight into procurement via think-tank work, also acknowledges that primes are not necessarily less innovative than start-ups, and that they are often best placed to integrate smaller companies into a program. But he agrees that primes are also favored because they appear less risky. Rather than go through extensive approval processes to fund less familiar companies, the preferred solution is to  “go to a big prime and ask, just sort this all out, we’ll leave all the subcontracting to you, and we’ll pay you a lot of money to get the whole thing done”. Then, when these mega-contracts start to go wrong, the lack of accountability within the MoD means that no-one has the authority to pull the plug.

The MoD insists that it is trying to help new entrants bid for contracts. Its recent strategy documents include various pledges to work more closely with small and medium enterprises. The people I spoke to, however, say that these efforts have so far been patchy and noncommittal, stringing companies along without any guarantees of substantial work. Politicians bear much of the blame here: the delays to the Defense Investment Plan have left both prime contractors and civil servants uncertain of the funds they have available.

Everyone agrees that the system needs greater accountability, but clearly it needs greater freedom too, in terms of providing attention and resources for ideas with potential, even if not all succeed. A number of people told me that the MoD could harness innovation by simply sharing the problems it wants to solve, along with a budget, and then seeing what proposals it gets. As for the problem with timelines, an AI consultant tells me that rather than having civil servants trawl through the dense and interminable paperwork involved in defense tenders, much of this processing could be done rapidly by new agentic software.

As things stand, ambitious British start-ups have an incentive to relocate overseas, and especially to the United States, where they can find the investment to scale. Skycutter, a very promising drone maker, recently warned that it will take this option due to the sluggish funding in Britain. It seems that, just as there is no-one to take responsibility for axing a disastrous program like Ajax, nor is there anyone to seize new opportunities when they fall into the MoD’s lap. Still more potential is lost by talented individuals avoiding defense altogether. According to Macdonald, “if you’re a repeat founder, or you’ve got engineering expertise, defense is a nightmare. What we’ve seen in the UK is most people with the requisite skill sets will go into AI and robotics, where the market is far greater. The venture money is also greater.” Harper argues that there is risk aversion in the private sector, but for many companies, the risks of Britain’s defense industry are simply irrational compared with the alternatives.

This takes us to the other conundrum in defense, namely sovereignty. How does Britain ensure that its military capabilities and industry are not so dependent on other states as to be unreliable in a crisis? I raised this with a director at the British subsidiary of a major defense contractor, who asked not to be named. He argues that thinking about sovereignty must be based on two factors. The first is resilience, meaning that we recognize the importance of being able to make things in Britain, with supply chains that are reliable and, as far as possible, local. The other factor is commercial exploitability. Obviously, it is far easier to build and maintain capabilities in Britain if they can pay for themselves, and better still if they can generate prosperity. This means that companies must either be dual-use – making goods and services for the civilian economy as well as the military one – or they must have export potential.

On this front, my source says that the MoD has neglected the importance of intellectual property, the knowledge that underpins technology. “If you want a company to grow, you’ve got to have something to exploit,” he says. “When we talk about high-tech, IP is the key thing that you exploit. Don’t just say we’re buying from a UK company. Use the tender to work out where the IP is held, who controls it, and do they have a commercial exploitation plan.”

But the biggest obstacles to sovereignty, he says, come from the political level. While Britain has “strengths that are just about still there in all areas of science and technology and military experience”, it is being held back by “inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the rest of policy supporting industry.” He points out that the countless strategy documents pledging to build up British industry have been undercut by Treasury decisions to raise taxes for employers, increase fuel levies, and commit to renewable energy subsidies that lock-in “the most expensive electricity we’ve ever had”. All of this acts as a massive deterrent to industrial investment.

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Rob Harper agrees that Britain is unlikely to become an industrial power with its current energy policies. But he has a somewhat different view of sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, it involves greater boldness. He thinks Britain should accept that it cannot compete in every field, and play to its strengths instead. “Look at what is being produced by universities, look at areas where we have a really strong legacy, things we will be great at and that will drive export revenues, and focus, blindly focus on those things.” Even if this were just three to five areas of excellence — and even if those areas were quite specialized, such as aerodynamics or systems engineering — Harper believes that allies would opt to rely on Britain for these capabilities, allowing Britain to rely on them for others.

He has a similar outlook when it comes to homegrown companies.“The best thing they can do, which again involves making big decisions, is to choose five companies and say: we want them to win. Then ask, what do we need to stop the founders re-headquartering, or getting bought out by other firms? How do we make them huge?”

Macdonald agrees that Britain should think of sovereignty in terms of interdependence with others, finding points in the supply chain, and levels in the technological stack, where it can become indispensable. Part of this is manufacturing, namely “really, really specialized parts for important military infrastructure like submarines and helicopters”. More generally, it means recognizing Britain’s strengths in technology and design: “leaning into the future of warfare as being dominated by autonomous systems and data, that is absolutely somewhere where we can be a leader. And that’s absolutely something we should be putting money into.”

A strategy based on specialization raises further questions, of course. Which allies does Britain want to be interdependent with? My civil service source says that the MoD already looks for “things we can become so good at that we’re indispensable to the Americans.” But after the shenanigans of the Trump administration in recent months, this no longer seems such a sure bet. As for the gambit of picking five companies and “making them huge”, this seems bound to create another generation of over-powerful prime contractors, such as America’s neo-primes. To some degree, sovereignty and meritocracy are conflicting values, and the MoD will need to find a way of preventing companies it does support from resting on their laurels.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Britain must decide what kind of battle it wants to be able to fight, for unlike great powers such as China and the US, it cannot try to do everything. The hyper-innovative warfare we see in Ukraine, where drones and other unmanned platforms now dominate the battlefield, is not a universal model. Other scenarios will still require aircraft carriers and battleships, artillery, tanks and large armies of soldiers. But Britain’s leaders must accept that, thanks in no small part to their own role over decades in eviscerating the country’s industrial capacity, most of these scenarios are now beyond its means. The Defense Investment Plan, if it does finally arrive this month, will likely show that the Government and MoD are still trying avoid this reality, spreading resources ever-thinner across many domains so that politicians can swagger a little longer on the world stage.

By installing democratic government in Iraq, the neocons imagined, they would set off an America-friendly movement for democracy across the region. As the influential foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen wrote in September 2002: “it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq.” He added that “Syria would follow in short order”. Of course, things did not quite turn out this way. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be drawn-out, bloody and humiliating disasters. 

This February, when the United States and Israel launched a new war in Iran, there was understandable speculation that the neocon agenda had been resurrected by its supposed nemesis, Donald Trump. It does appear that Trump was persuaded to take up unfinished business on behalf of Israel and hawks in the US foreign policy establishment. He may also have inferred from last year’s protests in Iran that destabilizing the government could spark a popular uprising. But despite Trump’s occasional claim to be seeking freedom for the Iranian people — one among many stated rationales for the war — it is impossible to believe that he, or perhaps anyone, shares the erstwhile neocon conviction that democracy could be spread across the globe. 

That conviction was an artifact of the unchallenged American hegemony of the Nineties and 2000s. Trump’s blundering sequel, in which the increasingly isolated president raves about blowing Iran off the face of the earth, even as the Iranians hold the global economy hostage via the Strait of Hormuz, only emphasizes how distant we are from that world of two decades ago. We can scarcely imagine the sublime vistas glimpsed by those who dreamed of bringing about the End of History, spurring on a worldwide convergence on liberal democratic institutions. Yet there it is, in black and white, in the 2002 US National Security Strategy. This document, also known as the Bush Doctrine, pledged to “actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world”.

Does this mean that the End of History was no more than a baseless, dangerous fantasy? A new book by Ian Shapiro, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, argues that it was not — though his vision of the End of History is more modest than that of the neocons. Shapiro, professor of political science at Yale, thinks that “different and vastly superior possibilities” were on offer after the fall of Communism in 1991, even if those possibilities did not include overthrowing authoritarian governments willy-nilly and spreading democracy to places where it had little chance of taking root. Rather, what emerged from the rubble of the Iron Curtain was “a real chance to extend and deepen the rules-based international order” through the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. According to Shapiro, this opportunity was squandered by the shortsighted and foolish decisions of Western leaders, and especially American ones, of which the War on Terror is a prime example. In pursuing their End of History fantasies, Bush and co. closed the routes that actually existed to a new and better world.

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It was Bush’s father, President George H. W., who showed what that world might look like. During the first Gulf War of 1991, he carefully rallied 42 countries to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but stopped short of toppling the dictator so as to respect the parameters agreed by the UN Security Council. He thereby acknowledged the principle that, as Shapiro writes, “even great powers must negotiate with adversaries, and they often invest in norms and institutions to help manage their conflicts lest they become overextended”. The younger Bush demonstrated no such wisdom, and it was often lacking in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too. 

An amnesia has set in during the Trump era, nurturing the impression that, for all its missteps, American power before 2016 was the largely benign lynchpin of a functioning rules-based order. In fact, as Shapiro details, America’s actions since the Nineties have amounted to a steady demolition of any possibility that such an order might take shape. Trump marks a new iteration of an existing pattern, not a break with it. 

The War on Terror anticipated Trump’s Iranian gambit not in its ideology but in its recklessness. Bush, like Trump, was elected on a platform of reducing foreign entanglements. He was a tax-cutting president who could not, or did not want to, cough up the resources necessary to finish the wars he started. The approach taken by both men (strategy is too generous a word) answer Shapiro’s description of “Ready! Fire! Aim!” In Afghanistan and Iraq, as in Iran today, the US started out by decapitating the leadership and decimating governing institutions; one of its first actions in Iraq was to fire 85,000 civil servants. 

Then there was the Bush administration’s dismissive attitude to international legitimacy. The 9/11 attacks brought condemnation from leaders across the Muslim world, and offers of solidarity and support from, among others, China and Russia. The Taliban government was willing to assist in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, as was the Pakistani leadership. But the US spurned such cooperation, sidelined the UN, and through its actions alienated much of the world. Its preference was for “coalitions of the willing” — alliances acting outside international legal frameworks — and for the uncompromising stance captured in Bush’s phrase “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. 

As with Trump’s misfiring tariff diplomacy, which has inadvertently revealed China’s ability to resist American pressure, the neocons demonstrated the limits of American power rather than its extent. It is little discussed today, but the 2006 election victory which preceded Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip came as a result of America’s desire to show progress in its democracy agenda. The Bush administration insisted that the elections be held, despite warnings from the governing Palestinian Authority, and was then outraged at the results. 

The War on Terror was not the only instance where the US thumbed its nose at the world. Shapiro is no less scathing about the humiliation of post-Soviet Russia during the Nineties and 2000s, when Russian leaders went to extraordinary lengths to show goodwill towards the United States, and were repaid with the expansion of Nato up to their borders. Whether a less antagonistic course would have avoided the Russian military aggression we see today is impossible to say, but many prominent voices at the time warned of just that outcome. Another excoriating chapter deals with the response to the eruption of civil war in Libya in 2011. In this case the UN approved a limited intervention to secure a ceasefire, only for France, Britain and the United States to flout this conditional support by aggressively pursuing regime change. This enraged countries around the world, and threw the region into anarchy, creating a breeding ground for terrorist groups and a pathway for gangs to smuggle migrants to Europe.

Trump, then, is not the aberration we make him out to be. He has extended to America’s traditional allies the imperious attitude that it has long shown towards other parts of the world (often with those same allies clinging to its skirts), and he has enlarged the scope of his predecessors’ bullying tactics to include trade. Who can miss the Trumpian overtones of Hillary Clinton’s remark at the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died”?

Yet Shapiro’s chronicle of foreign policy failure is so damning that his explanation for it — bad decision making and bad ideas — feels inadequate. Nor does it lend much credence to his counter-factual scenario, which asks us to imagine the US binding its own hands for the sake of international harmony and cooperation. As a political scientist, albeit one who has been admirably critical of his own discipline in the past, Shapiro is keen to demonstrate that an informed reading of history, empirical studies and behavioral science would have steered politicians towards better decisions. To show that he is not just indulging in hindsight, he reminds us constantly that there were people on the scene who warned against the mistakes that were made and saw the paths not taken. But this still raises the question of why the leaders in question kept listening to the wrong people, and kept misjudging their situation so badly. And here Shapiro answers more clearly than he seems to realize. 

The underlying theme of After the Fall is that Western leaders were undone by short-sightedness, arrogance, imprudence, a sense of invulnerability, delusions of grandeur, and above all, by hubris. These are defects of character; not in the sense of personality, but of the habits of thought and judgment which mark the actions of individual leaders and the governing classes to which they belong. To think in this way does not fit comfortably with the analytical models and policy wonkery of contemporary political science. Though populist politicians such as Trump are routinely analyzed in terms of character, we tend to treat this as a special measure demanded by the peculiar nature of populism itself. 

Yet character was central to a classical understanding of political action which was still alive in the 20th century, and which stemmed ultimately from ancient Greece and Rome. One part of this understanding is simply to acknowledge the tragic nature of human fallibility. Leaders make bad decisions because they are people with vices as well as virtues. But historians and dramatists in the classical tradition also recognized that character is shaped by historical circumstance. Civilizations rise and fall because they produce people, and leaders, with particular strengths and weaknesses according to the challenges and opportunities that history presents them with. Voltaire expressed one version of this theory with his remark that “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers descending the stairs and wooden shoes coming up”. Wealth and power do not always cultivate the virtues needed to sustain them.

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If we scrape away the surface of Shapiro’s narrative, where a series of politicians succumb to erroneous beliefs and stumble into one disaster after another, what we find is a familiar morality tale of imperial apogee, overreach and decline. More particularly, we find leaders demonstrating a catalog of character flaws which were set in motion by the temptations of enormous power. Ideas matter, of course. During the War on Terror, for instance, a mistaken image of reality informed by neocon ideology had disastrous consequences. But such utopian conceits do not gain traction at random; in this case, they appealed to an American political elite which believed itself capable of reshaping the world. 

Even Shapiro’s later chapters, which deal with the corrosive effects of neoliberal economic orthodoxy in the End of History period, show the same thread of wishful thinking, complacency and irresponsibility. Free trade and globalization were held to be inevitable in much the same way as the spread of liberal democracy; politicians treated disaffected voters with a similar disregard as they did their international counterparts; and financial and business interests recognized no more restraints on their freedom than presidents and their advisors did. 

The simple truth in all of this slips out belatedly in the concluding remarks of After the Fall: “they did it because they could get away with it.” Western leaders were drunk on power; they were powerful enough, in other words, to be careless of the limits of their power, a condition which invariably leads to it being exhausted in self-destructive follies. Shapiro contrasts the last 35 years of foreign policy with the more enlightened decisions of American leaders after the Second World War, who supported international institutions and helped to rebuild their vanquished enemies into allies and trading partners. The crucial difference, of course, is that those leaders did not enjoy the illusion of untrammeled power and historical inevitability; they had the threat of the Soviet Union to sharpen their minds.

The question now is whether the challenge of Chinese power will change the character of US leadership, resulting in greater prudence and restraint, as rivalry with the Soviet Union once did. The fact that Trump has blundered into another Middle Eastern quagmire, creating a fresh distraction from the long-promised pivot to Asia, is not a promising sign. Perhaps America’s prestigious universities and think-tanks should devote less attention to political science, and more to the study of character in decision making. 

I searched all afternoon for a punter who was enthusiastic about the Mayor’s vision of Englishness, but found none. The small crowd in the square consisted almost entirely of tourists who happened to be wandering by, and friends and family of the performers. As for those who had come to celebrate England and St George, they were hoping for something quite different. “We’re surprised there’s not more English here,” said one disappointed woman who had traveled with her husband from Crawley. She remarked that the day before, when a Sikh celebration had taken place in the square, it was “absolutely mobbed”. They wanted a strong turnout to make a statement of resurgent English pride, especially as, on a previous trip to London, they had bumped into a Palestine march where one of the demonstrators had allegedly told them “you’re not welcome here” after seeing the husband’s Union Jack phone cover. This struck a nerve, since he had, in fact, been born on the Old Kent Road. He pointed dramatically to the bronze lions around Nelson’s Column: “May 7th. Those lions are gonna roar again,” he said in reference to the local elections next month. 

Another man, a street sweeper who lives in Bow, gave me a similar account. “These wars, you know, Iran, Israel-Palestine, they’re protesting here every week, for no reason. This is a day for the British, for the English.” When I asked him about his 43 years living in the capital, he sucked his teeth. “It’s changed a lot, for the worse. Believe me.” He explained: “When I first got here it was very friendly, polite. You knew everyone, knew your neighbors. You don’t know your neighbors now. If you get on a bus or a train, you don’t know if someone’s going to pull out a knife and stab you.” Politicians, he said, “are only working for themselves”. Then he leaned in: “I think it’s time for the British to fight back.” 

This peculiar non-event in Trafalgar Square, and the discontent at its margins, illustrate some important realities. The first is that London is not in any meaningful sense an English city. It is the capital of a multinational state, the United Kingdom, whose hopes of surviving intact are at odds with England having a strong identity. But principally, the city is best understood as an island within an island, a place unto itself, or as the Victorians had it, “not a town but a country covered with houses”. When Khan calls it a “global city” he is mostly correct. Its economy has long been built on trade with the rest of the world, not England (although it does pay for England). In the 13 years that the capital was my home, most of the people I lived, worked or socialized with had either arrived as adults from overseas, or had moved there to escape England. Needless to say, the latter would have called themselves British. Two exceptions proved the rule: international football tournaments, when everyone became honorary Englishmen and women, and the cockneys I knew in Bethnal Green, remnants of an English-identifying community which has largely decamped to Essex. 

In Khan’s short video addressing the question “What does it mean to be English?”, he does of course imply that the capital is part of England. But on closer inspection, his idea of Englishness is defined by London rather than vice-versa. After nodding to the usual clichés — “fish and chips and a Sunday roast… our love of queuing, our incessant apologizing”— he moves onto “a tapestry made up of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas, woven together to tell one story”. He concludes that being English means “we stand up for what we believe in” (at which point the video shows a “Refugees Welcome” sign). The event in Trafalgar Square suggests that he views Englishness like any other identity in his scheme of managed diversity, whereby the authorities, like a nursery teacher negotiating with tired toddlers, ensure that every group gets its moment at the center of attention, flying its flags and performing its rituals in public space. 

None of this is entirely unique to Khan; it reflects the social realities of the city. In 2009, Conservative mayor Boris Johnson called for a “unifying” idea of Englishness, fit for a city that is “proud to showcase” its “many cultures and communities”. He also referred to St George as “a Cappadocian merchant who sold bacon to the Roman army”. Though Khan has gone further than his predecessors in building his personal brand on multiculturalism, no leader in London can ignore it. 

But the other point hinted at by Sunday’s event is that, even among those who are eager to celebrate it, English identity still seems to have little political content beyond protest. The small sample of unhappy patriots I met all came from deprived backgrounds; one of them said he had “lost the lottery of life” (a strange reversal of Cecil Rhodes’ claim that “to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life”). They wanted to push back against other groups they saw as taking over public space in the city, and they shared a feeling of injustice at the Government’s failure to control migration, as well as a more general impression that the city was sliding into chaos. As one man told me — a Scot, as it happens — “It’s not English anymore, that’s the truth. It’s been taken over. The system’s allowed it… The whole system’s failed. The courts, the police, probation, the prisons, the NHS. It’s all gone.” But as for any sense of what it means to be English, it was clear that they all saw Englishness not only as a subset of Britishness, but as inseparable from it. 

This seems consistent with the broader circumstances in which the rhetoric and symbols of Englishness have barged into the public realm over the past year. English flags have appeared, often alongside Union Jacks, at demonstrations outside asylum hotels, and of course as part of the last summer’s spasm of defiance, which saw flags going up on lampposts and motorway bridges across the country (variously interpreted as expressions of patriotism and attempts to intimidate minorities, both of which are probably true). In these cases, the St George’s Cross seems to draw more of its charge from the breaking of a taboo, the flag still being somewhat tarred by association with Right-wing extremism, than from any shared understanding of English identity. 

Even on those parts of the Right which are now espousing ethnic nationalism, there is no positive vision of English society beyond one that is governed and largely inhabited by people of English ancestry. There is not even much reckoning with the blatant contradiction that this favored group includes most of those who despise Englishness as a political identity, while excluding many non-ethnically English who would welcome opportunities for patriotism. Such complexities tend to be drowned out by the almost pornographic narratives of British decline that circulate online, often focused on London’s alleged collapse into anarchy. As the people I met at Trafalgar Square testified, this vision is disturbingly familiar to some of the city’s poorer inhabitants; but its purpose is clearly to galvanize a nationalism with more anger than plausible answers.

Englishness is trapped in these volatile and divisive modes because efforts to reimagine it have been feeble; the uneasiness of public figures such as Khan and Johnson on the subject, insisting that the flag must be “reclaimed” for everyone but struggling to show much enthusiasm for it, only confirms its subversive appeal. But the deeper reason is simply that a former English consciousness fell by the wayside. Look back to the 19th century, and much of the 20th, and English patriotism appears to blaze proudly. “England expects that every man will do his duty,” said Nelson at Trafalgar. “Speak for England, Arthur!” was the backbench cry that signaled Parliament’s resolve to confront Hitler. But in these and many other evocative examples, “England” was a synonym for Britain, as it remains in many foreign languages today. As Englishness blended into the wider British state in which it predominated, and then into that state’s global empire (“the empire of England”, as Benjamin Disraeli called it), it inevitably lost much of its particularity, paving the way for a reversal that has resulted in many English now thinking of themselves as British. 

Another peculiarity is that, as Robert Tombs notes in The English and their History, the country never had a particularly deep attachment to its folk traditions. To be sure, modern England has always been deeply invested in its past as an aesthetic matter: see, for instance, the much-mocked “Tudorbethan” facades of Thirties suburbs, and the sentimental love for the “green and pleasant land” of the English countryside. But in the crucial period when European countries saw their pre-modern heritage vanishing with the onset of industrialization — the period when cities like London bulged into mega-cities — the English, Tombs writes, were a “commercial and cosmopolitan” culture, which saw “no urgent need to discover their roots or throw off foreign influences, and were happy to buy in the good and the fashionable wherever it came from”. As a result, “English manifestations of ‘folk culture’ were pallid compared with the ebullient and assertive popular nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Finnish, and Russian art and music”. The consequences of this are still evident on St George’s Day, when, in my experience, people pressed to think of English folk traditions can name only Morris Dancing. 

This curtailed history has left Englishness with a mysterious, forlorn depth which has proven fertile for artistic expression, but which cannot be easily translated into politics. The poetry of Thomas Hardy and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams contain a rich sense of England’s landscapes and rhythms of life as treasures to be recovered only in dreams. A century later, a ghostly vision of England as something lost to history and myth can still be found in Jez Butterworth’s 2009 play Jerusalem, or in PJ Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake. There are jaundiced accounts of England too — Philip Larkin and John Betjeman come to mind — but even here, there is a certain irony and regret which seems to defy political expression. Perhaps the setting which most people instinctively recognize to be English is the countryside, where it is still possible to see past the fund managers’ mansions and newbuild estates and to imagine an innocent world of pubs and churches, hedgerows and lanes. It was only when I left London and formed a connection with the Sussex landscape that I felt, viscerally and unexpectedly, like I had found England. 

That this silent Englishness of culture and memory manages to exist apart from the St George’s Cross is surely something to be grateful for. A refuge from politics is not such a bad thing for a national identity to provide. But there is a more material problem, which pertains, again, to London. A more developed political Englishness would be valuable if it allowed different parts of the country to recognize their common cause in challenging the dominance of the capital, where too much power of every kind is concentrated.

During the 20th century, and especially since the Second World War, England’s impressive traditions of local government were sapped away by Westminster and Whitehall. The war effort, followed by the establishment of the NHS, the centralization of the planning and education systems, and the nationalization of industry, made for a stronger Britain at the expense of a weaker England. In the ensuing decades, as the country deindustrialized and globalized, London emerged as the overwhelming force in a service economy that relegated England’s other cities and regions to shadows of their former selves. The capital and the South East of England are the only parts of Britain that raise more revenue for the state than they receive. But they also enjoy favorable treatment. The data specialist and blogger Tom Forth has spent years arguing that Northern cities consistently lose out to London when it comes to investment in key areas such as transport, research and development and public institutions, even when they have the better economic case.  

Meanwhile, Britain remains far more centralized than its European peers, even as its state has increasingly proven unfit for the responsibility it hoards. So we find ourselves in a destructive situation whereby England must blame London, as a political center, for all of its problems, from hospitals and schools to energy bills and river pollution, while also relying on the metropolis for fiscal support. And London, of course, is where the country’s financial and cultural elites overwhelmingly cluster, appearing in the provinces only in the resented but sorely needed guise of tourists and second-home owners. There is arguably already a latent English identity in this shared ambivalence towards the capital; jokes about London and Londoners are current across the country. But they are not enough to bridge the local identities of the different counties, cities and regions, which must therefore struggle to claw back power from the center separately.

It is difficult to imagine how these differences could be bridged without a dedicated forum for English politics. But the Scottish and Welsh experience suggests that layering new capitals on top of London, while it can sustain devolved political cultures, also encourages further antagonism and the fudging of accountability. So England must somehow fight the center without a center of its own. That is the country’s tragedy: London occupies the place where its capital should be.

The next generations are here, too. Later I will meet Green’s son, Johnson, and his grandson, who at two months old has been judged too young to work. But first, the grand opening. The town’s mayor and accompanying dignitaries have turned up wearing gold-trimmed coats, bicorn hats and ceremonial maces. One carries a sword. Standing alongside a dodgem arena, they could be mistaken for entertainers at an amusement park, or perhaps time-travelers from the era when this square, known as the Tuesday Market, hosted public executions. I detect a hint of wistfulness in the 200 or so faces looking on, many doubtless recalling distant childhoods at this same fair. This part of Norfolk is one of the few places in Britain where you can ask an elderly couple whether much has changed in their lifetimes, and receive the answer “not at all”.

Now a vicar is reading some doggerel composed for the occasion, and the mayor pays tribute to a “remarkable and much-loved tradition”. There is a short, blaring rendition of “God Save the King”. Finally, the whole august party boards the dodgems, and a moment later, with club music pumping out, they’re racing around like a gang of sugar-crazed kids. The fairground kicks into action, a sickly blur of color and noise, a world devoted to the garish kitsch of childhood. Everything is spinning: teacups, barrels, miniature cars and trains, carousels, Ferris wheels, little helicopters branded with Disney characters.

It may seem strange to dignify this spectacle with the seal of heritage, but such is the contradiction of the showmen’s culture. Theirs is an ephemeral existence, traveling constantly, appearing in a blaze of fun that lasts a week or two and then moving on. And yet, their own understanding of this life is one of continuity and loyalty. John Green’s pedigree of multiple generations is the norm among showmen (a word, incidentally, which is used for women as well as men). This industry has, essentially, consisted of the same group of families for the past 150 years. Today, it numbers around 20,000 people, counting the showmen, their families and other employees. Each family charts its own course among the 2,300 funfairs staged in Britain each year, following routes established by parents and grandparents, some cleaving to a particular region and others roaming across the country. At the King’s Lynn Mart, even the hotdog vans are a multi-generational, traveling family business.

Such hereditary trades, once the default across much of the economy, are now curiosities in a fluid modernity where each individual is expected to plot a unique path through life. Fairgrounds are among the last remaining places where work is part of an identity that one is born into. “That position there was my great-granddad’s position”, Green says, pointing at a stall opposite his merry-go-round. He started contributing in earnest around the age of 10, when his parents announced, “right, double figures now, you’ll have to work”. He remembers helping his grandfather adjust to decimalization in 1971, when the number of pennies in the pound went from 240 to 100. When I ask Green why this way of life manages to endure, he raises another paradox characteristic of showmen: the combination of solidarity and liberty. “You meet friends”, he says. “I’ve got loads of friends all over the country, and if I was in trouble now, they’d be there.” But there is also “the freedom of life”. As Green explains, “if you don’t wanna work, you don’t work. So then you starve.”

I hear another, simpler explanation from retired showman Perry Day. “We were born into it,” he says, “conditioned into it.” Day cuts a demure figure in a long dark-green coat and a shirtfront adorned with tiepins. One of these, a golden medallion bearing the image of a helter-skelter, marks him out as a former chairman of the Showmen’s Guild, the official body representing Britain’s fairground business. All showmen, as far as I can tell, are members of the Guild. Perry is 78 and says he would still be working had he not developed diabetes, preventing him from driving a heavy goods vehicle. He and his wife, Margherita, still come to the King’s Lynn Mart every year. “We used to travel, me and Perry, everywhere”, Margherita tells me. “King’s Lynn, London, North Wales, Jersey, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire… everywhere.” With the exception of two or three months in “winter quarters”, they were mobile all year long.

This arrangement remains typical. Many showmen also pause for a few months in the summer, when they run food kiosks or entertainment businesses in tourist spots. It’s not uncommon for families to own some property by way of a base, where the rides “sleep” during winter, but younger showmen, especially, live in their trailers full-time. These vehicles, increasingly, are not the customized wagons of old, but 40-foot mobile homes imported from America. On account of their nomadic lifestyle, showmen have long been mistaken for gypsies, an association they resent. “It’s a little bit heartbreaking, in a way,” says Johnson Green. “When you go to school you used to get bullied a lot. ‘Oh gypsy, gypsy, living in a tent, can’t afford to pay the rent.’” He goes on: “I’m not saying they’re bad people, but we’re doing something completely different.”

Being on the move does, however, create challenges when it comes to educating children. As Margherita Day explains of her own kids, “they was always behind, because they only went in the winter months for schooling. If we took them to other schools [while travelling], they’d just put them in the nursery class and let them do what they want. They didn’t know what to do with them.” So it was a big improvement when an innovative teacher devised work packs for the children, allowing them to stick to a syllabus even as they migrate from one school to the next. Then again, home schooling can still yield results: “My sister’s girl, she used to do her own work in the lorry on going away days, and she went to Oxford.”

The showmen’s retinue also includes workers who help to build, run and maintain the rides. These assistants, generally speaking, can be identified by a cigarette in their fingers and a conspicuous lack of dentistry. They do not belong to the ancient web of showmen’s families, but are often supported by it. Dylan, a 27-year-old who looks after the dodgems, is outspoken about his loyalty to the man he works for. “I had a bit of a hiccup as a kid. I got kicked out of my house… My boss said there’s a job for you here, there’s a place to stay, there’s everything sorted for you.” Dylan now has his own home and family in Essex, but still works at several fairs each year. “If he needs me,” he says of his boss, “one call and I’m here.”

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Every family of showmen has its legends and lore. One of John Green’s great-grandfathers was apparently the first to bring cinema scopes to fairgrounds. Perry and Margherita Day have traced their genealogies back to the mid-18th century, where they found figures like Francis Wheatley, a celebrated painter and notorious rake. A later Wheatley is said to have had eight daughters, all of whom brought their husbands into the showmen’s community. Margherita Day is most proud of her great-grandfather, “a Leicestershireman who went to Balmoral with his menagerie show to entertain the princes and princesses of Queen Victoria”.

These are not frivolous tales. It is easily forgotten, after a century of radio and television, that the arts of entertainment were once a seedbed of extraordinary people, practices and skills. If you had gone to a popular fair in the 18th century, you’d have found fire-eaters, trick riders, jugglers, acrobats, and freak shows. Since medieval times, performers had appeared at the trade fairs which were mainstays of commercial life. These included London’s Bartholomew Fair, established by Henry I’s jester in 1120, or indeed the Mart at King’s Lynn, chartered by Henry VIII almost exactly 500 years ago. Thanks to its proximity to the Low Countries, Norfolk was once the commercial heart of Britain; its funfairs are a legacy of this prosperous past, no less than the handsome buildings at the quayside in King’s Lynn, where a ghostly quiet now reigns along the river Great Ouse.

Satirical performances and ribaldry flourished at the fairs, and so, much as with social media today, nervous authorities and outraged moralists were always trying to shut them down. The raucous Bartholomew Fair finally succumbed to these forces in 1855. In the late 19th century, the crusading MP George Smith sought to restrict the itinerant lifestyles of the showmen, a battle which led to the formation of the Showmen’s Guild. One branch split off to form the circus, while some enterprising showmen used steam power to build thrilling mechanical rides. Foremost among them was Frederick Savage, a mayor of King’s Lynn, who invented mechanisms to make carousel horses gallop. For the next century, fairgrounds would display some of the country’s most creative engineering.

Here, then, is another contradiction: showmen are deeply immersed in their history, but have always been ready to embrace novelty and adapt to new circumstances. Even as safety standards have become stricter, the designers of white-knuckle rides have found ingenious ways to torture fair-goers with motion and speed. At King’s Lynn, they speak reverently of a brand new ride, ominously named “High Voltage”. (Yes, I held my breath and climbed aboard; yes, it was terrifying). Virtual-reality headsets and simulators are beginning to become part of the fairground experience.

It is natural to wonder, though, for how many more generations the showmen will stay on the road. While many showmen’s children have stayed in the family business, others have not. “Unfortunately, our children want things that we didn’t want,” says Perry Day, “as in, a good life, as far as finances go”. Day’s offspring didn’t stray too far though. His son is an artist who paints fairground rides, something which also happens to run in the family. According to Johnson Green, it isn’t unusual for showmen to swap their trailer for a “settle down business”, such as an amusement arcade or seaside café. His wife’s family were former showmen who ran ice-cream parlors in Skegness. But his sister has moved further from the fairground: “She went and got a job, she married a normal person. She’s settled down, happy. She just works.” He says many showmen never came back after the Covid pandemic, when they were forced to settle down and grew used to a stable income.

Less than a decade ago, the Government reported 7,000 fairs happening annually, three times the current estimate. In Norfolk, some of the old fairs are dying out as villages are hollowed out by second homes and holiday rentals, a development ironically driven by the area’s supposedly unchanging character. High fuel prices have squeezed showmen everywhere. But I suspect there’s a bigger threat to their future: what Johnson Green calls “the way the world is going”. Given that it’s now not uncommon to see toddlers in strollers staring numbly at a screen, oblivious to the world around them, one wonders if children will continue to be excited by funfairs, and if their parents will still bother to take them. “We’re the bottom of the food chain now,” Johnson Green says. “You got iPads, PlayStations, and kids are probably more indoor people than they are outdoor people.”

The image of an empty fairground suggests a depressing vision of the future: a society bereft of fun, with most people too distracted to even realize it. Nightlife is dying; pubs are continually bullied by a puritanical state; seaside towns are divided between extreme poverty and pompous art galleries; even music festivals are becoming glorified glamping trips for the middle classes. Funfairs are a reminder of how the festive spirit has been expressed since time immemorial: in a seasonal rhythm, within the local community, with young and old together. After a few hours of throwing darts, eating hot dogs, and grinning uncontrollably in the whirling arms of monstrous rides, I realize that the showmen are not the marginal characters I took them for; they represent a principle of merriment which is vital to a healthy society, but which may soon be gone for good.

Alas, he did not fool anyone. Yuan’s bid to become Emperor was met with widespread revolt, and only hastened China’s descent into political chaos. The ancient rites could no longer be performed except as a modern charade; the giveaway was that Yuan had cameras present to record what none had previously been allowed to witness. There comes a point where the changes a nation undergoes are too large to be quietly folded back into a story of deep continuity.

Perhaps this tale can help us to parse the uncertainty which hangs over the ceremonial heart of British government, the Palace of Westminster. Last week, a joint commission of the Lords and Commons published costed proposals for “restoration and renewal” of the building. The plans are so expensive, extensive and disruptive that the task of refurbishing Britain’s Parliament, which has already loomed for years, looks set to drag on much longer still. So now is the time, before this magisterial building is dismembered in the name of modernization, to ask whether its own magic has not already turned to empty gesture.

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The Palace of Westminster embodies a constitution that was also fabled for its continuity, its traditional framework evolving by peacefully incorporating change. Parliamentary government emerged without discarding the monarchy, which aged into a symbol of national unity transcending politics. Through the House of Commons, democracy was progressively extended to encompass more of the population, even as the aristocracy retained its influence in the Lords. New classes of wealthy businessmen were brought into the establishment through the lower house, and then the upper one, a path later followed by the Labour Movement. For generations, a widespread Whiggish view held that this gradual process of change, perhaps reflecting the hand of divine Providence, protected Britain from the revolutions and dictatorships that rocked the European continent.

The current Parliament building entered this story halfway through, but tellingly, it was designed to invoke a much deeper past. The Commission which selected it during the 1830s had asked for proposals only in the Gothic and Elizabethan styles (although the contract had originally been awarded without competition, leading to a procurement scandal; some things really are continuous in British history). The winning submission, by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, combined classical stability in its structure with delirious masses of Neo-Gothic ornament, the latter signaling Pugin’s preference for an idealized medieval social order over what he regarded as a squalid modern world. It was a bold decision by a political class which was, in the same decade, undertaking the contentious process of expanding democracy through the Great Reform Act. In the ensuing decades and centuries, Barry and Pugin’s masterpiece provided a symbolic anchor against countless further storms. This is where the great rituals of democracy are performed, investing the country’s leaders with authority: the debates and votes, the spoken formulas, the waving of order papers and confrontations at the dispatch box.

But the new proposals to renovate Parliament are an omen, if one was needed, that this Westminster world cannot continue forever. It is a baffling report, symptomatic of deep problems with how the British state tries, and fails, to manage its projects. Parliament needs upgrades to its fire safety and services such as sewerage and heating systems, along with asbestos removal and conservation of the building’s fabric. Somehow this refurbishment has spiraled into a proposal of eye-watering cost and duration. One option, costing up to £11.5 billion, would see the works going on for 24 years, during which the Commons would leave the building for up to a decade, and the Lords for up to 15 years. Should the Commons prefer to remain in place, and Lords to decamp for a mere eight years, the works will take up to 60 years, at a cost of up to £20 billion in today’s money. Worst of all, the revamp will insert various new spaces into the building, including a visitor area and education center, in the most horrifically dull style imaginable.

Part of the problem, as so often with state procurement today, is that a practical task has been swamped with nice-to-have social schemes. The renewal program “will seek to create opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises”, with partners given “contractual obligations to achieve the widest practical geographic spread of the supply chain”. As Nicholas Boys Smith points out, the goal of reducing the building’s energy consumption by 40% comes at a price that could produce far greater environmental dividends if spent elsewhere, and step-free access is demanded for parts of the building where few people go even on foot. The Commission has gone for the second most expensive of six initial options, partly because it will allow still more tampering in the future. Even if this renovation avoids the budget overruns and delays we see in so many other projects, it will become a potent symbol of governmental dysfunction and waste, adding another layer of ridicule and scorn to the word “Westminster”.

Unless, that is, Parliament takes an option not mentioned in the report, and moves out of the Palace for good. This would surely be the best way to honor the historic beauty of the building itself, by saving it from further misguided renovations and allowing it to become a heritage site. More importantly, though, it would free Britain’s lawmakers from the weight of a civilization which has already, for the most part, passed into history, and whose rituals they struggle to perform with conviction or plausibility.

The Palace of Westminster was built in a society in the midst of an Industrial Revolution, moving towards mass democracy, at the heart of an expanding global empire and undergoing a boom in Evangelical Christian faith. It served the country through enormous convulsions, including two world wars, the loss of its empire and a transformation in social attitudes. But whatever authority was once bestowed by images of green benches, state openings and robed peers is now largely gone. As Parliament’s own website reports, between 2014-24, “the proportion of people with low to no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76%”. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, just one-in-five respondents think that Britain’s system of government — the one embodied by Parliament — needs little or no improvement, whereas half did in 1999.

At what point does change become too great to bury behind the façade of continuity? This question is impossible to answer with certainty, but it feels as though the line was crossed at some point in the past few decades. There is nothing wrong with anachronistic customs; they are, in fact, important for nourishing the emotional dimension of politics. The problem arises when the figures performing those customs evidently no longer belong to the world they invoke, creating an impression of self-importance which makes those concerned appear like pigmies parading in boots several sizes too big.

Consider, then, that Britain’s constitution is increasingly remote from the one which the Palace of Westminster once represented. The upper house, whose grandeur Pugin sought to recognize with ornament far more lavish than that of the Commons, has only a dwindling rump of hereditary peers left, which the current Labour government has tried to remove. The Lords is now a constitutional appendage, hosting a combination of diligent legislators and political cronies, its ranks swollen by wave after wave of appointments and its future an elaborately dressed question mark. Meanwhile, some MPs are apparently unaware that the separation of powers, an American concept, doesn’t apply in Britain, which may be the result of confusing innovations like a US-style Supreme Court. The fundamental principle of Britain’s constitution, parliamentary sovereignty, has been undermined by Blairite reforms, dispersing authority to devolved governments, international courts and a vast web of unelected bodies.

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No less striking are the changes in the nation that Parliament is meant to govern. Most obviously, London’s transformation into a city of immigrants means that fewer than half of its residents come from families that lived in Britain at the time of the Second World War, a single lifetime ago. Taking the British population in general, around a quarter have no familial presence in the country before 1945. British people no longer attend the churches, read the newspapers, work in the industries or hold the class loyalties that they used to, nor do they have the same understanding of themselves as a nation. These shifts are undermining the political foundations on which Parliament was built. The adversarial system of governing party versus opposition which always underpinned the House of Commons is falling apart, as Britain becomes effectively a multi-party system trapped in a two-party constitution. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Brits surveyed claimed to prefer coalition over single-party government.

It seems that no one currently benefits from British politics playing out against the traditional backdrop of Westminster. For voters of a conservative bent, that hallowed setting can only be a reminder of the history the country has abandoned; for those of a progressive or radical one, the survival of such a hidebound institution implies that history has not been abandoned enough. Politicians shout endlessly about “change”, about the broken system that needs fixing and the establishment that needs to be overturned. As long as they do so from what is itself the unchanging home of a broken establishment, they will struggle to be heard.

Providing a connection to the past, even an imagined one, is a valuable function for a public edifice. Indeed, historicist monuments like the Palace of Westminster, which inspired parliaments in a number of other countries, represent one of the great innovations of modernity, helping to steady a society in the face of disorienting change. But there are other roles which such buildings can perform. Britain does not have a great record of constitutional reform in recent decades, yet its leaders cannot just look on as the country’s governance becomes increasingly unfit for purpose and the public’s anger increasingly implacable. Commissioning a new Parliament building could be an opportunity to properly think through the roles of the two chambers, and possibly a spur to a wider reorganization, or in some cases restoration, of the British system. It seems sacrilegious to move government away from Westminster, where it has existed for the best part of 1,000 years, but the alternative is a forlorn hope that the authority of the old rituals will return.

It would also be helpful to have a tangible representation of the British state as it exists today, rather than in its 19th-century pomp, for us all to see and judge accordingly. At present, Britain’s lawmakers are hiding in the remnants of a vanished country, cloaked in a borrowed dignity which is wearing thin. Is it not time to see, in the cold light of day, how the living center of the constitution would choose to present itself? To judge by the recent renovation proposals, not to mention Scotland’s modern parliament building at Holyrood, the successor to the Palace of Westminster could be very uninspiring. But why the state manifests itself in such ugliness is not a question we can shy away from forever, and need not be the end of the conversation. Seeing its parliamentarians encased in soulless fiberglass, like glorified office workers, might be just the reality check the country needs.

There are complications of course. Starmer has framed the visit as a careful balancing act, insisting there are “opportunities” for economic benefit, but that this “does not mean compromising on national security”. The third, unstated element in the equation is that any new arrangements with China must not offend Britain’s primary patron, the thin-skinned and capricious President of the United States. Donald Trump recently threatened Canada with swingeing tariffs after its own prime minister, Mark Carney, declared a “strategic partnership” with China. A similar reaction would be unwelcome for Starmer, who unlike Carney has staked his authority on his ability to appease Trump.

The Chinese leadership will no doubt reward Starmer’s deference with a token pledge of investment, perhaps a greater one than the paltry £600 million which Chancellor Rachel Reeves secured on her trip last year. But China neither wants nor needs British goods and services on any meaningful scale. It has two basic goals in Britain, and they are to ensure a growing market for its enormous surplus of manufactured goods, and to leverage its economic power to disrupt the American-led Western alliance system. It is on its way to achieving both aims without needing to offer any special inducements.

A country like Britain can only negotiate with China if it can plausibly threaten to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains and technology. Instead, under successive governments but especially under this one, Britain has shut down its industrial base and pursued policies which have pushed up the cost of living, stoking demand for cheap imports. China cannot prise Britain away from the United States, which is still the guarantor of British security, but it can slowly raise the cost of supporting the US where Chinese interests are at stake, and in a crisis, threaten to cripple the British economy. What is more, Starmer remains idealistically committed to a system of international law which Beijing is slowly bending towards its own ends. Even if Britain is the last nation to abandon America’s old global order, it can become a member of China’s new one long before that. The two are already overlapping.

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None of this means that Starmer is wrong to reboot relations with China. The diplomatic “deep freeze” of recent years was the result of contingent circumstances which the march of history has already left behind. Starting in 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne launched an ill-timed strategy to deepen ties with China, touting the City of London as a putative gateway to the Western financial system. That plan was complicated by Brexit and the realization that Chinese tech posed a threat to critical infrastructure. As American antagonism towards China hardened, Britain’s leaders prioritized fealty to the US. Then came Hong Kong, Covid, and Ukraine. During the Johnson and Sunak years, as the extent of Chinese espionage efforts in Britain became more difficult to ignore, the government’s China policy seemed to be largely dictated by a desire not to appear weak in front of hawkish backbenchers.

The problem is that, despite the British media’s strange habit of equating diplomacy with surrender, the country does not gain anything by keeping these channels closed. None of Britain’s key partners in security and intelligence have cut themselves off from Beijing to the same extent. Not Australia, despite its bitter disputes with China; and not even the US, which, for all the rhetoric of decoupling, remains firmly integrated with the Chinese economy at every level, from major tech companies like Apple and Tesla to the financial managers at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, China continues to assume an increasingly dominant position in the global economy. As Kyle Chan has written, the era when China needed technology transfers from the West is over, and the flow of knowledge is now going into reverse. Western companies are buying access to China’s expertise in everything from electric vehicles and robotics to pharmaceuticals and even artificial intelligence; Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta recently acquired the Chinese AI startup Manus. China maintains a firm grip on the raw materials which underpin advanced technologies, as it demonstrated last year by using its chokehold on critical minerals to repulse Trump’s tariffs. Many British companies manufacture their products in Chinese factories, and the two countries have a strong partnership in scientific research.

Britain’s economic prospects therefore depend on its commercial relations with China as much as with the United States. Indeed, I’ve heard from businesspeople who much prefer working with Chinese counterparts than American ones that the former are more inclined to seek long-term relationships based on mutual benefit, while the latter, much like their property developer President, tend to see business as a zero-sum contest.

The problem, then, is not that Britain is engaging with China, but that it is doing so from a position of weakness and apparent desperation. Bowing to Chinese demands for a strategically located London embassy, and undermining the prosecution of two alleged spies, were the acts of an auditioning vassal rather than a sovereign partner. More importantly, a reliance on Chinese imports is increasingly baked into Britain’s economic model. Whereas most comparable countries are wary of China’s aggressive trade practices, Britain embraces them.

Since 2020, the Chinese leadership has pursued a strategy of dual circulation, meaning that it seeks maximum self-reliance in meeting its domestic needs, while also producing an enormous surplus of goods to export overseas. This is partly an expression of China’s own weaknesses: its society is submerged in debt, its once mighty property sector is bust, and its state does not want to undergo the painful readjustment that is required before its own consumers can grow the economy through spending. So it needs the world to continue buying its products in ever-larger quantities. But this model also serves to enhance China’s political power over other nations. Just as it uses investment and loans to gain influence over poor countries, it uses cheap exports, which are subsidized by the state, to undercut producers in richer ones, leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Labour’s agenda has made Britain a willing accomplice in this strategy. A combination of wage increases and taxes on business has kept inflation high, putting upward pressure on both the cost of living and interest rates. This is a politically toxic situation for the government, and Chinese imports are an obvious solution, as a Bank of England official recently stated. Another Labour priority, Ed Miliband’s rush to bring down British carbon emissions, has similar implications. Not only does it rely on Chinese solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries; it is also accelerating the demise of British industry through high energy costs and regulations. Much of that production will relocate to China. Hence Britain’s imports from China grew by 6% last year; the roads are filling with “Temu Range Rovers” — as the Jaecoo 7 SUV is sometimes called — while Britain’s domestic car production has fallen to its lowest level since the Fifties; and David Lammy has celebrated a British company investing £800 million in a new plastics plant in Zhejiang, even as Britain’s own chemicals industry is collapsing.

Britain may be one of China’s more accommodating trade partners, but the EU, for all its clout on paper, faces a similar dilemma. Visiting China in December, French president Emmanuel Macron said of the trade relationship that “these imbalances are becoming unbearable”. The EU has tried to use tariffs to resist a glut of Chinese electric vehicles entering its market, but China has retaliated by targeting European agriculture and luxury goods, and it still has the ability to withhold critical resources from Europe as it did from the US. Germany is now hemorrhaging industrial capacity to China, and cannot intervene because it also needs access to the Chinese market. As in Britain, European governments presiding over febrile societies will not risk an inflationary shock caused by a disruption of trade with China.

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There is an argument that Britain should simply write off the loss of its remaining industrial base and free itself to gorge on Chinese imports, thereby helping to raise its living standards. In fact, to a large extent this is already happening. But the lesson of China’s rise is that, while such tradeoffs can be beneficial in the short term, they will, in time, become dependencies to be exploited. The much vaunted rules-based order that Trump is now dismantling was not only a framework of American hegemony; it was a scaffolding that China ascended by treating every economic relationship as a vehicle for its political objectives. For the most part, Beijing’s coercive trade tactics have been much more subtle than Trump’s tariff blitzes, but not always. Mongolia, Australia and Lithuania have all suffered naked blackmail from China, due to their stances on the Dalai Lama, the origins of Covid, and Taiwan, respectively. The anti-coercion measures that the EU is now threatening to use against Trump were developed in response to China’s treatment of Lithuania.

The same instrumental approach can be seen in Beijing’s new Global Governance Initiative, announced in September, which advances a Chinese-led world order in the guise of a more democratic and equitable “global community” adhering to international law. This continues a longstanding Chinese campaign to expand its influence over international institutions. It is an unfortunate irony for Britain that Starmer, who would in many ways be at home in the Chinese Communist Party, given his preference for technocratic solutions and skill at operating his party’s machinery against his rivals, does not show the same ruthless nous in the international domain. Instead, he cleaves with an almost touching faith to the sanctity of rules and procedures, apparently blind to the agendas they might serve.

There is a possible future in which some of the nations trapped between the US and China finally make good their fantasies of “strategic autonomy”, radically changing their spending priorities and building up a degree of independence in technology, industry and defense. This would probably be a world where Britain cooperates more closely with its European neighbors, as well as other allies such as Australia and Japan. It is far more likely, however, that Europe’s “middle powers” will become a complicated space where American and Chinese influence mingles and collides. Both superpowers will exercise control over Britain’s infrastructure and economy in different ways, and both will impose their own limits on British sovereignty. If that is the case, an important question for the country’s future will be whether the United States and China can coexist peacefully in contested lands like this.

Such is the disconnect between the rhetoric surrounding the British military and its true condition that it is tempting to simply dismiss the strategy documents and high-stakes summits as diplomatic bluster. But the disintegration of global order may well produce scenarios in which politicians and officials, prisoners to their own commitments, are sucked into a shooting war. At that moment, the danger of a tragic and ruinous fiasco will become very real. In his recent book The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, retired brigadier Ben Barry warns of this very outcome, albeit in the understated language of the military analyst. Unless “capability weaknesses are rectified”, he writes, “deploying British Army units and formations to fight carries increased risk of avoidable casualties and mission failure”.

British strategy is like a man riding multiple horses whose paths are gradually diverging, and some of which are biting each other. With US commitment to Nato in doubt, Britain finds itself with greater responsibility for countering the Russian threat in Europe. At the same time, to maintain its own American alliance — not least in the interests of moderating Donald Trump’s claims on the Danish territory of Greenland — the Government will feel compelled to serve as a junior partner in some of the US President’s ongoing military adventures, as it already did with the seizure of the oil tanker (the ship had evaded a US blockade of Venezuela). Since 2021, Britain has also pledged to follow the United States in supporting a coalition of Asian and Pacific states ranged against China, while remaining active in the Middle East, where British interests are bound up with issues of terrorism, migration and trade.

Since 2010, when the Coalition government took office against a background of financial crisis and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British response to these challenges has been shaped, above all, by spending cuts to the armed forces. Barry writes that by 2012, Britain’s deployable combat power was already down by a third compared to 2009. Aircraft carriers and jets were retired early, experienced officers were made redundant, and personnel were slashed across the navy, airforce and army. In 2014, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that Britain would soon lack “the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past”.

Britain has since regained its military ambition, but not the budgets to match. It has signed up to develop nuclear submarines with Australia and the US, and a new fighter jet with Italy and Japan. It has played a prominent role in boosting Nato defenses in Eastern Europe and the Baltics — just short of 1,000 troops remain stationed in Estonia today — while focusing resources on the murky realm of “hybrid” activities such as intelligence, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare. It plans to build a new generation of nuclear warheads as well as an AI-enabled “digital backbone” to coordinate its forces.

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All the while, conventional capabilities have continued to wither. Britain has drastically reduced its numbers of tanks, planes, ships, armored vehicles and airlift helicopters. Its missile defenses are inadequate to defend its own territory from attack. It has abandoned its major landing craft, meaning that an operation like that to retake the Falkland Islands in the Eighties would now be extremely difficult. It has donated a large quantity of weapons and equipment to Ukraine, without replenishing its own stocks. It lacks the engineering, medical and logistical abilities to support its soldiers in the field. Army troop numbers, which stood at 109,000 in 2010, are now down to 72,500, their lowest since the early 1800s.

The mood music accompanying this decline, and still audible in last year’s Strategic Defense Review, is the hope that new forms of fighting with hi-tech systems will allow British forces to do more with less in the way of traditional platforms and manpower. Drones, cyber and precision strikes will cripple the enemy before the soldiers and sailors arrive. This theory is highly suspect in its own right — because we do not yet know what the demands of modern warfare will be outside the specific contexts where it is happening now, because new technologies will be subject to failure and contestation, and because many of the lost capabilities just cannot be performed by newer ones. More to the point, military chiefs and politicians are now contemplating precisely the kind of mission that will require large numbers of soldiers equipped with a wide range of hardware, namely the deployment of a ground force to Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia, where they will risk war with Russia itself. Should this actually come to pass, the army could, in extremis, deploy a division of 25,000-30,000 troops, which would soon seize up for lack of ammunition and other resources, while leaving Britain unable to fight elsewhere. For comparison, Russia currently has around 700,000 troops in Ukraine.

The frailty of British forces is now common knowledge, but plans to strengthen them are far from convincing. Starmer last year promised to raise defense spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, while pledging 3% at some point in the 2030s “if economic and fiscal conditions allow”. A further 1.5% will be earmarked for defense industries and protecting critical infrastructure. Even with such vague timelines, it is questionable whether any of Britain’s parties can persuade the electorate to make the sacrifices required to meet these targets. Public finances are already overstretched, the economy is suffering from years of underinvestment, and the bills for pensions, health and welfare continue to grow. The hope is that defense spending will act as an “engine for growth”, by rebuilding the manufacturing industries that disappeared along with the military reductions of recent years. There are signs that this is starting to happen, but greater certainty will be needed to bring companies into the supply chain, and contracts have so far been slow to appear.

Money is one thing, but Britain is also struggling to find people willing and able to serve in uniform. The Army and Navy have missed their recruitment targets every year since 2010. I recently had a sobering conversation with Mark Maguire, an anthropologist at Maynooth University who has been investigating the erosion of the people and cultures that once underpinned Britain’s military. The forces which have transformed British society in recent decades, from deindustrialization and immigration to falling birth rates, are also being felt in traditional recruiting grounds. “If you go to these military towns, there is no evidence of the people that used to populate the British Army,” Maguire said. “They’re just not there anymore.” He told me of army units which are now recruiting over the phone from Commonwealth countries, their traditional streams of working-class men having dried up.

Attitudes have changed too. Maguire describes focus groups with young people where “the negativity towards the armed forces was stunning, frankly”, the military now being associated with “bombing poor counties and murdering kids”. One young man signed up in secret to avoid the stigma. Recruitment is further hampered by high rates of drug use, obesity, general unfitness and physical and mental disability. In 2024, it was revealed that more than a fifth of regular British forces was not “fully deployable” or deployable at all due to health conditions.

Scarcely less troubling is the MoD’s abysmal record on planning and procurement. The current budget shortfall is anything but unusual. Since 2010, when the department revealed it was £36 billion in the red, defense spending has been marked by, in the words of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a “consistent pattern of planned overspend”, “serious organizational failings” and “a dangerous culture of optimism”. This has led to important programs being cut while others spiral into expensive failures. The new Ajax range of armored vehicles, for instance, was originally due for 2017, but has repeatedly been delayed due to design flaws causing illness and hearing problems in soldiers. Consequently, the army still lacks a replacement for its Scimitar and Scorpion vehicles, which entered service more than 50 years ago.

Considering the mismatch between Britain’s posture and its military resources, many will naturally conclude that the former should change. Why must Britain do so much? Surely, the bloody disaster of the Iraq war showed us where blind fealty to the United States leads, and under Trump, we are potentially allying ourselves to a rogue state. And why would we put British lives at risk more than 1,000 miles away in Ukraine, when other European states, with the exception of France, feel no need to? Britain is a declining, middle-ranking nation; what business does it have trying to operate in distant corners of the globe, as though it were still a great imperial power?

These questions are always worth asking, insofar as they pressure our leaders to set aside their vainglory and think carefully about which military endeavors are truly vital to Britain’s interests. It may well be, for instance, that the Navy’s Pacific ventures are not sustainable in a world where Britain has to help compensate for less American involvement on the European continent. But Europe’s humiliation at the hands of Trump, who has imposed one-sided tariffs on it and tried to exclude it from negotiations over its own future, has put paid to the notion that military weakness is a symptom of an enlightened society. Hard power is vital for being taken seriously by friends and enemies alike, especially as the global system fragments. Nothing else is as effective in discouraging aggressors or in reassuring allies.

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This logic is especially compelling for Britain, and especially after Brexit. An island nation whose prosperity depends on connections with other parts of the world, Britain has, since the 18th century, pursued a policy of forward defense, recognizing that threats are best met at a distance from its own coastlines, and that its interests must sometimes be protected far from home. Britain needs good relations with other nations, and security cooperation is a very concrete form of assistance to offer. Being a loyal partner to the US can be a thankless and demeaning role, but America remains the world’s greatest military power and one that is crucial for British intelligence, nuclear assets and weapons programs. If we are to stand any chance of influencing Trump, it will be in situations where it can offer material assistance. Starmer has got very little right in his first 18 months as Prime Minister, but he has been wise to insist on not choosing between Europe and America for as long as possible.

Regardless, this is all moot if Britain cannot find the resources to recruit, train and equip its armed forces to adequate levels. And ultimately, those resources are social and cultural as well as material. After decades under the American security umbrella, western European nations like Britain are not only reluctant to make economic sacrifices in order to defend themselves; they have become totally estranged from the reality that societies sometimes have to fight in order to survive. The clearest evidence of this is that the British state makes no real effort to provide young people with a positive vision of the nation as something to which we owe loyalty and a sense of duty. Nor does it give any account of the role of the Armed Forces in protecting our way of life. The numbers of 18-27-year-olds who are proud to be British and who are willing to fight for the country has plummeted over the past 20 years.

But the problem goes deeper. Maguire argues that “every developed economy now has a problem with self-sacrifice”, meaning that they struggle to produce people who are “willing to run towards danger”. Few of us now have jobs which involve any degree of physical risk, and we are more likely to worry about safety than to celebrate physical bravery. We have little acquaintance with violence beyond films and news stories, while the harsh realities of death are carefully quarantined in medical buildings. Much of this is good, but it leaves us unable to fathom what warfare actually entails. Fighting, Maguire points out, is “pretty gruesome work”, a fact that is now routinely repressed even among those responsible for managing it. He calls the UK’s latest, tech-centered Strategic Defense Review “the most bloodless document I’ve ever read”.

In a recent interview, the historian Stephen Kotkin put Europe’s defense dilemma succinctly: “You need to build really large armies, navies and air forces, of killers — of soldiers who can kill, not build homes, or roads, or sing songs… there are many brave people in Europe, but they’re just not interested in war.” The question in coming years will be whether firmer foundations can be established before they are truly tested, or whether the country’s goals will be revised downwards to match its means. The third course, our current one, is that it will stumble into a fight it is not ready for.

My interviewee is explaining Costco’s appeal. It’s convenient: everything is in one place, and since you have to buy in bulk, you don’t need to come often (the store is meant to supply small businesses, though everyone I talk to here is shopping for personal consumption). Then there are the deals: even for electronics, it often has the best prices and warranties. It all sounds like a perfect exercise in prudence, getting the most out of your time and money. Except, did he really mean to buy all of this? Does he really need quite so much salmon? “That is the drawback,” the man says ruefully. “You see things as you walk around, and you end up spending a lot. I came here just to buy some chicken, some meat, and I’ve just spent £360.” I point to a pair of olive-green chinos recently added to the trunk. “They’re nice,” he objects. “I thought I could wear them for work.”

It is not the only time I will hear such a tale of accidental indulgence. In fact, it almost becomes a running joke during my afternoon at Costco. Everyone says they are here to save money, before acknowledging that they treated themselves to something they couldn’t resist. “The problem is you get carried away,” says an elderly woman who comes with her neighbor to stock up. A builder eating pizza in his van tells me, as though I’m an idiot for asking, “it’s cheaper. You buy in bulk.” Then I raise the matter of spontaneous purchases, and he goes quiet. “Yeah, that does happen,” his friend chimes in. One man who complained of being broke was nonetheless leaving with a liter of Jack Daniels and a crate of Nigerian Guinness. These were, he assures me, excellent value for money.

Costco has, it seems, cracked the secret of selling to a population which is increasingly concerned with belt-tightening, as living standards are ground down by taxes and inflation. It lures people in with the prospect of cheap stuff in large quantities, and then overwhelms them with temptation. And frankly, there is such insane abundance here that I struggle to believe anyone could avoid this trap. Fancy three liters of vodka in a glass skull? Australian abalones? A “giant treat tower” comprising “3kg of festive treats”? And while you’re here, what about a 10-player poker table, or an oriental rug?

Everything about Costco is big: the stores, the products, and the money. It is currently the third-largest retailer in the world by revenue, behind only Walmart and Amazon. Much of its success comes from its membership model, whereby you pay £42 annually to access its stores (or £30 if you run a business), allowing it to operate with smaller margins on its products. The company came to Britain in 1993, a decade after it first opened in the United States, and has been steadily expanding since. Long ago, when my parents first got hooked, they made pilgrimages to Costco in Watford two or three times a year, but with each decade another branch has opened closer to home. There are currently 29 stores in Britain, and more than a dozen new ones at various stages of planning and construction. Last year, Costco managed sales worth £5.3 billion in the UK, almost double its turnover in 2019.

Croydon offers some insight into this success. Occupying a liminal zone where London bleeds into Surrey, people of every conceivable class and background live or work around here, from gilet-wearing rugby dads to African Muslims, from civil servants to white-van men. And despite the fact that Costco officially restricts its memberships to individuals from certain occupations, I found virtually all of these groups shopping there.

It is safe to say that few people approach this place on foot — one can only carry so many five-kilo blocks of cheddar — but doing so is revealing, if you want to see the hinterlands where retail is migrating. The Croydon Costco, a rectangular fortress, is nestled among acres of dual carriageway and brick warehouses, school sports fields and self-storage facilities. Around the corner is the surreal Grand Sapphire “Hotel and Banqueting” venue, essentially a Travelodge with lots of neoclassical columns and pediments tacked onto it. This masterpiece of banality, I later learn, was due to host a Reform UK Christmas party, but pulled out after a campaign of complaints.

We are a long way from the reassuringly suburban forms of the Tesco, Asda or Marks & Spencer superstore, with their gabled roofs and detailed taxonomy of class signifiers (cheese and onion or cheddar and chive?). These remain a familiar setting for British life, but their position is being steadily eroded by the rise of warehouse shopping. Whereas the traditional supermarkets still gesture towards the ideal of the friendly local community of shops (which they in reality replaced), hiding their brutal efficiency behind a chatty marketing style and an emphasis on British produce, their challengers cut the frills and let the prices speak for themselves. Ikea’s giant edge-of-town warehouse-stores were pioneering in this regard, teaching the middle classes to swallow their pretenses for the sake of a bargain. Lidl and Aldi brought the warehouse onto the high street, their chintzy copycat branding made more palatable by the ravages of inflation. With Costco, the trend approaches its zenith. Retail collapses into logistics and infrastructure; architecturally, Costco stores are cousins of the data center and the Amazon fulfillment hub.

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Look at the trolleys leaving Costco and you will see plenty of evidence of our straightened economic times. The company’s obvious audience in Britain are the comfortable but concerned; natural denizens of the M&S food hall who have been driven in search of bargains by the high cost of everything, and who have the current account balance and the cupboard space to buy several months’ worth of cashew nuts at once. According to market researchers, high earners are more likely to shop at Costco. But most of the shoppers I see at the Croydon store are not in this category. Unlike that gentleman with the green chinos, they cannot spend several hundred pounds on a whim. Rather, many have come to stock up on a small number of products — one family appears to be living off Yazoo milkshakes and tins of baked beans — even if they pick up a few treats along the way. The most common items appear to be toilet paper, laundry detergent, and above all, crates of bottled drinking water. (The people of South London, it seems, do not trust what comes out of their taps. I’m not sure why, though one young woman, a nurse, describes herself as “prone to typhoid”.) No doubt some Costco members like the idea that they have hacked grocery shopping by going wholesale.

Still, we have by no means entered an era of Gradgrindian retail, where enjoyment counts for nothing and all that matters are the numbers on the sticker. At Costco, the sheer volume and variety of products creates its own kind of pornographic spectacle, which is only heightened by the lack of ceremony. Add some promotional giveaways and an in-store canteen, and you get something like an experience. I have barely arrived when I find myself looking at a case of diamond jewelry — placed near the door, along with the fancy perfumes, for Christmas — trying not to think about what I paid for my wife’s engagement ring. Moments later, I am sampling coffee from a ludicrously discounted espresso machine, joking with two ladies in headscarves and their trolley full of young infants. With the aisles stretching ahead of us, there is a sense of anticipation almost like the start of a big night out. I later manage to sample a steak, a chicken Kiev, and a tot of Panamanian rum. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but by the time I reach the vats of olive oil my resistance is broken and I fetch a trolley.

After 45 minutes in the store, my theory of Costco has changed. I no longer think that people are being seduced into spending more than they wanted to; I suspect that, on some level, they come here to be seduced. The genius of warehouse retail is that it makes shoppers feel like they are behaving as purely rational economic agents, which seems like the responsible way to act when money is scarce. In truth, they are engaging in a kind of leisure, enjoying the chance to browse, fantasize, and buy things that they believe they probably shouldn’t. This is not without social and political significance. It suggests that, for all the manifest anger and unhappiness at our system today, a major plank of capitalist society — the desire to possess and to enjoy commodities — remains firmly in place. On the evidence of Croydon, American-style supersized consumerism is probably a more unifying cultural force in modern Britain than the vague British values which people are always trying to formulate.

Leaving the store, I join a chaotic queue of trolleys as it converges on a handful of overworked cashiers, frantically sifting through the mountains of goods with their barcode scanners. My turn comes and it turns out I’ve managed to spend £100. I check my receipt in disbelief, convinced there is a mistake. Is this actually saving me money? Probably not. Do I regret it? Not really.

Clifford’s speech was genuinely rousing, even for someone who is skeptical of the message, borne forth in Looking for Growth’s name, that economic growth is the straightforward key to most of the country’s problems. As Clifford pointed out, Britain was once the most prosperous nation in the world. But its innate genius for innovation has been tragically stifled in the 17 years since the Great Financial Crisis, “the biggest economic disaster in the history of our country”. We still have it in us, though, to Make Britain Rich Again. By the end of the evening, as one speaker after another echoed this call, it had almost come to feel like a patriotic duty.

I heard various motives for being there among the 1,300-strong crowd. One young woman hoped to meet people of a “center or center right” persuasion, a group she felt was significant but voiceless among under 35s. A group of muscle-bound blokes was mainly interested in the star speaker, the political strategist and blogger Dominic Cummings, and his insights regarding the German master of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck. But most said they were frustrated with the malaise they felt around them every day, and responsive to Looking for Growth’s message, spread through X and Instagram, that they did not have to passively accept it. A TfL employee told me that London’s rail infrastructure is disintegrating as Britain gets “poorer year after year”. A soon-to-be-qualified architect complained that “it’s a bureaucratic nightmare to lay a single brick in this country”.

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This mood of exasperation was amply reflected onstage. Marc Warner, founder of an AI firm, described how he had helped the government create a world-leading system for testing wastewater to monitor Covid, only to be locked out of the subsequent procurement process. According to Warner, Britain now trails Malawi in this particular field. All the infamous cases of planning absurdity, from the HS2 bat tunnel to the 350,000-page application for the Lower Thames Crossing, were repeatedly wheeled out to be pelted with rotten fruit. By the time Cummings came on, the audience was ready for a characteristically dramatic assessment. Britain, he said, has reached a treacherous point in the lifecycle of modern states, where “a gap opens up between the elite and its institutions and reality”, a process of ideological self-delusion which usually grows worse until “the elite falls into the gap”.

The genius of Looking for Growth has been to create a sense of grassroots energy around a program that is really focused, like Cummings’ attacks, on Whitehall and Westminster. Its recipe for achieving growth is planning reform, a large-scale build out of housing and infrastructure, and a supercharged tech sector centered on artificial intelligence. But most of the movement’s attention has come from more emotive issues of law and order and the state of the public realm. Its leading figure, the former academic Lawrence Newport, rose to prominence in 2023 when he successfully pressured the Conservative government to ban XL Bully dogs. His next campaign, Crush Crime, demanded action on mobile phone and bicycle thefts, repeat offenders, court backlogs and grooming gangs. Since Newport launched Looking for Growth last December with his brother, the former Treasury civil servant, and AI researcher, Joe Reeve, their greatest impact has come from a widely publicized campaign to clean graffiti from public transport and town centers.

One might say these initiatives demonstrate that many of Britain’s problems do not, in fact, require economic growth to be fixed; they require some civic pride and for the state to perform its basic functions properly. But as one perceptive audience member told me, the grassroots work can win converts to the growth mission. There is, he said, “a learned helplessness in this country”, and once people realize they can make a difference on small, immediate issues, they may develop an appetite for bigger changes. And the movement is trying to bring the same element of participation to its ambitions on planning reform. In January, it published a National Priority Infrastructure Bill, focused on nuclear power stations, electricity cables and data centers, which supporters were encouraged to submit en masse to MPs and government ministers. At Thursday’s event, Newport promised a raft of new initiatives, including a “hit list” of important projects for YIMBY foot soldiers to force through the planning process.

The effort to involve people is one thing that separates Looking for Growth from an organization like the Tony Blair Institute, which shares many of the same concerns with tech, state efficiency, and modernization. Another is the movement’s patriotic emphasis. Its central story is less about progress per se than about national renewal. Clifford was not the only speaker to celebrate Britain’s history as the first industrial nation, leading the world in living standards for over a century. As Newport put it, Britain “birthed the modern world” in the industrial revolution, a feat of a magnitude that no other country has matched. Tory MP Katie Lam ended the night by demanding “the growth that every generation for 200 years came to see as their birth right” and claiming that “our leaders are failing us but our people are as great as they ever were”. Even the Labour speaker Chris Curtis — who devoted a long aside to attacking Lam’s recent comments on immigration, without actually naming her ­— gave a patriotic account of sorts, using Milton Keynes as a symbol of the country’s post-war spirit.

The movement’s sense of itself as a popular, apolitical crusade for common sense is misleading, though. Its followers represent a relatively thin, highly educated and successful slice of British society. It has broken through because it has access to skills, contacts and media support which the political system is responsive to. It may draw inspiration from Britain’s past, it is really closer to the modernizing elite factions which appeared in the late stage of civilizations such as Edo Japan, Qing China, Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire. These groupings saw the rise of technologically advanced Western powers in the late-19th century and realized that their only hope of survival was to seize control of their own states and force them to undergo rapid, radical reforms. Likewise, Looking for Growth is contemporary Britain’s answer to the Young Turks: an elite tendency urging a hidebound establishment to look at Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Dubai, and to recognize the lateness of the hour. As Clifford put it: “we are here to save our country.”

Even if this is a non-partisan cause — in addition to Curtis and Lam, Reform’s Danny Kruger appeared via video message, inviting talented individuals to join his own party — it cannot remain, as Newport claims, merely an influential background force in politics, like the woke tendency or the environmental lobby. The nature of the changes it seeks to make will inevitably, sooner or later, force it to develop a fuller political stance. Will it let the free market rip, as its more Thatcherite members would prefer, or will it try to build strategically important industries in Britain, even at the expense of short-term growth? Will it prioritize new projects or first address the accumulated social problems of regions that have been left behind for decades? How will it respond to the inevitable drawing away of government resources and attention by pensions, healthcare and benefits? How will people be trained for the new growth industries, and what will happen to those who cannot be? How will it justify immigration that may be needed for labor and skills? How far is it willing to go in removing the ability of locals to block unwanted developments, a right that many regard as part of the social contract?

In other words, growth for growth’s sake can only get you so far; there are always questions of which growth, and for whose benefit. And even before that, the movement faces a more basic conundrum. With the current Labour government appearing increasingly chaotic and incapable of carrying through anything consequential, when will there actually be a political force worth exerting influence on? At this week’s event, Cummings himself sketched a probable scenario which is difficult to refute. By next year, and especially after the May local elections, both Labour and the Conservatives will likely be discredited. The likely route to a mandate for change lies with a professionalized Reform Party, or some other, as yet unknown entity.

This is why Looking for Growth’s message of British exceptionalism is potentially so significant. Through their alliance with Donald Trump, the tech giants pushing through the AI boom in the US have shown that populist, nationalist politics can function as a vehicle for an agenda of deregulation and massive infrastructure building. It would not be surprising to see a similar pact forming in Britain in the coming years. A story of national renewal would be one way to sell radical policies in aid of growth to at least some disillusioned voters.

Asked for his own judgment on Britain’s prospects, Cummings claimed there is a “black pill” in the fact that few societies escape the dynamics of decline that the country now appears trapped in; the “white pill”, on the other hand, is that Britain’s system has proven surprisingly resilient and adaptable in the past. He then implored the Looking for Growth membership to put aside their start-ups and to help rejuvenate the establishment. Whether and how they respond to this call will be of some consequence to the country’s future.

Two decades of consensus on green policy, shared by Britain’s governing classes and to some extent its public, is currently unraveling. A recent YouGov survey found flagging support for Net Zero, the government’s commitment to decarbonize the British economy by 2050 or sooner, with a quarter of voters now saying that the dangers of climate change have been overstated. It may be, as Labour’s zealous energy secretary Ed Miliband argues, that Britain’s climate debate is being polarized along American lines; but it clearly matters that material sacrifices demanded by green measures, which were long a question of principle, are now starting to be felt in people’s lives. At any rate, the Reform Party, who will potentially form the next government, are determined to scrap what its deputy leader Richard Tice calls “net stupid zero”, and the Conservatives are now following suit, with Kemi Badenoch this week pledging to repeal the Climate Change Act.

Even Labour is wavering. Miliband’s green policies are beginning to look like a political liability. The party faces pressure from its trade union supporters over job losses at closed oil and gas facilities, while energy costs for both homes and businesses remain painfully high. All the while, anger continues to mount at the difficulty of building anything under exacting environmental regulations.

The rest of the world has shown scant regard for Britain’s delusional bid at “climate leadership”. America and China continue to burn fossil fuels on a scale that dwarfs anything in our own industrial past. Donald Trump is dismantling the Biden climate agenda and railing against Europe’s green policies. In August, a proposed treaty to limit global plastic production failed to materialize, and now a draft report by the International Energy Agency suggests that, far from reaching “peak oil” this decade as previously hoped, the current trajectory will see global oil and gas demand still rising in 2050. The apparent futility of Britain’s climate mission must also be sapping the public’s support.

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These developments have barely registered in Polanski’s publicity drive since becoming leader. Instead, the former Lib Dem council candidate has established himself as a darling of the Corbynite Left. One of his first moves was to support the police for sending five armed officers to arrest Irish comedian Graham Linehan for his comments about “trans-identified males”. In interviews and on his own podcast, “climate emergency” is merely one ill-defined theme in a familiar repertoire of wealth taxes, colonialism, and the looming threat of fascism. Among the issues occupying the Greens in the lead up to their conference are legal action and protest by former members who say they were purged their gender-critical views.

The Green Party, in other words, has ceased to be an organization dedicated to environmental campaigning and policy, at precisely the time when such an organization is needed most. In fact, just 16% of those who would consider voting Green see the environment as the top issue facing the country.

How did we get here? The root of the problem is that, during this century, environmental politics has split into two parts: an establishment strand, and a protest strand. The establishment strand is comprised of the methods by which governments and large firms have tried to mitigate environmental damage. It is a bureaucratic affair, focusing on carbon budgets, regulations, and the allocation of capital to green technologies and energy sources. The protest strand, by contrast, is just what it sounds like: direct action demanding that governments go harder and faster to save the planet, whether in the form of climate marches or guerrilla campaigns by groups such as Just Stop Oil.

The result of this division is that, while environmentalism has maintained a high public profile, its political base has eroded. Neither strand has really bothered to involve a broader public in debating the goals and means of green policies. Nor have they properly considered the resentment those policies invite, whether through growing energy bills or the constant creep of restrictive rules.  Environmental politics ought to help us keep sight of one of the most profound questions a modern society faces: how can we prevent our way of life from ruining the world we are handing on to future generations — its landscapes, waterways, and fast-diminishing wealth of natural life? Instead, it has become a byword for stifling bureaucracy on the one hand, and for a facile politics of gesture on the other.

Unmoored from the lives of its citizens, the environmentalism of Britain’s establishment has drifted into a realm of fantasy targets and unworkable edicts. Nothing shows this better than the adoption of Net Zero goals in 2019. As Professor Helen Thompson has noted, the legislation passed through parliament with “little contest in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, when the country was still politically consumed with the question of whether the UK would actually leave the EU”. Our political system was paralyzed, our politicians unable to agree about anything, yet they still committed to “reinventing modern civilization… within less than three decades”. There was neither the technology existent to realize these ambitions, nor a plausible route to the green industrial boom promised by May, by Boris Johnson, and now by Miliband.

Instead, Net Zero policy has contributed to the on-going deindustrialization of the country through exceptionally high electricity prices. Moreover, a rush to install wind and solar before the grid has been updated means that we have problems not just with inconsistent supply, but with oversupply, so that we will pay an estimated £1 billion this year to prevent windfarms from generating too much electricity. This strategy, or lack thereof, risks discrediting the entire project of decarbonization, as does the failure to explain why Britain must shoulder these costs when other countries do not. It is becoming apparent that an additive approach — building up renewable sources as well as some domestic oil and gas — will be more politically sustainable, and may be more effective as well. Energy is so important to a modern economy that, with more of it, we could develop our own cleaner industries, rather than relying on dirty ones overseas, and could ultimately invest more in green tech and infrastructure.

The unpalatable nature of such compromises has helped to push the environmental movement, and the Green Party specifically, onto the more comfortable terrain of protest. As one Green member recently tried to remind his leadership, the party has grown over the years through patient advocacy and attention to local issues. Yet the “hyperpolitics” of the past decade, with its online activism and public demonstrations, has taken its toll. Greta Thunberg’s graduation from climate heroine to Palestine campaigner is emblematic of how green politics has been submerged in a wider protest agenda. Now an exodus of progressives from the post-Corbyn Labour party, combined with the longing for a charismatic populism on the Left to match Nigel Farage, is creating a party that is green only as an afterthought. But if the cause is too diffuse, its appeal is too narrow. Research into the Green membership has found that it is concentrated in London and the southeast of England, that 88% are Remainers, and that almost all identify as Left-wing.

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Obviously an environmental movement can be based in a critique of society, and even a spirit of revolt — love of the natural world usually involves some degree of disillusionment with modernity — but in the past, this has taken diverse and colorful forms. During the Twenties and Thirties, the so-called “muck and mystery” movement, led by reactionary and fascist-sympathizing British landowners, combined organic agriculture with Morris dancing and festivals celebrating an imagined ancient English culture. In the Seventies and Eighties, meanwhile, New Age hippies dabbled in Tipi communes, Native American cultural practices, and pagan ceremonies at Stonehenge — culminating in a brutal clash with police at the 1985 “Battle of Beanfield”.

Such mysticism, while it inevitably veers into the ridiculous, represents something that would serve today’s green movement better than an emotive attachment to politics: a sense of wonder at, and direct connection with, the natural world. Focusing on nature not just in an abstract global sense, but in a concrete, local one, can paradoxically appeal to a much broader base of people, of different temperaments and outlooks.

This may sit uneasily with the practical purview of environmental politics, which demands a careful understanding of economic webs spanning the world, as well as the mundane technical systems which make our societies function. But that is precisely what makes this problem so difficult. An effective environmental movement must be at once romantic and rational, global and local, radical and conservative, and above all, capable of incorporating many types of people. With that in mind, and looking again at the Greens today, we might conclude that political parties are probably the wrong mechanism for this challenge altogether.

Though rarely expressed so honestly, these are sentiments that leaders around the world could sympathize with. Most governments claim to be answerable to their people, yet if they rely on debt to fund their activities, they will find their sovereignty constrained by analysts sitting in distant financial districts. James Carville, the outspoken former adviser to Bill Clinton, famously quipped that he would like to be reincarnated as the bond market, since “you can intimidate everybody”.

When Labour entered power last year, Chancellor Rachel Reeves faced the same problem that bedeviled Erdoğan and Carville: how to reassure the bond markets that they could keep lending at reasonable rates. Her answer was to commit to a set of “fiscal rules”, pledging that government debt will be falling by the end of the parliament. This was not an original strategy: Reeves was merely adapting what has become a convention for British chancellors since George Osborne created the framework for austerity in 2010. But during Reeves’ hapless tenure, it has become clear that the mantra of fiscal responsibility conceals another tendency: government by metrics.

Bereft of imagination in a rapidly changing world, our political class clings ever more tightly to numerical targets and indicators, hoping to convey an impression of competence and stability. Instead, they have only reinforced the sense that we are ruled by management consultants rather than leaders. Nor have metrics provided the bulwark against chaos that they promised; for the numbers, it turns out, do not always show what people think they show.

An over-reliance on statistical models and measurements comes with two great dangers. The first is that the seemingly objective quality of numbers can seduce us into believing that they present an infallible picture of reality. In fact, data are gathered and modeled by institutions with all the shortcomings and flaws that one would expect of a human undertaking. The second problem is that our behavior is increasingly determined by what we can measure — or think we can measure — rather than what is actually important or desirable.

Both problems are abundantly illustrated by British politics today. When it comes to her fiscal rules, Reeves is essentially relying on economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent body, to tell her how much money she has to spend. The government ties its own hands, inviting the OBR’s economists to rate its finances before the markets get a chance to. The problem is that these forecasts are imprecise, and regularly revised as the various metrics change. Consequently, Reeves’ chancellorship has been an endless drama of budgetary “black holes” and vanishing “fiscal headroom”, as she scrambles to tailor her policies to the shifting estimates. Measuring has displaced thinking, to the point where the government’s decisions are being dictated by a numerical target rather than an actual plan for how to match the public finances to the nation’s needs.

In July, for instance, Reeves tried to tackle the problem of runaway welfare spending. Instead of setting out a strategy for reforming a fiendishly complex and thoroughly broken system of benefits — a problem whose roots go deep into British society ­— she set about salami-slicing various budgets to satisfy the fiscal rules. This so outraged Labour backbenchers that Reeves and Keir Starmer had to abandon their cuts in any case.

That same month, as if to emphasize the futility of the government’s approach, the OBR suggested it would be reconsidering some of its forecasts, which were too optimistic. The adjustment will likely force Reeves to raise billions of pounds in tax at her upcoming Budget. As the blogger M.F. Robbins has aptly put it, “you cannot micromanage policy based on statistical noise. The more you try to do this, the more you’ll find that, in fact, the noise is managing you.” The Chancellor is now trapped between a bond market waiting to see if she will keep her promises, and a party that wants her to abandon them. Last week, former transport secretary Louise Haigh published a frontal assault on the Chancellor’s strategy, demanding a less prominent role for the OBR in government. A group of 40-odd Labour MPs in Red Wall seats has previously expressed similar frustrations.

Labour’s love of metrics does not end with fiscal rules. Hoping to show a firm, technocratic grip on the nation’s problems, Starmer’s government has issued a blizzard of “missions” and “milestones” based on quantifiable targets. It wants 75% of five-year-olds to reach “a good level of development”. It aims to recruit 13,000 neighborhood police officers and 6,500 new teachers; to build 1.5 million homes and to achieve 95% clean electricity. The list goes on. At one point, the government even proposed a “digital dashboard”, so that the public could track its progress towards these goals on their smartphones.

All of this assumes that we want to treat politics like a stock market, assessing the fundamentals of a government before choosing to invest. We measure and rate everything else, so why not our politicians? One reason is that voters have an intuitive understanding of “Campbell’s Law”, which observes that a measure which becomes a target will likely come under “corruption pressures” — that is, it will be fudged or misrepresented to appear more impressive. More importantly, politics, like human experience, is fundamentally qualitative. The number of new houses does not tell us whether they are decent homes in neighborhoods where people actually want to live, just as the number of new police officers and teachers does not tell us whether the criminal justice and education systems are working as we would like. These are ratings we make with our eyes and ears.

It’s tempting to think that numbers can build trust by helping the public to understand the work of government. But if statistical and subjective reality clash, it has the opposite effect. People do not like being told a graph proves that their perceptions are wrong. In 2024, supporters of then president Joe Biden foolishly tried to convince struggling voters that they were doing great, actually; had they not seen the economic metrics? Something similar is happening with law and order issues in Britain today, as data on falling crime rates fail to assuage anger at low-level lawlessness and police impotence. The Covid pandemic was perhaps the most ambitious attempt in history at doing politics via statistical models, and it was ultimately a disaster for public trust in institutions. People were initially willing to give up their freedoms to “bend the curve” of infections, but as time wore on, the experts who were meant to save the politicians from resentment were themselves contaminated by it.

It is true that our impressions diverge from the numbers in part because we are biased. Political partisanship has long influenced perceptions of the economy in the United States, and now the same appears to be happening in Britain too. Then again, sometimes the official statistics are just spectacularly wrong, as has consistently been the case with immigration. In 2004, Tony Blair’s government estimated that welcoming migrants from Eastern European countries to work in Britain would result in a maximum of 13,000 people arriving annually. Just four years later, the Home Office revealed that 750,000 had come already. Another discrepancy emerged when EU citizens were invited to apply for settled status after Brexit. In 2019, the government thought there were 3.7 million EU nationals in the country, yet closer to 6 million have asked to remain. Similar misjudgments led former prime minister Boris Johnson to relax visa restrictions in 2021, resulting in a surge of new arrivals.

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Such errors stemmed in part from a woefully inadequate method for collecting data. The International Passenger Survey, designed in the Sixties for studying tourism, involves little more than questioning people at random at airports and other border crossings. It uses a tiny sample of migrants, and misses out many patterns of movement altogether. But until other data sources were added in the last few years — and despite immigration becoming a persistent political issue — this was the British state’s sole way of measuring it.

At one point, it could be argued that migration was an outlier in a generally solid field of British statistics. Since the Covid pandemic, though, the country’s chief number-crunching body, the Office for National Statistics, has been mired in crisis. Reports have been delayed, revised, and retracted, and it has admitted that some of its most important metrics are no longer reliable. It is a portrait in miniature of British misgovernance. In 2007, the ONS lost 90% of its London-based staff — a devastating flight of expertise — when a misguided attempt at devolution saw the agency moved to Newport in southern Wales. Governments have subsequently cut its funding, which as a cost-saving exercise is a bit like trying to lose weight by gouging out an eye. But the most pressing problem has been that fewer and fewer people are taking ONS surveys, which seems partly to reflect an unwillingness to cooperate with the state, or for that matter to answer phone calls and open the door to strangers.

This erosion of statistical competence has far-reaching implications, given the range of public and private actors who use ONS data. Their uncertainty has knock-on effects for the affordability of mortgages, the value of British businesses and assets, and the quality of government policy. Political discourse will, meanwhile, become increasingly farcical, as politicians stake their authority on numbers that provide only a tenuous picture of reality, and we will criticize them using the same illusory figures. We are already familiar with the seismic importance given to every tenth of a percentage point of GDP growth, even though such changes are far too small to measure accurately, and would tell us little of value to our lives in any case. So we are unlikely to change tack just because the measurement has been declared unreliable as well.

A grasp of metrics is essential for governing a modern society; we are right to expect that the state will make the numbers add up. The fate of Liz Truss, a prime minister effectively toppled by the bond markets when her plans were found wanting, is a reminder of the ruthless will to measurement at the heart of capitalism today. Donald Trump can bully government agencies to confect more favorable economic data, as he appeared to do last month by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but he cannot force businesses and investors to believe that data. Still, politics requires an insight that goes beyond our fixation with the quantifiable. The numbers do not lie, but nor do they tell us everything. It was once widely believed that demographic change in the United States would hand the future to the Democrats, and that the size of the EU’s GDP and population meant it could easily propel Ukraine to victory against Russia. Those claims appear less certain now.

Likewise, Britain’s current regime shows that an obsession with metrics is ultimately a profound weakness, mistaking the means of statecraft with its ends. Starmer and Reeves’ project appears to be falling apart before it is even clear what that project was, teaching us that a government led by managerial bean counters can be as fragile and incoherent as one led by clowns. Leaders who confuse meeting targets with governing well will achieve neither.

I was late for the exam, got a bad mark, and ended up narrowly missing out on a first-class degree. So ended my university career: years of hard work undone by a navigating blunder. I’ve sometimes thought back to that nightmarish morning and wondered if I was deflected from my proper calling as an academic. Others have suggested the same, which I suppose is an insult for an author (as one acquaintance put it: “have you considered writing for the London Review of Books?”). These days, it strikes me more as a lucky escape. Almost everything I hear about the University now, including from those inside its walls, makes it sound like a frustrating and somewhat depressing place to be. Underpaid and overworked, facing negligible career prospects and an increasingly illiterate culture: I can have all of this as a writer, without the footnotes and office politics.

This raises a question that, I suspect, goes beyond my own experience. How can those of us with intellectual inclinations lead secure and fulfilling lives today? And if neither the University nor the world beyond it can sustain intellectual activity — aside from research for medicine and technology, that is — then what is the point in nurturing such aspirations anyway? These questions are explored with wit and imagination in a new book by David A. Westbrook, Social Thought From the Ruins. Westbrook approaches them from the opposite angle to mine: the director of the business and law program at the University of Buffalo, New York, he is a veteran academic who now finds he is “no longer in love” with the University. The “ruins” in the book’s title are those of the humanities and social sciences, in particular — disciplines which seem increasingly unable to foster original thought, to engage constructively with modern society, or to convince the public that they deserve to exist at all.

Westbrook argues that the crisis of the University is bad not just for committed professors — a group he likens to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, who longs to be a gallant knight after the age of chivalry has already passed — but for all of us. The contemporary world is full of complex structures, from banks and corporations to armies and government bureaucracies, which need competent people to lead them and competent critics to save them from their own worst tendencies. Only a University-like institution can fill these roles, even if it is not doing a very good job at the moment. As Westbrook puts it, “sickness in the University is sickness in the gonads of the polity”, a cancer in society’s reproductive organs.

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The modern University, in Westbrook’s account, was born after 1945. Previously, there had been “the Free University”, a model stemming from the Enlightenment, whose guiding ideal was the cultivation of autonomous citizens who could hold their governments to a high standard. It reached few people though. What emerged after the Second World War, by contrast, was “the People’s University”, an enterprise which encompassed a much larger section of society, and performed functions of vital importance to the state. Not only did it provide the knowledge for an increasingly specialized economy, and the research for new technologies (especially military ones; the People’s University was a child of the Cold War). It offered a way of binding nations together, socially and ideologically. In the United States, especially, “the promise… of success through education became a way to offer participation in the American project to diverse communities”.

Something similar can be said about the expansion of the British University, first during the Sixties and then under Tony Blair, who aimed to get half of young adults into higher education. A University education had become an important dividing line in Britain, in terms of culture as well as occupation. The gradations of the middle and upper classes share the experience of leaving the place where they grew up (residential universities being favored in the British system) and entering an institution that habituates them to socially desirable ways of thinking, acting and speaking. An important aspect of this division is the one David Goodhart described as “anywheres” versus “somewheres”. Those with a university education tend to develop a more cosmopolitan outlook and to be comfortable among people of a similar graduate background more or less anywhere in the West. Those without it are more likely to be tied, practically and culturally, to a particular place and sense of home.

But the role of facilitating entry to middle-class life was always in tension with traditional ideals such as the pursuit of truth and the forging of independent minds. As universities have grown, they have bureaucratized, commercialized, and infantilized. Undergraduates now pay large fees to enjoy an extended adolescence under the supervision of administrators who are more concerned with their safety and satisfaction than their development as adults. “We teach them that they are weak, and their world is shit,” writes Westbrook in the most scathing section of the book, “and then… we wonder at the sorry state of our political discourse”. The same managerial oversight applies to those working and teaching at the University, who find their vocations reduced to performance targets and their freedom of thought sacrificed for “deeply humiliating, cruel, Orwellian” training in political correctness. In this way, “the professionalization of the life of the mind… has been almost fatal to intellectual life, or joy”.

The academics are not, of course, blameless for the decline of the academy. As two young teachers at Oxford recently complained, many disciplines have become “puritanical and doctrinaire, obsessed with an oddly narrow range of social justice issues”. Westbrook points out that this, too, can be traced back to the institutional prerogatives of the People’s University. The importation of French “theory”, with its emphasis on activist scholarship, helped professors to feel they were doing something more profound than rubber-stamping the next generation of bourgeois professionals. More importantly, it gave the multiplying departments of the humanities and social sciences a shared language in which to converse. The result was that, for all its pretensions to radicalism, “theory” ossified into a rigid orthodoxy, a body of precepts more closely resembling a religious creed than an intellectual framework. The most damaging of these, for Westbrook, is the axiom that “power is bad by definition”. This effectively rules out politics, the entire point of which is the (hopefully beneficial) use of power, replacing it with protest. And when locating the transcendent evil of power becomes the goal of scholarship, it leads to a numbing incuriosity about the actual world that people inhabit, and the actual circumstances facing those who must wield power. “Once sin has been identified, the intellectual’s work is over”.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the public, and especially not by populist movements which identify the University, quite correctly, as a linchpin of the progressive cultural and institutional power they despise. “We are watching the de-legitimation of the mandarin class”, says Westbrook, “the class created through higher education”. In the United States, Donald Trump has brought the crisis to a head. Seizing on collapsing public trust, as well as outrage at the frenzied anti-Israel activism on campuses, Trump is forcing many of America’s most prestigious universities into humiliating ideological capitulations by threatening to withhold their funding. Should they come to power, British admirers of Trump would no doubt do something similar at home, where universities are already engaged in mass redundancies due to their failing financial model. Many are closing entire departments.

Even those without political animus may agree that it’s past time to slim down the University, an unaffordable relic in an age when so much knowledge is freely available. A degree like mine, English Literature, now means incurring significant debts in exchange for poor employment prospects. Surely this does not need to be part of a state-subsidized institution? There are few signs, however, that the world beyond the University can sustain a healthy intellectual culture. Yes, many public intellectuals have used new platforms to attract large audiences, whether it be Jordan Peterson’s ascent to stardom via Youtube, or phenomenally successful newsletters like that of economic historian turned policy pundit Adam Tooze. Westbrook himself writes on Substack, speaks at film festivals, and has been involved with a new play by Matthew Gasda, the fashionable New York author. But it’s no accident that each of these individuals, and many more like them, can draw on years of study and teaching at universities. For obvious reasons relating to time and money, it is rare for a blogger, journalist or podcaster to achieve a similar intellectual depth without any academic background.

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Moreover, if the University has problems with falling standards and groupthink, it seems crazy to think that a public culture dominated by social media could do better. The relentless crushing of attention spans, the restless mob mentality, the constant exposure to the judgment of our peers: these do not seem like promising conditions for original, fearless intellects to be forged.

Besides, modern society needs mandarins to function, and so it needs institutions to train those mandarins. The techno-populist fantasy of replacing bureaucrats with AI engineers is no less frivolous than the academic squeamishness at “power”, since the problems of governance are ultimately human and political, not technical. Fiascoes such as the Global War on Terror, the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic are good reasons to mistrust elites, but we still need people to steer our military, financial and public health systems, and they might as well be good people. But Westbrook’s vision for the University goes beyond the education of elites. He sketches a possible future for the intellectual as someone who actively engages with major institutions, an “interlocutor” and benevolent critic helping to grease the wheels of modernity. Rather than pretending they are somehow aloof from power, academics should aim to “humanize” powerful organizations by providing them with different perspectives and insights, seeking to diminish the blunders and absurdities which bureaucracies are so prone to. Curiosity and conversation are the key concepts here; I imagine a lot of fieldwork taking place in bars, on company cards.

This may be an ingenious way to save the role of the intellectual from oblivion by making it socially useful, perhaps even glamorous. It is true more broadly that the rush to embrace AI, against a backdrop of plunging literacy, makes the humanities more important, not less so. Sadly, the modern way is not to adapt new technologies to our shared ends, but to bend society to accommodate new technologies, which will likely mean that our systems become increasingly unresponsive to the complexities of their human subjects. That deficit is something which humanistic knowledge and understanding ought to fill. The news that the University of Chicago, long a heavyweight in the humanities, will now be cutting down or removing PhD programs in many of those subjects is not just a tragedy; it is a very bad omen.

What I am left wondering, though, is whether there cannot also be space for learning for its own sake. Looking back at my own academic experience, cut short as it was, I can think of no better way to have spent those three years immersed in Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Eliot, and I’m glad that there are people who can dedicate their careers to this cause. Can such study be useful in life? Undoubtedly. But a stronger defense of the humanities is surely that they keep alive our stories, our history and our cultural inheritance, as well as the practice of scholarship itself. Now more than ever, as the wider culture grows intellectually barren, these things need some sort of institutional form to survive; losing them would make us infinitely poorer.

While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanized region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centers will double or triple in size.

Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialize has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travelers and employees of foreign businesses.

As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalization has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual laborers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centers. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favor. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

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Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organization predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combating radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programs and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

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But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialization. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialized region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilizational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labor, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamoring to use that workforce on our own aging continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.

Herein lies a fundamental problem for the NHS. The American public profess their gratitude for it, but through a combination of desperation and complacency, they have come to use it as a sticking plaster for a failing social fabric. Abandoned parents are far from the worst examples. In poorer parts of the country, pensioners allow their health to deteriorate so that they can receive hospital care, while young women “resort to swallowing household objects to secure a bed for the night”. The NHS and the welfare system have together been burdened with the fallout from a whole range of social pathologies, from poor education and family breakdown to substance abuse and widespread emotional suffering, now typically medicalised as mental health.

When the consequences of these problems, whether in the form of childhood obesity or drug addiction, can be assigned to a particular arm of the state, it becomes easier to ignore them. This is a perverse consequence of the moral consensus behind free, universal healthcare in America: we feel we have done our part by supporting the principle of a safety net. In time, though, the costs of that avoidance mount. In England and Wales, one in every 10 people now receive disability or incapacity benefits, and around 1,000 new claims for Personal Independence Payments are registered every day. The health service, which swallows an ever-growing portion of the overall government budget, is likely spending more than £50 billion annually on the effects of deprivation.

The situation recalls that adage about great fortunes: the first generation earns it, the second spends it, the third loses it. The NHS is now well into its third generation of patients, and the conscientious appreciation of its first users has given way — despite the constant warnings of crisis — to an assumption that it will always be there, regardless of how much pressure we place on it.

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This raises a further issue: if we demand that politicians “save the NHS”, and the threats it needs saving from are societal in nature, then politicians will conclude that society must be reformed to accommodate the NHS. Having defined ourselves as a country with a health system, we will gradually become a health system with a country. This has been the direction of official thinking for some time, with numerous NHS reviews calling for stronger measures to prevent sickness and improve public health. Under Health Secretary Wes Streeting, the current Labour government is promising to deliver as never before. The new 10 Year Health Plan for England, published last Thursday, has as one of its three key aims the creation of a health service that “predicts and prevents ill health rather than simply diagnosing and treating it”. Combined with the other two goals — more healthcare accessible within local neighborhoods, and greater reliance on software — the idea is to mitigate the pattern of people having no contact with the health service until they turn up at A&E, often repeatedly, or develop conditions requiring long-term treatment.

More generally, though, the emphasis on prevention represents the inevitable expansion of the health service into a lifestyle, employment, happiness and surveillance service. The 10 Year Plan announces that the next generation of adults will never be allowed to buy tobacco, that the state will support the market for no- and low-alcohol beverages, and that food companies and supermarkets will be made to adopt various targets and reporting protocols around health. Patients will receive employment support and debt advice in Neighborhood Health Centers, and the government will launch an exercise campaign “to motivate millions to move more on a daily basis”.

Such policy ideas are not entirely new, of course, but they do represent a quite significant shift in the state’s relationship to culture. Habits that a few decades ago would have been considered normal, and certainly a matter of private choice, are being rooted out by a growing Puritanism in Whitehall — yet the motivation is not primarily moral but financial. More intrusive still is the growing role of technology and “incentive schemes” in these reforms. Launching the 10 Year Plan, Keir Starmer boasted that a new NHS app would be an “indispensable part of life”. In time, it will presumably be used to monitor our lifestyle and health metrics, as such tools are already used by private insurers. The new NHS plan approvingly cites an app developed by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board, which records daily step totals and allows diet logging and sleep tracking. Healthier choices and attendance at screenings are rewarded with e-vouchers. Labour’s plan promises to create a similar “digital NHS points scheme”, in which “people are rewarded for taking positive actions to improve their health”.

The growing scope of health policy creates all sorts of political puzzles. Which actions should be regarded as symptoms of deeper social problems, and which as irresponsible decisions? Why is overeating placed in a different moral category to smoking? Why can we encourage someone to exercise but not to do a better job at raising their children? Where exactly is the boundary between what the state is and is not willing to regulate in defense of the NHS? Running throughout the 10 Year Plan is the clash between two fundamental principles of contemporary thought: that personal choice is inviolable, and that people are products of social conditions who can be manipulated (or “incentivized”) accordingly.

It is a sign of how far we have accepted the role of the state in deciding these questions that we rarely discuss the alternative, which would be to take greater responsibility, personally and collectively, for public health and social care. A friend who works at NHS England, the quango in charge of the day-to-day operation of the health service, tells me that the healthcare problem can’t be solved without “changing the English societal culture”. For instance, if parents can organize for children to do exercise together after school, then fewer children will have to go home and sit in front of screens because their parents are still working. Retired baby-boomers could help with initiatives like this, helping to solve the problem of isolation among older people.

Such proposals tend to be denounced as stifling communitarianism, contrary to the British spirit of individualism; or conversely, as ideological cover for the weakening of public services. To the first accusation, I’d suggest that this is what independence from the state actually looks like: not simply acknowledging some responsibility for yourself and your children, but for your wider family, friends and neighborhood too. If you would rather be free from these bonds, don’t complain when the government steps in to fill the gaps. As for the second complaint, the financial plight of the health and welfare systems are proof that such services can only provide for the most vulnerable if the rest of us cooperate.

The notion that we are entitled to demand endless care from the state because we pay taxes, or because a politician promised it to us, is not socialism but consumerism. Clearly, given the staggering rise in claimants, a large number are claiming health-related benefits who should not be. The growth is being driven by mental health claims, which suggests that these are vulnerable to fraud, but also that people are claiming for conditions that, while doubtless producing real suffering, no society can afford to classify as debilitating. Disability advocates tend to reject any skepticism about benefits claimants, but it is obvious that if we continue on the current trajectory, it will wreck the system for those who do need such support.

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The example of Sweden’s famously generous welfare state — though in many ways incomparable with Britain — is illustrative in this regard. Their system works because it is underpinned by strong social norms. One Swede emphasized to me that people are expected to work and contribute if they want to benefit from public resources. Another told me about applicants being rejected after job interviews because they don’t exercise. These attitudes strike the British psyche — my own included — as judgmental and conformist, but we are the ones prone to treat the state like an indulgent parent. Anecdotally, I have heard about patients demanding a treatment or diagnosis because they heard about it on Instagram.

As a consultant at an NHS hospital once explained to me, many of the organization’s troubles stem from three major, incompatible goals: that healthcare should be distributed equitably to all; that it should provide the most advanced — and expensive — treatments modern science has to offer; and that it should be run with business-like efficiency. Streeting is placing special emphasis on the third of these goals, trying to create a service that performs its key functions more effectively at lower relative cost. To make headway, he will likely have to concede something on the other two. Making private health insurance tax deductible, for instance, would relieve pressure on the NHS by encouraging wealthier citizens to make less use of it, but it would also violate British taboos about inequality in healthcare. As for expensive new treatments, Streeting has already limited the availability of diet drugs and Alzheimer’s medicines; but what about genetically designed cancer therapies, or multiple cycles of fertility treatment? These are incredibly costly services that a previous generation would not have expected, yet for the small numbers of people that receive them, they are deeply important.

These are brutal decisions. But if we want to maintain a thoroughly utilitarian institution like the NHS, we have little choice but to think like utilitarians, maintaining some sense of the greatest good for the greatest number. The best way to reduce our exposure to such cruel reasoning is, again, to acknowledge that we can do more to support one another on our own terms. Of course the same problems of social breakdown that place such strain on the health service also make voluntarist solutions more difficult, especially in the areas where they are needed most. The temptation, instead, is to grab our share of scarce resources before they disappear. But if this model proves as unsustainable as it already appears, the need to do more for our own collective health and happiness will be forced on us sooner or later. We may as well accept it now.

Farage later conceded that restoring the furnaces may not be possible, though perhaps new ones could be built. Either way, the episode neatly captured the surreal state of contemporary British politics. After all, there are still four years to go until the next election, and Labour has over 400 MPs, while Reform has just five. As Farage’s promises regarding the steel industry demonstrate, his party’s economic platform consists almost entirely of unworkable gimmicks. And yet, he is quite right to say of Keir Starmer’s government that “Reform are now leading much of their agenda”.

If there was an underlying purpose in Rachel Reeves’ spending review this week, it was to confront the rise of Farage and his party. Since the local elections six weeks ago, Starmer has tried to stake out tougher positions on immigration and integration, while attacking Reform’s economic absurdities. The prime minister has given speeches devoted solely to countering Farage, and has told MPs that they have “a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins”. Reeves’ spending review served as the financial complement to Starmer’s political crusade.

For Reeves, who addressed Farage a number of times in her own speech, the decision to reverse course on the winter fuel allowance was obviously driven by Reform’s local election success. She also coughed up $15 billion for transport investments, targeted at regions where Reform is a threat, and provided Labour with some rhetorical ammunition on immigration with extra cash for Border Security Command and a pledge to end the use of asylum seeker hotels by 2029. Higher defense spending will be funded with a 40% cut to foreign aid.

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One can argue that the Government is foolish to build up the Reform threat so much when the next election is still so distant, but it would be wrong to think that this is some sort of knee-jerk reaction. Contra accusations that Starmer lacks a clear direction, there have long been signs that, behind his tepid personality, he has embraced a historic mission of sorts. His purpose is to defend the remnants of Britain’s Blairite settlement from the ongoing revolt against elites, and in favor of national sovereignty. Starmer has filled his government with New Labour figures, and is himself wedded to the technocratic liberalism of the New Labour era which nurtured his political career. He wants to conform to supranational legal structures, empower Britain’s institutions to enforce doctrines of equality and rights, and generally maintain the rule of progressive lawyers and officials. In order to protect these ideals, he has to see off the forces hostile to them.

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s election, a report in the Times suggested that this mission was already taking shape. It noted that, in the northeast of England, you can drive for an hour through seats where Reform came second to Labour. Spurred by campaign manager Morgan McSweeney, who would soon be promoted to Starmer’s chief of staff, the Government’s response would essentially have three strands. Populist rhetoric would make disaffected voters feel represented by Labour; crime, health and immigration — “areas where [voters] see or viscerally feel the price of government inaction” — would be soundly managed; and economic improvement would be made manifest in people’s lives, a strategy Reeves calls the “everyday economy”. This, by-and-large, is the agenda which has come back into focus since the locals. The spending review was a reiteration of the third prong, promising, as Reeves put it on Wednesday, that “renewal” will be “felt in people’s everyday lives, in their jobs, and on their high streets”.

As a theory of how to tackle populism, the formula appears to be a fairly standard center-left one: some “flag shagging” may be necessary to address the tribal needs of voters, but fundamentally, higher living standards and a stronger state will make them good social democrats. Yet to continue giving Starmer the benefit of the doubt, he may have a deeper sense of how material and immaterial factors, matters of welfare and emotion, interact. For he has surely realized that British politics is increasingly becoming oriented around the fundamental question of citizenship. Not citizenship in the narrow sense of who gets to have a passport, but in the broader sense of what it means to be a member of British society; the rights and responsibilities it entails, and the relations, between individual, state and civil society, that it ultimately comprises.

Much of Reform’s popularity stems from the simple assertion, made salient by globalization and particularly immigration, that citizenship requires boundaries to be meaningful. If the state expects citizens to pay its taxes and follow its laws, it cannot make its resources and rights available to anyone in the world. Its first responsibility must be towards the security and welfare of British people, and it must show a preference for the culture and norms of the country as the majority of its citizens understand them. This is not enough to constitute a proper model of citizenship, but if there is a perception that the state is not maintaining the boundaries needed for citizenship even to exist, it can be politically successful. Starmer realizes this, which explains many of the positions he has taken in recent months: criticizing uncontrolled immigration, talking about the need for rules in society, and tightening requirements in areas such as English language proficiency.

But Starmer has also inherited from New Labour a more substantial model of citizenship, one that is much misunderstood. You will often hear, especially on the Right, that Blair primed the country for multiculturalism by reducing British identity to a collection of nondescript “values” like tolerance and fair play. In fact, Blair’s revolution was grounded in a much more sophisticated and comprehensive redrawing of the social contract. It was, indeed, intended to crack open older and more bounded understandings of British society, not just by redefining identity but by marinating public life in a range of progressive narratives and principles, a project assisted by sympathetic NGOs and by cadres of new graduates in the professional classes.

Crucially, though, there was another component in this scheme, essential for winning over the public, and that was public services. Improving public services was central to New Labour’s electoral pitch in 1997, and from that date until 2010 spending rose sharply, increasing by an average of 4.4% each year with a focus on health, education and transport. As for the quality and quantity of public services — more difficult to measure, of course — the Office for National Statistics estimated an increase of about one-third between 1997-2007. But this was not simply about improving material living standards or voter satisfaction; public services were a vehicle through which a new image of Britain could be sold to citizens.

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Immigration is a case in point. In the Blairite vision, people would embrace new arrivals if they were able to walk into shiny hospitals, schools, and community centers and be greeted by smiling teams of multiethnic staff, before receiving high-quality support. This is still the image of Britain emblazoned on every public-facing brochure and webpage, and the notion that immigration serves the purpose of staffing public services remains the most commonly heard case for it.

Similarly, via education, bureaucracy and broadcasting, public services provided opportunities to promote cultural change, whether by encouraging certain attitudes to language or presenting Britain as an amalgam of distinct communities. Meanwhile, the authoritarian side of Blairism — the growth of surveillance, anti-terror programs and new criminal offenses — approached the same task from the opposite angle, advancing the role of the state as a protective if menacing force capable of maintaining order in a changing society.

There are parts of Britain, increasingly likely to vote Liberal Democrat, where this vision has been really quite successful: good schools, hospitals and infrastructure underpin a way of life that is socially liberal and cosmopolitan. Here we see modern Britain “at ease with itself”, as the cliché would have it, a world that peacefully minds its own business. But these areas are generally quite wealthy. Throughout much of the country, by contrast, the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity eroded the foundations on which the New Jerusalem was supposed to be built. To make matters considerably worse for Starmer and Reeves, more recent Conservative governments botched Brexit and lost control of the country’s borders. What remains of the Blairite model of citizenship, conceived as a system of managed change, are incoherent and disconnected pieces, with none of the security or prosperity needed to anchor them: social justice campaigns that seem to spring up from nowhere; a police force both unreliable and strangely aggressive; incomprehensible concessions to international law.

If there is a discernable purpose in the Starmer project, it is to shepherd these fragments and painstakingly restore them to a more coherent whole. The urgency with which his government has awarded public sector pay deals, while insisting on the need for growth, shows an elemental desire to rebuild the progressive state by getting public services functioning and funded. The problem illustrated by this week’s spending review, however, is that the government simply lacks the resources to do anything more than plug some of the gaps left by the state’s steady decay. The golden geese of New Labour’s financialized economy are not coming back, and since investors demand high interest rates from the government, the Treasury now spends more than £100 billion each year just on debt interest. For comparison, Reeves’ winter fuel payment cut was predicted to save £1.5 billion annually.

But if Labour lacks a vision for citizenship without healthy public services and a generous state, then so does Reform. Farage’s purely opportunistic economic policies, comprised of lavish, largely unfunded tax cuts and giveaways, show a failure to grasp the seriousness of the moment. He may think that the problem of citizenship is just one of reasserting boundaries, but he will soon find that, for much of the public, it is also defined by material benefits which he cannot provide.

In a new book, The Haves and Have-Yachts, a collection of essays written for The New Yorker over the past decade, Evan Osnos describes Hanley as “a bon vivant, with a fondness for salmon-colored slacks, and a ready checkbook for political ventures”. Hanley inherited, and expanded, a family business in construction supplies and oil. In 1980 he campaigned for Ronald Reagan in Connecticut, developing an approach that, Osnos writes, “uncannily prefigured Trump’s electoral strategy” by assembling “a coalition of conservative elites and the white working class”. Over the next decades he funded numerous organizations and initiatives that promoted a low-tax, small-state conservatism, including publishers, non-profits, and a powerful lobbying firm, Black, Manafort and Stone. (Roger Stone had been one of Reagan’s campaign managers; he would also, along with Paul Manafort, advise Trump.)

Then, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Hanley commissioned a pollster to look deeper into the underlying mood in the United States. He was informed that “the level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable”. Hanley became convinced that Trump was the only politician capable of channeling this energy in a favorable direction, and set about converting other wealthy donors to the cause. It was a canny investment. Even as Trump gave expression to the anger of Bannon’s “hobbits”, his presidency brought immense material rewards for wealthy Americans, most obviously in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and financial benefits during the Covid pandemic.

Reflecting on the role of figures like Hanley, Osnos concludes: “The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s elite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.” That bargain is still paying off today. Trump’s latest budget, which cleared the House of Representatives last month, pledges to entrench and expand the tax cuts passed during his first term. By some estimates, those earning above $500,000 will receive more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts over the next decade, while a similar amount will be cut from government health insurance and food assistance programs. If we add to this the Trump family’s brazen use of office for self-enrichment, the privileges granted in return for financial contributions, and the political powers given to billionaires such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, then surely all but the most gullible can conclude that America’s regime deserves to be called oligarchy — rule by the wealthy few.

How did the US reach this point? And given the country’s increasingly fragile political and financial position — Trump is adding trillions to an already prolific national debt, even as his policies threaten economic chaos — how sustainable is it? Osnos’ book, subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich, provides some important answers to these questions. His starting assumption is that “Trump is a creature of the money-world, and, specifically, of a period of American thinking about greed, fairness, liberty, and dominance”. The essays try, in an almost sociological fashion, to draw back the curtain of this money-world, and “to capture the thinking and behavior of some of the world’s most powerful people”.

What these forays reveal is that, over the past five decades, a section of America’s elite has increasingly rejected constraints on their ability to accrue wealth, disavowing the notion that their great resources entail any special responsibility towards their fellow citizens. They have embraced a libertarian ethos which casts them simply as private individuals, responsible for their own fate, and entitled to enjoy their riches as they see fit. They have not, however, forgone the prerogative of using their money to shape government and society. The resulting pattern, traced in The Haves and Have-Yachts, has been a “simple arithmetic of compounding — of money making money, of lobbyists layering on new exemptions each decade, of the cultural amnesia that makes ideas about wealth come to seem normal, honorable, inevitable”. In 1978, the richest 0.1% of Americans controlled 7% of the country’s wealth; by 2023, their share was two-and-a-half times greater. Over the same period, the average tax rate of the top 0.01% fell by more than half.

The transformation of the American elite is illustrated by Greenwich, the Connecticut town where Osnos grew up. Known as “the hedge fund capital of the world”, Greenwich is home to a cluster of ultra-rich financiers, who cleave to the privacy of their high-walled estates and their superyachts. But it was not ever thus. The town was once the bastion of an older WASP elite, whose patrician culture included the beliefs that “showing off your money was déclassé”, and that wealth should “justify itself” in both private and public life. Typical of this milieu was Prescott Bush, a congressman in the Fifties and Sixties, and patriarch of the dynasty that would produce two presidents. The “ludicrously aristocratic” Prescott required his sons to wear a jacket and tie at the dinner table, while his grandchildren addressed him as “senator”. His political positions, including a higher minimum wage and taxation to fund investment, reflected a paternalistic sense of duty to the less fortunate.

Greenwich changed in part because its residents, already rich, became much richer, thanks to the post-Eighties boom in financial services. But this coincided with an ideological shift, led by figures like Hanley, away from the Country Club Republicanism of Prescott Bush and towards an outlook focused on personal liberty and suspicion of the state. One decisive moment came in 1980, when Hanley chose not to back local son George H.W. Bush in the Republican primary, working instead to ingratiate Reagan with the genteel denizens of Greenwich. Hanley’s wife even sourced an emergency replacement for the Californian senator’s “ghastly” brown tie.

In Osnos’ telling, this revolt of the elites and the subsequent decades of rising inequality would ultimately force conservatives into their volatile tryst with Trump, as they sacrificed their integrity to surf the wave of discontent which they helped to unleash. The basic insight here is that, while liberal democracies are in theory predicated on equality before the state, in practice they require the wealthy to play along. Once capital becomes sufficiently concentrated, there is always a danger that the richest will rig the system in their favor to the extent that they destroy its legitimacy. Such a moment almost arrived in the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century, an era of oligarchic power in the US that saw rising class conflict and political violence. It was the fear of revolution, together with the humbling of capital in the Great Depression, that created the opening for Franklin Roosevelt to construct the class compromises of the New Deal. The state expanded massively, and the rich were squeezed: taxes on estates larger than $50 million reached 77% in 1941. In the decades following the Second World War — the heyday of Prescott Bush — rapid economic growth helped reconcile elites to the claims of government.

This contract is now all but dead, its legal basis steadily chipped away. Wall Street discovered “vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering”, but those realms remained to a large extent unregulated. (At the height of the Gilded Age, during the financial crisis of 1907, America’s leading bankers had still assumed personal responsibility for backstopping the system; in 2008, by contrast, taxpayers were forced to take responsibility for them.) Big money moved into tax havens, prosecutions for white-collar crimes declined, and American states began competing to offer the wealthy the most accommodating terms. A proliferation of loopholes around estate taxes have ensured that — contrary to meritocratic justifications for extraordinary wealth — families can keep their fortunes intact from one generation to the next. In 2010, the Supreme Court lifted limits on political donations by individuals, with the effect that “candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters”.

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The horizons of this moneyed class are, of course, much wider than the US itself. After the Cold War, the Pax Americana provided American business with opportunities around the world, while the wealthy had their playgrounds from the French Riviera to Dubai. In Osnos’ portrait of Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta chief almost resembles an imperial administrator, struggling to respond to a genocide being orchestrated through Facebook in faraway Myanmar. And the ultimate symbol of 21st-century wealth is the superyacht, “the most expensive objects our species has ever owned”, an artifact designed to flaunt money but also to enable the purest, most solipsistic enjoyment of it. (The fund manager Edward Lampert named his 288-foot vessel Fountainhead, after the Ayn Rand novel beloved of libertarians and defiant teenagers.)

Osnos’ subjects would doubtless dispute his portrayal of their self-interestedness. Tributes to Lee Hanley, for instance, noted his commitment to employees at his business, and many wealthy Americans devote large sums to philanthropy — though the preference for such personal largesse over tax contributions tells its own story about changing notions of public responsibility. More importantly, by treating Trump as the ultimate expression of oligarchic power, Osnos underplays a salient aspect of oligarchy in the American system: its presence on both sides of the political divide, Republican and Democratic. Wealthy elites wield plenty of influence among Trump’s opponents, as some of Osnos’ own vignettes suggest. In 2017, a raft of eminent liberals aboard the yacht of media executive David Geffen included Barack and Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah Winfrey. Or consider the Getty family, heirs to mid-century America’s greatest fortune. Gordon Getty has hosted fundraisers for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom at his mansion in San Francisco, while the “artist-model” Ivy Love Getty had her wedding officiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2021. A number of the Getty clan are now major donors to progressive causes, even as they energetically shield their vast trust from tax. Alexandra S. Getty has suggested that, while taxes are “very important”, the problem is that “if the wrong government is in control, then they all go to stuff I don’t support”.

In other words, America’s super-rich are not united in a single faction. This is not to say that their involvement in politics is balanced: while Forbes reported on the eve of the 2024 election that Harris had more billionaire donors than Trump (83 versus 52), Trump received more funding from billionaires in total thanks to the enormous contributions of Musk and Miriam Adelson. Moreover, an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness claims that, taking last year’s federal elections together, “over two-thirds (70%) of billionaire-family contributions went in support of GOP candidates and conservative causes”. It also reports that billionaire political spending is now an astonishing 160 times higher than in 2010.

Still, while it may be comforting for New Yorker readers to think otherwise, big money alone cannot explain how Trump won two elections — or how the Democrats lost them. Answering that question would require, among other things, a more rounded picture of America’s class system than Osnos provides. By his own admission, he is giving us “the view from the top”, but this creates the illusion of a society that is straightforwardly divided between the many and the few. In fact, private wealth is just one source of elite status in modern society, albeit the most powerful. There are also managerial, political and cultural elites. These divisions matter, because they are central to the aims and methods of Trump’s wealthy supporters.

Many leading MAGA figures have a particular antipathy to the managerial class that runs corporate America and Washington D.C. Musk has taken a slash-and-burn approach to bureaucracy in his companies and now in the federal government. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading MAGA think tank, has written of the need to revitalize US capitalism by systematically diminishing the influence of university-educated corporate managers. Another prominent Trump backer, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, has touted something called the “iron law of oligarchy”, derived from the political theorist James Burnham. As Andreessen explained, “there’s no actual system of democracy, because you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority in basically every society in human history.” He portrays the Trump-supporting oligarchy as a “counter-elite”, whose goal is to save American liberty and economic dynamism from the rule of “expert technocrats” aligned with the Left.

Of course, Andreessen’s own remarks show that there is some role for democracy even in an oligarchic system: he is discussing a presidential election after all. Intra-elite conflicts can be waged by mobilizing popular anger at institutions perceived to be hostile or ideologically corrupt. This brings us to the Trumpian riddle that Osnos sets out at the start of his book: “to understand why a voter could revile ‘the elite’ and revere the billionaire scion of a New York real estate fortune”. One reason is simply that Trump and his allies do not belong to the same parts of the elite as the people this voter reviles. Yes, when wealthy businessmen with Harvard or Stanford credentials attack elites, it is usually self-serving and often cynical; but what matters politically is that there is a considerable audience which thinks they have a point.

In truth, more than one of America’s elite groupings have helped to pave the way for the chaos of Trump’s second term. Since the election, many on the Left have acknowledged their own part in making voters feel frustrated and insecure, whether through the condescending tone of cultural institutions or the dysfunction of Democrat-governed cities. It is possible for an irresponsible and exploitative super-rich class to coexist with wasteful and ineffective governments; in fact, this now seems to be the status quo in much of the Western world. Osnos is right, however, to observe that the disillusionment created by elites is now forcing them to embrace unpredictable forms of populism to maintain their power. Trump will surely not be the final iteration of this process.

Earlier that day, a power outage originating in Spain had swept across the Iberian Peninsula and part of France. Traffic lights went down and trains stopped in their tracks, above and below ground. Given that the blackout lasted less than 12 hours, our response in hindsight appears slightly hysterical. But until that update at the supermarket, which we couldn’t verify in any case, we had no way of knowing it would be over so quickly. We had no mobile reception or Internet access of any kind, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone outside the village.

Much as one would expect in an apocalyptic film, the information flowed just long enough to provide inklings of disaster. On WhatsApp, a fake news story claimed that Russia had launched a massive cyberattack across Europe. Speaking to neighbors, we heard that the cause was in fact some kind of atmospheric phenomenon, affecting not just southern Europe but also, bizarrely, Japan. Apparently, Portugal was going to be without power for days. Then, after an hour or two, our communication channels dried up. Before long, there was no water in the taps.

Anxiety spread quickly. Outside our village, the quiet country road was backed-up with drivers rushing to fill their tanks. Some of the local grocery stores were stripped bare by panic-buyers. We kept our nerve for most of the afternoon, reassuring one another with uneasy jokes and casual speculation. After a while, though, we began asking questions. What if the stores didn’t open in the morning? What if there wasn’t any water left on the shelves? Doesn’t so-and-so down the road have a cistern, a solar panel, a Starlink connection? And so we persuaded ourselves that, actually, we had better err on the side of caution. That’s how we ended up at the supermarket, where two girls stationed at a closed door asked if we had cash, before ushering us inside. That is the nature of radical uncertainty, as typically seen in a bank run: you know you are probably overreacting, but why take the risk?

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Why China will beat the West

By Wessie du Toit

Above all, the blackout was a lesson in how utterly dependent modern society is on a product that we never see directly, and rarely think about: the constant, reliable flow of electrons through copper and aluminum wires. The incident has raised serious questions about the future of Europe’s electricity systems. To meet their environmental goals, European countries are trying to electrify large parts of their economies, including cars, household heating and industrial processes. Data centers to provide computing power will mean further, big increases in electricity demand. At the same time, Europe is rapidly switching to renewable energy sources, notably wind and solar, to provide that electricity, and in many cases is shutting down the coal, gas and nuclear-powered alternatives. According to one estimate cited by the Financial Times, government targets mean that electricity will be responsible for 70% of the continent’s energy by 2050, up from around 20% today. More than 90% of that electricity could come from renewables.

This growing dependence on electricity comes with significant risks, including sabotage. Those who suspected hostile actors to be responsible for Monday’s blackout were not merely paranoid. Since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, numerous power cables running under the Baltic Sea have been targeted, prompting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to disconnect from the Russian grid. Centralized electricity networks are appealing targets for terrorists and adversaries, since bringing them down can paralyze a society, and sow chaos in the process. Thanks to the digitalization of grids, cyberattacks are increasingly plausible, and are in fact being reported with growing frequency.

The shift to green electricity also brings dangers that governments have been slow to mitigate. Battery technology for storing wind and solar power remains ineffective. This means that electricity becomes scarce — and expensive — when there is no wind or sun, but it also means that renewables can, at times, produce too much energy relative to demand, endangering the stability of the grid. By contrast, the output of gas and nuclear plants can be closely controlled to maintain a balanced supply, and their turbines are better at smoothing over disruptions. Last week, at a London conference attended by 60 countries, the International Energy Agency raised these issues as threats to energy security. In a confidential report seen by Bloomberg, the IEA warned against the “premature retirement” of less volatile energy sources that are needed to stabilize grids.

It appears likely that such vulnerabilities triggered the blackout in Spain. The country is a leading adopter of renewable energy, with 72% of its electricity coming from wind and solar in the moments before the outage struck. According to Red Eléctrica de España, the national grid operator, the crisis began when a solar plant in the southwest of the country disconnected suddenly. The cause was probably an oversupply of electricity, combined with a shortage of traditional plants that could have lowered their output in response. And this was foreseen: Red Eléctrica warned in February that, due to a “high penetration of renewable generation”, “severe” outages could be on the horizon.

Though it lasted less than a day, Monday’s power cut will cast a long shadow over the politics of Net Zero. Last year, the Spanish government confirmed its decision to retire the country’s five nuclear power plants, a move criticized by opposition parties on the Right. Unsurprisingly, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez this week vehemently denied that over-reliance on green energy was culpable for the blackout.

An almost identical exchange played out in Britain, with Keir Starmer adopting the same line as Sánchez, while Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch claimed that renewables were likely responsible. The blackout will certainly frighten Starmer’s Labour government, which is pushing for 95% of electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. After all, the British grid came dangerously close to failure in January, when weak wind and solar generation struggled to meet high winter demand for electricity. The day after the Iberian power cut, former prime minister Tony Blair broke with his party by publicly stating that an ill-conceived rush for Net Zero was inviting a backlash that could “derail the whole agenda” of decarbonization.

Meanwhile, electricity is also creating tensions between European countries. A system dominated by renewables will require a shared electricity market underpinned by an extensive network of transmission cables, allowing electrons to flow from areas with wind and sun to those without. That arrangement is still taking shape, but it’s already apparent that consumers don’t like paying more for electricity because demand is spiking elsewhere. In December, for instance, when Germany and Denmark suffered a period of dark doldrums — cold, cloudy, windless weather — their neighbors baulked at meeting the shortfall in generation. Norway’s governing parties pledged to sever its electricity connections with Denmark, while Sweden demanded that Germany restructure its electricity market to prevent competition from high-demand industrial regions — a request that was backed up this week by the organization overseeing Europe’s grids. The Swedish economy minister also took the opportunity to criticize Germany for voluntarily shuttering its nuclear energy capacity. In France, meanwhile, the opposition National Rally has pledged to exit from the EU’s system of cross-border electricity trading.

The problems posed by renewables are not insurmountable, but they require a measured and honest approach, not a blind dash for quotable statistics. I write this as a supporter of green energy in principle. We should begin with a recognition that, as the energy analyst Javier Blas writes, “grid design, policy and risk mapping aren’t yet up to the task of handling too much power from renewable sources”. Rather than closing down gas and nuclear plants, governments will, for the time being, need more of them to provide resilience and backup sources of electricity. They will need to limit the share of solar and wind generation to prevent grids from becoming fragile. And they will have to upgrade infrastructure to incorporate renewables properly, while improving storage and flexibility.

This will only work if the associated costs and risks are negotiated with the public. Ofgem, Britain’s energy regulator, announced on Wednesday that it would “need hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to build the capabilities needed to run a clean power system and decarbonize the economy”. These upgrades will add further costs to consumers. Seeing your electricity bill go through the roof — even as your local environment is overwhelmed by pylons and solar panels — is bad enough; it is considerably worse when your government refuses to acknowledge there are any downsides to the green transition.

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Britain can't cope with nuclear power

By Wessie du Toit

The political consensus around Europe’s sustainability agenda has been fraying for some time, but more major blackouts will prove fatal. Decarbonization has become so politicized that even if renewables are not actually responsible for the failures in question, they will be discredited by association.

An even more pressing question, though, is how to safeguard against our growing dependence on electricity more generally. The Portuguese town I visited during the blackout showed an impressive degree of resilience, because it could fall back on older technologies. Within hours, uniformed wardens were directing traffic at the gas station, where drivers did manage to refuel their cars. Here and in other local businesses, a key factor was that people still used and accepted cash. Now imagine a scenario in which the majority of vehicles, virtually all payments, and even central heating systems are dependent on electricity. Imagine that government and basic services have become heavily reliant on artificial intelligence software. Adaptation would be more difficult, and the sense of panic considerably greater.

In an ideal world, we would try to ensure that manual and mechanical systems don’t disappear from society entirely, providing a backup to digital and electrical technologies. But this seems overly optimistic. All the more reason, then, for governments to prioritize the robustness and security of our electricity networks, ensuring, among other things, that they stay ahead of the competition in the fast-evolving realm of cybersecurity. As for businesses and communities, a diesel generator or solar module for use in emergencies would not go amiss.

As I quickly realized during the outage in Portugal, what makes such situations different today compared with the recent past is the degree to which we have become conditioned to a constant flow of information. We are now so accustomed to engaging with the news on an hour-by-hour basis, if not a minute-by-minute one, that losing this link to the outside world can be profoundly disorienting and even panic-inducing. When a sudden, unexplained event ruptures the fabric of normality, it soon becomes apparent that the whole edifice of society rests on a fragile foundation of trust. Were a world of media junkies to be plunged into silence, that trust might not last very long.

Scenes like this played out across the country in the Forties as the long twilight of the British aristocracy plunged into a gloomy dusk. Hundreds of stately homes were demolished or converted into hotels and flats, their owners faced with crippling taxes and lacking the means to repair or maintain them. It was a busy time for James Lees-Milne, the Country Houses Secretary at the National Trust. His diaries show him traveling the country and meeting with families who saw in the Trust the last hope of saving their homes. Everywhere he found the forlorn signs of a dying order: an old man giving the last tour of his gardens; a Viscountess scrubbing the floor of her servantless kitchen; unheated rooms under the “mournful, reproachful gaze of dozens of forgotten ancestors on the walls”.

The Trust wanted to prevent important buildings and landscapes from perishing with the hierarchy that had sustained them. Not every house met Lees-Milne’s aesthetic standards — “A horrible property. I hope it gets bombed,” he writes of one in Kent — and they had to be donated with assets or capital to pay for their upkeep. But dozens were accepted in the following years and decades, among them Clandon Park, transferred to the Trust in 1956. It was a peculiarly British compromise. The country’s leading families were able to preserve the symbols of their former prestige, and many of them stayed as tenants in their ancestral homes. In return, these were formally recast as the common inheritance of the nation. Commoners could stroll in their grounds, marvel at their collections, and nose around their servants’ quarters.

The country house survived as an emblem of enduring Englishness, and it gave the National Trust something of the same familiar, steadfast quality. It is thanks in significant part to these polite artifacts that the Trust membership ballooned from around 7,000 in 1945 into the hundreds of thousands by the Sixties. In 2017 it reached five million. But this year, as the charity marks its 130th anniversary, it appears to be losing faith in its most recognizable asset.

Clandon Park was gutted by fire in 2015. The Trust initially committed to restoring the property, but in 2022 it reversed course, claiming the damage was too great. Instead, it wants to fashion the burned-out shell of the building into a different kind of tourist attraction, installing glass walkways, a new roof and a café. The decision has appalled many lovers of architectural heritage and craft, who insist that restoration is possible. Especially painful is the loss of Leoni’s Marble Hall, a dramatic, lavishly ornamented room at the heart of the house. The stucco ceiling by Giuseppe Artari, teeming with three-dimensional figures and motifs, was a masterpiece in its own right.

The Georgian Group has appealed against the Trust’s plans, and is now waiting to hear whether Angela Rayner, the housing and communities secretary, will agree to reconsider. But the case is already tangled up with a wider set of concerns. “You get the impression they’re well rid of places like Clandon,” says Caroline McAslan, a former volunteer at two National Trust properties. Aslan was also active in the volunteers’ association. She gave up her responsibilities some years ago, out of “frustration with the direction the Trust was taking”. She had observed a shift in the institution’s priorities. “It’s now nature, beauty, and then history,” she says, referring to a slogan frequently used by the Trust. “The houses come in right at the bottom.”

The Trust, which is one of the UK’s biggest landowners, has ambitious plans for nature restoration on its 10,000 square-mile estate; these include planting trees, rewilding land, and changing farming practices. It has also been focusing on social justice initiatives, and on appealing to different audiences, especially urban ones. The Trust has pledged to help 100 towns and cities expand their green spaces, and is partnering with Mind, a mental health charity, as part of its plans for “ending unequal access to nature”.

Meanwhile, the Trust has been looking at its houses with a critical eye. In 2020, it published a bitterly contested report tying its properties to slavery and colonialism, and further projects on these themes have followed. “I think some people would like us to feel more guilty than we should be,” says McAslan of the Trust’s approach to history. It seems unlikely that members who pay almost $100 annually to visit historic buildings were unaware of the darker aspects of their provenance. Clandon Park was probably paid for with the wealth of Elizabeth Knight, who inherited wealth from merchants operating in Jamaica. There is no evidence that this influenced the Trust’s decision not to restore it, though before that decision was announced, a headline on the charity’s website referred to the house as “built on the profits of slavery”.

What is certain is that the Trust’s search for new audiences is changing its attitude to houses. A leaked internal presentation, also in 2020, proposed a “revolutionary” shift away from “the English Country House as a distinctive part of our national heritage”. It called instead for an “audience-led approach” that would make the houses “useful for as many people as possible”. In practice this has meant that, while a number of houses are still presented in a “traditional” way, others are being refashioned with gimmicks and leisure facilities. Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, for instance, was turned into a “Children’s Country House” with neon signs, a disco, and speech bubbles next to portraits. During the Trust’s post-pandemic layoffs, the experienced curator Andrew Loukes was made redundant because he lacked the ability to “attract new and different audiences”.

Jeffrey Haworth, who was a historic buildings representative at the Trust for 22 years, tells me how the curatorial direction has changed. “Instead of protecting the aesthetics and character and architectural importance of the country houses, it’s all about interpreting things.” Rooms have been insensitively repainted, baubles hung from ceilings, and “modernistic intrusions” such as glass-walled restaurants added to Grade I-listed buildings. According to Haworth, the problem is that “the vital post is missing” in the senior management, namely the post of Historic Buildings Secretary. This may have proved decisive at Clandon Park, where the director responsible for the building’s fate “was bamboozled into believing it couldn’t be restored”, Haworth believes. “He simply wasn’t equipped to make the decision, and yet he had to because there was no one else.”

All this is suggestive of the Trust’s priorities. Haworth notes that under Helen Ghosh, director general at the charity until 2018, there was a feeling “that country houses were wicked, were not the Trust’s core purpose”. Similarly, McAslan says of the current director general, Hilary McGrady, “I don’t think she likes big country houses.” When I asked the National Trust about their approach to houses, they replied that “we will continue to conserve our national heritage to a high standard while looking to balance the significance of our places and collections — and how we look after them — with the public benefit they offer.”

It is difficult to gauge the extent of the discontent at the Trust. The membership has dipped to 5.38 million, from a peak of 5.95 million in 2019-20, and volunteer numbers have dropped slightly over the same period. But there could be other reasons for this. The Trust’s governing council claims a democratic mandate, yet it has undermined its credibility by introducing a digital voting system, “Quick Vote”. This inevitably makes participation difficult for older people, who make up a big proportion of the membership, and tilts the scales by inviting voters to endorse the management’s approved candidates and resolutions — but not the alternatives —with a single click. Restore Trust, a movement established in 2020 to contest changes at the charity, says its own donors number “in the thousands.”

The recent tensions do raise some fundamental questions, though. Is the Trust’s first duty to the public, or to the places it cares for? Does it exist to conserve beautiful and significant things, or to make them serve a greater number of people? McGrady says that she wants the charity to “go back to our roots” by focusing on nature and inclusion, referring to the Trust’s origins in the 1890s with campaigns for public access to rural landscapes and green spaces in towns. Yet the implication that country houses were a later add-on is slightly misleading. Founders Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter were advocating for architectural conservation before they even formed the Trust, and the organization acquired historic buildings from the start. People had been visiting great houses in large numbers since the mid-19th century, as the Romantic ethos of that era had already identified these structures as remnants of a fast-disappearing world. In an age of industry and foreign competition, ownership of agricultural land was no longer a secure basis for financial and political power.

The situation became more urgent after the First World War, when estates were left without heirs or struggled with large increases in death duties. The rise of mass democracy made the landed class an obvious target for taxation, with politicians eager to demonstrate fairness and to raise funds for social spending. Many grand families could no longer afford to keep their mansions running. As much as a quarter of England’s land was sold in four years after 1918, and old manor houses began to be demolished in their hundreds. Some were bought by Americans and reassembled across the Atlantic, a sign of the wealth and power that was draining away from Britain to the United States.

Still, the Trust’s growing involvement with stately homes from the late-Thirties brought contradictions. The group became, as the historian Adrian Tinniswood has written, “a curious alliance of conservatives and radicals… which could number socialists and the nobility among its ranks”. Although it was not immediately obvious, two contrasting moral visions had taken root. One was primarily interested in equality and social progress, while the other saw the conservation of the nation’s heritage as a sacred duty in its own right. The former tended to emphasize nature and public access, the latter countryside and houses. As Lees-Milne wrote of his calling to save important buildings: “My loyalties were to the houses, the families and the National Trust (which I regarded as an instrument of the others’ preservation) in that order.” He makes no mention of the public.

By the mid-Sixties, the cracks had begun to appear. Conrad Rawnsley, grandson of one of the Trust’s founders, launched an agenda that closely anticipated what we are seeing today. He led a successful environmental campaign, Project Neptune, which raised millions in donations, allowing the Trust to acquire hundreds of miles of coastline. He also tried to instigate a members’ revolt against what he saw as an excessive reverence for stately homes. “Should all the great country houses be shown as museums, or should some of them play a more active part in the life of the community?” Rawnsley asked. Through the Eighties and Nineties, similar divisions appeared over hunting and military bases on Trust land.

So the Trust’s activist approach is not entirely new, but it suffers contradictions of its own. As the clumsy interventions at historic buildings show, there is a point at which the effort to reach new audiences ruins the thing you are trying to share. To say that country houses should be for everyone is like arguing that operas should be rewritten for rap fans, or that chess needs to become more like skateboarding. If a diverse society means anything, it’s that people have different tastes. Another problem is that the supposed democratization of the country house appears to be an entirely top-down project. It is not as though these places had to change to stay popular; the Trust’s membership grew over the 2010s, as did visits to heritage sites more generally. Thanks no doubt to productions like Downton Abbey, the allure of aristocracy, and interest in how people lived in the past, remain strong.

Judging by its recent schemes and announcements, the Trust has become carried away in its desire to wrap the whole nation in its loving embrace. This is heritage and nature viewed through the lens of public service delivery; a vision of an NHS for Britain’s soul. The charity’s head of communications places it among those institutions which seek to “apply expertise”, “make decisions to benefit society as a whole”, and through their benign neutrality, “act as roadblocks to extremism”. These may be laudable aims, but they suggest that social purpose comes before specific roles and responsibilities, whether addressing the concerns of the 1,300 tenant farmers on National Trust land, or using the restoration of Clandon Park as an opportunity to train craftsmen and other specialists.

The Trust is also creating the impression that there is something inadequate about its existing audience, which seems unwise for an organization that depends on membership fees and the unpaid labor of volunteers. One former volunteer of 15 years, who asked to remain anonymous, tells me that the Trust’s paid staff and management treat contributions like his as disposable. “Many people gave years, some decades, only to be cast aside by work-shy selfish ideologues.” In this and other interviews, it was clear that workaday frustrations involving timetables and admin burdens are compounded by a more general sense that the ideals of the institution have changed.

I did find that, among most of its critics, there is still a deep loyalty to the Trust, and a willingness to acknowledge good work where it is being done. Unsurprisingly though, those who commit their time and money to the houses regard them as worth preserving not only to be useful to others, but for their own merits. As McAslan says, “volunteers love their work because they value the houses that they’re working in.” Ultimately, what is special about the country house as an institution is its combination of aesthetic and historical interest. With their gardens, artworks and architecture, they remain, as the Marquess of Bath said of his own house in 1949, “a thing of beauty in a drab and dreary world”. And the families which amassed these trophies were, in effect, the governing class of Britain for many centuries. Their stories are therefore worth telling.

Take the Onslows of Clandon Park, for instance. This lineage certainly included some wastrels, such as the 2nd Earl, who much preferred driving his carriage to contributing in parliament, and thought “a good veal cutlet on a plate” to be “a much more rational object of admiration” than fine artworks. But the Onslows also produced courtiers, privy councillors, philanthropists and decorated soldiers. It is the only family to provide three Speakers for the House of Commons. The 4th Earl was a governor of New Zealand and — perhaps more importantly for the average Brit — the founder of Battersea Dogs Home. His son made important discoveries in genetics at Cambridge, despite being paralyzed in a diving accident. And Gwendolen Guinness, the Countess of Iveagh whose bequest allowed the Trust to acquire Clandon Park, was, among many other things, one of the first woman MPs.

When the National Trust took over estates from families like this, it helped to smooth the transition from an aristocratic society to a popular one. It proposed to the masses that, rather than simply forgetting the culture previously enjoyed by a few, they could regard it, in some sense, as their own. Of course many people had no interest in this final act of noblesse oblige, but a remarkable number did. One of the questions raised by the loss of a building like Clandon Park is whether Britain’s cultural institutions still have faith in this covenant with the past, and in the national story it was part of. They may believe that its time has passed; and yet, finding a new story to replace it will be no easy feat.

These thefts were motivated by a phenomenon that commodity traders call a supercycle, meaning an extended period of high prices for raw materials. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has seen five supercycles, coinciding with major bursts of economic development or war. Those manhole covers had become valuable because the price of iron, an ingredient for the production of steel, was surging. And most of the demand was coming from one country in particular. China was beginning its rise as an industrial giant.

Iron ore was the signal substance of Chinese growth — by 2024, its price was almost 1,000% higher than in 1995 — but all kinds of resources were sucked into the whirlwind: oil and coal, nickel and copper, soybeans and rubber and wool. In recent months, though, analysts have been announcing the end of the two-decade China supercycle. Chinese iron ore consumption is starting to come down, along with steel production. Some reckon its demand for oil may be peaking too. This does not mean that China will stop growing, but the economic patterns are shifting.

As Donald Trump’s tariff experiment now lurches into an escalating trade war with China, it is worth considering the epochal shift that brought us here. The supercycle was an epic chapter carved into the material substrate of our world, reverberating in every corner of the globe. It has raised China, in the space of a generation, from a poor and largely rural society to a superpower that is competing at the frontiers of technology, while controlling the most important resources for the future. It has transformed the developing world. It is implicated with the rise of Trump and, in various ways, with European weakness.

“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” declared Trump in 2018. The British government seems to agree, as it haggles with Jingye, a Chinese company, to save the UK’s last two remaining blast furnaces. These strands of history can be traced back to the start of the century, when those manhole covers were being cut up into scrap, shipped across oceans, melted down, and fed into Chinese steelmaking converters.

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China is ready for battle

By John Rapley

What set the supercycle in motion? Until the Eighties, China still measured affluence through the humble quartet of a bicycle, a wrist watch, a sewing machine, and a radio. By the turn of the century, however, the country was reaching an inflection point. Its GDP was approaching $4,000 per person, the level at which a society’s demand for resources tends to leap upwards, as consumers buy more manufactured goods and governments build more infrastructure. Crucially, though, China’s transition was supercharged by global trade in the decades following the Cold War. With its enormous, cheap labor force, and its authoritarian government, it was perfectly positioned to become the world’s factory. Just as China was reaching the $4,000-per-head threshold, it gained admission to the World Trade Organization.

China began sucking in the world’s resources like a drain emptying a bath, turning them into vast cities and infrastructure projects as well as products to be shipped back out to the world. What happened next is best captured in numbers, since language can scarcely convey its sheer scale. In 1995, China’s economic output was one-tenth the size of America’s. By 2021, it was three quarters. Over the same period, the Chinese share of world manufacturing output went from 5% to 30%. Whereas just one-in-five Chinese people lived in cities at the turn of the century, today more than three in five do. So rapid was this urbanization that, between 2000-2010, China’s villages disappeared at a rate of 300 per day.

In 2003, China had no high-speed rail, but by 2011 it had the world’s biggest network. The country produced more steel in two years than Britain has in almost two centuries. Similarly, China poured more concrete between 2018-20 than the United States has done in its entire history. China melts and refines almost half the world’s copper supply. Chinese oil imports, at 11 million barrels per day, are more or less equivalent to the entire output of Saudi Arabia. China burns 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, and its consumption is still rising. This means that the Chinese energy system is, by far, the biggest factor determining the future of the climate.

If global trade helped to set this engine running, the Chinese Communist Party pushed it into higher gears. Rather than directing the proceeds of growth towards social safety nets or consumer spending power, the CCP has, until recently, sought to funnel them back into material production. This strategy has helped China become utterly dominant in key supply chains underpinning the modern world, but it has also resulted in prodigious waste and, ultimately, instability. The country’s enormous, debt-swollen property sector, which went into crisis in 2021, threatens to drag the entire economy down. Dozens of concrete “ghost cities” are still awaiting residents, though some are so poorly constructed that they might collapse first. An overworked population faces one of the world’s most daunting fertility deficits. Polluted industrial areas have poisoned their residents and spawned ecological catastrophes.

But Chinese economic development has not only taken place within China itself. A large share of the resources fueling China’s growth has come from poor and developing regions of the world, whether Brazilian iron ore and soybeans, Congolese copper, Malaysian rubber, or Indonesian nickel. Many of these places have received big Chinese investments in infrastructure, and have become markets for Chinese construction firms and manufactured goods.

The results have been especially dramatic in the world’s poorest continent: Africa. China is the leading purchaser of a wide spectrum of African metals and fossil fuels, and it imports large quantities of African food products, timber and tobacco (China has almost one-third of the world’s smokers). Chinese companies, many of them state-owned, have built more than 300 dams, almost five-dozen power plants, and thousands of kilometers of roads and railways right across Africa. They have constructed an immense apparatus of pipelines and other facilities to access the petroleum reserves of more than a dozen African countries. That’s not to mention the airports, hospitals, and sports stadiums, or the nearly 200 government buildings.

This relationship has undoubtedly brought Africans some benefits, in the form of much-needed government revenues and basic infrastructure that would otherwise not exist. On the other hand, much of this development is designed for resource extraction rather than the needs of ordinary Africans. Much has been financed through exploitative debt arrangements, and much Chinese spending has merely lined the pockets of African politicians. China has stripped African forests for timber, ravaged African wildlife for traditional medicine, and supplied African governments with advanced tools for surveillance and repression.

In 2002, shortly before all of those manhole covers started to vanish, 1,000 Chinese workers arrived in Dortmund, a city in Germany’s Ruhr region. They had come to dismantle a large steelworks. Steel had been produced at the site since 1843, employing 10,000 workers at its peak. Now ThyssenKrupp, a German conglomerate, had agreed to sell the plant to the Chinese firm Shagang.

The enormous industrial edifice, complete with a seven-storey blast furnace, would be packed into crates and shipped 9,000 miles to Handan, a city on the Yangtze River north of Shanghai. It took the Chinese workforce less than a year, toiling 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with scant regard for health and safety precautions. Tens of thousands of parts were meticulously labelled and packed, down to individual screws, requiring some 50 container ships to move. The documents detailing the reassembly process alone weighed 40 tonnes.

Shagang’s steelworks in Handan — which also incorporated equipment from France and Luxembourg — is now the largest in the world. It has helped China’s steel output to surpass that of every other country combined. Back in Dortmund, the site of the former plant is unrecognizable. It has been redeveloped into the Phoenix-See, an artificial lake offering water sports, surrounded by restaurants and ranks of pristine white villas in the International Style. This post-industrial idyll has not, of course, managed to fill the void left by the city’s coal and steel sectors, which employed more than 75,000 people in 1960. When the journalist James Kynge visited Dortmund after the departure of the steel plant, he found widespread unemployment and social disintegration. “Do we look like yachtsmen to you?” a jobless steel worker asked. A local Lutheran priest had a starker message: “Our identity is lost.”

The implications of this story are not exactly what we might expect. Since 2015, when Trump first ran for the presidency, we have become familiar with his account of the “China shock”, or the impact of Chinese growth on manufacturing in the West. According to Trump, China had stolen American blue-collar jobs and grown rich selling America goods that should have been made there. Trump’s trade war against China during his first term was the opening salvo of the radical tariff program we are seeing today. This view of China’s rise has not gained the same political traction in Europe, but it has become a kind of conventional wisdom. It is because China makes everything, we assume, that areas like the Ruhr or northern England no longer do.

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But Western de-industrialization is a much longer story. It was well underway before the China shock arrived, thanks to competition from countries like South Korea and Japan, and it is still going on today. Those Chinese workers who came to Dortmund were dismantling the last vestiges of unprofitable industries which had been closing down for decades. Germany had already shifted to sectors like cars, machinery, and chemicals, where China was not initially a competitor.

The impact was greater in the US, where according to one commonly cited estimate, the China shock cost a million manufacturing jobs, and 2.4 million jobs in total, during the first decade of the century. Still, what made Trump’s pitch so politically potent was not the number of lost livelihoods, but their concentration in Rust Belt states that helped him to win election in 2016. These areas were suffering from a manufacturing recession at the time, but one that was caused by the dollar’s appreciation against the Euro, not by China.

If we want to understand how the China supercycle has reshaped and undermined the political economy of Western countries, we should focus not just on the losers, but on the winners. Chinese growth offered significant benefits to the Western business and governing classes, and these benefits ultimately made them complacent. In Europe especially, elites became tacitly reliant on China to help them avoid difficult choices. They did not want to acknowledge that their advantages were only temporary, and that they were storing up problems in the longer term.

China rose in a global trading system dominated by America, and American big business reaped the rewards. Multinationals like Apple and Walmart benefited from Chinese manufacturing, which was not only cheap but highly skilled and innovative, allowing them to develop new products and sell them around the world. In 2018, Forbes suggested that an iPhone would cost “in the $30,000 to $100,000 range” if Apple had to make it in the US, which may be an exaggeration but gets the point across. Likewise, business and financial interests poured capital into China to take advantage of the country’s growing market.

The wealth generated by this system incentivized the belief that, somehow, Chinese growth would not pose a major threat to America’s own power. This was despite clear evidence in the 2010s that China was rapidly scaling the technological ladder, while leveraging its own advantages in resources, production, and trade to secure a controlling position in the global economy. Since 2016, US politics has been overshadowed by these misjudgments, with both parties competing to appease the working class and trying to slow China’s advance.

A similar story can be told about Germany. The German car industry, which has played such an outsized role in European politics over the years, was another winner in China. The big three German carmakers — BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen — together accounted for a quarter of the Chinese market in 2019. But they failed to anticipate that China would rapidly develop its own world-beating automotive industry, focused on EVs and software. In fact, in this and other important areas, China has now become a direct competitor. And Germany is ill-prepared for this challenge, since its earlier successes disguised an irresponsible political consensus that, in the name of fiscal restraint, has starved the country of much-needed investment.

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Even Europe’s moral aspirations look like a complacent fantasy when China’s role is taken into account. European politicians claim to lead the world in two areas: ensuring the welfare of their citizens, and protecting the environment. But in 2007, when the New York Times ran a report on the aftermath of the Dortmund steel transfer, it could already see that this model of virtuous prosperity was “illusory”. Europe’s clean air, the authors noted, was only possible because Chinese cities like Handan had become a nightmarish “miasma of dust and smoke”, poisoning their residents and driving up global CO2 emissions. Chinese steel mills produced three times more carbon dioxide than German ones, and did so in part to supply Europeans with cheap goods. As an economist at China’s Ministry for Commerce admitted, “the shortfall of environmental protection is one of the main reasons why our exports are cheaper.”

In other words, Europe built its green ambitions on the back of China’s rise as the biggest polluter in history. Britain is especially guilty here. UK governments have boasted about cutting the country’s emissions by about 40% since 1990, but when imported products are taken into account, the figure falls to 23%. Last October, to great fanfare, Britain marked the first day of coal-free electricity in its history. Yet this is basically irrelevant when global coal consumption, led by China, continues to reach new highs every year. Even the transition to renewable energy is being largely driven by coal. Everything from solar panels and electric vehicles to the metals used by green technologies are produced cheaply in China thanks to coal energy.

The solar panels now carpeting the English countryside also rely on the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where much of the world’s polysilicon is mined and processed. Meanwhile, China’s fishing fleets plunder the world’s oceans and its petrochemical factories pump out plastics for Shein garments, all to the benefit of European consumers.

Since January, the instability rippling across the world has been seen, understandably, as a result of the revolution taking place in the United States. The Trump administration has undermined old alliances and appeased old enemies, extorted trading partners and nakedly coveted the resources of other nations. Now it is trying to fashion a new economic order with the bluntest tools it can find. But even if America is responsible for the dramatic shape and pace of events, we should not lose sight of the dynamics operating in the background, dynamics unleashed by the supercycle.

The US has been trying to pivot its military forces away from Europe and towards Asia since the days of Barack Obama. The disregard in Trump’s circle for Ukraine and NATO is a more extreme expression of the same logic, which is ultimately dictated by the need to contain Chinese power. And recall that Joe Biden prosecuted his own trade war against China, raising tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar cells and EVs — the latter tariff was 100% — and tried to limit Chinese access to advanced computer chips. The Biden administration also coordinated Western investments in African railways and other infrastructure, as part of an effort to counter Chinese control of natural resources on the continent.

Likewise, Europe’s frantic efforts to regain a measure of autonomy are not only a response to Trump’s betrayal, but a belated attempt to gird the continent against Chinese economic might. The enormous investment packages recently passed by Germany’s parliament, reversing two decades of fiscal policy, are aimed at strengthening German industry as well as building defense capacity. European governments and the EU itself are reassessing environmental schemes that threaten security and economic competitiveness. Regulations on combustion cars are being relaxed, while carbon tax exemptions and the recent “clean industrial deal” actually protect polluting industries. If Europe wants to defend itself, then carbon-intensive sectors like steel may need to be subsidized after all.

Even the incipient sense of anarchy in the world is not entirely Trump’s doing. In recent decades, stability came not only from American supremacy, but from the structure of the supercycle, which anchored the world’s supply chains in China. But raw materials traders have long been gearing up for the next supercycle, which is now commencing. This one will be driven by the minerals used in renewable technologies and advanced computing. And rather than the stabilizing framework of American-Chinese cooperation, it will take the form of a competitive scramble for resources. Numerous countries will want access to lithium, cobalt, and nickel for batteries, copper for transmitting electricity, platinum for electronic components, and a host of exotic rare earths — gallium, palladium, neodymium and more — for the hardware that underpins artificial intelligence. They will also want oil for the tons of plastic that go into every wind turbine and electric vehicle.

The problem for Western countries is that, thanks to the last supercycle, China has a massive head start in this race. It controls two-thirds of all lithium and cobalt processing, almost 70% of rare earths, and around 80% of battery production. Nor is this only a material question. Western commentators sometimes imagine that industrial capacity can simply be summoned into being by relaxing planning laws and providing financial incentives. But advanced manufacturing requires deep pools of experience and skill, which China has developed over time and the West, in many areas, has not. As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it a few years ago, “in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”

Look at Europe’s struggle to make batteries. Last year, around two decades after those workers came to Dortmund to dismantle the steel plant, another Chinese contingent was in the Swedish town of Skellefteå. This time they had come as experts, installing machinery for Northvolt, a beleaguered company that was being billed as Europe’s battery champion. As one engineer told the Financial Times, referring to China’s skill base, “they are established and they have already done it. So they’re just better. We are late to the party.” Northvolt went bust in March. China may not have cracked advanced semiconductors, but neither has America. In Arizona, efforts to kick-start an industry with Taiwanese assistance have been bogged down by a shortage of skilled workers.

Insofar as there is a consistent logic in Trump’s economic plans, it appears that he wants the US to be more like China — to have more heavy industry, more manufacturing jobs, more exports, and more self-reliance. Yet his tariffs are a self-destructive way to pursue these goals. They have already caused American manufacturing to seize up, because it relies on the very materials that Trump is making more expensive to import. As Michael Strain has pointed out, for every job making steel in the country, there are 80 jobs that use steel to make something else. And bringing back factories back to the US is not the same as bringing back jobs, since companies will seek to avoid the higher wage costs through automation.

If the China supercycle taught us anything, it is that the ability to make things depends on raw materials and supply chains far beyond a country’s borders. For all its industrial power, China too is vulnerable in this sense, and that is why it has invested so much effort in building up global networks through its Belt and Road Initiative. Trump, by contrast, prefers threats of conquest and the erratic theater of the “deal”. To compete in the next supercycle, America will need leaders with a more subtle sense of how to run an empire.

In its small way, the whoopee-cushion function illustrates a weakness of Tesla’s CEO, the serial entrepreneur-turned-political actor Elon Musk. It is not enough, apparently, for Musk to be idolized for his achievements in business and technology. He also insists on engaging in the kind of attention-seeking behavior you might expect from a troubled 13-year-old boy, albeit one who commands unfathomable wealth and influence. The potential downsides for Tesla have long been apparent. The same man who exhibited those fart sounds to me — a progressive-minded software contractor at a major European company — also said that he was thinking about trading in his Model Y in protest at Musk’s political activism, which was then just getting started.

Today, Tesla’s future hinges on a bewildering combination of factors. In addition to Musk’s overbearing persona, given free range on his social media platform, X, he has entangled himself with the radical Trump regime, and with insurgent Right-wing parties in Europe. As if this was not jeopardy enough, the entrepreneur is also betting that he can use Tesla to launch a new wave of paradigm-shifting technological breakthroughs. Or so he claims. In this strange mix of audacity, hubris and mere trolling, it is becoming difficult to tell where the strategy ends and the hot air begins.

For the time being, Tesla is in the firing line as misgivings about Musk pall into outrage. Sales are plunging around the world. In Germany, where Musk enthusiastically backed the Alternative für Deutschland in the recent election, they were down 76% year-on-year in February. In Australia they fell by 66%. A wave of protests and vandalism at Tesla dealerships, which has been building in the US for months, erupted in numerous other countries last week. Meanwhile, a fresh dip in the company’s stock price means that it has now lost more than half of its market value since December. Tesla owners are even trying to disguise their cars by rebadging them as other vehicles. A JP Morgan analyst said of the backlash: “we struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly.”

Thanks to his showboating, Musk has made himself a focal point for resistance to the Trump regime. The surreal spectacle of Just Stop Oil protestors vandalizing a Tesla showroom in London, thereby attacking a company which has done more than any other to kill the petrol car, suggests the strange territory that the brand is entering. Its image is shifting from green icon to MAGA accessory. In a bid to stop last week’s rout, Trump was persuaded to pose with some Teslas and to commit to buying one. But there are few signs, as yet, that Musk’s closeness with the President is delivering significant spoils for his car company, even if Tesla will suffer less than its competitors from the withdrawal of EV subsidies. A rumored contract to supply armored vehicles for the diplomatic service will not outweigh the brand damage of associating with a regime intent on dismantling climate policies. When Musk was known as a brilliant if somewhat eccentric entrepreneur, he could rely on a wide base of progressives, tech fans and admiring business types to buy his cars. By contrast, his new followers on the libertarian Right are more likely to cherish their diesel trucks as symbols of liberty threatened by a despotic green state.

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This all looks like a baffling campaign of self-sabotage, until we step back and reckon with the full scope of Musk’s ambitions. The man is mission-driven to an unusual, almost frightening degree. He uses capitalism as a framework for trying to realize big, concrete visions for the world, and is willing to take risks and suffer setbacks on the way. The simplest explanation for his decision to partner with Trump and ransack the Federal government via his Department of Government Efficiency is that he saw the American state bureaucracy as an obstacle to his goals, namely exploring space, developing artificial intelligence and “deleting the woke mind virus”. As for Tesla, Musk appears to be wagering that a dramatic expansion of the company’s mission will render irrelevant the hostility to his personal actions.

The first bet is autonomous vehicles, in the form of Tesla’s Cybercab, a product that some excitable analysts think could replace not just combustion cars, but car ownership as we know it. Musk has suggested that these vehicles — the prototypes resemble the streamlined noses of high-speed trains — would allow Teslas to operate as self-driving taxis when their owners aren’t using them, independently roaming cities and providing lifts for paying customers. The implication is that we will soon be treating cars as a service rather than something we own. At the same time, Tesla is developing a humanoid robot, for which Musk has made even grander claims. It will, he says, be “the biggest product ever of any kind”. Called the Optimus, this AI-powered minion could “be a teacher, babysit your kids… walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”

Last year, a showcase of these futuristic machines raised more questions than it answered (it later emerged that the “autonomous” robots were being remotely operated). Notwithstanding Musk’s ever-optimistic timelines, they remain largely in the realm of science fiction. And yet, despite the beatings that Tesla has taken in recent months, there is still everything to play for. Its enormous stock market losses have merely erased a surge in value since Trump’s election in November. Tesla is still as valuable as the next five biggest car companies combined, suggesting a level of expectation totally out of proportion with what its current business model can achieve. Market analysts say that Tesla’s value now owes much more to bets on self-driving technology, robotaxis and robots than to car sales.

So why do these investors remain so confident? The obvious answer is that, while Musk rarely delivers his promises in full and on time, he nonetheless has an impressive track record of high-stakes innovation. At Harvard Business Review, Andy Wu and Goran Calic observe that the billionaire tends to focus on problems that “involve navigating scale and overcoming complexity”. He chooses very big and difficult challenges that few rivals have the stamina or risk tolerance to tackle. When he succeeds, he captures a significant advantage in the relevant industry. Take SpaceX, for instance: designing cheap rockets is difficult, and designing reusable ones more so. But by 2023, the company was responsible for almost 80% of US space launches, and nearly half of all launches worldwide.

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Tesla’s own history shows the same principles in action. Its original mission, as Musk wrote in 2013, was “to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible”. The company had been founded a decade earlier, though Musk did not join until 2004. It began by trying to design an attractive electric sports car, which required bold thinking as well as a good deal of improvisation and borrowing. When its first model, the Roadster, arrived in 2008, it used a Lotus chassis and ran on laptop batteries. Tesla’s subsequent partner, Panasonic, made battery cells with techniques adapted from VHS cassettes. Until recently, the cars have also looked pretty conventional; an element of familiarity has always been important for encouraging people to adopt new technologies.

As it rose to success in the 2010s, Tesla became the first major carmaker to function like a Silicon Valley tech company. Its vehicles have sophisticated software systems, updated remotely like an iPhone, and since 2015 they have been partially controlled by an Autopilot capability. What really made the difference, though, was that Tesla found a way to manufacture EVs on a massive scale. Like Apple, or indeed Henry Ford, the company focused on making just a small range of products in large numbers. And rather than outsourcing to external suppliers, it developed its own infrastructure and supply chains, from enormous battery plants to networks of charging stations. Such tight control over production allowed Tesla to drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. With its S and X models, Tesla effectively created the mass market EV as a viable commercial category.

Tesla is, of course, much larger than Musk. But we shouldn’t fall for the now-fashionable conceit that the CEO is some sort of simpleton who just got lucky; his bloody-minded, autocratic management style has delivered results. Across his various companies, he has personally interviewed thousands of employees. Under his very public leadership, Tesla’s image was initially so potent that it did not advertise at all until 2023. If the brand manages to maintain an aura of possibility, it will be, in considerable part, because people think it unwise to bet against someone like this.

The problem is that the EV industry has caught up. Between them, the world’s big car marques now offer a bevy of electric and hybrid vehicles, making Tesla’s handful of models look increasingly stale. Meanwhile, China’s BYD has overtaken it as the world’s biggest EV maker by volume. Having grown with shocking speed, BYD is dominating the crucial Chinese market, and has just announced a new battery that allegedly charges in five minutes. Tesla needs a careful redesign, but this is one task that Musk seems unsuited to. The recent Cybertruck, with its sharp angles, metallic finish and domineering presence, has an anti-social character that recalls the most unattractive qualities of its chief architect.

And so, the company has reached a perilous juncture. Its remaining customers and investors face an increasingly urgent question: can Musk’s volatile public persona and political recklessness be judged separately from Tesla’s future trajectory, or do they reveal a CEO who is losing the plot? The longer Tesla promises fresh marvels without delivering them, the more people will be inclined to believe there is a madman at the helm.

Whatever the outcome, though, it is already too late to repair the wider rifts that Tesla’s recent troubles have exposed. Not too long ago, the tech world which sprang from Silicon Valley was held together by an ethos of corporate capitalism suffused with cultural liberalism. If this world was shaken by the radicalization of Left-wing identity politics in recent years, it has now been decisively ruptured by some of its most prominent entrepreneurs and moguls shifting into the MAGA orbit. The Tesla brand used to appeal, above all, to people like that man who entertained me in his Model Y: successful, sensible progressives who wanted to believe that capitalism and technology would ensure everything works out for the best. Such complacent optimism now belongs to a simpler age. Clearly, innovation does not have a liberal bias after all.

The White House was responding, most obviously, to the passage through South Africa’s parliament of the Expropriation Act, a bill allowing the state to confiscate land for reasons of public interest. This includes the pursuit of racial equity, and in some circumstances it will now be legal to seize land without compensation. Though my cousin’s comment was ironic, it also conveyed a hint of nervousness. As her husband put it, somewhere at the back of their minds there does lurk the possibility that one day the state will simply confiscate their land. Prominent politicians have been threatening to do so for years — and not just firebrands such as Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. In 2017, to give one example, then-President Jacob Zuma promised to strip white landowners of their property.

Understandably, then, many Afrikaners will feel relieved to have Trump’s support. And yet, by singling them out as victims, the American President is effectively claiming them as members of a Western civilization that he is now the guardian of. This doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the Afrikaans identity, and nor is it likely to win them many friends in the country where they reside.

Indeed, in South Africa as elsewhere, Trump’s comments were immediately mocked. The rebuttal was obvious: the country’s white minority, which includes English-speakers as well as Afrikaners, still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and colored compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, though the import of these figures is not primarily about economic justice; in England, for comparison, half the land belongs to less than 1% of the population.

The issue, rather, is historical and cultural. Apartheid, the system of white minority rule that ended three decades ago, is still regularly invoked in political discourse. Though often dressed up in Marxist jargon, land redistribution is both promised and demanded as restitution for historical dispossession. At the same time, land carries a special significance for many Afrikaners as well, since farming is a profession and way of life with which they identify to a unique extent. “Boer” — the colloquial term for Afrikaner — literally means farmer.

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More importantly, I’m not sure that people in the West citing ownership statistics genuinely understand the situation of South Africa’s white farmers. Take my cousin again. In some ways, she and her family enjoy a very high quality of life. But 15 years ago, her first husband was murdered during a robbery at their farm, and she was dumped in the wilderness with her six week-old infant. Then she married a man whose first wife had also been murdered, on the same farm where they live now. The actual business of agriculture entails a constant struggle against a corrupt, disintegrating and ideologically hostile state. A few years ago, an illegal settlement sprang up in their area, consisting of improvised housing and such basic services as the inhabitants can provide for themselves. It now numbers thousands of people and will, they fear, soon spread onto their land.

These experiences are far from unusual: South Africa regularly sees the murder of 50 farmers each year. Over the past decade, such crimes have invited wider interest in the Afrikaner question. In particular, Western conservatives who suspect mainstream institutions of anti-white bias claim that the attacks are being ignored or downplayed. Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — has referred to the farm murders as genocide. The issue is inherently muddy due to the inconsistent nature of the crimes, and the very high levels of violence in South Africa more generally. But there are certainly many Afrikaners who resent their own government’s failure to even recognize the problem. “White farmers are regularly characterised as ‘criminals,’ ‘land thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ ‘oppressors,’ by high-ranking politicians,” Ernst van Zyl, spokesperson for the Afrikaner interest group Afriforum, tells me. “Farm murders are often characterised by incredibly brutal levels of torture. In many cases nothing is stolen.”

Arguably, though, Trump’s concern with Afrikaners has less to do with their daily lives than their status as symbols. According to the framework of post-Seventies liberal thought, Afrikaners were the archetypal villains: white invaders who subjugated the indigenous people of a foreign land. It is on this basis that it became unthinkable to express sympathy for them as a group. Trumpism is all about attacking such taboos, and overturning the moral hierarchies they imply. In this case, he is turning the logic of progressive liberalism against itself: are Afrikaners not also an ethnic minority, with all the protections that is said to entail? Can they not also suffer discrimination, and be granted the sacred status of refugees?

This tendency of outsiders to view the Afrikaners in terms of political symbolism, though reductive, is nonetheless made possible by their peculiar history and identity as a group. For centuries, they have inhabited a position of existential ambiguity, understanding themselves by turns or even simultaneously as an endangered minority and divinely sanctioned masters; as humble land-dwellers and custodians of a higher civilization; as fundamentally both African and European. This is one of the paradoxes of the Afrikaners: their situation is singular and unclear, yet they have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.

As the historian Hermann Giliomee has written, South Africa was “unique in the world of European colonization”. White settlers didn’t form their own self-sufficient society (as in North America or Australia), nor did they remain a small administrative and commercial elite (as in India). Rather, they dominated only in certain places, often only precariously, and even there were dependent on African labor. This last point cannot be stressed enough. The relations between Afrikaners and the peoples they encountered in Africa, whether the Khoisan inhabitants of the Western Cape region or the Bantu-speaking tribes inland, were extremely varied. Yet they were usually defined, at least in part, by the contradictory dynamic of trying to remain socially distinct while also needing these groups to serve as workers and fighting auxiliaries. This meant that Afrikaners frequently engineered situations — including, arguably, Apartheid itself — in which they exploited other populations while seeing themselves as an endangered minority.

No less important, the Afrikaners were not the only people of European descent in southern Africa. From the early 19th century, when the region began to be incorporated into the British Empire, they endured an uneasy coexistence with British settlers, numerically fewer but in most other respects much more powerful. Supremely confident in the superiority of their customs, manners and laws, the Victorians in southern Africa often looked down on the Afrikaners as primitive and backward, and sometimes even as an inferior race. The English South African writer Olive Schreiner remarked that, as a child in the 1860s, it would have been unthinkable for her to eat food or sleep in a bed that an Afrikaner had previously touched. As late as 1946, the average Afrikaner’s income was less than half that of an English-speaking South African’s.

The British had their own bitter conflicts with African peoples, and much of their involvement in southern Africa was driven by land speculation and the mining of gold and diamonds. Yet the British at this time were also a liberal superpower. Inspired by Evangelical Christianity, they were radically committed to the welfare and basic rights, as they saw them, of non-Europeans in their empire. A major source of friction with the Afrikaners was the British insistence on protecting their workers, who included Khoisan peons and, until 1838, slaves of South Asian and African origin. In a foreshadowing of more recent events, some Afrikaners felt they were unfairly discriminated against. One of their leading figures, Piet Retief, complained in the 1830s of the “prejudice” stirred against them by “dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion, whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favor”.

The struggle for independence from Britain would provide crucial moments in the Afrikaner nationalist mythology. One of these was the Great Trek, when groups of Afrikaner pioneers fled the Cape Colony in their wagons through the 1830s. Some of these were wiped out by disease and battle, but others managed to establish a pair of Boer Republics beyond British grasp. Another milestone was the Boer War, fought 1898-1902, in which these states fought unsuccessfully to maintain their sovereignty from the British Empire. The people who would later become the world’s most famous oppressors were, ironically, also the first anti-imperialist freedom fighters of the 20th century.

Yet Afrikaner identity was late in finding a definite shape, and its eventual contours were far from inevitable. Even in the late 19th century, the word “Afrikaner” was used loosely and inconsistently. Few regarded Afrikaans — essentially a simplified and creolized version of Dutch — as a distinct language. In the Cape, many Afrikaans elites were loyal subjects of the British crown. As one leader put it: “I am, I hope, a patriotic Dutch-Afrikaner, but if anyone dares to touch the English flag I shall shoot him point blank.” An influential proponent of the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit (no relation), ended up supporting the British in the Boer War. Today, Afrikaners are not even the largest group of Afrikaans speakers. That would be the coloreds, whose mixed ancestry includes the Khoisan people of the Cape and Asian slaves from the early colonial period.

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Likewise, Afrikaners are far from homogenous today. Besides the gruff farmers of popular imagination, there are cohorts of Johannesburg hipsters, artists in the Karoo Desert and suburban white-collar professionals. The South African diaspora in places like the UK and Australia numbers in the hundreds of thousands, of which a significant proportion are Afrikaners like myself. The members of this far-flung tribe certainly do not think alike, as I discovered when I canvassed opinions on Trump’s intervention. Some regard the American president almost as divine, others as Mussolini with a toupee.

Still, I get the sense that the challenges of adapting to South Africa’s crumbling state are bringing parts of the Afrikaans community closer together. At AfriForum, for instance, van Zyl talks about the twin principles of staatsbestand and selfdoen: “state-proof” and “autonomous”. These are clear in the efforts of neighborhoods and community groups to plug gaps in basic services and infrastructure, from police patrols to road repairs. Such cooperation, together with Afrikaans schools, historical commemorations, religious belief, sports fixtures, and the all-important ritual of the braai or barbecue, have produced a kind of thick identity I’m not sure I’ve encountered in Britain.

I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured “first world” state to be suffocating and infantilizing. I remember asking one such man if South Africa’s violence didn’t bother him, to which he shrugged and said that everyone dies eventually. Others, of course, are less glib. My cousin’s husband told me that he’s still excited about the country, that there is so much to enjoy — but for his children’s and grandchildren’s sake, he worries about the volatility of South African politics and the ongoing deterioration of the country’s institutions.

The backing of Trump and his supporters may also turn out to be a mixed blessing. To an important degree, his gesture relies on an image of the Afrikaners as an embattled outpost of Western civilization, about to be swallowed by the chaos of the African continent — a metaphor for the perceived threat to traditional ideals within the West itself. Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.