This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television program called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronizing paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveler. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behavior of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realize that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalize crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organization claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

These two approaches to creativity for kids, the splatter and the craft kit, encapsulate two far broader lessons we deliver to children on how to live. On the one hand, unbounded self-expression coupled with absolute aesthetic relativism, in which we reject any imaginable constraint on a kind of “creativity” we imagine to come only from within ourselves. On the other, a rigid obedience to externally-imposed rules. And when I learned, earlier this week, that some secondary school children are now identifying as non-human creatures — or, in one case, as a cape-wearing moon — it left me wondering: do such absurdities apply the former lesson, rejecting every rule in the name of self-expression? Or are such youth in fact colouring inside the lines their teachers — which is to say us, the adults — have provided?

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Schoolchildren, we learn, are now identifying as dinosaurs, horses, cats, and even planetary bodies. One pupil at a secondary school in Wales reported that a fellow pupil “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”

When my own daughter was a toddler, an art-world friend and I used to send one another pictures of our kids’ splatter paintings, with solemn commentary in the style of a contemporary gallery. Such affectionate mum-jokes aside, though, it would be extremely bad form to greet your pre-schooler’s colourful smears with substantive artistic critique rather than unalloyed delight, simply as joyful self-expression.

But it’s one thing embracing a three-year-old’s poster-paint splodges with judgement-free rapture. It’s another altogether when secondary-school teachers embrace (or, perhaps in many cases, have imposed on them) an equivalent refusal to judge even the most unconstrained self-expression. Within this stance of unconditional acceptance, the teachers in question are left completely unable to impose boundaries, even when limiting their pupils’ self-expression would, in fact, be a basic precondition for conducting a functional, meow-free lesson.

But while the contrasting approach to creativity — lines to colour inside, or a pre-prepared kit for assembly, for example — seems to offer more structure, in practice it’s less different than you might imagine. Whether literally or metaphorically, the “craft kit” approach represents the other extreme to the splatter painting: a total or near-total relinquishing of skill, judgement, and agency, in favour of pre-prepared templates.

And we see this applied, too, in young people’s lives. Some parents are now heavily involved in their offspring’s university life, and others have even gone into their child’s place of work to help them confront an angry customer, or phoned their boss to ask for a pay rise. Adults are also pre-defining the forms that supposedly radical self-expression takes, and then inviting young people to discover their “authentic selves” by adopting such an identity wholesale: a “craft kit” version of selfhood, as it were, requiring only simple instructions and little in the way of accomplishment. This agency-free, pre-assembled approach to living is now so widely accepted that it commands a whole month-long summer celebration, complete with a pocketbook’s worth of off-the-peg selves from which to choose.

But what, in reality, does either approach offer as a set of moral precepts on how to live? Both work well enough, provided the locus of authority is elsewhere: that is, if you have an admiring mummy to coo at your splatter painting, or a teacher on hand with a kit or print-out for you to complete. But they leave something to be desired at the point where individual judgement and agency is required — which is to say, in theory at least, for the whole of life after childhood.

It’s far rarer to find artistic endeavours offered to children that emphasise imitation, practice, and mastery of a technical skill — for example drawing freehand rather than colouring in. This is unsurprising, in a way: even assuming you possess the skill in question, helping a child make something nice using a method that’s difficult to master is much more time-consuming than praising them for making a mess, or else giving them a kit to do while you catch up on emails.

But the trouble with such approaches to “creativity” is precisely this: they swerve the acquisition of skill. And this means, in the end, swerving the acquisition of agency. We used to understand this, and treat artistic education as the inculcation of skill and judgement through practice. In the studios of Renaissance sculptors, for example, would-be “creatives” could spend years imitating existing works, and mastering technical skill, artistic register, and the larger aesthetic framework, before they were allowed anywhere near a composition of their own. The resulting skill, in the hands of even an average sculptor, could produce good work; allied with an exceptional talent such as Michelangelo’s, the result was masterpieces still world-famous today.

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We might say: was Michelangelo not also expressing himself? Well, yes; but for all that his creations are exceptional in their vividness and exquisite execution, they also exist within a tradition of craftsmanship, as well as a visual register and shared religious and mythological framework. And creativity within such a demanding frame implies submission to what the philosopher-engineer Matthew Crawford calls the “affordances” of your chosen material and métier: not just your patiently-acquired skill, but also what stone can be persuaded to do, plus more broadly the topics and visual language that will make the result meaningful to others.

In place of this difficult-to-acquire matrix of skill and meaning, we’ve embraced the idea that “creativity” is a spontaneous property of individuals, drawn solely from within an individual without much need for training, practice, or imitation. So much so, in fact, that we’re running full-tilt into a new aesthetic age, that hands the aggregate treasure-trove of historic human visual and linguistic conventions wholesale to machines, treating it simply as a means of “training” programmes such as ChatGPT and Midjourney so that they may “create” new configurations of that cultural legacy on our behalf.

In doing so, we’ve sidelined that domain’s critical role as an enabler of creativity: providing the meanings to create with, and the skills to realise a vision. And again, we should not find it strange how easily this has been accepted, given that for decades now we’ve been treating the whole domain of skill, practice, and shared meaning as incidental to “creativity”.

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There are signs that this poverty of skill-based judgement has percolated upwards, into adults. At the most literal level, adult colouring books are wildly popular as a way of relaxing, a trend that first hit the headlines in 2015. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is also the year the American Dialect Society nominated, as most creative new coinage, the transformation of “adult” into a verb meaning “behave like a grownup” — or that the same year, too, the overall American Dialect Society winner for innovative dialect was the “nonbinary” singular “they”.

In other words, in 2015 adults embraced, en masse, a form of artistic endeavour that surrenders overall control to an outside force. The same year, self-created identities became so mainstream as to begin reshaping language. And that same year, adults began expressing, also en masse, a generalised ambivalent distance from their own capacity (or willingness) to behave as adults.

Custom identities, adult colouring books and semi-ironic clinging to childhood have not disappeared since 2015. You can even buy (possibly ironic, possibly not) “I Adulted!” reward stickers on Amazon.But being an adult implies having the skills and knowledge to take independent action: in other words, knowing how to make a Pietà, rather than colouring inside the lines or making a mess.

And what exactly are you to do, as a child, when the adults around you offer no opportunity to develop any skills or moral frameworks, refuse to acknowledge any objective moral or aesthetic standards? Under those circumstances, you will have grown up thinking the skills, norms and shared meanings that form the basis of independent creativity or moral judgement are so irrelevant as to be ceded wholesale to imitation machines.

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Then you get to the age of supposed autonomy, and find yourself without either a loving authority figure who will tell you your splatter art is wonderful, or even an authority to give you some lines to colour inside. We shouldn’t be surprised if many such adults feel nostalgia for the innocent age before anyone expected them to like being free.

If I have a measure of hope, it rests with the kids now riotously trolling this limitless-yet-rigid modern orthodoxy of value-free self-expression, by identifying as planets or dinosaurs and forcing their teachers to play along. If such absurdist stunts have little to offer on the artistic front, they nonetheless demonstrate an enduring truth. Human creativity will always meet and exceed its boundaries, even when it’s constrained only by the pretence that we can live without boundaries.

It used to be a hotspot for secret societies and occultists, such as Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon. And it was here that the 17th-Century English philosopher would allegedly associate with a group of Rosicrucians — a Western esoteric movement based on Kabbalistic and gnostic thought.

This sense of rebellion is not confined to the past; swathes of millennials and Gen-Zers are turning to online occultism and ritual magic in what seems like a rebellion against modern disenchantment. 

Digital forms of New Age spirituality go especially viral on TikTok (or WitchTok) — from virtual trans-Atlantic covens gathering to cast spells on politicians (and planets), to the idea of “manifestation” that is currently in vogue. These trends are paired with politics, where magic is channelled into anti-capitalist “spiritual activism”.

Occultism tends to attract young people because it appears subversive. The idea of Francis Bacon and his cabal of Rosicrucians practising magic behind closed doors seems inherently subcultural; a mark of an “alternative lifestyle”. Even the word itself — derived from the Latin occultus, meaning “hidden” — suggests something dissident; a left-hand path leading away from the masses. Its compatibility with anti-establishment sentiments thus tends to go unquestioned. 

Today, though, these connotations are deceptive. While occultism may have been subversive in the context of 16th and 17th-century religious societies, it rapidly ceased to be so with the birth of modernity. Why? Because the heirs of Western occult philosophy were also the heirs of the secular liberalism and capitalism that dominates the West today.

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Far from being a black sheep in Western intellectual history, it was Bacon — along with Hobbes, Locke, and Hume — who laid down the norms of our time. He was the father of British empiricism and the scientific method: the cornerstone of liberal, rationalistic modernity.

Bacon was one of the most proactive actors in building a world free from tradition and “superstition”. He was part of the same revolt against religion that brought about the Age of Reason, and, ultimately, the materialist dogmas upheld by contemporary science, philosophy and politics. On a more conceptual level, Western occultism came hand-in-hand with the founding principle of the modern age: Man’s domination over nature.

It is no coincidence that Bacon straddled both worlds, when both emerged from the same reaction against religion and the will to seek more “rational” and autonomous ways of arriving at truth. Liberal capitalism and occultism are both fruits of the Enlightenment. Both place man at the very centre of the universe, attempting to emancipate him from the constraints of tradition and the natural world itself. Both also attempt to manipulate nature, be that with magic or brute force. Though one clings onto a veneer of transcendence and the other admits to its own materialism, both tend towards this same end: “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”.

At least, this is what the early critical theorists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw as the Enlightenment’s end game. For them, the subjugation of nature that was justified by 17th century rationality was inextricably linked to “‘bourgeois liberalism” and capitalism — even though, ironically, they themselves ended up subscribing to the very materialism and atheism that defined these systems. 

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Given that this subjugation of nature is precisely what motivated Bacon to pursue the occult, it is clear that Western esotericism does not subvert the impulse behind capitalism, but compliments it. Nothing sums this up more perfectly than the “magick” of Aleister Crowley, the West’s most influential occultist after Bacon, which he based on the sole principle of “do what thou wilt”; a sentiment which can hardly be distinguished from that of modern liberalism.

This overlap is strongly felt in the New Age movement of the Sixties and Seventies — a strange and self-contradictory synthesis of quasi-transcendent freedom and consumerist self-actualisation. Despite its reputation for rebellion, the flower power generation only took the grounding principle of Enlightenment liberalism a step further, overthrowing tradition and nature in ways more forceful than ever before. Their attraction to the occult was hardly subversive; it simply served the 17th century urge to make man (and now, with birth control, woman) master of nature.

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Despite the deeply entangled roots of the Enlightenment and occult spirituality, the latter’s appeal is reliant on its performative claim to be an insurgency allegedly directed against the ruling forces of our society. Hence its attraction to young people as an alternative to “organised religion”, the Protestant work ethic, or whatever thin residues of traditional thought remain in the public sphere. 

But this relies on an outdated view: that there is such a thing as religious (and specifically Christian) hegemony. Numerous WitchTok videos play on this idea, sometimes stereotyping and mocking Christians for their alleged ignorance, “irrational” beliefs or lack of “critical thinking”. But far from being truly rebellious, their attitudes are simply echoes of those that govern the modern world.

WitchTok, being effectively stuck in the 17th Century, forgets that the status quo has shifted: it is now secularism that dominates in the Western world. Yet the members of its virtual covens continue to rebel against a phantom hegemony, using magic against power structures and religious dogmas that are too weak today to oppress anybody. It is out of this delusion that magic becomes merged with activism, as in the case of feminist witches hexing Trump. Despite sharing a philosophical genealogy with the modern establishment, acquiring magical power becomes a means of rising up against that establishment.

As with Francis Bacon, this power is of a distinctly individualist, rationalist kind, that looks to manipulate nature at the command of the human will — just like Adorno and Horkheimer’s “bourgeois liberalism”. Almost all of the practices that are popular on WitchTok are oriented towards personal gratification, be that “manifesting” money, beauty and success or casting hexes on enemies. Despite standing in opposition to modern capitalism, their individualism and materialism ends up succumbing to it; the very same paradox that ran through Sixties counterculture.

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One could even compare WitchTokers’ attempts to “manifest” or “reality shift” (a trend of inducing alternate states of consciousness — while filming oneself, of course) to the scientific method, in line with the double legacy of Bacon. When TikTok users sift through various magical practices to find which one works for them, they are undergoing the same procedure of experimentation to arrive at empirical proof as in scientific inquiry. That is to say, they are not really “superstitious”, but committed to the principles of modern science and rationality.

Once again, TikTok’s romanticisation of witchcraft as something subversive forgets the reality that Western occultism arrived in tandem with the very Enlightenment ideologies underpinning modernity. Its desires to forge transcendence “autonomously” and “rationally” do not go against the status quo; they are the status quo’s founding principles.

In reality, to be truly subversive in this day and age would be to free oneself from the shackles of individualism. It would entail drawing wisdom from the traditions that modernity has so violently delegitimised, and submitting to nature rather than seeking to manipulate (or mutilate) it. Prospects that are unlikely to appeal to many Millennials, Gen-Zers, or TikTok witches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lark Ascending; Romance for Violin and orchestra was a revised version of a composition Vaughan Williams wrote just before World War One for solo violin and piano. Referencing a poem of the same name by George Meredith, the piece lasted around 15 minutes and had little in the way of musical pyrotechnics for Hall to get her teeth into.

Yet today the Lark regularly tops ClassicFM’s annual Hall of Fame — ahead of Beethoven, Mozart and all the rest. Explaining why they love the piece, fans often point to how it evokes the beauty of the English countryside, rather like a Constable painting. As Peter Sallis, assured of his place in English rural folklore from his role in Last of the Summer Wine, put it: “You’ve only got to listen to it, and you’re listening to England.”

The Lark has often assumed a sense of nostalgia, conjuring up images of what has been lost: the unspoilt England or Britain that existed before the arrival of two World Wars and the era of mass road-building, sprawling housing estates and out-of-town shopping centres. It recalls “an Arcadia that perhaps never was,” as one radio presenter recently remarked with a hint of a sneer.

There is certainly something in these descriptions, not least in the orchestral accompaniment with its gentle rise-and-fall which maps on to the undulations of the English countryside — and indeed to English speech. Talking about Vaughan Williams and his fellow English composer Edward Elgar, the late conductor Richard Hickox said: “Our speech has a lot of rise and fall and our countryside [that] they knew so well has lots of rise and fall. I think the landscape of England really did affect them…”

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However, Vaughan Williams’s music and his attempts to create a definably English musical language are routinely dismissed as parochial. Chrissy Kinsella, who runs the London Music Fund, recently wrote that the Lark “is one of the dullest pieces of music known to man, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on” — a sentiment, it seems, that is shared by many.

Now it is certainly true that the Lark can be dull. Vaughan Williams’s champion Adrian Boult once lamented a performance in which “we all agreed that the poor lark never left solid earth”. Overplay has made it over-familiar for many. Sometimes it does not always match our moods. Some of us may never be in the mood.

However, it is uncanny how often these comments appear with a political edge. The Lark’s popularity and its associations with Englishness, nostalgia, the past and the countryside is more than enough to trigger the average progressive. Kinsella, whose charity has London Mayor Sadiq Khan as patron, laughed along at a colleague blaming the Lark’s popularity on the English. The music writer Hugh Morris recently suggested: “the residual spectre of British (read: English) exceptionalism that characterises our politics, governance, and musical life runs strong in Vaughan Williams… It’s no surprise that he now represents a highly middlebrow attitude to music in the UK.”

Again and again in such comments we find the assertion of quite a strong “us” and “them”, gathering Vaughan Williams and his unassuming piece around England and Englishness as unfavoured categories, typified by dullness and backwardness. A certain referendum result never appears to be far away. “Just like Brexit the British are fixated on The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams,” says one critic.

These recurring associations suggest how the piece serves, at least in part, as a proxy to display distaste for other things and people. Certainly, attacks on the Lark tend to be addressing a wider world around the piece as much as the piece itself.

One of the common accusations made against it is “backwardness”, which implies a ranking schema based on how it relates to history: a work either looks backwards into the tainted past or forwards into an imagined and apparently better future, either sharing the taint or the betterment.

In this way, the theorist takes over the meaning of works of art: measuring and judging. It rather evokes what John Carey wrote about in The Intellectuals and the Masses: of self-styled intellectuals working — and using their work —to distinguish themselves from the inferior plebs.

Certainly for many, disparaging the Lark, its popularity and its English associations appears as a way to demonstrate superiority, to place oneself ahead of others, as more mature in the progressive fashion. This also brings the group together, reproducing solidarity through group superiority, thereby reproducing political power.

In a lecture given at Cornell University in 1954, Vaughan Williams said:

“My old teacher, [the German composer] Max Bruch, used to say to me, ‘You must not write eye music, you must write ear music.’ But many musical writers who ought to know better think that music is not what we hear with our ears but what we see on the printed or written page; and some of them say with pride that they never want to hear music, it is enough for them to see the score.”[1. Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Making of Music (Cornell University Press, 1955). Chapter 3: ‘How do we make music?’]

In privileging what is written over what is heard, the theorist wrests music away from the listening experience towards the measurable and tangible, which are more accessible to judgement. Is it inventive and innovative? Does it represent a “step forward” from the “music of past”? What do people invoke in support of a piece and how does this measure up to our value system?

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However, appealing to the tangible often ends up disregarding and delegitimising meaning. Talking about the Lark on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac captured how powerful the music can be:

“It hearkens back to my father again. But also, when I first heard this piece of music I collapsed in tears with emotion. I just thought it was probably the most beautiful piece I ever heard. And also, interestingly, Peter Green was very influenced by this piece of music. It hearkens to some elements of what Peter’s playing and his guitar when he plays Albatross and other such pieces  . . .  It’s like a prayer.”

The comment sections of Lark videos tell similar, often moving, stories. One of the most highly rated comments on YouTube reads: “My sister told me about this beautiful work today, as I was feeling pretty suicidal…. Listening to this music lifted my heart above the clouds and I felt the pain subside… I know there is Love because it is written into this music”. Indeed, the Lark seems to contain a special magic for those who are struggling existentially. “This is what finally coming out of a depressive episode feels like,” reads another comment.

In this latter sense we might think of the Lark representing what it is like to be in-flow, in life: not in conflict with the world or withdrawn from it, but aligned to it and living within it.

Vaughan Williams’s widow Ursula wrote:

“He had taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought in The Lark Ascending and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken.”[2. Ursula Vaughan Williams: RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1964), p.156]

From this standpoint, the violin part is not so much attempting to translate the words of the Meredith poem into music, as to be that flight and that song. The accompanying orchestral parts, which some players find dull and boring, have a quiet yet powerful role, gently supporting the soloist. They form the environment in which the little bird sings its song and soars to great heights.

Perhaps, in its simplicity and ease — and in its sense of the individual being supported — the Lark shows us what it means to be free. We might think, then, that its sneering detractors, in trying to prevent the Lark from speaking for itself, display a certain contempt for freedom.

Sentimental, I know. I think what I found moving was that the Communards, including most of their leaders, were ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. Here was a crisis not of their making or choosing, but one they seized nonetheless.

At the crack of dawn on 18 March 150 years ago, the French government sent troops to repossess a large number of cannon in the possession of the Paris National Guard, the citizen militia. Crowds of Parisians turned out to stop the troops and, in a panic, the government, the army, the police and the senior civil service fled. Paris was left in the hands of its people.

A week later, they elected a city council, the Conseil de la Commune. Soon after that, clashes with government troops began in the suburbs, and intensified over the following six weeks. On 21 May, soldiers climbed over the city walls, and there followed a week of fighting which left whole streets in ruins, major public buildings in flames, and the streets strewn with corpses. Many hundreds of people were summarily executed, 40,000 were marched away as prisoners and over 4,000 were subsequently exiled to penal camps in New Caledonia. The Paris Commune seemed utterly defeated.

That the Commune and the “Communards” should still be remembered by so many people, however vaguely, is itself something of a mystery. Nineteenth-century Europe was not short of urban uprisings and bloody massacres. But only specialists recall the Warsaw rising of 1830, the revolts in Vienna and Prague in 1848, or the Roman Republic of 1849.

Part of the reason must be that it concerns Paris. But apart from Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People and Les Misérables, most know nothing of the half-dozen other Parisian uprisings of the century. Marx wrote importantly about the Commune, which must be another part of the reason. But then he wrote importantly about the June 1848 revolt and the December 1851 coup d’état, without that being enough to place them within popular folklore. So is it the name “Commune” which resonates both with hippy dreams of anarchic togetherness and with Communist narratives of history?

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For Marxists (although Marx was privately unsure) the Commune was a political and theoretical breakthrough: “the form at last discovered”, he wrote, “for the emancipation of the working class”. The Communards, he argued, had hit on a non-oppressive and yet fully revolutionary way of exercising power, by abolishing all oppressive institutions — army, church, police — and giving power directly to the people themselves.

Marxists took it for granted that the industrial proletariat of Paris must have been the most dynamic and forward-looking element. Engels elaborated further by defining the Commune as the first “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the transition to a classless society. Lenin (whose body was to be shrouded in a Communard flag) was more critical: it was the Commune’s defeat that was really significant. It had failed because it did not have the leadership of a disciplined party, and because it was insufficiently ruthless in combatting class enemies. So the Communards were retrospectively enrolled for nearly a century as pioneering ancestors in the long march to Communism.

But a heretical counter-explanation emerged in the 1960s in the work of a young French historian, Jacques Rougerie: the Commune was not the first of a new kind of revolution, he said, but the last of an old one. Rougerie was brutally attacked by the Communist Party for his suggestion that the Communards were the descendants of the sans-culottes of the 1790s. Not an industrial proletariat, but skilled workers in traditional industries (engravers, joiners, cobblers), small businessmen, shopkeepers, clerks. Not looking forwards to Communism, but backwards to self-managed workers’ cooperatives and the republics of 1848 and 1792: they officially adopted the revolutionary calendar, which placed them in the Year 79. So, concluded some historians, the Commune was really the last gasp of the French Revolution.

But historians have a weakness for pioneering movements, which after all give their research projects extra glamour. A popular view in the Swinging Sixties was that the Commune was a bit like May 1968, a carnival of anarchy, even a “total revolution, as one historian suggested fancifully. Or was it a revolution to take back control of space that had been appropriated by bourgeois urbanism?

Particularly in the United States, it was reinvented as an act of feminism. It was the women of the Commune, the notorious pétroleuses, who made it unique. This had once been a label of shame for the (mythical) women who supposedly went round setting fire to buildings. Now it became a title of honour. Communard women not only spoke up for themselves and their collective interests, it was argued, they actually fought on the barricades.

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For some American historians, it was their organised use of violence that was the significant novelty of 1871: emancipation by the gun. The most recent reinterpretation is that the Commune was an event in global history, the most fashionable historiographical trend.

Old? New? Leninist? Anarchist? Feminist? Urban? Global? There are plenty of reasons for commemorating its 150^th anniversary. But there are also simpler explanations for why the Commune is still remembered by many as inspiring and meaningful.

First is that it was short: two months. As Marx noted, this was only enough to indicate what might have been — and, of course, that includes almost anything. So it is easy to project things onto the Commune, things we would like to imagine as possible. And it also means that it didn’t have time to go really wrong. Yes, there were plenty of errors and some sinister aspects, but compared with the 1793 Terror or Stalinism, the Commune was innocent. It didn’t have time either to moderate into bourgeois banality, or to start devouring its own children. So always unfulfilled, its promise undiminished, it remains (in the words of a famous song written by one of its leaders) “le temps des cerises” — the cherry time.

The other reason it is remembered, as Marx also noted at the time, is because of the ferocity with which it was crushed during the last lurid “Bloody Week” of barricade fighting amid a city in flames. Around 7,000 people were killed — a unique bloodbath for the 19^th century. This turned its followers into martyrs, and created a heroic legend.

There is still an annual pilgrimage to one of the killing sites, the Mur des Fédérés in the Père Lachaise cemetery. But the intention was commemoration, not repetition: in future, the French Left would fight at the ballot box, not on the barricade. Quite a number of prominent Communards returned as elected politicians or city officials. Two lived to be ministers in the French national unity government of 1914. Put all these elements together, and you get a powerful if enigmatic memory which can serve a range of purposes, including sentimental nostalgia.

But is this all the Commune can tell us 150 years later? I think there is something else, something that is not so often celebrated: namely, that the Commune was fundamentally about popular democracy. Today, we might even call it “populist”.

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France since the implosion of the Revolution in the mid-1790s had lived under a succession of oligarchies, whether under republics, emperors or kings: a roundabout of elites. But the defeat by Germany in 1870-71 had discredited both mainstream Left and Right, and created a political vacuum. It looked as though this would end in another period of monarchy — rule by another section of the elite, with nothing to offer except repression spiced with paternalism.

But the Communards said no: this time the people themselves would rule. Of course, their defeat in war marked a far more dramatic break than anything we have so far experienced in the West. But today’s impatience with politicians, technocratic bureaucracies and establishment “experts” certainly invites some comparisons. Certainly, too many progressives today seem to prefer the elite: they have abandoned the idea that people who are poor, or even those who do ordinary jobs or who have not been to university, have ideas and experience of their own, and an equal right to a political voice.

Populism is feared and denigrated as reactionary. Yet the most basic principle of the Communards was that power should be shared as equally as possible, and that every person (well, every man) had an equal right to make decisions. Office holders at every level would be elected, and if they failed in their duty their electors would dismiss them: not just politicians but officials and magistrates, too. Wherever possible, citizens would perform public duties themselves — for example, as members of the National Guard, they would be their own police force. The aim was freedom and emancipation: to be treated as adults.

This was the purpose behind the secularisation of schools and a widespread demand for technical education: so that, wrote a Communard newspaper,  “those who can handle tools can also write books”. It lay behind the aspiration to workers’ cooperatives for women and men. The multiplication of political clubs across the city showed a thirst among ordinary people to have their say on political and social matters, often speaking for the first time in public.

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The pithiest expression of the Communard spirit is the famous Internationale, written by a member of the Commune, Eugène Pottier. It includes this: “there are no supreme saviours, not God, not emperors, not politicians … let’s save ourselves; … enough of languishing as dependents, equality demands other laws.”

It is, of course, easy to pick holes in this. Not much was put into practice in seven weeks of civil war, and if it had been it wouldn’t have worked for long: what normal person wants to spend all their evenings in political meetings, sitting on local committees, or patrolling the streets in National Guard uniform chasing prostitutes and bakers illegally working at night (two of the Commune’s slightly eccentric reforms)? Besides, there were plenty of Communards who were a bit too keen on repressing opinions they didn’t like, persecuting harmless priests and nuns, and dreaming of a return to the Jacobin Terror.

Nevertheless, the Communard leadership were reluctant to introduce censorship, disliked locking people up and refused to use the death penalty: the guillotine was fetched from its shed and publicly burnt. Yes, in the end a number of hostages were killed, some even nastily lynched: mainly gendarmes and priests, including the Archbishop of Paris. But this was done in the last desperate days, as Communard prisoners were being slaughtered by the army, and it was never officially sanctioned. As the writer and Commune member Jules Vallès put it, even in defeat they wanted to go down in history “unstained by the filth of the abattoir”. How many revolutionary leaders can say the same? Lenin’s conclusion was that they were fools who were defeated because their “excessive magnanimity” held them back from the “implacable extermination” of their class enemies —not a weakness he ever yielded to.

The Commune was doomed anyway. No government was going to permit that level of democracy. If the French army had not defeated it, the German army, which was still camped outside the city, would probably have done so. Or it might well have collapsed of its own accord: as one of its members lamented, they were really just “a talkative little parliament” and they were haemorrhaging support. As we have seen over and over again in history, most people sooner or later (and often sooner than later) want to get back to normal boring life.

But had the Communards anticipated Lenin’s retrospective advice, or followed the example of Robespierre’s Terror, the Commune would not have left the enigmatic but positive legacy it has — this wistful, always unfulfilled aspiration to true democracy.

There remains something profoundly moving in that aspiration; moving enough for me to make my annual journey up to Montmartre. For on the whole the Communards did their best, according to their lights, for democracy, for their city, and for their fellow citizens. They were people for whom Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were more inspiring than Censorship, Identity and Victimhood. In that sense, at least, their actions still resonate today.

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is a development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.

You can read what he really thinks below. And watch our interaction on Lockdown TV — it was a fascinating conversation.

Podcast version:

On civil disobedience:

“Sometimes the most public spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them. I think that if the government persists long enough with locking people down, depending on the severity of the lockdown, civil disobedience is likely to be the result. It will be discrete civil disobedience in the classic English way — I don’t think that we are likely to go onto the streets waving banners. I think we will just calmly decide that we are not going to pay any attention to this. There are some things you have to pay attention to: you can’t go to a shop if it’s closed. On the other hand, you can invite friends round for a drink, whatever Mr Hancock says. People are doing that to some extent already.

“Everyone will have their own different threshold. But I think that in the eyes of many people who disapprove of the lockdown, and some people who approve of it, we’ve reached that point quite a long time ago.”

On the ethics of law-breaking:

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

On sacrificing civil liberties:

“[Thomas] Hobbes believed in the absolute state — it didn’t have to be a monarchy, but it had to be absolute. He said that there was nothing short of the state actually killing people that the state should not be entitled to do. He was not, let us say, a believer in liberty. This is because of his experience of the anarchy which flowed from the civil war in England. Hobbes believed that we resign our freedoms unconditionally and permanently into the hands of the state, in return for security. Now, this is a model which ever since the rise of a recognisable form of modern Liberalism in the middle of the 19th century, has been almost universally rejected. But we have tended to revert to it during the current crisis. And I think that that is a very striking and very sinister development.

On the dangers of public fear:

“John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.”

On the fragility of democracy:

“Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…

“Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.”

On being a liberal:

“I regard myself as a liberal with a small L. Until the Covid outbreak, that was a very middle of the road position to be in. Since the outbreak, it’s become controversial, even in some people’s minds extreme. This is, I think, some indication of how far our national conversation has moved.”

On what the Government should learn:

“My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.”

On his critics:

“I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.

I caught myself having similar flashes of gratitude as the Prime Minister set out his roadmap this week, towards liberating schools, restoring outdoor socialising and eventually — gasp — allowing people to see their loved ones when and where they like.

Our expectations have become so diminished that his granting of permission “to have coffee on a park bench” is taken not as an insult but a gift; and the restoration of permission to “hold hands on care visits” is accepted with joy, the cruelty of his withdrawing it in the first place long-forgotten. For parents across the country, the relief that schools will soon be opened will no doubt temper the anger at the damage it has wrought on the people they love the most. All the horror of livelihoods destroyed, funerals with no mourners, older people aged beyond recognition by a year of isolation — the instinct will be to forgive it all in exchange for getting our lives back.

This, for me, is the most frightening thing about the past year. More than the virus itself, more than the political divisions that have opened up — it’s that extraordinary ability of humankind to adapt their horizon of expectations. Twelve months ago it would have been unthinkable that we would so readily accept, apparently with an overwhelming majority, another four months of such drastically reduced existence.

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Inside the Zero Covid campaign

By Freddie Sayers

How did we come to be here? The political argument against lockdowns was lost, comprehensively and globally. The awkward-squad journalists who styled themselves as “lockdown sceptics” were systematically pilloried; the scientists who thought there were better ways were shut down. The campaign was effective and only made easier by the careless statements of the “sceptics” themselves.

No one now wants to hear arguments about Sweden, which — still now — poses an awkward counter-factual to lockdown, with its strikingly similar (although less bad) epidemic trajectory to the UK, or India with its partial herd immunity and mysteriously small death rate in comparison to ours; no one wants to admit the stubborn absence of any clear dataset showing that countries with more stringent restrictions performed better than those that avoided them.

As long as we can agree that “there was no alternative”, then nothing has been wasted, nothing needlessly destroyed. This means that as we emerge, blinking, into the sunshine, we can once again make common cause with friends who felt differently, and put past disagreements down to the strangeness of a lost year.

I’ll go along with it. I don’t want to be fighting about lockdowns for a day longer. I’ll take my vaccine and sign my papers. I look at that 21 June date with as much exhilaration and trepidation as anyone.

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We need Scepticism more than ever

By Freddie Sayers

But the suspicion will never leave me that a more elegant policy response could have been devised — something less cavalier about the precious achievement of our liberal way of life and less insistent on the fallacy that an entire population would behave identically (they never did, not even at the height of the lockdowns). That niggling thought that perhaps there was always a better, safer option than on-off national mandatory confinement.

What about that voluntary “traffic lane” system I suggested, which seemed a more positive metaphor for a functioning society than the “traffic lights” we endured, with their attendant frustration and crudeness? Or greenbandredband, a proposal that never got much attention, but which might, with more work, have been developed into something good. We’ll never know because no government tried them. Creative ideas were suppressed rather than developed. They were dismissed for being “too complicated” —which is rich when you consider the byzantine tiers, rules and regulations we’ve all had to navigate over the past 12 months.

With the UK timeline now set, I imagine most self-styled “sceptics” will pack up their placards, wind down their WhatsApp groups and start to look forward to Spring. But the Prime Minister should realise that if that timetable were to slip — if, for example, an increase in cases that is not pressurising the hospital system were to lead to a new campaign to delay; or if a domestic vaccination passport were to threaten to fundamentally alter the relationship of every citizen with the state; or if the close-the-borders activists were to try to use this crisis to drastically restrict international travel long-term; or if a new variant or virus identified in some faraway land threatens to start the whole process again — they would be reactivated fast. So far, public opinion has surprised everyone by being so much in favour of restrictions; next time it may surprise again, but in a different way.

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Boris needs to take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

Obviously, I hope we continue smoothly on the roadmap out of here, and that the summer and following winter opens up and plays out just as the Prime Minister has detailed.

But even if we do manage to return to the “old normal”, it will now have a different aspect. The past year has changed the way I see the world. Having grown up in the 1990s, at university in the 2000s, I’m a product of the “End of History” generation that never got awarded an initial. Too old for the full force of the new technology, too young to remember the Cold War, if anything my generation’s complaint was that the world was too safe, too mercenary, too boring.

Well, the past year has shown how precarious that settlement always was. After this taste of what it is like to have freedom withdrawn, I appreciate it fully for the first time. I have also seen up close how intellectual fashions can sweep through the governing class just as excitedly as they can among those disparaged as “populist voters”. I have seen those elites throw out many principles that they previously held dear in response to a new threat, and invoke the new religion of science and “data” to cast dissenters as heretics. I’ve seen this power wielded by my own friends, my own class — and how sinister it has the potential to be.

So, yes, let’s look forward to spring and promised liberation. Please, let’s move the conversation on. But as we move towards the exit of our long confinement, I don’t think it will feel the same as before. The structures and freedoms that once felt so unassailable have been exposed as fragile and contingent, their defenders weak; and the question of whether there was a better way lingers, taboo and unanswered.

The ensuing trial would see Anderson and Heap convicted for obscenity and the serialisation of Ulysses discontinued – perhaps the most famous overreaction to a wank since God killed Onan. The trial took place almost exactly a century ago and, inevitably, our conception of “obscenity” has shifted beyond recognition. By modern standards, Joyce’s imaginative elision of Bloom’s ejaculation on the beach with a nearby firework display seems euphemistic rather than obscene:

“And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!”

In the early twentieth century, however, such imagery was always bound to upset the censors. Ezra Pound, the man most responsible for persuading the editors of The Little Review to publish the novel, acknowledged the risk in a letter to Joyce: “I suppose we’ll be damn well suppressed if we print the text as it stands. BUT it is damn well worth it.”

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When will the online Thought Police come for you?

By Andrew Doyle

Today most of us would regard the very notion of obscenity to be as hopelessly subjective as taste in music or sense of humour. But even 40 years after the aborted Ulysses serialisation, the judge and chief prosecutor in the 1960 trial against Penguin Books — who had just published D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover — were left bewildered by the jury’s disposition to acquit. Much was made during the trial of lead prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s opening statement, in which he asked the jury to consider whether the novel was something “you would wish your wife or servants to read”.

The defence understood something that Griffith-Jones could not: that this was a trial about incomparable social values. For a certain class of citizen, Lawrence’s novel was an unambiguous attack on British morality. But this did not square with the lived reality of a population on the cusp of a sexual revolution. For Griffith-Jones, the appearance of the words “fuck” and “cunt” in the pages of a book surely disqualified it from the possibility of literary merit. What he would have made of the appearance of “Cunty Kate” in Chapter Fifteen of Ulysses is anyone’s guess.

Despite his noble intentions, Griffith-Jones was not blessed with a literary instinct, and was clearly unfamiliar with the ways in which obscenity has always been an important tool for writers. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, “the Miller’s Tale” is offered as a direct response to that of the Knight, which is why the high style of courtly love gives way to phrases such as “prively he caughte hire by the queynte”. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare mocks the puritan Malvolio by having him inadvertently spell out the word “cunt” while examining the handwriting of a forged love letter: “these be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s”. (The “N” was marked with the word “and”, a commonplace abbreviation). If obscenity has the imprimatur of the great bard, might this not give even the staunchest of prudes pause for thought?

In practice, obscenity laws do little more than codify a sense of disgust, an experience that we all share to some degree but that cannot possibly be universalised. It was not until the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and the trial of Regina v. Hicklin eleven years later that the legal test of obscenity was established as whether the material has the potential “to deprave and corrupt”, an amorphous formulation if ever there was one. Yet the Hicklin test was retained in the Obscene Publications Act 1959, legislation that remains on the statute books today.

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What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

But just as many are arrested in the UK every year for “grossly offensive” statements under the Electronic Communications Act 2003, the way in which material might “deprave and corrupt” has never been satisfactorily defined. During the so-called “video nasties” panic of the 1980s, videos of films such as The Evil Dead and Driller Killer were seized on the grounds that they, in the words of the director of public prosecutions, had the capacity “to deprave and corrupt, or make morally bad, a significant proportion of the likely audience”. No evidence for this assertion was ever forthcoming.

Like the pornography restrictions brought in by the UK government in 2014 – which included bans on the depiction of various consensual adult activities such as “caning”, “humiliation” and “facesitting” – the benchmark for what might “deprave and corrupt” is probably best paraphrased as “things we don’t like”.  These are standards that cannot be applied with any degree of consistency, particularly when it comes to literature. Is it obscene, for instance, to write that “Egyptian men have members the size of donkeys, and ejaculate violently like wild stallions”? And, if so, should the Book of Ezekiel be excised from the Bible?

At its heart, the very concept of obscenity seems to be based on a distrust of the masses, an elitism which would prefer bawdy talk to be confined to the smoking rooms of private members’ clubs. We see this mentality in the early editions of the Loeb Classical Library series, in which offensive phrases in ancient literature were invariably left untranslated. Flicking through an early rendering of the Roman poet Catullus, for example, one might have happened upon the line ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo’ (‘I will sodomise you and fuck your face’) still in the original Latin. Of course, the effect of this kind of academic paternalism, designed to restrict certain passages to those sufficiently educated, simply made it easier for curious schoolchildren to locate the filthiest passages.

While it may seem contradictory to be worried about the Great Unwashed being exposed to a little more dirt, such is the chief concern of those who set themselves up as the public arbiters of good taste. When the British Board of Film Classification decreed that The Exorcist was unsuitable for home viewing, they were effectively acting in loco parentis over the entire nation, implying that they were able to stomach imagery that would corrupt lesser mortals. Similarly, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was deemed not so menacing when it existed solely in limited Italian and French editions, or in its expurgated form. When Penguin Books decided to publish the full version in 1960, over thirty years after it was written, the ruling classes saw this as an existential threat to the foundations of societal respectability.

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The English have always been drunkards

By Ed West

It was under this lingering cloud of paternalism that Norman Douglas published his book Some Limericks in November 1928, five months after the Italian publisher Pino Orioli had brought out Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Douglas felt that Lawrence had usurped the aristocrat’s privilege of lewd indulgence, and had democratised a sub-culture in which, to quote Douglas’s biographer Mark Holloway, “gentlemen of discretion could be relied upon to keep their filth in its proper place”. To take a typical example:

“There was an old fellow of Brest,

Who sucked off his wife with a zest.

Despite her great yowls

He sucked out her bowels,

And spat them all over her chest.”

Obscene? No doubt. But the puerility is offset by the author’s pseudo-scholarly annotations and, in any case, he had explicitly written this book for the “dirty-minded elect”. Douglas had rushed through the publication of Some Limericks having read Lawrence’s novel in draft form, feeling that its impact would be lessened if the taboos had already been broken.

The implications are somewhat paradoxical. While censorship is an affront to artistic freedom, obscenity as a literary device loses its potency where there are few boundaries of social decorum. So perhaps we need the Mervyn Griffith-Joneses and the Mary Whitehouses of this world as much as we need those artists who are willing to provoke them. At the same time, we should be aware that today’s outrage over scandalous books and movies is often no more sophisticated than those early critics of Ulysses who failed to see any distinction between Joyce’s masterpiece and the kind of vulgar scribblings one finds on a toilet wall. Disgust has the effect of destabilising our critical faculties; like rage or sexual arousal, it actuates our passion at the expense of our reason. Just because we find an artist’s work obscene does not mean it lacks value. We would do well to remember this even as we recoil.

Mothers do all sorts of things to solve this dilemma: I start work by 5am most days. In earlier times, women in search of “a room of one’s own” adopted even more extreme measures in pursuit of peace and quiet. Many opted to give sex the swerve altogether by joining a monastic community: in the Middle Ages there were some 138 nunneries in England.

Over the millennia, doubtless many more women have felt ambivalent about motherhood than is recorded. My grandmother, who worked as a doctor before World War II, told me once that she wasn’t that bothered. But having married, as she put it, “it was rather expected of one”.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Certainly, many of the women who wrote to early birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger found their fertility burdensome. In 1928, Sanger published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of these letters which describe grinding poverty, struggles with physical health, multiple miscarriages, malnourished children and constant money worries. Frustrated, impoverished and still stubbornly fertile, women pleaded for greater control over their own reproductive biology. One wrote:

“I have been married six years, at the age of seventeen. Am twenty-three now. It seems I can’t keep out of the family way. Have had six children, four living and two dead… every year there is another arrival. I don’t have any enjoyment out of life, staying at home all the while. I will not have anything out of life but worry, children and cares.”

Sanger saw her cause as a progressive one, and reproductive healthcare remains cast in the same light. Recent celebrations in Argentina over the legalisation of abortion, and protests against its restriction in Poland, were led by feminists who understand the constraints imposed on women by our reproductive biology. As Sanger put it: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Thus control over fertility has been a central plank of women’s emancipation, more or less from the moment it became medically feasible to do so. Having fewer children really does afford women greater freedom — and as a culture we really do place a premium on freedom. As Mick Jagger sang in 1965: “I’m free to do what I want, any old time”.

But as I’ve argued before, motherhood cuts across this in ways you can’t really change. The moment you become pregnant you aren’t free to do what you want. You’re not free to drink or eat what you like, and you get progressively less free in your movements as the bump gets bigger. When babies are tiny, you aren’t free to sleep uninterrupted. You can kiss goodbye to the freedom to have a lie-in for a good decade, and to the freedom to spend your money as you please pretty much forever. At best, freedom — in the Rolling Stones’ sense — mixes uncomfortably with kids.

In the same decade as Jagger sang about liberation, women gained an unprecedented new freedom with the legalisation of the contraceptive pill. It was made available in 1961 to married women, then in 1965 extended to all. At that moment, women gained a form of freedom that had previously been the preserve only of (irresponsible) men: the freedom to have sex with limited consequences. To be free, as the Stones put it, “any old time, to get what I want”.

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How the establishment fell for eugenics

By Peter Franklin

Even more profoundly, the Pill delivered the freedom Sanger sought for all women: the freedom to choose motherhood consciously. Fast-forward a few decades, and Sanger’s campaign has been realised. Barring the odd accident, in the West motherhood is largely something women opt into, rather than struggle for ways to opt out of. And it turns out that more women were ambivalent about it than anticipated: birth rates are collapsing across the developed world, leading researchers to warn of a ticking demographic time bomb.

This connection between emancipation and childlessness seems to work both ways. In the West, an emphasis on individual freedom in the women’s movement has depressed fertility among high-flying career women, with egg-freezing rising five-fold in the UK since 2013. In China, meanwhile, the current flowed the other way: the “one-child policy” fostered an explosion of career women.

Thus freedom, feminism and fertility have long been nested issues in progressive politics. But historically, there has also been another, darker aspect to reproductive technology: the vision of using it to improve the human species through selective breeding. In fact, eugenics enjoyed widespread popularity in the early 20th century as a progressive cause, and was discussed by both Margaret Sanger and her English counterpart, Marie Stopes.

For as soon as one can control fertility, the question arises: who gets to do so, and to what end? Stopes argued that reproductive technologies should be used in the interests of improving humanity by eliminating the stupid, the weak, the disabled, those she considered morally deficient and those belonging to racial groups she thought inferior. In the interests of the greater good, all such human specimens should be sterilised:

“When Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present ever increasing in proportion in our midst.”

Such casually dehumanising language rightly appals us today, and the foundation started by Marie Stopes recently changed its name to MSI Choices to downplay the association with a eugenics advocate. It was an understandable effort to untangle the acquisition of women’s freedom afforded by reproductive technology from the horrifying potential of such advances. And yet the genie is out of the bottle. Stopes’ nightmare vision of eugenics as public policy is a reality today, in the programme of forced sterilisation being perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party upon Uighur minority women in Xinjiang.

Suggested reading

China's modern genocide

By Sarah Ditum

Revulsion at such a monstrous policy is instant and instinctive. Yet similar methods are embraced as liberating in a vastly different context. And that’s how the CCP was able this week to throw the thin moral gruel of individual freedom back at us, in an attempt to reframe a campaign of genocide as a grotesque story of feminist emancipation. In a post which has since been deleted by Twitter, the Chinese Embassy in the US shared a link to an article in a state-run newspaper which said that, as a result of being sterilised, Uighur women were no longer “baby-making machines” and therefore had “more autonomy”.

The way out of this bind is to be franker about the nature of reproductive healthcare, something usually only done by people who oppose it. I support the legal availability of contraception including abortion but, but as one anti-abortion campaigner Lila Rose starkly put it: “Abortion is violence”. Inasmuch as it interrupts and terminates the normal biological process of gestation, it’s hard to disagree: there is an inescapably violent aspect to abortion. Yet Rose soon found herself accused by a pro-choice activist of “violent rhetoric” and “domestic terrorism” – for stating something that is factually true. Liberal, freedom-minded defenders of sometimes objectively violent reproductive healthcare procedures here sought to forcibly prevent further mention of that violence. It seems that where reproductive politics is concerned, violence has a way of creeping into the picture.

The women’s movement that took off in the same decade as the introduction of the contraceptive pill asserted that the personal is political. Today, we should perhaps acknowledge the extent to which the political is also personal. We nod sagely at the insistence that babies should be solely a private matter, but how can human fertility be solely a private matter?

On an intimate level, reproduction is about love, bodies and family continuity. For women, it’s also about what happens inside our very bodies. Motherhood is, literally, a visceral question. At scale, though, fertility is a question of the future workforce, growing or shrinking economies, immigration policy, competing ethnic groups, even of the survival (or not) of a people or culture. These are not small questions. We should not pretend they can be treated as purely private matters.

I believe abortion and contraception should be safe and legal. But it should also be understood as a grave action. There is, inescapably, violence implicit in bringing technology to bear on the creation of new human life, and we can’t bat away that violence away with talk of ‘freedom’. By failing to grasp this nettle, we risk inviting a loveless and easily politicised science into the heart of our society, whose face – behind the surgical mask – is the stuff of nightmares.

Published in October, A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear is subtitled The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). In it, Matthew Hongolz-Hetling describes the real-life story of a group of libertarians who plotted to take over the town of Grafton in New Hampshire. They put their idea into action by moving there en masse, in 2004, and campaigning (in some ways successfully) to liberate the community from statism, taxes, intrusive regulation and all constraints on individual freedom.

Full-bore libertarians are more an American than an English thing; the English national temperament is perhaps better-suited to libertarianism’s more understated cousin, ‘classical liberalism’. But America’s talent for being extra, for super-sizing everything from burgers to limousines, shouldn’t blind us to the overlap between our individualistic, freedom-loving Anglo cultures.

Hongolz-Hetling’s characters, and their adventures, take many forms: the cultist, the gun-toting granny, the advocate of bum fighting, the bear-hunting gubernatorial candidate, the inaudible hilltop preacher, even an unexpectedly aggressive llama. The chapter on the compulsive goat-collector alone is a gothic masterpiece:

Police, following a trail of dead goats that spanned four states, finally caught up with Goat Man in West Virginia. When he was arrested, he had sixteen goats in his possession (including one in the freezer).

But along with being a joyous romp through American weirdness, the book is also about the flipside of the West’s individualism: virtue and common values. Both tend to be overlooked nowadays, in our freedom-loving cultures either side of the pond; and yet both have were increasingly bandied about this year, as Covid-19 cases ascended to crisis levels.

Suggested reading

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

The Founding Fathers drew a direct line between virtue and the healthy functioning of a nation as the guarantor of freedom. As James Madison put it in 1788:

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

That is, in order for government to support a free and flourishing society, everyone needs to share at least a general idea of what a good person looks like. For as the English political theorist Edmund Burke pointed out around the same time: “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” That is, the less virtue you have, the more official rules you’ll need.

In 2018, Matt Hancock was calling for everyone to take more personal responsibility for managing their own health; in 2020, the health secretary has been forced to view coronavirus case numbers as the state’s problem. And in pivoting from promoting controls within to those without, in the form of compulsory lockdown, Hancock tacitly conceded the moral vacuum at the heart of the modern Conservative Party.

That is, the Tory Party may pay lip service to freedom and personal responsibility. But when it came to a crisis where collective action was needed at speed, that same party has proved (probably rightly) unwilling to gamble on the British public’s commitment to doing the right thing.

Suggested reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Hancock ought to read A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear. It would help him to justify his policies — if only to himself. Take the story of John Babiarz, one of the first libertarians to settle in Grafton and subsequently its one-man volunteer fire service. After extinguishing a fire on someone else’s property, Babiarz is ostracised by other libertarians for ‘statism’ — which is to say, taking any sort of coercive action in the public interest. But these obsessive opponents of state authority seem unable to address the question of how to protect the public interest if no ‘statism’ is allowed. They have no framework for considering those consequences of individual actions that ricochet far beyond one individual.

And for the Graftonites, the chief spanner in the works of self-organising freedom wasn’t even the risk of wildfires. It was another force of nature, one hungry not for flammable matter but garbage: bears. One Grafton resident wishes to feed doughnuts to the neighbourhood’s bears, but her next-door neighbour is terrified of being attacked by them. Should they both be left to do their thing? The instinctive libertarian answer to this is ‘yes’.

The libertarians apply their anti-statist principles to the growing problem of bears raiding bins, loitering around houses and eating cats, resisting any gesture at public bear management, because such things imply taxes. And their conception of liberty goes further still: they resist even socially-enforced bear management efforts such as rules about bear-proof rubbish bins. The consequences become increasingly, er, grisly as the book goes on.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

In effect, then, they dream of a society that needs no ‘controlling power on will and appetite’, as Burke put it, either within or without. Albeit in slightly more constrained form, this was also the Cameron-era Tory stance: economic liberalism plus an aversion to giving people moral lectures of any kind.

But for Grafton at least, it transpires that the outcome of this maximal freedom is not a flourishing community of self-organising individuals. Instead, it’s one in which neighbour disputes triple over the six years following the libertarians’ arrival, while public infrastructure crumbles and bears grow bolder and more numerous. Anyone who has lived in the increasingly shabby and rancorous UK over recent years may be seeing certain resonances by now.

2020 has raised some pointed questions for us, about the political scope within our individualistic culture for coordinated public response to a force of nature. For us this has taken place on a scale more horrifying even than a plague of bears. But in one respect our dilemma echoes Grafton’s: one ‘side’ calls for ‘personal responsibility’, ignoring the fact that in the absence of strong shared values this will not produce enough cooperation to rein infections in. The other ‘side’ calls for more stringent top-down controls, raising alarms about whether basic freedoms we took for granted only a few months ago will ever find their way back.

If we’ve had enough of state micromanagement, but it also turns out that, in the absence of shared values, ‘personal responsibility’ is just code for ‘I’m alright Jack’, then it may be time to reflect on the piece that’s missing for us as much as it was for Grafton’s libertarians: civic virtue. As the vaccine is rolled out into 2021, we might consider the question Hongolz-Hetling leaves hanging: is it even possible to rebuild a shared moral framework?

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The Government's Covid scaremongering

By Timandra Harkness

If we don’t, we could continue along the road toward the total state we lived under in lockdown. Such a state would follow the Chinese template, assuming maximal responsibility not just for infrastructure, security, healthcare, law and justice but also our wellbeing, moral choices, even our happiness — and therefore claim the intrusive powers necessary to execute those duties.

Inasmuch as this vision is resisted, it tends to be by ‘classical liberals’ or libertarians who are less keen to make positive pronouncements on the nature and obligations of the good life than they are to defend our freedom to pursue it. But this isn’t enough. For Grafton’s church serves as metaphor for what will happen if we claw our way out of the Covid-era’s maximalist state, toward a polity with scope for personal autonomy, only to slump back into the indifferent embrace of an individualism without virtue.

Already declining due to the fading of Christian belief, Grafton’s church was in disrepair before the libertarians arrived. Purchased by a libertarian and subsequently the focus of a years-long dispute over its tax status, the building grows more dilapidated before catching fire. Because the fire service in Grafton is by then so underfunded, the fire cannot be extinguished. What was originally built as architectural expression of the community’s shared religious views declines first to white elephant, then political football, then death-trap. At last it’s left a charred and collapsing hulk, emptied of use as gathering-point for anything larger than nesting birds.

“In light of evolving evidence, WHO advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.”

This is in stark contrast to their previous advice — issued just two months earlier:

“… the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks.”

As Tom Chivers points, out the UK government is also in the process of U-turning:

“…the UK government began by telling people they didn’t work, then ‘advising people to consider‘ using them in enclosed spaces, now mandating them on public transport.”

Late last week, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the Prime Minister calling for mask-wearing to be made compulsory in shops.

So, battle-by-battle, the war for masks-for-all is being won. But it’s not over yet.

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Go to a supermarket in the UK and the majority of people are not wearing masks. Prominent politicians are failing to lead by example — appearing maskless for photo-ops. Donald Trump, despite his own government’s advice, makes a special point of it.

Further reading

Donald Trump: from superhero to zero

By Tanya Gold

A wide range of commentators have declared their support for masks, from Polly Toynbee to Tom Harwood, but there’s no shortage of anti-mask contrarianism. For instance, last week, Toby Young retweeted this pearl of wisdom:

“On average, the gap in weave of (non-medical) cotton masks is around 1/10th mm. The virus is 1/10,000th mm, so roughly like trying to stop mosquitos with hula-hoops…”

A vivid image, but an incomplete one. The coronavirus is spread through what are delicately termed ‘respiratory droplets’ — i.e. bio-weaponised mucus missiles that are big enough to be impeded by an ordinary face mask. That’s especially true when they’re being propelled out of an infected, super-spreading individual who’s sneezing, coughing or otherwise breathing heavily.

Of course, were not talking about complete effectiveness here. Ordinary masks don’t provide the same degree of protection as medical-grade PPE — but then they don’t have to. At a population level, any significant reduction in R (the rate of transmission) can still make a difference — whether it’s in flattening the curve at the most dangerous stage of an epidemic, or crushing it when R drops below 1.

Any extra help is especially important when lockdown restrictions are lifted and there’s a risk of R rising above 1 again (as appears to be happening in America). Mask-wearing is of particular relevance at this stage, because unlike a lot of other social-distancing measures it is compatible with re-opening and re-mobilising the economy.

*

Yet, if that’s all true, why didn’t more governments adopt a masks-for-all policy from the outset — or, at least, from the start of lockdown? Why was the official guidance from the WHO and elsewhere decidedly unenthusiastic? Why is our own government’s U-turn still incomplete (masks required on public transport, but not yet in shops)?

The answers to these questions not only reveal a deep misunderstanding of risk at the highest levels, but also a fatal conceit in our culture of politics — and a childish self-centredness in the soul of modern man.

To begin with, risk. The main excuse given for not recommending masks was the lack of a conclusive evidence base. However, governments didn’t have proof that the lockdown measures that they did take would work either — but they went ahead with them anyway. Putting entire populations under house arrest? No probs! Pitching millions of people out of work? Needs must! Bringing whole industries crashing down? We’ll work it out later! But requiring people to wear a small piece of cloth over their mouths? No, for some reason, that was crossing the line. A measure with almost no downside risk, but a potentially huge upside in terms of saving lives and shortening lockdown was not only not taken, but actively discouraged.

Further reading

Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

It is, of course, important not to react to one systemic risk by taking another systemic risk — for example, the disastrous error of trying to protect hospitals by moving potentially infected patients into care homes. Perhaps that’s why the WHO speculated at length as to what it called the “uncertainties and critical risks” of wearing masks. Among the scenarios floated were “self-contamination”, “diversion of resources from… hand hygiene” and “potential breathing difficulties”. But where was the evidence for any of that?

If there was a systemic downside of wearing masks, wouldn’t we have noticed it by now? After all, habitual mask-wearing in a modern setting is not a novel practice. It’s a long-established feature of 21st century life in a number of East Asian countries where masks are commonly used as protection against infectious disease and air pollution. Indeed, in the course of the current pandemic it quickly became clear that these countries have done a lot better than most of western Europe and North America in containing the spread.

As for the argument that mask-wearing might lead to a “false sense of security” (another WHO assertion), that is a question that could have been settled very quickly by the simple act of observing people. In fact, when researchers did observe they found that, if anything, the effect was in the other direction, i.e. mask-wearers taking more care than non-wearers. That’s not so surprising. The slight discomfort of wearing a mark, the deliberate act of putting one on and the sight of other people wearing them are all reminders of the pickle we’re in.

*

Speaking of the latest research, studies (e.g. here and here) are now coming in to confirm the common sense expectation that mask-wearing does indeed reduce transmission. The missing evidence base is missing no longer.

Still the question remains: why wasn’t common sense alone enough to prompt action on masks much earlier on? Nassim Taleb identifies numerous errors in the reasoning of those in power; not least mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence. With low-cost, low-risk measures like mask-wearing, the obvious thing to do is try them on the basis that they might work — because what have we got to lose?

Taleb has a long record of accusing the credentialed ‘expert class’ (and the decision-makers they serve) of having a poor philosophical understanding of risk — both epistemically and ethically. He has an equally long record of being proven right, including on the pandemic. He and his colleagues, Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam were early to realise the seriousness of the threat posed by Covid-19, early to argue for lockdown measures and early to criticise the initial errors of the UK response.

Further reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

And yet while Taleb is right about the biases of the expert class, this doesn’t in itself explain why our system of government is biased to the expert class. In other words, as well as asking why the official advice was so negative about masks, we also need to ask why the decision-makers didn’t over-rule the experts and go ahead with masks-for-all on the basis of common sense.

It is sometimes said that the problem with common sense is that it isn’t common. But, in this case, it is precisely because it is. Unlike the hierophantic bestowal of official scientific advice, common sense doesn’t provide political cover if things go wrong. Furthermore, it tends to lend itself to the local and experimental. It requires epistemic humility on the part of our leaders — a willingness to admit what we don’t know and to own up to failure.

Unfortunately, our culture of politics, which systematically centralises decision-making — works in the opposite direction. Influence is exerted and reputations are made through the enacting of bold, confident, top-down solutions. Which is why the narrowness of the official expert advice that informs those plans is a feature not a bug of system.

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But we can’t blame it all on our politicians. The resistance to mask-wearing is also cultural.

A lot of this is entirely understandable. To conceal one’s face in public — or cause someone else to do so — is a powerful statement. The controversy surrounding the Niqab and the Burqa is testament to that.

Face masks impede communication. Indeed that is one of the things that makes them effective — given what we know about how loud talking spreads the virus. The easing of lockdown will remobilise the economy, but with masks-for-all how we look and sound to one another will be transformed. Public spaces will fill with people again, but they will be weirdly silent, their smiles (and scowls) hidden away. It will, in its way, be more disconcerting than the deserted streets of deep lockdown — a cityscape of crowds without hubbub, faces without expression.

Further reading

How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

But it wouldn’t be forever. Indeed, as a price for accelerating the eradication of the epidemic — and for preventing an economically ruinous second wave — it is surely worth paying.

So, what’s stopping government from giving the order? Perhaps because the stakes are so high. If you think of most of the other things we’ve been universally required to do, there’s always been a bit of wiggle room. Unless you’re a public figure like Neil Ferguson or Dominic Cummings, the anonymity of modern life allows people to occasionally bend or break the rules with a low chance of detection, let alone punishment. Outside of our immediate circles, we don’t know who’s been washing their hands, keeping their distance or self-isolating should they need to. Masks, though, are different. Someone is either wearing one or they’re not. Both compliance and non-compliance would be immediately visible. Which is why a masks-for-all policy is such a high-profile test of a government’s authority (and, competence, should not enough masks he made available). 

The visibility of non-compliance is also what so sticks in the craw of civil libertarians — especially those who imagine their liberties to be ancient ones. I say “imagine”, but in some ways, they’re absolutely right. Our ancestors were allowed to do all sorts of things that we are not. At one time it was the right of every freeborn Englishman to throw the contents of his chamber pot out the window. He could spit in the street and no one cared. He could bait animals for ‘sport’, build a house without planning permission and, in later eras, drive a car without a licence… or being sober. Even in my own lifetime, one could still legally drive without a seatbelt, smoke on public transport or, in certain circumstances, beat a child with a weapon.

The history of civilisation is the history of regulation — the accumulation of rules that we are all expected to abide by for the common good. For all these impositions, we are not only safer, but fundamentally freer and happier too. Not that we admit it, of course. We seem to think that our comparatively carefree world is the result of us being able to do as we please, when in fact the opposite is true.

Mandatory mask-wearing would be a further catch-all imposition. Indeed, that may be the most effective thing about it  — the fact that it encompasses everyone, including super-spreaders. Personally, I’d be happy if masking-up while sick with a cold or the flu became a permanent norm, but the priority right now is killing off Covid without killing the economy. For most of us, wearing a mask would be a temporary inconvenience for a lasting victory.

Further reading

Why we should be worried about coronavirus

By Peter Franklin

As anger over a deeply unpopular extradition bill with mainland China erupted into the most serious violence Hong Kong had seen in years, one protester, Hailey Kok, found herself amid clashes between police armed with rubber bullets and beanbag rounds outside the territory’s parliament building.

“My parents came from China, they took a big risk to bring me to Hong Kong and escape the fear,” she told me. “And now what’s happened? Where is the freedom to speak out?”

Five years after the 2014 Umbrella Movement brought parts of the city to a standstill, anger has returned with a vengeance. Back then, it was students who were demonstrating for the right to elect Hong Kong’s leader. This time, it wasn’t just the young teeming the streets.

The protests, which have now been going on for a fortnight, have electrified the city and saw two million marchers all clad in black flood the canyon-like streets of Hong Kong Island on 16 June. That’s almost a third of the population. So overwhelming were the numbers, they killed the bill stone dead. Carrie Lam, the city governor whose determination to ram through the extradition agreement was the catalyst for the protest, has been left with her career hanging by a thread.

Suggested reading

Is Xi losing his grip on Taiwan?

By Bill Hayton

The awesome scale of the march did force an apology from Lam, but the marches have now moved beyond the bill to become a wider expression of malaise about life in one of the world’s wealthiest – but also most unequal, expensive and crowded – cities.

The past five years have seen a steady worsening of many of Hong Kong’s deepest-rooted problems – despite an expanding economy, astronomical cash reserves and one of the world’s biggest budget surpluses.

Inequality is at its highest in 45 years. As Hong Kong’s top tycoons pocket (tax-free) billions in dividends, elderly women are dragging stacks of cardboard through the streets to sell for HK50 cents (5p) per kilo. The housing crisis, too, is intensifying. More and more people are being forced into squalid, illegally subdivided flats. With one in five people below the poverty line, many are reduced to living in notorious ‘cage’ homes, enclosed by wire mesh with only room for a single bed.

There has been precious little political will to confront any of this; Asia’s financial capital is at pains not to hurt its reputation as the world’s freest economy. And it has all fuelled the growing impression of Hong Kong as a once futuristic city now stuck in the past.

Suggested reading

China: not just an economic superpower

By Peter Franklin

Its extraordinary post-war boom is now but a memory. Year after year, in e-commerce and the digital economy, it falls further behind the Mainland, which boasts the rise of tech giants and financial markets in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It has also been left trailing by Singapore in areas such as fintech.

Hong Kong built its glittering wealth on its unique status as a city which enjoys the rule of law and freedom of speech on the doorstep of the world’s second largest economy – which allows neither. Yet the city’s future expansion is focused on integration with the Mainland, and in particular the fast-growing province of Guangdong which borders Hong Kong. How the tension between integration and independence is resolved will be pivotal.

Beijing, in concert with the Hong Kong government and leader it effectively appointed in 2017, has been cracking down in the years since the Umbrella Movement, as it steps up attempts to integrate ahead of 2047, when the “one country, two systems” agreement expires.

Leaders from 2014 have been jailed, one foreign journalist expelled, pro-democracy lawmakers disqualified and a party advocating independence banned. But combined with the chipping away at the agreement that was designed to guarantee the city’s autonomy for 50 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the extradition bill proved a step too far.

As Tom Lai, a 23-year-old protester told me, “The government is no longer a Hong Kong government, it is a China government. They are not thinking about Hong Kong people.”

Suggested reading

Singapore shows there’s more than one way of doing capitalism

By Peter Franklin

This partly explains why, for a society that remains conservative in many aspects, the marches of the past two Sundays have been far more diverse than their 2014 predecessors. The young and the old, students, families, office workers and manual workers, those living in homes they own and those in public housing – this affects them all.

Their activism has been about defending something Hongkongers already have: the supremacy of the common law system, which has underpinned the city’s prosperity and freedom for decades and which stood as a beacon for millions of refugees who fled to the city from the chaos of Mao’s China. That’s why so many hundreds of office workers walking home on the network of high-level walkways spontaneously chanted their support to demonstrators honking car horns on the streets below.

It’s unclear, though, where the movement on the streets of Hong Kong goes from here. Organisers have insisted the marches will continue until Lam steps down, but she would only be replaced by another Beijing apparatchik. Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and author of City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong, said all eyes were on the administration of President Xi Jinping, which has repeatedly backed the bill, on how it responds to the current volatile situation.

“There is a feeling that ultimately Beijing decides what happens,” he said. The central government could either react aggressively as it did after 2014, or seek to build bridges as happened after mass protests in 2003 against a proposed national security law.

There is, he adds, “no sign Xi Jinping will back down over exerting control within China’s borders, or even beyond”.

Suggested reading

China's rise has been stunning - and we shouldn't be afraid of it

By Michael Burleigh

But nor is there any sign that the new generation of protesters is willing to stand down. “It’s the youngest activists, the younger generation who are the future of Hong Kong in the coming decades, who have shown themselves to be the angriest and the most radical,” Dapiran said.

“They have a huge appetite for change, and no trust in Beijing.”

With the Communisty party fixating on national sovereignty, unity and control and a new cohort of Hongkongers resisting, who knows how far either side will go. As Lai told me last week: “We will still fight. This is Hong Kong, this is my home. We must protect it.”

“Foreigners often view American attitudes to gun ownership with incredulity. They just don’t understand the passion with which the right to bear arms is defended. However, I think that they will understand when their own governments try to stop them from driving.

“Charlton Heston once declared that the government would only take his gun from his ‘cold dead hands’. In the next few decades, there will be those who clutch the steering wheel with equal determination…”

Suggested reading

We're going to ban human-operated cars. Yes, all of them.

By Peter Franklin

As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait long for ‘a right to drive’ movement to get off the ground.

Alex Roy is a rally driver, writer and activist. I’ve no reason to think he read my article, but at the time he too was thinking about the implications of driverless technology, albeit with rather more concern. In fact, as M. R. O’Connor tells us in the New Yorker, Roy has emerged as the leader of the human resistance:

“Roy started the Human Driving Association in early 2018, after reading a manifesto written by Robin Chase, the entrepreneur and former C.E.O. of Zipcar. In the manifesto, ‘Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities,’ Chase outlines a now familiar vision for autonomous driving, in which dense urban areas are filled with autonomous vehicles that operate in fleets, so as to reduce congestion and emissions… In ninety frenzied minutes, [Roy] wrote his own manifesto, which he published as an article for The Drive, an online car magazine. It begins with a picture of a steering wheel and the words ‘From my cold, dead hands,’ and culminates by calling for a constitutional amendment creating a right to drive.”

The Human Driving Association already has 10,000 members, even though there’s no immediate threat to the ‘right to drive’. Just how big could the movement get if the companies investing in driverless technology succeed in putting fully automated vehicles (AVs) on the road?

Every year, more than a million people die in traffic accidents around the world. We’ve become habituated to the slaughter. But would we be as tolerant if computerised driving systems were responsible? I doubt we’d allow robots (because that’s what driverless cars are) to kill a million people every year, or a hundred thousand for that matter. Even a death toll of 10,000 could generate hundreds of ruinous law suits. If AVs are ten or a hundred times safer than human drivers, that won’t be enough; to go mainstream they will need to be thousands of times safer.

Suggested reading

What cost convenience?

By Peter Franklin

However, if that standard is ever achieved then it will place the human right to drive under immense pressure. Every death or injury caused by human error would be seen as a completely avoidable tragedy.

Of course, the same is often said about gun deaths – which, in America, are mostly the result of accidents, suicide or criminal activity. Yet gun ownership remains deeply entrenched. Might we see the same libertarian impulse protect the right to drive?

The parallels are inexact. Firstly, there’s no constitutional amendment upholding such a right, let alone one as old as the Second Amendment (hence the campaign). Secondly, the compulsory application of AV technology would not necessarily ban car ownership. Though driverless cars may well be most conveniently accessed as a driverless taxi service, it’s conceivable that many people will choose to own one (or several) of their own, even if they aren’t allowed to drive it themselves.

Thirdly, I doubt that the prohibition on human driving will be single event. Rather, it’s more likely to be phased in gradually, with computer control of enabled vehicles being mandated in certain locations (like city centres and school vicinities) or in certain circumstances (above a given speed, or in hazardous driving conditions).

There won’t be a particular date on which human drivers are dragged kicking and screaming from the steering wheel. Rather, expect a process of ‘automation creep’ in which the driving seat gradually becomes a passenger seat. In fact, with the introduction of partially automated features like cruise control and automatic parking, the process is already underway.

O’Connor conveys Roy’s dystopian view of where this is all heading:

“In place of the driverless utopia that technologists often picture… consider another possibility: a congested urban hellscape in which autonomous vehicles are subsidized by companies that pump them full of advertising; in exchange for free rides, companies might require you to pass by particular stores or watch commercial messages displayed on the vehicles’ windows… In such a world, Roy said, ‘The joy of the ride is taken away.’”

That’s not an implausible scenario. However slow and subtle the shift, going driverless does mean individuals surrendering direct control over their mobility on a massive scale. We need to think through the implications of that for a free society.

In theory, the AV fleet operators would probably be as keen to cater to our whims as taxi firms already are. Nevertheless, AV tech (especially if it is networked) implies a road transport system where either the state or some powerful private interest would be in ultimate control.

Suggested reading

Who benefits from the Uberised economy?

By Peter Franklin

But for all the agency that the car has given to so many, we shouldn’t forget how much it’s taken away from others. The streetscape was once a thoroughfare for everyone, the car turned it into a killing ground – a place we teach our children to be afraid of. Ending that terror could itself be seen as an act of liberation.

Expect a long and bitter fight between incompatible freedoms.

These freedoms are fundamental to liberty, and a society that imposes restrictions on them will inevitably be less free. But as Britain and other Western nations experience deepening problems of societal fragmentation and atomisation, a serious assessment of the role of the State in facilitating integration and social harmony is crucial. In particular, consideration of the effects of the policy of State-sponsored multiculturalism is overdue.

Conventional wisdom has it, of course, that multiculturalism is an inherent good: progressive, inclusive, enlightened, the essence of equality. Sceptics are dismissed as reactionary nativists.

And yet a philosophy designed to break down barriers and bring people together has in fact achieved the very opposite. Modern Britain is dotted with monocultural ghettos whose inhabitants often live an utterly parallel existence to their compatriots dwelling in some cases just a few streets away.

Further reading

The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Is it perhaps because the active promotion of separation and difference – for that, ultimately, is what State-sponsored multiculturalism amounts to – drives wedges between people and is inimical to integration? Might it be that we took a wrong turn when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot?

Cultural solidarity is hard-wired into the human psyche. People naturally gravitate towards those with whom they feel a sense of cultural understanding and attachment, and the societies most at ease with themselves are those in which deep and enduring common bonds exist, developed organically over generations through shared customs, language, institutions, religion and social mores. Indeed, these cultural ties, through which reciprocity and mutual obligation to fellow citizens are best nurtured and sustained, were instrumental in developing and shaping the nation state – still the best model of government ever created.

The promotion of multiculturalism has the effect of unpicking this. It starts from the point that nothing that went before has any greater relevance to what exists now, that no culture or tradition should be elevated above others, and that the State should be if not an uninterested then certainly a disinterested party in the cultural life of the nation. In doing so, it dismisses an entire history, and violates the sense of belonging felt by those whose lives, as well as those of their ancestors, were so profoundly shaped by that history.

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

That the establishment’s adoption of multiculturalism as public policy coincided roughly with the emergence of rapacious globalisation helped to create a perfect storm in which communities experienced significant upheaval and millions became disorientated and resentful.

The political elites like to kid us about all this, of course. So they constantly preach the gospel of multiculturalism while ignoring its deleterious effects. Thus, we are invited to take pride in the fact that ‘Britain is a diverse, multicultural society.’ Well, parts of it certainly are. But much of it isn’t.

You could travel to Cornwall or Norfolk or the Scottish Highlands and be largely untouched by multiculturalism. What do the inhabitants of these areas feel when they hear politicians and commentators describe their homeland in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with them? It is another example of the elites looking out from their vantage points in the cosmopolitan cities and concluding that the entire country looks the same.

Further reading

Labour’s conspiracy of silence on immigration

By Paul Embery

These champions of multiculturalism will fiercely upbraid those who argue against their creed. There are the usual insinuations that opponents must be motivated by racism – a logical fallacy which conflates culture and race, and ignores the obvious fact that one can be a committed multiracialist without embracing multiculturalism.

In their minds, there is something ignoble and chauvinistic about striving to develop common cultural bonds among the population. But are nations and communities that defend a monoculture any less content than those which don’t? Japan, for example, is no less prosperous or happy for its deep cultural homogeneity.

Should the Amish be forced to accept a dose of diversity? Would a Western liberal dream of telling a Native American or Indigenous Australian that their bitterness over cultural erosion was unfounded and ‘nativist’? Proponents of multiculturalism do not seem to see the hypocrisy in respecting ancient cultures and civilisations elsewhere while neglecting and derecognising our own.

The liberal and cultural elites’ experience of multiculturalism is, of course, different to that of most people. If you’re a well-heeled professional living in a trendy part of town, you will see the best of it. But for those residing in the grittier parts of the country, for whom place and belonging mean so much more, it can mean loneliness and isolation.

Further reading

Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home

By Giles Fraser

So what should be the approach? Outlaw the speaking of foreign languages? Ban mosques? Shut down Italian restaurants? Of course not. Only the truly despotic would ever consider such unconscionable assaults on personal freedom. However, if we are to promote real integration and overcome the divisions that bedevil our society, we must start by ensuring that every lever of the State is used to cultivate the deepest, unforced cultural consensus among our disparate communities.

This would mean, as a simple example, promoting only the common language. It is astonishing that well-meaning people ever thought it was wise for public bodies to translate official documents into dozens of foreign languages. It removes the incentive for newcomers to learn the native tongue, which in turn impacts their ability to find work, to truly integrate, to understand and feel part of the country they now call home.

It means drawing on our cultural history in every area of life and unapologetically setting it above all others, promoting it proudly, inviting every citizen, regardless of where they came from, to share in it – yet all the while unremittingly defending their individual liberty to make their own choices.

Societies are fracturing around us. Establishment politics is changing before our eyes. The old order is collapsing. Across the West, the liberal and technocratic elites are on the defensive as never before. The reason can be summed up in six words: we forgot the politics of belonging.

If you’re an avid watcher of French crime drama Spiral, you’ll know that detective Laure Berthaud had an unexpected pregnancy and found that, at 15 weeks, she wasn’t permitted under French law to have an abortion. Before deciding to go ahead with the pregnancy, she considered travelling to another country in Europe for a termination, because the rules are different in each place.

That’s part of the problem, when it comes to trying to establish what people really think about abortion. The variance in term limits from country to country[1.  It’s important to remember there is a rich/poor divide here, and the developing world comes off worst. The World Health Organisation estimate that 25 million unsafe abortions are carried out each year, 97% of which are in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.] means that is difficult to decide what is meant when the legality of abortion is discussed. It effectively means different things in different places – and without a level playing field it’s impossible to compare levels of public support. The debate is further complicated by people voting with their feet: expressing their disapproval of a strict legislative regime by travelling elsewhere.

At a federal level, the Roe vs Wade ruling – 45 years ago this week – was intended to put an end to the debate by making abortion legal throughout the United States.

It didn’t work. Availability of abortion in the US – along with requirements for counselling and ultrasound, and access to public funding – varies from state to state, creating at national level the situation Europeans find themselves in across the continent.

And while the American public is marginally more supportive than not of abortion’s legality, with 57 % in favour, 40 % still think it should be illegal. Data gathered by Pew Research Center shows that many religious groups still feel strongly that it should be mostly illegal. The more evangelical groups, many of whose members voted Trump into office, are more likely to say that abortion should not be legally available.

But members of the Episcopal Church and United Church of Christ would support it, as would 83 % of American Jews, according to the Religious Landscape study of 2014. There may be official doctrines held by religious groups, but that doesn’t mean all believers will subscribe to them. And this disparity was writ large when it came to the 2016 Presidential election: a vacancy on the Supreme Court focused much of the electoral campaigns onto the issue, and it became a deal-breaker for many people.

But what about society? One of the most noticeable aspects of the period which gave rise to neoliberalism was a social revolution. Rapid social change culminated in dramatic changes in the law affecting homosexuals, ethnic minorities and women. Individual liberties were front and centre.

The dip in support for capitalism today has, as in the 1970s, similarly been explained in economic terms – a dissatisfaction with rising inequality and with the after effects of the global financial crisis. If capitalism is to regain its popularity, it must, however, re-find its social roots.

Social and economic freedom go hand in hand

In the words of Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan:[1. The Culture of Capitalism and the crisis of Critique, Anthropological Quarterly, 2012]

“The hallmark of the [social] revolution of the 1960s was the defence of individual liberty against the constraints of mass conformist society. Resistance to the draft; the defence of free speech; the right to divorce, abortion, contraceptives, and other sexual freedoms all references the desire to make choices for oneself, through one’s own reason and according to one’s own conscience.”

A growing army of students and academics – particularly those involved in the 1960s counter-culture movement – employed the writings of Durkheim and Freud to highlight the potential antagonism between the individual and society. While individuals were fighting for the freedom to be themselves, the political economy of the day was dominated by a heavy-handed state. As a result, anti-authority feelings grew.

This fight for social freedoms paved the way for greater economic freedom. Within little more than a decade, the state interventionism of the 1960s was overhauled. Keynes was out and Milton Friedman was in.

In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman argued that political and economic freedom are inextricably linked; that:

“a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom”.

He understood that society – much like the playground – was not always harmonious and as such there was the risk of conflict between society and the individual. Friedman argued that the market could ease the resultant tension, allowing us to engage – through the market – anonymously, without having to agree with one another. The result was that we could all live side-by-side and meet our daily needs in a way that avoided the enforced conformity that communism would involve. In his own words:

“…a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely [that]… it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity…Each man can vote, as it were, for the colour of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what colour the majority wants and then, if he is in a minority, submit…By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power.”

Winning back support for capitalism means going beyond economics 

In the current climate, dry economic arguments in support of capitalism will persuade some of the merits of free markets, but they will not convince the majority. For many, their lived experience – stagnating wages, inequality, insecure employment – tells a different story. Today’s anti-capitalist feeling is set against a background reminiscent of the 1930s, when, on the face of it, capitalism seems not to have delivered.

Winning back support for capitalism therefore requires its advocates to go beyond economic arguments – to engage at a human level with the tension between the individual and society. That could not be more fitting for the age of Trump and Brexit, a time which has revealed deep social cleavages and disagreements.

The weakness of the hard Left is as much social as it is economic. The rise of neoliberalism, and the long decline of socialism from the 1970s onwards, was not merely as a result of ‘screwing up’ the economy, but a consequence of treating the ‘working class’ as a homogenous whole. In obsessing over class conflict, they ignored all other tensions. They were, in short, happy to sacrifice individual freedom in the name of doing what the socialist state – not the people – thought was best for the majority. The hard Left saw no inherent differences between individuals (other than on the basis of income), they treated everyone as if they were carbon copies, happy to be manipulated so long as the state could in return guarantee food, shelter and clothing.

Individual difference is, if anything, even more celebrated now. People do not want to be pawns in some five-year plan. To quote Hickel and Khan, neoliberals “made the moral case that beneath all acts of regulation lurks hubris and elitism – the desire of technocrats to manipulate the masses”. People want to be free to take charge of their own lives – to, quite simply, do as they please and to be themselves. Individual freedom: that is the true value of free markets – and it’s the argument capitalists need to make.