Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”

The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.

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By Darran Anderson

It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.

In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.

Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom. 

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While dystopian novels such as The Iron Heel and The Sleeper Awakes pre-date We, as do the utopian texts they were upturning, so many dystopian tropes, from Logan’s Run to the Hunger Games, would first emerge here in then-innovative forms. Zamyatin noticed early on the Bolshevik obsession with “modernising” everything, in appearance, and satirised it throughout We. Russian institutions had their formerly archaic titles and heraldry discarded, to be replaced by acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteau (Gosplan, NKVD, Comintern, GULAG etc), which suggested dynamism. There was an ominous obsession too with productivity, alluded to in We with its 24-hour clock, “inspiring” 1984’s opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Indeed, many aspects of We made it into 1984, albeit through the grimy prism of post-Blitz London. Surveillance is everywhere, though Zamyatin’s comes from glass buildings and listening devices rather than telescreens. While Orwell did draw attention to the novel in an essay for The Tribune, it’s telling that he covered his tracks by damning it with faint praise, labelling the novel as: “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age” and having the brass balls to imply that Brave New World plagiarised the book. Where We and 1984 differ is in mood and format. We has a strange avant-garde style that is reminiscent of the not-yet-annihilated Russian Futurist world of Vertov, Tatlin and co, whereas Orwell is more ashtrays and spam. One soars into oblivion, and one sinks.

All great dystopias of the future, the truism goes, are really about the now. Reversing 1948 to 1984, Orwell simply followed the threads of duplicity in contemporary rhetoric and the press, the horrors of ends justify the means in politics, the grotesque moral acrobatics required by any corruptible yet infallible orthodoxy. These things were all too evident after Stalin’s purges. How did Zamyatin know what would come to pass before it happened? Well, for one thing, he was not the first. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was scathing in his exchanges with Karl Marx  — “the instinct of liberty is lacking in him; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian” — and correctly foreboding as to where his gospel would lead. Zamyatin had the extra dimension of being an engineer and it might be surmised, in the tenor of our times, that he wrote of how technology corrupts us. But instead he showed how we corrupt technology and wield it against each other. He knew physics for sure, but he knew human nature even more. 

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By Dorian Lynskey

The portents are dark in We. In Soviet terms, “the war between town and country” in the Two Hundred Years War prophecises the inferno of collectivisation and the Holodomor. The unease we might feel today reading We, however, is one of creeping recognition. He writes of the cult of productivity of Taylorism and how “he didn’t think of extending his method to the whole of life, to every step, to the entire day”, which predicts the unending hustle of today, wherein everything from sexuality to trauma is monetised and branded. In Zamyatin’s characters’ speech, we might see a particular contemporary condition; they continually preface what they are saying with ritualistic explanations and the performance of self-denunciation, which we see today in identitarian catechisms and, for example, land acknowledgements that do nothing to address injustice or land theft. Familiar mantras, internal censors, and in-group signalling is evident throughout the dialogue of We, despite being written a century ago.

We shows us that contemporary phenomena like cry-bullying, purity spirals and safe spaces are not uniquely contemporary, partly because they are simply secularised symptoms of faith. As JS Carr has noted, “The ideal of absolute mathematical order has become so ingrained in the mind of the protagonist… that he now feels actual oppression from that which stands in contrast to the One State’s teachings.” It might offer some comfort to know that the craven have always been with us. Zamyatin rightly points out that the victory of dogma over free expression results in “the entropy of thought”, and he rails against the overt politicisation of literature, which always ends in convention, if not outright servitude. 

It takes love, or rather desire, to fuck up this wretched fabrication of utopia. In a world where everything is problematic and everyone, bar the administrators, is paralysed, the impulse to lust, to have, to possess becomes not just disruptive but revolutionary. Here we find another borrowing by Orwell. In both books, love is transgression and must be defiled and betrayed as it is a threat to the system. In the case of We: “Every number has the right to any other number as a sexual product”, and satisfaction is ticketed and approved by the state. It’s hard to read of this systemisation of sex without thinking of how it’s been commodified in our broken time by dating apps and deluges of porn, resulting not in mass libertinage, but younger generations having less sex than their predecessors.

One notable difference between We and 1984 comes with the fact that, in Orwell’s vision, tyranny is imposed whereas in Zamyatin’s vision it comes as a kind of relief. In this, the latter was more accurate. Zamyatin returns to the Matrix-like choice of Eden: “To live without illusion is to live without comfort, not all cut out for it, few can bear it, but great are those who can.” A wise judge of character, Zamyatin recognised that society was not cynical but infantilised, and most of us are not dissidents-in-waiting but rather responsibility dodgers. When he writes of “unfreedom” being “happiness”, Zamyatin is foreshadowing Orwell, but he is always looking back too, to the supposed Fall of Man from Paradise. His characters touch on this, damning Satan as the “bringer of dissonance, the teacher of doubt”, while his state develops an operation to surgically extract the imagination when it is scarcely necessary. He knows resistance is always a minority position, and yet everything depends on it. 

What of those who ruled and benefited from this warped state of affairs? The abiding feeling by the end of We is fear and neurosis. We know enough about totalitarian history that any attempt to perfect human beings — the Übermensch or the Stakhanovite Homo Sovieticus — ends with inhuman monsters. Yet, the urge to perfect nevertheless continues, from our execrable managerial revolution, the misuse of AI, and the puritan deconstruction of all that’s historically and culturally flawed. Fear is rife in We and it trickles down from above.

Zamyatin would eventually escape the Soviet Union into exile, with the help of Maxim Gorky, and by sending a suicidally confrontational letter to Stalin, who, ever the capricious tyrant, let him go. He would find no peace in Paris, among the fallen aristocratic White émigré he despised. He remained a true rebel and therefore an exile even among the exiled. His imperfection was his making and undoing. 

“To err is human” is not an excuse — it’s a foundation stone. Zamyatin, constructor of ships, knew that humans could not and should not be constructed: “Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.” Disturbance keeps us real and honest, while certainty is deadening and antithetical to the human psyche. 

Zamyatin pushes beyond the claustrophobia of dogma into panoramas, a writer who sees that our messiness, clamour, indignities and imperfections are the qualities that save us from ourselves as much as ethics and integrity. In a paradoxical sense, Zamyatin was that most despised and persecuted of Soviet figures, the wrecker, and he absolutely excelled in it. Consider all ideologies as echo-chambers or gated communities, where most of the work goes into maintaining the wall between belief and the encroaching reality outside. In We, the authorities admit “with that Wall we isolated the mechanical, perfect world from the irrational shapeless world of trees, birds, animals”. And there’s Zamyatin, 100 years later, prising open gaps in those walls, chipping away to let the chaos of truth in, like everything depends on it because everything does.

But Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this.

The most famous Notting Hill story is the one by Richard Curtis, which turns 25 today. Curtis is an affable man who can’t look at the world without trying to turn it into something it isn’t: an entirely benevolent place. He has lived in Notting Hill, and he made it an object, like a man writing a love letter to his sofa. His Notting Hill is a retelling of Cinderella with William Thacker (Hugh Grant) as the maidservant and Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) as the prince — now a film star; what’s the difference? They are both thwarted artists (he can’t sell books; her films are terrible) and neither seems to know if they are humble or grandiose or if they want to live in fiction or reality.

Notting Hill feels the same way —more wax-work garden than place — and is the ideal setting for this self-pitying, consumer capitalist love affair, which reaches a climax when Anna gives Thacker a Chagall. Here, on a Saturday morning, the market is swagged for its six million annual visitors. It is a crush, which happens when you hollow out London, put all the wisteria in one place, and write a vapid, world-famous fairy tale about it.

I am posing as a vapid fan on a Notting Hill film tour. Because my fellow fans are foreign tourists — Gucci-heavy Italians, exhausted Israelis, and an ethics professor from Michigan — their first question to the young guide is: do you live here? I repress a snort as she says that she lives in the western suburbs of London, because I knew that.

The idea that Notting Hill is an authentic London is powerful: because cinema says so, we believe that ordinary children walk these streets, though they don’t. The Phoenix Cinema, which appeared in Notting Hill is now an art gallery filled with Victoriana: that is, it has stopped screening a fake London, and has become the set of one instead. This is a film-maker’s ideal: a brightened Victorian slum filled with happy Victorian children, a Dickensian stage without Dickensian ideas. It’s true that Portobello Road — named for a battle in Panama — was once like this. Notting Hill’s gentrification is tidal: the rich come in, leave, and return, and the poor take up whatever space is left to serve them. But we are at the top of the curve: a terraced house on Chepstow Villas is £15 million now, and the only working-class people who own houses in Notting Hill have lived here since the Sixties.

I meet a greengrocer with a flat in Blenheim Crescent. Her father was in Notting Hill, she says, in a yellow shirt, and when she misses him, she watches it. Notting Hill was more fun in the Sixties, she adds, when everyone was on LSD, and I don’t doubt it: actresses manned stalls when they were resting. The market traders are fearful that the market will be shrunk, to make it more like Soho. The market and the carnival are always under threat, being remnants of working-class culture but the traders have bought into the dream world too. One tells me: “It [the market] creeps under your skin, and you come to love this untidy little creature, it becomes part of you.” He sounds like Bert in Mary Poppins, or Richard Curtis himself, if he had given a working-class Londoner a leading role in Notting Hill, which of course he didn’t. It famously had no black characters, though this was a Caribbean district, and you can see the remnants to the north: Jay Dees Catering and Caribbean Take-Away and People’s Sound. Curtis held a looking glass up and saw only himself.

Probably unconsciously, our guide tells us a joke. She pauses by Banksy’s “Made You Look” (2006, it’s the title in scrabble tiles) on the wall of an ugly modernist house. She says the owner interrupted the graffiti artist and was told that if he went back to sleep, he would wake up to a more valuable house. This is Banksy the anti-war anti-Capitalist as Rumpelstiltskin, weaving straw into gold for the already rich. George Orwell’s house is opposite, and I wonder what he would say to Banksy’s intervention. But capitalist activism is popular here: Conscience Kitchen, for instance, on All Saints’ Road.

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Thacker’s Travel Bookshop was inspired by the Notting Hill Bookshop in Blenheim Crescent. Tourists mass round it, taking photographs of themselves. “Notting Hill feels like a film set,” a local woman tells me, “because so many people are taking photographs all the time.” “It’s like a cult,” says another. The shop is packed but almost no one is buying a book. Perhaps they don’t need one since, being in fiction. Instead, they buy canvas bags that say Notting Hill to prove they came here and write love letters, which are posted on the cork board: “Dear reader it was like a dream to enter the store after watching the movie.” We visit the blue door of Thacker’s home. It isn’t the real door: that was auctioned for charity.

You can’t buy a home here, but you can buy an idea. Notting Hill, one tells me, “is huge in China”. Biscuiteers “Biscuit Boutique and Icing Café” has an entire biscuit London in the window, because the more uninhabitable London becomes for the average person the more it is finessed into an aesthetic or, here, biscuit. A ginger-bread resident is £7.95, and you can buy a biscuit pencil to write a biscuit novel.

At the end of Portobello Road is the pub where the murder in Martin Amis’s London Fields was planned: in the novel, the Black Cross; in life, the Golden Cross. It is now, inevitably, a sushi bar, but it is still sticky with alcoholism, which is oblivious to newer dream worlds, having one of its own already, and it is my favourite place on Portobello Road.

“Being a resident from a working-class background we say Ladbroke Grove,” a man tells me, pointedly. (Like all dream worlds, the boundaries of Notting Hill are vague and sinuous). He says calling it Notting Hill, “does bother me. Because of everything that comes with Notting Hill. The working class will be moved out, and the history will be rewritten in a heartbeat. I don’t think tourists truly grasp that.”

The charmed rich tend to destroy what they think they love: they can’t help it. John from Portobello Camera under the Westway says: “So-called people,” — he means the charmed rich — “don’t want nothing to do with the carnival. The very thing they love about the area they don’t want to participate in. They board up their property, lock it down, and fly away. They want to pick their social menu.”

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I head north to the Grenfell Tower and the memorial to the 72 dead. It isn’t much. The memorial is a board by a school, shockingly close to the ruin itself, and a mirror to the corkboard in the Notting Hill Bookshop. “Five years, no justice,” it says. [It’s seven years now]. “We will never forget all these lives lost for what? £££! Your lives ALL matter no matter what age, colour, or creed. JUSTICE FOR GRENFELL.” “Fuck the Tories”. “Poor quality housing kills too”. “You all deserved so much better”. “Missing you is a never—ending sorrow”.

Notting Hill is where the architects of Austerity lived: it is also the site of its calamity. “Could Grenfell have happened elsewhere?” a man asks me. He answers his own question. “In other parts of Kensington and Chelsea, definitely not.” This part of Notting Hill ripples with fury: there are makeshift memorials in scrubby gardens, and on walls. I find a list of 18 children who died in the fire, one still born. Even so — or, rather, for this reason — dream Notting Hill is winning, being pretty, better funded, and a movie star.

Plato observes that poets love their poems like fathers love their children. That’s why writers hate to cut their own work — to “murder their babies”, as they must learn to do if they hope to be any good. But they hate it more when others murder their babies, and are even ready to die for the ones they’ve raised and sent out into the world.

D-503 — the protagonist of We, the dystopian sci-fi novel of totalitarianism published in 1921, for which the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin was lucky to be exiled rather than shot — calls the diary he has just begun “a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I and, at the same time, not I.”

And when the KGB confiscated the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, Grossman wrote to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, asking: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

A famous passage from the Talmud helps to explain why writers feel this way — and why we should, too: “Adam was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he preserved the entire world.”

Had the first human being died alone, neither Eve nor any of her descendants would have existed. The destruction of a soul is the annihilation of all of its potential offspring, physical and spiritual, until the end of time. But a human soul is an entire world in another way. Perception, thought and feeling open the soul to very many things beyond itself — in principle, to all things — whose impressions it absorbs and assembles into a more or less meaningful whole. Apart from this humanising work, the notion of a universe, a single, all-encompassing whole, might never have occurred to anyone. But this inner world can also be destroyed, corrupted by forgetfulness and publicly erased.

For writers, this Biblical passage rings true: “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” God is said to have fashioned the waters of primordial chaos into a universe by divine speech. One need not be a believer to learn from this story. Human beings are obliged to sort social and psychological chaos by way of logos — reason, speech, order, proportion — in the first instance through law, ritual and the cultural memory of myth. Communities of shared meaning and purpose are woven of language, without which individual experiences would otherwise be poor possessions held in dumb isolation by lonely hominids.

Like the poets and chroniclers of remote antiquity, novelists and dramatists speak to the enduring questions of human life: who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They fabricate buzzing microcosms peopled by characters that live and breathe on contact with other minds and fertile imaginations. Censors don’t just cut out writers’ tongues and stop up readers’ ears, they obliterate worlds.

But the public response to the extensive and aggressive censorship of our time has been depressingly muted. In part, this reflects a widespread loss of what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feeling for language and the meaning of words. Most people don’t read books, let alone good ones. They produce and consume short, easily digestible “texts” through electronic media, but hard-won habits of literacy rust in disuse.

Few people know the thrill of repeatedly casting into the depths of a difficult piece of writing, feeling a tug on the line and hauling up a catch of meaning. That experience was more common when deep and challenging books were recited, studied and memorised as sources of wisdom. “Turn it and turn it,” an ancient commentator said of the Bible, “for everything is in it.” Generations of our forebears thought the same of Homer and Dante, Aristotle and Confucius. Who reads like that anymore?

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The metallic clang of abstractions now drowns out the living word of particular human minds. Like all bureaucratic and ideological jargon, the governing language of our time is flat, colourless and crude. It is no longer that of poets, prophets and statesmen, but of what Nietzsche called “the coldest of all cold monsters” — the increasingly unified, propaganda-generating, information-gathering-and-monitoring conglomeration of public and private entities that is the post-modern State.

The contemporary sclerosis of language has profound psychological and political consequences. One of Samuel Beckett’s characters wistfully contemplates the dance and hum of bees as they enter and exit their sun-drenched hives, exhibiting a kind of connectedness from which he is excluded by his lonely consciousness. That consciousness of exile is both quintessentially modern and distinctively human. It envies the bees, but cannot find satisfaction in any socially-ordered aggregation of identical units. It yearns for the inner connection between individuals that distinguishes a community from a characterless crowd. But censorship and the decay of language serve only to strengthen the hive-mind and the crowd.

The corruptions of language, politics and society we are now witnessing were foretold in some great dystopian novels of the 20th century. But the English and American authors of those novels had the evidence of history before them, in the form of ideological tyranny: Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism and Maoism. And they’d learned from the Bard that what’s past is prologue.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one of the characters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remarks. In the regime of Oceania, which is ruled by a technocratic elite “shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”, books are everywhere hunted down and destroyed. The State language is crudely binary (like one university’s definition of a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men”), purged of nuance and full of “telescoped words and phrases”, of which its very name, Newspeak, is exemplary. A large department meticulously destroys and reproduces newspapers on a daily basis, rewriting the past to conform with the demands of the present. (Orwell couldn’t have guessed how easy this would be in the digital age.)

The vocabulary of Newspeak is constantly shrinking, because its “whole aim … is to narrow the range of thought”. The State hopes that restricting speech to “short, clipped words which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind” will ultimately eliminate “thoughtcrime” — or independent thought — if only because “there will be no words in which to express it”.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, elite technicians govern a stratified society composed of classes of virtually identical human beings grown in scientific hatcheries. While a global State founded on eugenics hasn’t yet materialised, much that Huxley imagines has already come to pass. The society he foresees is debased in familiar ways. It is characterised by a cult of youth; an economy driven by entertainment and the pleasures of virtual reality; the near-universal, habitual use of psychoactive drugs, contraceptives and aphrodisiacs; overt public sexuality; general promiscuity; and a swarming media that makes a great public spectacle of non-conformists.

Love and friendship are hardly possible under these conditions. The citizens of the World State are mere shadows of human beings: smiling surfaces without tragic depth. Little wonder that the one surviving lover of Shakespeare is driven to suicide.

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Most people in Brave New World are content with their lot. Thankfully, we are not quite there yet. Ray Bradbury envisions a society more like our own, one full of vague foreboding. Fahrenheit 451 describes a rushing world of violence, suicide and looming war in which a depressed populace distracts itself from the slow death of love and longing with vapid entertainment. Bradbury explicitly connects the fact that “our civilisation is flinging itself to pieces” with the destruction of literature and the deliberate falsification of the past.

Montag, the protagonist, makes a living burning books, in accordance with rules said to have been established in 1790 by the “First Fireman”, Benjamin Franklin. His wife Mildred, who claims to be happy, spends her days in a room with three walls of television screens, surrounded by her “family”: soap-opera uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who “said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud”. She has no recollection of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills one night.

An old professor who’s been unemployed since the last liberal arts college shut its doors tells Montag that the magic of books lay in “how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”. But they are hated because they “show the pores in the face of life” to a world that wants “only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless”.

Chief Beatty, Montag’s deeply conflicted boss, explains how we got here. Everything sped up in the 20th century, when horses, dogs and carts were replaced by faster and faster machines. Time contracted. Books were condensed and pre-digested, “levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”. School was shortened, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored”. Sound familiar?

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Fahrenheit 451 concludes apocalyptically, with a revelatory global catastrophe. Bradbury draws on some very old stories to make the meaning of this ending fully intelligible. Montag flees a doomed city like Lot escaping the burning of Sodom. The world collapses and must be rebuilt. Insofar as there is hope, it lives in the hearts and minds of scattered old men who remember the writings of Plato, Swift, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Montag himself recalls passages from a forbidden volume of Ecclesiastes.

At the novel’s end, Montag remembers a verse from Revelations, The Book of the Apocalypse: “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruits every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Jews called the Bible — in Greek, to biblion, or “the book” — an etz chaim, or tree of life. In Revelations, the river of the waters of life sustains two trees of life: the Hebrew Scriptures (whose fruits were the twelve tribes of Israel) and New Testament. The “leaves” of these trees, their pages, were understood to be medicine for the sickness of “the nations”, people who knew nothing of the Bible.

Despite the best efforts of some of our greatest writers, the healing power of books has been mostly forgotten in our time. Must we really wait until our world is thoroughly burned and broken before we begin to mend it?

According to liberal conventional wisdom, we are in a post-industrial, post-imperial society where shouty (white) men can no longer trumpet their entitled assumptions unchallenged, and perhaps even have to stand in line. Well, if that’s truly the case, thank fuck for it. After all, imperialism and the patriarchy cost a lot of lives, and gave us wars, bad politics and bad art. And nothing’s changed.

Ironically, however, most of those lives lost in Western society were male, white and working-class; basically, those citizens assumed by the paradigm of class-denying intersectionality to be the enemy of progress. White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

Because some sections of the white working class bought into the reductive neoliberalism of unrestrained capitalism through the Thatcher-Reagan revolution, so the entire group was written off. In the “hierarchy of the oppressed” so beloved of intersectional theory, a (white) penis in the underpants is more important than the lack of an arse in the trousers in determining your place in the world.

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So, what excludes white working-class men from this LGBT intersectional paradigm? It can’t be race, as white women are permitted. It can’t be class, as working-class women and black men are allowed in. It can’t even be sex/gender, as gay or bisexual white working-class men and women are included. But perversely, white proletarian men are lumped in with their bourgeois “brethren”; outsiders in this rainbow-coloured festival of the oppressed.

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes. There’s something about the bourgeois psyche that produces a visceral reaction to that deadly combination of working-class, white and straight — irrespective of the actual views and life experiences of someone in that grouping.

The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order. After all, one unites and the other divides. The class war was won by the elite in Britain, probably as far back as Orgreave in the 1984 miners’ strike, when organised labour was crushed. Today, capital rules supreme, steadfastly tightening its hold, aided by a rapacious individualism that has now tipped into a demented narcissism, and a technology concentrated in the hands of corporations and its co-opted governments.

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Therefore, in the realms of finance and economics, nothing is now contestable, unless it’s national elites using their power (and manipulating the populace) to try to gain more traction and influence at the expense of the interrelated global ones. What is presented to us as politics is a hollow civil war of the super wealthy, with the rest of us as pawns. Silver-spooned, daddy-issue Republicans, like Trump and his ilk, have long presented as comic-book versions of the most vulgar, dumbass versions of redneck USA. This is now Right-wing de rigueur, enabling exploiters to “connect” with a politically and socially displaced white America, which embraces grievance and victimhood as eagerly as any grouping that claims to be oppressed. This folksy affectation is only partly strategic: late capitalism has stupefied its winners as much as its losers. Hollywood has recycled the potty mouth of the ghetto into the boardroom, where the same tropes are now regurgitated in a decontextualised way, with defiant alienation replaced by entitled arrogance, under the depoliticised posturing of “attitude”.

Meanwhile, digital technology and its deployment solely for private profit through capital accumulation has fucked all our attention spans, and our sense of the past, as completely as George Orwell suggested. (Indeed, there’s little point in saying that: the ubiquity of Orwell as just another internet cliché has completely nullified the power of his message.)

In Britain, I believe that the traditional working man — of all colours — has had a bad rap. Recently, I was out with some old pals, and we were talking about how we’ve stayed close friends down the years, despite life, love and work taking us off in varying directions. One friend went on at length about how his partner and her friends were quite surprised at the continuing bond between us all. It’s a recurrent theme with women I know, who ask, perhaps not unjustly: how can you still be bothered with each other?

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

Men, whose camaraderie can seem frivolous, built on drinking, football and laughing at each other’s embarrassments, paradoxically tend to stick together down the years more than women, who talk of weightier, more emotional subjects. Several years ago, following a relationship breakdown scenario, I went through a phase where I felt like I was done with male company. I decided I could do without the gung-ho nature of the archetypal male response to such events: “Forget her. They’re all the same. Get another round up. I’ve left a line out for you in the toilets.” As a result, I basically surrounded myself with my women friends. Not for the first time, they were the ones offering real support and genuine insight into my predicament.

Then you realise: it’s not about thesis and antithesis. There’s always got to be room for a synthesis of different ideas and values. Once more, I’m appreciating the narrow, lazy affirmation that belonging to a mob of men can offer. The best thing about being a man of my generation is that we’re allowed to get the fuck out of the house. Now I feel for youth who don’t do this so much — they really don’t know what they are missing. When they do, the experience is invariably packaged for them. The biggest indictment you can offer our current dystopia is that we’ve created a society where the old pity the young. That’s just not right.

Masculinity (as well as femininity) is tied to our lost sense of community. As pubs and clubs close down across the country, teenagers are more likely to spend their evenings on Instagram, TikTok, playing video games or on some dubious porn forums than getting drink from the offie and messing around in the park or on abandoned railway lines. A social vacuum has been created at the same time as a dumbed-down visceral communication system has emerged. This creates a place where someone as pathetic as Andrew Tate can gain a limited sphere of influence. The emergence of such characters would have been impossible in the Nineties. They would have been dismissed as ludicrous wankers in a truly contested, democratic street culture, as opposed to the top-down media one we now live in. Now a noncey, supermarket transgression has gained a foothold, appealing to an entire lost generation of anxious, isolated teenage bedroom wankers, brimming with the sleazy narratives of onscreen porn.

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

While young people are being stripped of their right to be completely irresponsible — i.e. young — those of us who spent a whole chunk of our change in the last century are often unprepared to let go of our unruly youth, still investing in bad behaviour and the institutions believed to encourage it; the pub, the gig, the nightclub, the rave, the football ground and the traditional workplace. I personally thank the higher powers for those declining bastions.

In their growing absence, the neoliberal state has gutted everyone’s lives of meaning — to the extent that we have little to cling to other than a narcissistic, media-constructed sense of who we are and our supposed entitlement to avoid personal discomfort at all costs. Thus, through toxic social media platforms, proponents of various identities get to sling all sorts of mud at each other, devoid of any social setting and real human interaction. Generally, it’s an inconsequential battle, in which people are afforded the keyboard warrior’s licence — rewarded by the dopamine hits — to abuse each other with relative impunity. The objective of the game is to goad the other party into an overreach and a subsequent pile-on, with an attendant Twitter ban or, the great weapon of our times, “cancellation”. Generally, however, in those futile wars, no party claims a feasible victory. Nonetheless, the participants are rarely shy of pompously deploying tiresome, overdramatic dictums declaring their cause or viewpoint to be “on the right side of history”.

This nonsense benefits only the continuation of the current bankrupt system. The establishment’s economic, financial and social elites once starved people into compliance; now it lures them into pointless shouting matches, allowing them to stupefy themselves in the process.

So, white men aren’t the only ones rendered toxic by our culture. Every group and demographic, as evidenced by its social media extremists, are fundamentally unhappy with their lot and in existential crisis about who they are in this changing world. Part of this is the old science of consumer capitalism: keep us feeling bad about ourselves and then give us a product or service or procedure that will make us centred, complete or alive. Ignore the fact that we’re strutting around in a zoo we’ve made for ourselves. Whatever we consume or change or alter, we remain polar bears in the same concrete enclosure, pacing up and down.

The toxicity of white rich men is more consequential than that of the rest of us, which is largely an acting out, a cry for attention. After all, they are seen to have the power to change all this. Only they don’t. The consciousness-crushing machine they’ve helped create and service brings them no substantive life benefit anymore. Can a man with £400 million in the bank really be poorer than one with £500 million? How many lives do you need to live to spend that? It’s the accumulation of meaninglessness; the buying of some kind of dominance and largely imagined status over peers. Checking figures from the spreadsheets on their screens. Seeing how efficient a capitalism no longer tied to production is in taking the resources of communities, monetising it, and transferring it to their accounts. Basically, wasting their lives away in that most futile of pursuits: making non-spendable money, while the years tick by, and dreams of love and laughter are replaced by a rancid resentment and urge to satisfy the ego-driven need for “influence”.

The continuing war of capital upon consciousness, on what makes us human, continues apace. In an economy that can produce everything at zero cost, the wealthy are coming to the end of their ability to control us by paying wages. Now, this can only be done through the steady erosion of human consciousness. AI is a backstop here, just in case our spirits rebel in reaction to this, and we cut up too rough. After all, a robot or a computer doesn’t need food. And crucially, it’s not changed by anyone looking at it. It is not self-conscious. But if the system can’t make robots quickly enough to replace us, it’ll try to make us all into robots.

“We’re not allowed to say that” is the factory bleat that resonates throughout social media from all we older, toxic, white working-class males. How excited we get on our dopamine hits, when some papier-mâché faced ponce seems to stick it to the poker-arsed gatekeepers of neoliberal morality with a racist or sexist quip — while they (quietly) endorse an economic system of gross inequity that now almost literally defecates on us. Our participation in “politics” is reduced to watching a Frank Drebin from Police Squad/The Naked Gun look-and-soundalike clownishly annoy some uptight disapprover.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

What we certainly are allowed to do, is to be nostalgic. The system plays on our need to make sense of our existence by processing our past, but only in a way that all conflict is taken out of it. Thus, our need to validate our lives in a fake “golden age” haze becomes a de facto endorsement of a system that has limited the potential of those lives. It encourages us to sit around crying into our beer about how things ain’t what they used to be, reconstructing a collective rose-tinted past designed to sustain us in our dotage, while ensuring this state creeps ever closer as mindless aphorisms — ubiquitous, circular — rot our brains.

Fuck that. Pick up a book instead. Let’s get educated. The smarter we are, the less easy it is for the unenlightened greed junkies to fuck things up for us. The world is changing, let’s change with it, but in ways which make sense to us, not to the blueprint of white-collar fascist controllers or soulless tech nerds who need to get properly laid. (They are the ones who’ve swamped our brains and culture with the shabby dictates of their crass dating algorithms.) If I could make one solitary plea to white working-class men: do not be servile to the upper classes. They are not your amigos. They blithely dispatched your forefathers to the killing fields, and they haven’t gained any greater appreciation or respect for you since. In broader terms, Trump-Biden 2 or 3 or 4 will not do anything for the citizens of this world that the first one didn’t. Probably much less. Toxic masculinity is just that, because it exists within a toxic system.

Regions are losing their identity. Professional football teams no longer field any local players, and local newspapers are disappearing, replaced by “some mass publication thrown at [the public] like a bone to a dog”. These organs of hatred publish indignant lies about workers bingeing on champagne and immigrants taking advantage of our great traditions of hospitality. The “miserable meanness” of the press faithfully reflects “this present age of idiotic nationalism, political and economic”.

The year was 1933. J.B. Priestley, born in Bradford in 1894, had been commissioned by the Left-wing publisher, Victor Gollancz, to spend two months travelling through rural and industrial England, from the honeyed manor houses of the Cotswolds to the stinking slums and slippery cobblestones of the Black Country, Lancashire and Tyneside. The vaguely defined “North” was a foreign country even to some members of the London establishment who were supposed to represent it. This geographical blindness appears to be a chronic condition. Several visitors from the South who have stayed at my home on the Anglo-Scottish frontier were surprised to discover that Carlisle is not a Scottish city, and that Hadrian’s Wall is not the national border.

Along with Daniel Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Priestley’s English Journey is one of the great travelogues of English literature. He talked to actual people and stayed in each place long enough to suffer the effects of its architecture, food and air. He listened rather than interviewed, jotting down the chatter of factory workers, bus passengers, commercial travellers, tramps in a hostel, women at a whist drive, slum children at a multi-ethnic primary school. The result is a work of bracing televisual intensity. There is none of the metropolitan prissiness that makes so many English travelogues, historically speaking, a waste of time.

Priestley wrote like an opinionated anthropologist with an ear for a good joke and a rare ability to communicate in different forms of English: “As a rule I like local accents, and have kept one myself. They make for variety in speech and they give men’s talk a flavour of the particular countryside to which at heart they belong. Standard English is like standard anything else — poor tasteless stuff.” Reading Priestley today, it strikes me that the “local accents” he relished were micro-dialects, peculiar to certain towns, small districts or even occupations. Received pronunciation may still be dominant, as Amol Rajan complained this year, but the remedy is not necessarily within easy reach. We also now have standard Yorkshire, standard West Country and standard Cockney, which can be just as flavourless.

Just over two years after Priestley returned to London (in a smog so thick that all he saw of England through the windscreen was “a large wobbling green rectangle” on the back of a removal van), George Orwell set off on his own voyage of grim discovery. He, too, had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz. The fruit of two ghastly months in Lancashire and Yorkshire, The Road to Wigan Pier, was published by the Left Book Club in 1937.

Seeking out the worst “the North” had to offer, Orwell was expiating the guilt he felt as an old Etonian and as a former officer in the Imperial Police Force in Burma, where duty had compelled him to bully and punch the natives. (“Orientals can be very provoking.”) His journey was an exercise in figurative and literal blacking-up — crawling along mine-shafts, sleeping in hostels and boarding houses infested with human “black beetles”, as he called them with pince-nez distaste. “Is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class?” he wondered. He generalised and supposed, identified this and that “sort of person”, and came to his own and to no one else’s conclusions.

The Road to Wigan Pier begins with the weariest cliché of life “oop North”: “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.” Curiously, Priestley had recently observed that “clogs have disappeared, for though they were really very sensible footwear for work, being healthy, comfortable and cheap, they carried a bad social stigma on them, even when I was young”. “Clumsy clogs”, Orwell speculatively calls them when trying to catch the eye of a young woman seen from his seat on the train. He supposes that she must have been poking a stick up a blocked kitchen waste-pipe: her face wore “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen”.

This kind of moral means-testing and stereotyping is still quite common in metropolitan and even local writing about the North of England. Why assume that the woman was desolate and hopeless? I hate to think what my face looks like when I’m doing it, but in the long and varied list of necessary household jobs there can be few more engrossing and ultimately rewarding than rodding out a drain.

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Why Grimsby was left behind

By Derek Turner

Priestley had his own forms of bigotry. He loathed the “violent racial prejudices” which blighted the lives of mixed-race children in Liverpool, but in the same decaying city, he yearned for the day when all Irish labourers would be cleared out of every western port from Cardiff to the Clyde: “what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease!” At a public meeting in Bristol, he found the black-shirted Fascists as pathetically insignificant as the Communists with their “rising of the masses”: “Who cares about masses? … Men, women and children — but not masses.” Yet when he celebrated “the West Indian flavour” of Bristol, he was referring not to people, but to the tobacco and chocolate industries.

It is a shame that, while Orwell’s northern odyssey is still a common point of political reference, Priestley’s more wide-ranging, less dictatorial survey rarely gets a mention. English Journey is said to have helped Labour win the 1945 general election by giving a friendly face to the frighteningly faceless victims of capitalism. Priestley himself stood as an independent socialist candidate (he came third in Cambridge behind Labour and the Conservatives). He believed that centralised government and national party politics were stifling democracy and that England should be divided into four, five or six partially self-governing “provinces”: “politics should be local, so that you can keep an eye on them”. Today’s Labour Party, with its plans for devolution, could usefully employ him as a posthumous consultant.

At Westminster, Priestley’s omnivorous intellect would have been a liability. He was quite happy to publish findings which might have supported the arguments of his opponents. There must be some politicians today who would do this for the sake of an honest discussion, but I don’t know who they are. Both Priestley and Orwell condemned the blithe assumption that one shouldn’t feel sorry for people who work in deadening and dangerous occupations because “they’re used to it”. Unlike Orwell, however, Priestley noticed that many people enjoyed working in a factory. At an electrical components plant in the Potteries, the workers were “brisk and contented” despite the production-line monotony. The women who did nothing but attach labels to pairs of socks at a textile factory in Leicester were astonishingly cheerful. They preferred a job of pure routine because “they could then work all day and think about something else while they were working”.

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Britain's forgotten King of the North

By Dan Jackson

So much of Priestley’s post-First World War England is familiar that a few months ago I began to wonder whether most of the big changes in British society since 1933 were simply adjustments or variations in very long-term trends. Living in the far north of Cumbria, I find some of the picturesque period details quite up-to-date. I know people who are happy to work in factories, who find coach travel “voluptuous” and who drink the “brown speckled mess” that, hereabouts, could still claim to be “the national drink”: “We are all floating somewhere on a full tide of tea.”

There is, however, one glaring difference which reassured me that our age of post-Brexit opportunities has brought something new to British history.

Neither Priestley nor Orwell say very much about politicians, except in a general sense. They chide governments for being oblivious or indifferent to poverty and squalor, and for sitting in a haze of self-congratulation in Westminster while the City plays games with the riches that the industrial North has manufactured and dug out of the ground. But they say nothing of elected and unelected parliamentarians lobbying for their own interests, promoting the cowardly, the idle and the vicious, and causing death and unhappiness for the benefit of their political careers.

Missing from Priestley’s English Journey and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier are Prime Ministers plotting coups, gambling away the nation’s wealth, lying in the face of evidence and shame, and installing the “miserable meanness” of the popular press in the heart of government. The fact that these are after all, despite the similarities, chronicles of a bygone age should give hope that the current virulent outbreak of Westminster parochialism is a passing phase. Priestley’s book would be just the thing for a north-bound fact-finding minister to read while waiting for the next uncancelled train to Outer England.

***

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It has — as usual — taken a football tournament to achieve this momentary tolerance, and there is no guarantee that it will hold. It hasn’t previously. But, while we may, let us enjoy it. Let us, against the background of not only this gruesome past 15 months but the bitter polarisation that has gripped our country over the past few years, appreciate the uplifting sense of solidarity and belonging that have emerged with the successful march of the England football team to the final of Euro 2020. Such sentiments, as most of us have always known, may be harnessed as positive forces if only the liberal establishment and assorted high-minded progressives were to abandon their own longstanding prejudices against them.

That we lost the final in the most cruel manner will not dampen the fervour. Not yet, at any rate. The feelgood factor generated by England’s advance through the tournament, as well as the admiration the players and manager have drawn for the impeccable manner in which they have conducted themselves, have given rise to unabashed displays of English national pride — the kind which, outside of a sporting context, are usually resisted and discouraged by those who know better.

St George’s flags affixed to cars and adorning houses; outpourings of support for “our boys”; the massed ranks of fans belting out “Football’s Coming Home”; the invocation of a history and culture that, by and large, has been a force for good; the spirit of openness that says that, irrespective of whence and when you came, you may be part of all this if you wish to be: these are not the divisive manifestations of a hostile or exclusionary nationalism or sense of superiority, but instead the benign and unifying expressions of national consciousness, born of a recognition that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Everything we have seen in recent weeks has been the best of what it means to be patriotic: a spirit of reciprocity, common values and identity, the nurturing of associative bonds that give meaning to life and transcend cold economic calculus. When communities which would normally live parallel existences unite in pursuit of the same desire – on this occasion to see a team of eleven young men win some silverware on behalf of the nation – we all have cause for celebration. That’s what football has the capacity to achieve, and no politician dare mock it.

Only the truly cynical would have sneered at the unbridled joy displayed by students at an Islamic school in Blackburn when Harry Kane scored the winner against Denmark in the semi-final, or the Bhangra flash mob dancing through the streets of Wolverhampton to their own version of the Three Lions anthem. Who could have failed to identify with exactly how these groups felt at those moments? What separated them from the residents of the Bermondsey housing estate which was festooned in St George’s flags for the entirety of the tournament? During the past few short weeks, not much at all. For all the incessant and patronising establishment lectures force-feeding us a diet of “diversity” and “tolerance”, it often takes the simplest things to break down barriers.

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England fans can't be beaten

By Will Lloyd

I predict, however, that it won’t be long before we are back to normal. Those members of our political and cultural elites who are instinctively hostile to any overt demonstration of Englishness — seeing it as an inherently reactionary and destructive force — will regroup and seek to ensure that the phenomenon does not take firm root. Not for nothing did George Orwell say that England was perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.

The sense of English national dispossession which has been in evidence since the advent of devolution and has intensified in more recent years, coming to a head over the issue of Brexit, will continue to be ignored — but it won’t go away. Those living in our post-industrial and neglected coastal towns, where a heightened sense of Englishness exists — not by coincidence, but because it is in those types of places that citizens are most likely to feel a disconnect with an ‘unEnglish’ liberal establishment — will continue to see national identity as a tool of resistance. The sentiment will remain inchoate and uncoordinated, but it will not abate. And it will continue to develop outside of normal political structures, not least because none of the major parties has any serious plan for giving the English a dedicated voice in the institutions of our democracy, nor for addressing the democratic imbalances created by devolution.

This patriotic sentiment will continue to be misunderstood by many of our cultural influencers. It is dismissed as the fruits of unenlightened and nativist English mentality which refuses to be persuaded of the merits of a global cosmopolitan liberalism – almost certainly synonymous with white superiority and a longing for the age of Empire. It was this patronising attitude — a refusal to recognise the legitimate grievances of England beyond the cities, or to understand the motivation behind an instinctive affinity for country that is considered normal in most other nations — that has created so many of the faultlines in our recent politics.

It has taken a team of 11 multiracial young men to show these people why they are so wrong. Let us savour the moment.

But its latest variants are not very contagious and cause little harm to the body politic. The National Farmers’ Union tries to revive Project Fear with stories of vast herds of Australian cattle, while Oxford dons insist that Rhodes Must Fall — for the Empire, so some of them insist, is the key to Brexit. One of their most vocal members, indeed, co-authored a book explaining that Brexit was due to “a nostalgia for a time when life was easier, and Britain could simply get rich by killing people of colour and stealing their stuff”. So here is the anti-Brexit cause boiled down to its primitive components: vested interest, and visceral alienation.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Brexit battle has quickly receded into memory. Was it really only five years ago? We are already commemorating the date: “Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars / And say ‘These wounds I had on Brexit day’.” In 2016, leaving the EU seemed a British eccentricity, whether to be praised or blamed. On one hand, it was the product of domestic politics: David Cameron’s miscalculated effort to silence the Tory Eurosceptics. On the other, it was the long-term result of a peculiar national history: having suffered less than elsewhere from the wars, revolutions and foreign occupations of the 20^th century, the British were far less attached to the “vision” of a United Europe, and hence far less patient with its failings.

But five years on, Brexit seems to be one symptom of broader changes in Europe and the world. At a political level, it was a popular reaction not only against globalisation, but against the political manifestation of globalisation, in which, for a generation, national governments had ceded increasing powers to international bodies. Peter Mair, in his already classic work Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, called it the “withdrawal of the elites” into supranational institutions, in which the “horizontal” approval of other politicians outweighed the “vertical” support of the electorate.

This was the catalyst for “taking back control”. In many, if not all, democratic countries, there have been manifestations of this desire, invariably messy and disruptive. Brexit turned out to be a relatively quick and clean solution, compared, at least, with the turmoil in the United States or the political paralysis in France.

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Why Remain lost

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

At the international level, the brief period of Western (above all American) hegemony after the fall of the Soviet Union was sharply ended by the failures in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Libya. This was underlined by the massive presence of China, and more particularly by the sudden collapse of optimistic expectations that China could be integrated into an international order created and still led by the West. For critics of Brexit, leaving the EU inevitably weakens Britain and undermines Western solidarity at the worst moment. At best, they argue, we shall be isolated, and at the mercy of great power blocs, whereas European membership gave us protection and a voice within a mighty organisation that could maintain itself against the United States and China. We shall see.

But at the moment, things look different. The EU is embarrassingly marginal in world politics. Most of its members do not want, and are not powerful enough, to play “the great game”, and so the EU itself is only a simulacrum of the Great Power. It has a flag, but not an army; and indeed, not a policy. Its dominant member, Germany, is increasingly dependent on China for its exports, and on Russia for its energy.

The EU cannot be relied on to play the smallest role in areas of danger: the Middle East, the Pacific or Africa. France’s failing attempt to hold back Islamist onslaught in central Africa depends on a few RAF helicopters. Deterring Russian adventures in the Baltic depends on a handful of British units in their traditional “tripwire” role. Should we not be asking ourselves why we are doing this, for an EU that is feckless and hostile, and whose main endeavour seems to be causing trouble in Northern Ireland?

And then there was the pandemic, a sudden materialisation of the dangers of the 21^st century: the perils of globalisation; the ruthless irresponsibility of China; the absence of effective global organisations; the complacency of the West … But nowhere so far have the political consequences been more severe than in the EU. It would be tedious and unnecessary to rehearse its failings. Suffice it to say that it proved worse than irrelevant in the sort of situation that its defenders commonly used to justify it: a crisis that “crosses frontiers”.

In this case, the EU’s member states had to restore frontiers and rely on themselves for vaccines. The glorious vision of a “sovereign Europe” has faded. Even Emmanuel Macron, the only remaining federalist champion of substance, relies on various permutations of Project Fear. Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced. But in neither case did that prevent its members from quarrelling.

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Did we really 'take back control'?

By Philip Cunliffe

What has become of the 48.1% of the British electorate — 16 million people — who voted in 2016 to Remain? The largest group (43% of them), according to Lord Ashcroft’s exit poll on 23 June, feared the economic consequences of leaving, and another 20% feared national isolation. Only 9% felt strong attachment to the European vision. As the fears of post-Brexit disaster have evaporated, and the EU has shown itself increasingly accident-prone and intransigent, support for the EU logically declines, as recent polls suggest.

Moreover, the Remain vote is dispersed among several parties. Only one of these remains politically formidable and openly “Rejoin”: the Scottish National Party. That it should cling to the EU is understandable: only EU membership (whatever the cost) makes independence feasible. But Europhilia is a waning asset. Every blunder or failing in Brussels must make the SNP’s strategy less attractive to rational voters. Its failure to win even 50% of voters in the recent Scottish elections is eloquent.

The same logic applies to Northern Ireland: unity with the South might have seemed attractive to middle-of-the-road voters as long as Britain and Ireland were both EU members. However justifiably annoyed Northern voters might be with both London and Brussels, for Northern Ireland to break fully from its main economic partner would be far worse. If the Protocol is either made to work or — which seems increasingly likely — junked, then unification will more than ever seem something that many Irish people on both sides of the border aspire to, as long as it is not actually imminent.

So that leaves the rather small number of British voters — and the even smaller number of English voters — who remain unreservedly attached to, or at least nostalgic about, the EU. Can anyone imagine a serious politician sounding a clarion call for Britain to return to the fold? The most they seem to be aiming for is to keep the maximum degree of linkage. Keeping Australian beef out, while allowing Irish beef in. Trying to retain regulatory alignment, presumably so as to maintain Britain as a lucrative market for EU goods (hence our huge trade deficit) while hampering trade with other continents.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Other than that, we have the Omega Variant of Brexit — the culture wars. How many of the 150 or so Oxford dons who are boycotting Oriel College because of its failure to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes do you think voted “Leave”? I suppose the culture wars could be dismissed as froth, as perhaps in a few years they will be: “Because,” as Burke wrote, “half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink… pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

Nevertheless, as one who belongs to the Acrididea order myself, I do find it interesting. George Orwell observed 80 years ago that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality” — though today I think he might have to add America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The “decolonisation” movement in all its ramifications seems to be a rejection of national identity, or at least of those identities which are stigmatised as pillars of an oppressive world system — a view that manages to leave genuine oppressors in the clear.

Orwell went on to criticise the “negative, querulous attitude… the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power”. Except that now, they have considerable power within our cultural institutions. Is this the fate of the Anywhere people? Aspiring to be citizens of the world, but discontented wherever they live? Supporting the EU. Supporting “decolonisation”. La lutte continue!

In fact, of the rare household flags you do see across the country, few are likely to be British. There’s been a Greek national flag flying in Walberswick for as long as I can remember. All last year our local Conservative Association had an Irish tricolour unfurled from the flat above. Ditchling in Sussex proudly flies the Cornish white cross at the moment, for some reason, and Eastbourne Town Hall the Gay Pride stripes, but that’s about it outside of major football tournaments. On the whole, like all other official symbols of our national identity — portraits, parades, anthems, uniforms and the like — we go quietly.

What does this tell us about who we are? First it speaks the truth: that states are all very well and we’d be literally lost without them, but that their official symbols are not what counts. What counts is generally found around the corner and that isn’t a flag up a pole. Our most telling identities are inherent in the people, although there are institutions — the armed forces, for instance — when popular and official expressions powerfully combine, and the battle flag is one of them.

Second, it shows a remarkable, non-political, political maturity. Communities come from the inside out. That is why they are communities. Raising a flag (especially the national one) in the middle of a community does nothing for that community, and is also just a bit naff.

The same goes for lapel pins. It was George W Bush, I think, who started wearing a tiny stars and stripes in his lapel soon after 9/11 and to my utter astonishment he kept it there and then Obama followed. British ministers do it now with Union flags or, in Hancock’s case, with the blue badge of the NHS. Warning to ministers: do you believe in our country or do you not? If you do, you don’t need to wear a pin. If you don’t, we don’t trust you anyway and a pin isn’t going to help.

Third, flags get tacky. They only look good for five minutes in a germ-free environment. After that they fly tattered and torn not by shot and shell, but by general indifference and neglect. Like weeds in the garden, flags that look like dishcloths are a bad sign. Leicester railway station used to have half a bush growing out of its clock-face and I can assure East Midland Trains that this did not inspire confidence.

Now flags are flying high in the Euro football championships, and like summer blossom, they burst out everywhere you are expecting them and in some places you are not. But like Christmas lights, or party balloons, or bare chests, they’re only there for the moment and the minute we’re out, so to speak, so are they. But if we win (did I really say that?) the whole country will come out like the Kirby Estate in Bermondsey and even Emily Thornberry will be forced to get her flag out to celebrate.

The point is, except on high days and holidays, we do not like to be told where we live or who we are, just as we did not need to be told by Gordon Brown back in 2007 what our national values were. Either they are our national values, or they’re not, and if they’re not they’re not, and if they are they are, and we don’t need teaching about them.

Only, they aren’t our “values” at all – more like pieties, and most Western democracies claim to share them. We look at ourselves more by managing, pro tem (it’s always pro tem), to come to terms with our history not by erasing what is shameful but by facing it, with all due humility. The rest can look after itself. For our history is us, not a set of values, or a lecture, or a flag, and of course it is never quite resolved. The trick is to keep it in play as an essential and positive part of who we are.

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By Robert Colls

The Union “Jack” was originally the creation of a Scottish king (James VI, also James I of England) who wanted a Union of Great Britain when he found himself ruler of both kingdoms. Designed for the main masts of the Royal Navy, St Andrew’s silver saltire was laid over St George’s red cross for Scottish ships, and St George’s red cross was laid over St Andrew’s silver saltire for English ships. After the 1707 Act of Union, the Jack joined John Bull and Britannia as the third great icon of the Union state, gradually taking on a darker blue to better weather the wind and rain.

In the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, St Patrick had no cross to offer and was not around to conjure his own martyrdom, so the flag designers found what they wanted in the red saltire of the Fitzgerald family. Stranger things had happened. In 1776, the Union Jack with stripes was the first flag of American independence, while the Welsh, who were in the Union from the start, were never in the flag, and the Irish, who were last in and first out (mostly), are in it still.

As the Union of Great Britain and Ireland was buckled together at home, and Empire accumulated abroad, the Union Flag became pre-eminent. The four home nations came to stand for the inner, more affective resources of the peoples they came to represent (and vice versa), while the Union Flag came to stand for the outer power and authority of a British state which, one way or another, claimed to represent them all.

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Inner and outer nationhood was an asymmetrical mixture of politics and culture that has confounded pollsters ever since, with England, the dominant partner, subsuming its identity the most. When England won the World Cup in 1966 just about every flag at Wembley was a British Jack, even the corner flags.

It might be that the English have moved on from those sunny days and the rise of the plain red cross of St George signifies as much. When a British Government built the opportunity for formal secession into the constitution, at any rate for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish if not for the English (who were persuaded that they had nothing to devolve from), politics in these islands changed forever. From then on, not liking the government meant, or could mean, not liking the Union, and not liking the Union meant, or could mean, politicising all the affective power of the inner nation. How well that inner power would do after independence is anyone’s guess because it has far more pull inside the United Kingdom than out it. As in the football, Scotland plays best in England. Dealing with a far bigger, more complex, and alien Union in Brussels would test Scottish flag-waving to the limit.

For the English, the rise of the red cross of St George might be a response to devo-nationalism; it saw a renaissance around the time of Scottish devolution being passed in 1997, although it probably had more to do with Euro 96 the year before. It is certainly a class signifier against a liberal meritocratic caste who, although they have found their love of football (and never stop writing about it), appear to have lost their nation. To misquote Orwell, they would rather be caught stealing from Oxfam than flying the English flag in their garden. Which is a pity. The flag of St George saw action on the people’s side in the Peasants’ Revolt and in the English Civil War, and is streaming now in pubs and bedroom windows and yes, from hard-working dirty white vans, across the land.

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By Fintan O'Toole

Back in SW1, it’s a risky game for politicians to stand in front of the flag not because it makes them look zealous but because it makes them look dull. At the Downing Street press conferences, flanked by freshly ironed Union flags, Boris & Co looked like a firm of undertakers who had got a bit above themselves.

For sheer iconic beauty and power, politicians done up in Union Flags are never going to beat gold medal athletes wrapped in red, white and blue. Flags have their moment and then they’re gone — and on their own they are never going to do it for you. If you are going to fly the flag, find the people to fly it for you, and only then spontaneously, and in earnest and together. As it was ‘Ooray for Bobby Moore, and Kelly Holmes, and Jessica Ennis, so it’s ‘Ooray for ‘Arry Kane.

When he created his artist’s name — and this is not known for sure, but it is too good not to be true — he thought of England. George for the saint, Orwell for the East Anglian river. The central question of his work is whether he saw Englishness as a tradition in itself and for itself, or as a source of imagery to be exploited for his own political purposes. Most of us don’t get that far though. The performance blocks our view.

A contemporary thought him “as English as the grass that grows alongside the Thames at Runnymede”. Another said “George Orwell walking down the road, was England”. “A quintessentially” wrote J.R. Hammond, “English writer.” “Full of good English qualities” reckoned the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, like common sense and concrete thoughts. Raymond Williams described him as the “most native and English of writers”. We still do. Whenever England or Englishness is the subject, Orwell is ready, the scripture we quote, the trusted authority.

It’s a lovely thing to have, in a way. Orwell there, on the bookshelf, waiting for us to steal ideas about our national identity from. When he imagined Charles Dickens’s face as “as the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of man who is generously angry” it is hard not to transfer the warm feeling these words summon to Orwell himself. It’s a preposterous feeling. They were both writers — so they were never in the open, and if they were they were in the open, then their reality was still their desks, and their words. Orwell’s best essays are always about the best English writers, like Dickens, and Kipling, and Gissing — projecting himself as a peer, and into the canon.

Orwell’s Dickens is a seductive fantasy, and the Orwell that comes down to us is a flattering fantasy, especially if you’re English. Kindly, gentle George, pottering about in his garden, counting the shillings he spends on books and cigarettes, contemplating pubs, all with a newspaper man’s interest in nitty-gritty detail. What elevates him into a figure, rather than a weird Jeremy Corbyn type stroking his marrows in an allotment, is that Orwell is a proper man, not soft or abstract, because he tells us he is prepared to use physical force, extreme violence even, to defend those flower pots, those books, and all those little shillings.

Until relatively recently in England we did not think of ourselves as aggressors. William Hazlitt, writing long before Orwell, said that England was the bravest nation. Why? Englishmen did not “delight in cruelty”. They only fought reactively: “not out of malice but to show pluck and manhood.” This is what Orwell meant 80 years ago when he described the “gentleness” of English life. It’s why he noted that all our war stories are tales of “disasters and retreats.” It’s why we quote him on this, and ignore that Trafalgar Day was toasted for more than a century. He wrote what we want to be true.

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In a sense he was born to flatter. Eric Arthur Blair’s family were Imperial agents and bureaucrats. They were well-off, and they feared working people. He called it the “lower-upper-middle class” which meant comfortable, but not mink coat, Rolls-Royce comfortable. No land, no substantial property. They were professionals with salaries — providing service, without being servants, but bag-carriers all the same. Today, they would be setting up all the zoom calls for Davos, or working as expensive personal shoppers.

At school, he was the scholarship boy who was crap at games. He writes about the hatred and resentment he felt against those “whose parents were richer than mine and who took care to let me know it”. The performance grows out of the anger. Reminiscing, describing why he became a writer, he admits that he “created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life”. Orwell never really left the school gates. That’s why his books are best read, and immediately understood by teenagers. In Nineteen Eighty Four, O’Brien is the top prefect, and Big Brother the headmaster, and Winston Smith will stay in detention until he’s written “I Love Big Brother” 50 times on the blackboard in shaky chalk letters.

The other boys recognised him as an intellectual. Today, there is a collective denial about this — like an awful family secret — about what Orwell was. He is usually described as an “intelligence” not an intellect; simple, direct, honest, undeceived. A “light glinting in the darkness” wrote one biographer; “straight as an arrow” thought Simon Heffer; a “national treasure” according to Julian Barnes. Orwell was always saying that the English could not abide intellectuals, that the English people were not capable of abstract thought. Part of his performance was acting this version of Englishness out — an artist pretending to be artless, an intellectual pretending to be stupid, a revolutionary pretending to be conservative.

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But he has to be understood as an intellectual. From prep school onwards until the day he died, he thought away. He was prone to daydreams as a child, ennui as a teenager, and abstract schemes for the improvement of mankind as an adult. He smoked roll-ups, to the extent that he should have been French. All of this he knew about himself, and hated, which is how he wrote the best lines ever written about why intellectuals are so dreadful. And only a neurotic, isolated, lonely intellect like Orwell’s could ever have chased authenticity, hardship, and punishment the way he did. In the barbarous Thirties, with all its dismay and havoc, how could it be right to moon over books when real people were fighting real enemies in real wars? To be less than a socialist was a moral disaster.

Choosing socialism made Orwell typical of his generation (not an “English Rebel” as Robert Colls puts it), however pleadingly he later tried to distinguish himself from it. They were all socialist intellectuals too. The Empire was pond-stagnant, Hitler was screaming on the radio, and the volcano they felt beneath their feet was hot. They discovered the people. When W.H. Auden was at Oxford he relaxed by frequenting the dog track, the boxing ring, and the speedway. Orwell, too, slid down by the standards of his day, his class — he wrote about the Burmese, and pan-washers, and Parisian bums. It wasn’t enough.

The breakthrough came in Wigan, where he stayed for 56 days, then never returned. He discovered something less abstract than the proletariat of socialist theory. Here were the English people, the real ones, not the nasty boys at school. In his northern book he remembers a cup of tea with the “lower orders” as “a kind of baptism”. In Wigan he was reborn as one of them. He wanted to use the poor to regenerate the society he despised.

In Orwell’s vision of England, the miners are not so different from the coal they shovelled. They are fuel for his dream of a revolution. “No genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of socialism” he wrote — because ideas were for people like him to grasp. In another essay he equates the struggle of the workers to the growth of a plant: “blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards…” It’s not far from Lenin’s view of people. For all his famous words about “the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns” and “the old maids biking to Holy Communion”, Orwell did not care much for the English. They are insensible plants, to be trimmed and pruned by a higher intellect. They needed to “breed faster, work harder… think more deeply, get rid of their snobbishness… pay more attention to the world”. After a late baptism, he had a convert’s faith in the English. And the convert’s faith is liable to be disappointed.

The revolution Orwell yearned for never happened in his lifetime. The British Empire did not become “a socialist federation of states”. Country homes were not recast as political “children’s camps”. The Stock Exchange was not torn down, and the House of Lords was untouched. He believed all of it would happen, none of it did, and we remember him as one of our greatest prophets.

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By Dorian Lynskey

These torpedoed expectations generated the hopeless air of Nineteen Eighty-Four. “If there is hope, it lies with the proles” writes Winston Smith — “proles” coldly described as drinking, gambling, singing, fat, anonymous people “who never learned how to think”. Winston wants dogs to take over a kennel. George Orwell was coming back around to the views of Eric Arthur Blair, the school boy who had “no notion” that the working class were human beings. Shortly before he died, Orwell put his son’s name down for Westminster.

A marker was placed with the first obituaries. Good, plain, honest, English George — not the ranting ideologue. He was the “wintry conscience of a generation” wrote V.S. Pritchett, a “kind of saint” who “prided himself on seeing through rackets”. Everyone assented to the performance Orwell made of himself in his writing. Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew him well, referred to Orwell’s clothes as “a sort of proletarian fancy dress”. He knew how kitsch it all was. When he read Orwell’s death notices in 1950, he “saw in them how the legend of the human is created, because although they were ostensibly correct… they were yet inherently false — e.g. everyone saying George was not given to self-pity, whereas it was of course his dominant emotion.”

Orwell would have liked to have been remembered for his “power of facing unpleasant facts”. His solidity and common sense. He would be amazed to find himself lazily cited every week in conservative newspapers by people who he would have put foot-first into a wood-chipper if it meant the brotherhood of man could be realised on Earth, in England.

He has become the opposite of common sense. If Millennials, as is so often argued, use Harry Potter as a kind of moral pattern recognition software, then this is what Orwell has been to three generations of Anglo-American journalists. It wasn’t that long ago that Christopher Hitchens was using Orwell to justify the Iraq War. The Trump administration was endlessly described as Orwellian, as was one of Theresa May’s Brexit deals, as is almost anything that is thought to be bad somehow. The performance has become an ideology. He’s what he railed against, but could never resist: an abstract thought. Maybe on April 23 it’s better to call him a saint — the other Saint George. “Sainthood is a thing human beings must avoid.” That’s one of his lines. It’s quite right. Just ask Eric Blair.

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.

The details are hazy. Bowie variously described his take on Nineteen Eighty-Four as a TV show, a stage musical and an album. Despite his claim that Sonia was “the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” it’s very unlikely that they ever spoke, or that she had a specific objection to Bowie. Horrified by the 1956 Hollywood version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which softened the edges and mangled the ending, she effectively imposed a blanket ban on adaptations (aside from radio) until shortly before her death in 1980. It is perhaps for the best that she died six months before the release of Rick Wakeman and Tim Rice’s unapproved concept album 1984, which featured a duet between Chaka Khan and comedian Kenny Lynch called “Robot Man”.

Bowie framed Sonia’s rejection as terribly unfair: a snobbish old fogey standing in the way of his brilliant notion. But really, what was lost? At the time, Bowie was far more interested in collaging striking images in his lyrics than in telling coherent stories and showed no indication of having the narrative discipline necessary to adapt a whole novel into songs. If Sonia had approved the project, it would probably have either collapsed or ended up as a grand folly. Instead, by having to combine fragments of Orwell’s dystopia with the more anarchic, youth-driven visions of Burroughs and Anthony Burgess, Bowie created a far more idiosyncratic and topical sci-fi nightmare. If you like Diamond Dogs, then you have Sonia Orwell to thank.

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Yesterday, the Beatles and why talent isn't enough

By Dorian Lynskey

The other great counterfactual collision between rock and literature is the Beatles’ version of The Lord of the Rings. In 1968, Denis O’Dell from the Beatles’ Apple Films thought that J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga could form the basis for the band’s third live-action movie vehicle and pitched it to them while they were in India. United Artists, who had the Beatles on contract, had just acquired the movie rights from Tolkien, so that wasn’t an issue. It was loosely decided in India that Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr Sam, George Harrison Gandalf and John Lennon Gollum, and they would all record new songs for the film.

After David Lean and Stanley Kubrick turned it down, Michelangelo Antonioni was apparently interested in directing but as the band fell apart, so did the film. Again, it’s hard to mourn the loss. I can just about picture the Fabs in Middle Earth in an animated sequel to Yellow Submarine but a live-action musical fantasy epic starring four non-actors who were increasingly sick of each other’s company? It had all the ingredients of a historic disaster.

There is an enduring cultural obsession with might-have-beens. In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, the critic David Hughes examines in tantalising detail such abandoned projects as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version of Frank Herbert’s Dune (the job went to David Lynch) and Tim Burton’s Nicolas Cage-starring Superman Lives. Every couple of years, the story of Nick Cave’s berserk rejected screenplay for a sequel to Gladiator resurfaces to general delight. There are long Wikipedia pages devoted to films that the likes of Spielberg and Tarantino talked about but never made.

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As the title of Hughes’ book indicates, such what-ifs are usually predicated on the assumption that movie-goers missed out because of killjoy rights-holders or short-sighted studio executives. If only the real artists had got their way! In the realm of the counterfactual, movies never have a chance to fail, so all we have to go on are their would-be creators’ best intentions. In reality, passion projects stumble all the time. Philip Roth is arguably the greatest novelist of his generation but until HBO’s The Plot Against America, adaptations of his books ranged from merely underwhelming (The Humbling) to utterly misbegotten (American Pastoral). In fact, Lego bricks have inspired more good movies than Roth.

To take one legendary example, it’s possible that Jodorowsky’s Dune, which was set to involve Orson Welles, Pink Floyd and Salvador Dalí, would have been a far-out masterpiece. But you could just as easily imagine Frank Herbert fans being bitterly disappointed by it and fantasising about what it could have been if only the visionary behind Eraserhead and The Elephant Man had been trusted with it. Counterfactuals usually flatter the thwarted.

The mythology of creativity requires villains in the form of out-of-touch gatekeepers who obstruct the path of talent. We laugh at the A&R man who turned down the Beatles and the numerous publishers who rejected Animal Farm because they epitomise the obstacles our heroes must overcome on their journey to greatness. That’s why Paul McCartney gave director Peter Jackson the misleading impression that the rock’n’roll-hating septuagenarian Tolkien himself kiboshed the Beatles’ Lord of the Rings movie, and it’s why Bowie invented a frosty encounter with Sonia. It’s a better story.

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If Bowie were still alive, he would be free to do something with Nineteen Eighty-Four now that all of Orwell’s books are out of copyright. (The screen rights to that novel, which Sonia sold in 1980, are more complicated.) There is already an Animal Farm video game and what happens next will be interesting. I’d like to see people use Orwell’s books as springboards rather than blueprints. The movie Clueless, a freewheeling 90s reimagining of Jane Austen’s Emma, and Damon Lindelof’s ingenious HBO sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen both prove that one way to respect beloved source material is to turn it into something radically new. Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s inspired 2013 stage play of Nineteen Eighty-Four turned the book inside out.

I’m not sure, though, that even hamfisted takes on Orwell will do him any harm. Like other overzealous managers of literary estates — Lord Tennyson’s son, T. S. Eliot’s widow — Sonia believed that a reputation was a fragile thing, vulnerable to serious damage in the wrong hands, but great work is impressively resilient. It’s unlikely that Austen would have endorsed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or that Eliot would enjoyed the movie Cats, yet the status of those writers is undented. There is no idea bad enough to diminish the standing of Dickens or Shakespeare. It’s the adapter who takes the blame when a new version goes awry. So I suspect that when Sonia killed the glam-rock Nineteen Eighty-Four, it wasn’t her late husband’s reputation she ended up protecting but Bowie’s.

The children expect it, notwithstanding the fact that they push their sprouts around the plate. And I am too much a fan of Dickens not to get all misty eyed about Scrooge’s heart-warming gift to the Cratchit family. Moreover, the idea that the majority of people up and down the land are eating something like the same thing engenders a spirit of national solidarity, perfect for Christmas. I don’t even know if this is true anymore — but I like the idea that it is. So Turkey it is, and somewhere out on a chilly, former Norfolk airfield, some poor overfed bustard has his card marked.

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As we contemplate this annual orgy of waist-expanding excess, my church, right next door to the rectory, is filling up with piles of tins and packets upon packets of dried pasta and breakfast cereal. As I walk the few paces from my own front door to that of the church, my world changes. Bags of groceries have been sorted for collection. People come by furtively and fill up their wheely trollies.

It is not quite the same as that recent heart-breaking BBC report from Burnley, where hungry children are ripping open the bags of food that the church brings to their door. But there is hunger here, too, and quiet desperation, and a sense of failure. Lockdown has taken its toll on people: jobs lost, relationships strained, too many funerals attended. No, we won’t all be eating the same thing. Of course I feel guilt at the contrast. Most of us should.

“You voted Tory, it’s all on you” comes the Twitter response, “Save us your crocodile tears.” This, however, I do not feel so conflicted about. Even before I abandoned the Labour Party, vowing never to return, I was scornful of those who subcontract their social responsibility to the ballot box, returning back from a five-minute trip to the polling station to comfortable untroubled lives with the added glow of inner virtue, their work now done.

Even many of those who live their politics 24/7 often seem to believe that right-think absolves them from all the practical activity of caring for those less fortunate than ourselves. Many despise charity or the practical activity of social benevolence, believing it shouldn’t be necessary (being the proper role of the state) and that it reinforces unequal social relations. The Cratchets need a government with the appropriate economic policies; they should have no need of a converted Scrooge.

This is only partly right. Yes, there absolutely is a proper moral outrage to be felt towards attacks on the welfare state and to so-called benefit reform. But nonetheless, I especially dislike the way that this sort of politics can be mobilised against kindness. Towards the end of his life, Lenin went to see a dramatised version of The Cricket on the Hearth, and walked out of the play in disgust at Dickens’ “middle-class sentimentality”. The Left-wing case against Dickens is that he believed social problems could be addressed by the prosperous becoming better people, rather than by a revolution in social or economic relations.

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How I became 'Tory scum'

By Giles Fraser

Orwell was particularly harsh on Dickens about all this, arguing that his great fear of revolution (The Tale of Two Cities) blunted his famous hatred of injustice (Oliver Twist). “It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure”, he argued, and that “a ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo.” And there is some truth in this: Dickens’ visceral belief in social justice was not built on some abstract political theory but on the need for people to be kinder to each other. And here Orwell points to what he calls the perpetual battle between the revolutionary and the moralist, who are “constantly undermining one another”.

I admit it, I have a Dickens-like vision of what constitutes a good Christmas, indeed probably of the good life in general. A fire on, children running around my feet, the smell of something roasting in the oven, my glass charged with a good claret. I share with him the idea that food bespeaks a kind of domestic, yes perhaps bourgeois, contentment. Which is probably why I recently set up a website devoted to food, wine and faith.

On Monday evenings there is an open invitation for people to come together and eat on Zoom, menus suggested by some of our bishops, wine pairings by the Sunday Times wine critic Will Lyons. It was intended as a small gesture of mutual solidarity in these dark times, for people who may be on their own, or for those who just fancied eating together, sharing the joys of the table. But some have expressed disapproval, thinking it inappropriate that some people get together to enjoy their food whilst others go without.

In her recent book Scoff, Pen Vogler powerfully reminded us that food is often code for class, especially in Britain, “with its innate social function and attendant rituals, as a way of firing up rivalry, envy and social unease and conveying the niceties of where we all sit on the social ladder”. Perhaps this is why the Brits find it so easy to scoff at each other for their food choices, for the way they eat, and for the politics behind it.

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Let food bank clients eat cake

By Matthew Sweet

In Great Expectations, the now wealthy Pip returns home where he “formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roast-beef and plumb pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everyone in the village”. As Vogler explains, both beef and plumb pudding have long been a symbol of charitable benevolence, the squire sharing his bounty with the peasantry.

Washington Irving, who did as much as Dickens and Prince Albert to revivify our Christmas imagination, worried that the old traditions of Christmas — that “brought the peasant and the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and kindness” — were being abandoned. I suppose it is easy to cast aspersions on all this, and the revolutionary will have nothing but contempt for it. Even Dickens recognises the condescension. And at a time when children are ripping open food bags in Burnley, how can others enjoy their beef?

But like Dickens I also distrust the revolutionary instinct and the revolutionary case against kindness — though it has taken me a while in life to get there. My Left-wing political antennae has been broken, probably for good. I still accept the Marxist analysis, but not the Marxist solution. And the emerging Tory in me is rediscovering something of that spirit of Dickensian benevolence that has done so much to inform our understanding of Christmas.

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The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

There is, however, surely quite a lot of space between the (very Protestant) Scrooge story of individual repentance and Orwell’s desire for a more political answer. It’s not reformed individuals that I seek so much as a reformed society. Like Dickens, I look for a society transformed by fellow-feeling and communal solidarity not by windy lectures on structural inequality.

And the feast is still a pretty good symbol of all of that. Cooking as a form of love, of joy shared, of togetherness celebrated. These days I trust this sort of practical love more than I do politics. I know all the criticisms, many of them correct: but I will take the not-always-good-enough practical stance over the theoretical one everyday of the week.

Some feel that they have answers to the current crisis. I don’t. I have tears and prayers and the best that I can do.

Until this weekend. At which point a screeching U-turn was performed — though this may have been lost amid the hubbub in America. Now, free school meals will be provided to eligible children during the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year.

The debate, as it raged over the past months, was partly philosophical: is it correct for the state to step in where parents have failed, either through neglect, poverty or sheer ill fortune? The Conservative MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, taking the argument for personal responsibility to its logical conclusion, provoked mirth by telling the Commons that he didn’t believe in “nationalising children”.

Another feature of the argument — and a frequent component of all such ideological wrangling — was the light it shone on what politicians and commentators would define as food poverty in contemporary Britain. Indeed, some of those opposed to Labour’s motion clamoured to demonstrate that it is possible to eat well on a shoestring and that food poverty is more often a consequence of irresponsible choices than genuine financial hardship.

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Can our seaside survive the winter?

By James Bloodworth

When I was researching a book on low-wage Britain, I stumbled across an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who managed to survive on £1 a day. “Frugal Kath Kelly, 51, ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged leftovers from grocery stores and restaurants,” ran the story. “She even collected a staggering £117 in loose change dropped in the street.”

The story was written in admiring tones — Kath Kelly was presented as a sagacious and resourceful example to the poor. The underlying message was that the lower orders were feckless and stupid. Instead of sourcing and preparing healthy ingredients, they chose to plonk themselves in front of a television set and inhale pot noodles and multipacks of crisps.

There is a George Orwell quote that is trotted out during every debate about food, with Orwell arguing that poverty and unemployment lends itself to the desire for “tasty” food over dour offerings such as kale and brown bread. “The less money you have,” writes Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.”

But is it actually more expensive to eat well? And how much does it cost to eat nutritious food in Britain in 2020?

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Why food banks are a cause for national pride

By robin Aitken

Nutritious ingredients such as lentils (£1, all Asda prices), potatoes (49p), chickpeas (33p) and half a dozen eggs (75p) certainly go further than salt and sugar-filled ready meals (£2) or a calorie-dense stuffed crust pizza (£3.50). The food blogger Jack Monroe has demonstrated conclusively that it is possible to make tasty and nutritious meals on a budget: her website showcases recipes for Cornish fish pie, mustard chicken, salmon and pea pasta — each meal costing less than £1.50 to prepare. But the cost of these meals per person is typically based on making enough for four to six people, which is not applicable to every family. They also don’t take account of the cost of electricity and gas, and the limited storage and cooking space that people may have access to.

Moreover, there are other impediments to eating well on a budget. A lack of education about culinary preparation is one commonly cited factor, though that has been mitigated in recent times by the emergence of budget-food celebrities and more generally by access to the internet. Though a strangely snobbish attitude toward frozen food lingers in Britain, with one in three believing it is inferior to fresh food. Bizarrely considering the popularity of frozen food in France, a nation viewed as infinitely superior to us in terms of diet, 30% of Brits agreed with the statement “frozen food is not for people like me” according to a 2015 survey.

A lack of education has become a catch-all explanation for many contemporary phenomena, from bad diets, to Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. However, a 2013 study concluded that unhealthy diets seen in poorer socioeconomic groups may be related to different physical activity levels. For example, the study found that adults of lower socioeconomic status were more physically active and expended more energy than those of higher socioeconomic status, perhaps explaining their higher consumption of sugar- and fat-rich foods.

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Let food bank clients eat cake

By Matthew Sweet

A critical factor in poor dietary choices in the UK is a lack of time. Britons work some of the longest hours in Europe and have some of the largest waistlines. A 2014 survey found that three-quarters of British workers said a bad day at the office was the main reason for bingeing on foods such as pizzas, burgers and curries.

Moreover, eating for many occurs “on the go” — as a thousand advertorial blandishments like to phrase it (although less so during the Covid-19 pandemic). The reality is somewhat less glamorous: the “buffet” car aboard most trains is a degradation of the act of eating; the typical offering is a choice of sweets, crisps, stodge, grease and other high calorie snacks. And while it may be relatively easy to source cheap ingredients from the supermarket, motorway service stations feature a “choice” that is usually limited to McDonald’s, KFC, or a cold and unappetising salad box. It’s hardly surprising so many choose the unhealthy option.

During my brief stint at working in an Amazon warehouse, my diet was appalling. Orwell’s point about the unemployed seeking out something “tasty” to ameliorate misery also applies to the working poor. I didn’t go home and cook up a hearty stew of lentils and pearl barley after a gruelling 10-hour shift: I collapsed on my bed with a McDonald’s and a beer. Most human beings would do the same under similar conditions.

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There's no such thing as a green vegan

By Mary Harrington

For those on low wages or benefits, poverty is the thief of time. Being poor invariably consists of countless hours spent waiting around for public transport, bosses, landlords or public sector bureaucrats. And that’s before one adds up the additional time it takes to care for a family. Even if it can be done relatively cheaply, preparing a healthy meal invariably takes longer than putting a pizza in the oven.

There have often been moral panics about what the poor are spending money on and what they are eating. In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, inmates in the workhouse receive “periodically small quantities of oatmeal” and are served “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. When Dickens was writing in the 1830s, the New Poor Law had recently been introduced with the intention of making life for those without work as miserable and as harsh as possible. Those is the workhouse were to be fed no better than the poorest labourer; by such methods men and women would be forced to accept the lowliest job they were offered.

We no longer dictate the food those on unemployment benefits must consume (though the argument that we ought to is a frequent saloon-bar trope). But a peculiar moral tone to our conversations about food persists. This is not confined to one political tribe. Nowadays liberals too are often heard laying down pious strictures as to what the poor should eat and drink. Sugar taxes have been introduced and junk food advertising is set to be banned before the 9pm watershed. Newspapers such as The Guardian have called for the government to go even further in terms of regulating what people eat.

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The emptiness of the Intellectual Dark Web

By James Bloodworth

Food taxes are not necessarily wrong per se — there is evidence to suggest that levies on fizzy drinks (which are empty calories after all) can encourage people to make healthier choices (what’s wrong with plain old water?). But financially penalising people for their dietary choices feels like the complacent and morally satisfying option. Perhaps it would be better to pay more attention to the material conditions that give rise to the use of junk food as an emotional palliative in the first place. Binge-eating is more often a response to external pressures than a signifier of innate moral deficiencies.

And, despite the good news this week about the Covid vaccine, things are going to get far harder over the winter before they get better. Ministers have also been warned that the weekly shop is likely to become more expensive in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

It would be too reductive to remove individual agency from the healthy eating equation altogether. Yet we should ask more penetrating questions as to why poorer families often have such gruesome diets — questions that go beyond Dickensian moralising about personal responsibility and “nationalising children”, but which simultaneously eschew the sanctimonious finger-wagging of the “nanny knows best” approach.

There are myriad reasons why Britons eat poorly. Addressing them will require a radical reappraisal of our work-life balance and a better understanding of the indignities that are a daily feature of life on the breadline. Changes wrought by the pandemic may inadvertently bring about the former. But is a Conservative government — against some of its deep-rooted ideological inclinations — ready to see life through the eyes of its poorest citizens? Never say never. But the fact it was forced into an embarrassing climbdown by a Premier League footballer over school meals for poor kids doesn’t bode well.

It’s quiet today because it’s raining, but all through our serial lockdowns, my local park has remained lively. While Leicester’s professional sporting venues — Grace Road (cricket), King Power (football) and Welford Road (rugby) — stand empty, park life has sustained the sporting life of the city after the old, archaic meaning. From toddlers pushing baby walkers to old guys on the trot, from kids walking the plank (arms-out), to teenagers sullen on the swings (arms-in), from some pretty serious Indian fast bowling at one end to some pretty unserious English tag rugby — both sexes, not very distant — at the other. I could go on, but you’ve all got a park and you know what I mean. There are more ways to sport than playing football for £290,000 per week.

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Is local football heading for the exit?

By Philip Collins

It has been calculated that “green infrastructure” provides Britain with £34.2bn benefits every year. I don’t know how they know that, and even if they do, it all sounds a bit sterile to me. The good that municipal parks do is there for all to see, and never more self-evident than in recent months.

Victoria Park used to be Leicester’s race course. Fashionable punters would disport their way up New Walk to get there. Racing ended in 1882 and the park opened in 1883. Old Aylestonians Rugby Football Club was founded in 1919 and has played Saturday afternoons here ever since. Club headquarters is The Old Horse. Quite sporting for a one-year-old, my grandson thought it fun to drop his arm straight down a player’s pint.

Rugby, football and cricket dominate according to the seasons, as the park changes too, from bright verdant mornings in the Spring, to inky pinky sunsets in the Winter. Keep fit apparatus runs around the perimeter, which is clever of it, as do families on the Saturday morning fun run. Over by the playground, the park thickens with bushes and a wildlife pond, perfect for a bit of (never to be under-estimated) nature-watching and finding what parks have always offered, relief from the town.

Every May the Caribbean Carnival swivels its way through the wrought iron gates, and it was here that local band Kasabian played to fans in 2016 — the year in which Leicester supporters (and a very big Italian contingent) covered the park in blue. When the team arrived with the Premier League trophy, 50,000 people sang Volare to Ranieri the manager while he conducted as if they were a great opera chorus, which of course, in a way, they were.

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Is capitalism killing cricket?

By James Bloodworth

There used to be a croquet and bowls club but I can’t find it. It seems to have been swallowed by a builder’s yard now morphing into a meadow. And dominating the entire skyline is the University of Leicester. Founded in 1919 as a war memorial, its motto is Ut Vitam Habeant. Which they do.

All this popular amusement used to be a big part of what sport meant. Blur’s 1994 hit Parklife captures it perfectly. “All the people”. “So many people”. “And they all go hand in hand through their parklife”. “Know what I mean?” Certainly do, Phil.

Apart from the grass cutting, none of this costs much. It’s a state of mind: cheap, amusing and near to hand — which is, as my book explains, exactly how the English used to sport in their old parish wakes, or at their Shrove Tuesday football, or in all those mad games and festivals which at least once a year denoted liberty and belonging to all who took part. Stamford used to run bulls and it took the NSPCA, Lincoln Assizes, the Home Office, the 14th Dragoon Guards, the patronage of Queen Victoria and a big dollop of the Metropolitan Police to stop them.

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Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Sport in the time of the virus, though, is not just outdoors. While elite sport founders in its billions looking as deracinated as it really is, our lockdown world has taken up those fine old British indoor sports of kitchen curling (aka cleaning the floor), skittles (tins of baked beans), balloon tennis over the sofa (an old favourite), and keepie-uppy with a toilet roll.

C. B. Fry (1872-1956) was a world class athlete who did it all. He scored a century against the Australians. He won a Cup Final medal with Southampton. He played right back for England. He held the World Long Jump record, wrote thrilling sports stories and declined the throne of Albania. But his favourite sport cost nothing and was performed entirely indoors — an amusing party piece where he’d jump up onto the mantelpiece from a standing position. Backwards.

I started writing This Sporting Life thinking the history of sport was important, but not that important. I finished it seeing the sporting life as one of our great civil cultures expressing our deepest national instincts.

I’ve stressed the custom and belonging aspects because they are most apposite to life in the time of the virus. But the book deals with other elements as well, including an equestrian world that says everything you need to know about the gentry, a prize-fighting underworld that stood for what we might call the plebeian side of national honour, local festivals that reflected how people saw their freedoms, and all those sports and games that flowered in schools and colleges as distinctive ways of being young. Then, of course, there was Association Football: England’s gift to the world. Football slipped its village moorings and became not only modern but modernist.

William James once said that the first demonstration of free will is to believe in free will. Football works against all determinisms. Every match involves absolute freedom of movement within set limits, which, come to think about it, is about as near to an everyday expression of liberal freedom as we can get. You could privatise the land to deny the people their sport, but you could never privatise the social solidarities that sport embedded. Where parish wakes ended, football took off. Sometimes a football crowd on the move can look like the parish on a war footing.

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Jack Charlton's vanished world

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Historically, people had little choice in where they lived or who with. They had to get on with it and like it, and being for the most part excluded from educated opinion, they found their own forms of expression. They didn’t call sport patriotism and they never called it nationalism. They were simply tapping-in to what was available.

Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked that the nation, comprising millions, “seems more real as a team of eleven named players”. This is fair enough as far as it goes but it misses the larger and far more untidy point that it works the other way as well. Patriotism in Britain has never really been about the great and the good as about faith in each other. Nobody ever cheered a national team for being better than them. They cheer it for being part of them, a piece of the main.

This is something intellectuals such as Fintan O’Toole and Pankaj Mishra, who portray the English as the upper-class gullible led by the lower-class stupid, do not understand. They like to claim Orwell, but not the Orwell who suddenly realised that if the working class was patriotic, it was patriotic in its own way, after its own heroes. ‘The great and the good’, lest we forget, is strictly ironic. Royals and politicians always look like fish out of water at Cup Finals because, deep down, they know it’s not about them. It’s about us.

I started in Victoria Park Leicester. In a piece for Literary Review, Sean O’ Brien cites Pearson Park in Hull as “the centre of imaginative operations” for England’s greatest poet Philip Larkin. On that park, no different from thousands of others like it, Larkin looked from his high windows on the kids and the football, on the fog and the litter bins, and turned what was ordinary into moments which, taken together, have entered the nation’s soul.

Here’s to This Sporting Life.

Robert Colls’ This Sporting Life. Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 (Oxford University Press) is published on Thursday.

Reeves was an energetic and successful socialist campaigner. In New Zealand, she’d helped secure votes for women. In London, where she moved in 1896, she founded the Fabian Women’s Group in her front room in Brunswick Gardens and, appalled by the disparities in child mortality rates across the city, decided to investigate. She and her fellow Fabian Dr Ethel Bentham recruited a cohort of 42 mothers and encouraged them to keep records of their domestic expenditure, with a particular emphasis on diet. Some were not literate, but their children were. Their spelling was often touchingly hard to decipher. Reeves scratched her head at references to items such as “dryaddick”, “sewuitt” and “currince”.[1. Dried haddock, suet and currants, in case you were wondering.]

Reeves and her Fabian comrades wanted to answer questions that attended the discussion of poverty in the Edwardian age, and are still asked today. Why did the working poor spend so much on the wrong things? (Lavish funerals, it seems, were the Sky boxes of 1909.) Why did they eat unhealthy food? Why, for instance, did they have bread and margarine for breakfast when a nice bowl of porridge was cheaper and more nutritious? “The women of Lambeth listened patiently,” wrote Reeves, “according to their way, agreed to all that was said, and did not begin to feed their families on porridge.”

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Since when did the Tories care about workers?

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Over a century later, the preaching goes on. At the end of last month, the staff at my local food bank used Twitter to issue a statement about confectionery:

Some followers have raised concern about us putting certain items on our shopping lists (eg crisps & chocolate). Let me clarify – whilst we agree that they are of little nutritional value, we also believe in blessing our clients with a treat from time to time. (1 of 2)

— Lewisham Foodbank (@lewishamfood) June 25, 2020

The announcement provoked an indignant report in the Lewisham News Shopper and a convulsion of disgust on Twitter — which was quickly converted into pledges of Milkybars and Curly Wurlys.

Human emotions are historically contingent. Nobody today is plagued by acedia, the form of religious despair felt by fourth-century Christian desert hermits between 11am and 4pm. Others are culturally specific. Only the Ilongot group of the Philippines feel liget, an angry enthusiasm that pushes them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. So what’s the nature of the concern felt by those donors who complained about the presence of chocolate in the parcels sent out by the Lewisham food bank?

It’s a powerful emotion, clearly. Powerful enough to move several people to share it with a group of volunteers distributing domestic food aid during a pandemic. (The food bank informed me that objections had been received in private messages, some sent via a local councillor.) But how could we describe its qualities?

Is it a relation, perhaps, of the feeling described by Edwina Currie when she spoke in 2014 of being “very, very troubled at the number of people who are using food banks who … never learn to cook, they never learn to manage and the moment they’ve got a bit of spare cash they’re off getting another tattoo”? Or perhaps it’s closer to the melancholia expressed by Vicky Ford, the children’s minister, who last week declared herself “Saddened to hear of incidents of some parents using free school meals vouchers for alcohol & non food products despite clear restrictions.” Her sadness was so profound that it seems to have rendered her incapable of confirming whether these were anything more than rumours she heard down the newly-reopened pub.

The minister should probably cheer up. The meal voucher scheme is for food. It would be as easy to buy a bottle of gin with a book token. However, as it is funded and administered by the taxpayer, she is entitled to ask questions about it, no matter how tangential.

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Why food banks are a cause for national pride

By Robin Aitken

The food bank system is different. It takes no money from the state. It is a voluntary enterprise that depends on donations from local people. Donors are not obliged to supply foodstuffs to which they may have a moral or a medical objection. Most people, I suspect, would judge that a food bank package contains little that would imperil anyone’s commitment to a life of monotonous frugality. But if anyone does believe that tinned tomatoes are a gateway to sybaritism, they can simply decline to supply them.

Food bank packages are not like those that middle-class people give each other when they are enduring misery and distress, with their M&S ready meals, bars of Green and Black’s and nice bottle of Beaujolais. (Though I find it hard to formulate any strong objection to a food bank distributing these items, were any donors generous enough to supply them.) And yet the complaints come — and are so strong and numerous that the Trussell Trust issues instructions to its volunteers on how to reply. Hopefully they can use this advice to assuage the pain that threshes the hearts of those who think the poor are not doing poverty correctly.

George Orwell puzzled over these impulses in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his classic account of working-class life in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire. He was reflecting on the sorry history of the Means Test, a much-hated government policy that sent inspectors into the homes of British people to inspect their food cupboards and make suggestions about what valuables they should sell before being confirmed poor enough to receive unemployment relief.

When the test was introduced in 1931, the letters pages of the British press buzzed with debate about how to set the value of this benefit — or, as Orwell put it, “a disgusting public wrangle about the minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive.” One correspondent to the New Statesman sent in his idea of a weekly budget for a single unemployed man — four shillings a week, to be spent on bread, margarine, dripping, cheese, carrots, onions, broken biscuits, dried fruit, oranges and a tin of evaporated milk. (Fuel was not included, as this was all to be consumed raw.)

Orwell suspected that the letter was a hoax. He reasoned, however, that even if its recommendations made nutritional sense, few would follow them. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t,” he argued. “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull and wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’”.

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Ideologues miss Orwell's greatest lesson

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The point of chocolate is its smooth consoling sweetness; the way it snaps and crumbles and melts against the roof of your mouth. Why deny that pleasure to food bank clients? You might argue that chocolate is bad for you and people should not eat it. You might argue that the receipt of charity should be conditional on the renunciation of pleasure, and that chocolate mars the purity of the contract between the donor and the recipient. But you might also just mind your own damn business.

George Orwell didn’t much like the Fabians. The Road to Wigan Pier reserves some of its most venomous comments for them. Orwell dismissed the society’s leading light, Beatrice Webb, as a “high-minded socialist slum visitor” who, like others of her type, understood revolution as “a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders”.

But he would have had no grounds on which to lecture Maud Pember Reeves. The book in which she published her research, Round About a Pound a Week (1913), is the story of how its author renounced the gospel of porridge. She did so because she listened to the women whose experiences she recorded. They told her that porridge required long cooking and that gas was expensive; that porridge burned easily, and demanded attention when they were busy getting their children up and dressed; that it picked up the flavour of last night’s dinner from the household’s only pan. Moreover, without milk or sugar, children simply didn’t like porridge. (“They ’eaved at it,” one mother reported.)

As for the surprisingly lavish funerals, Reeves also got to the bottom of that mystery. Most working-class parents, she discovered, bought funeral insurance at a penny a week for every child as it was born. She inquired among the undertakers of London and discovered that it cost 18 shillings to bury a baby and 20 shillings for an older child. Cemetery charges could push the final figure to 30s. A family obliged to cover that expense in one week would be forced to ration its food to almost nothing — which risked the possibility of more sickness and death.

Reeves had never experienced poverty, but she was acquainted with grief. Her son, William, had died in infancy in New Zealand. (Another, Fabian, was killed on duty with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917.) She knew there were some calculations that only the poor understood.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

The legacy of Fabianism is ambivalent. It was a formative influence on the welfare state. It also had an authoritarian streak. Some of its adherents wanted to sterilise the poor. That’s not an argument you hear much these days — though in 2012, Ben Bradley, MP for Mansfield, wrote a blog post suggesting that unemployed men should have vasectomies in order to prevent Britain “drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters”. Mr Bradley is another figure worried by the summer holiday extension to the school meal voucher system. “I have,” he told Parliament on 16 June, “one concern …” Thankfully, the education secretary was able to clear it up pretty briskly. No, you cannot use lunch tokens to buy fags, booze or scratchcards.

This week it emerged that in the first six months of 2020, 2,500 children were hospitalised with symptoms of malnutrition — double the rate for the same period last year. The figure was calculated from data extracted from NHS trusts by a Freedom of Information request. As only two thirds of those trusts responded, the total is probably much higher.

I hope some Parliamentary questions will be asked about this grim statistic. It seems kind of urgent. Did these children end up in hospital because they ate too much chocolate? Or is there, perhaps, some other explanation? We should know the truth, however sad it makes us, however bitter the taste.

Rarely has the process of state formation been observable to such a wide audience in real time. But will the CHAZ vindicate Rousseau’s utopian and cooperative vision of human nature, or that of Hobbes, who traces the origin of the state in the acquiescence of the mass to authority, for its own protection from anarchy and extortion?

The reality, as always, contains elements of both. But perhaps the most fascinating element in Seattle’s ongoing experiment is the adoption of many of the trappings of the Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria, formerly known as Rojava. This is another quasi-anarchist statelet which has been carved out from the chaos and bloodshed of the nearly decade-long civil war, becoming the country’s most competent and harmonious system of governance.

Governing between a third and half the country at its height, managing Syria’s most ethnically and religiously diverse region, and controlling its most productive wheat and oilfields, the AANES project has achieved a cult status among many young Western leftists. They view the region as a viable and appealing alternative to both liberal capitalism and state communism and have flocked to take part in the project.

They are reforesting the region’s arid plains and fighting as part of the local YPG militia to preserve the statelet’s autonomy. Indeed, many of these young activists who abhor the very notion of borders in their own countries have died to defend the borders of the Autonomous Administration from both ISIS and Turkish attacks.

Back in Seattle, one groupuscule, “Demand Utopia Seattle”, has renamed itself as the Democratic Confederalists of the Puget Sound in homage to the AANES experiment, and further afield the “Black Socialists of America” movement explicitly cites the Rojava administration’s model of policing by community militias as a model for the US to emulate.

Indeed, much of the Left-wing American discourse around police abolition derives directly from an idealised misapprehension of the nature of policing in northeastern Syria. While it is true that the region’s HPC militia functions as an armed neighbourhood watch— some 40,000 HPC militiamen and women are currently deployed guarding the growing wheat harvest from ISIS sabotage— they are not central to maintaining social order.

Over the seven years that I have been visiting northeastern Syria as a journalist, policing has become increasingly professionalised. There are separate and well-armed militias for the purposes of general crime prevention, traffic police, highly-trained and well-equipped special forces teams for counterterrorism operations and military police to find and detain draft-dodgers and return them to their units. It is not a slight on the region’s genuine achievements to observe that, for all its ideological basis in anarchist thought, it is a highly bureaucratic security state, and far from the policing abolitionist demands of American protestors.

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Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the AANES experiment is that it is a testing ground for anarchist thought, where ideology is adapted to the demands of real-world governance. Where the theory fails, it is abandoned. Those aspects of the traditional Westphalian state found to be useful or necessary are adopted, forming a hybrid system of governance, part-anarchist, part-statist, part autonomous statelet, part traditional state.

As for the theory itself, much of AANES’s system of governance derives from the work of the little-known American political theorist Murray Bookchin, whose post-anarchist thought, filtered through the idiosyncratic readings of the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, have become the region’s governing philosophy.

On the Left then, as much as on the illiberal Islamist Right, the Syrian war has filtered back to the politics of the West. Rojava’s success, and the romantic drama of a multi-ethnic and gender-equal libertarian socialist statelet fighting and beating ISIS in the middle of the most brutal civil conflict for a generation has led to a revival of Bookchin’s ideas in western discourse.

Bookchin’s political philosophy, centred on “a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighbourhoods of large cities”, are attractive as an alternative to the crisis of liberalism. Versions have been adopted, in one form or another, by European administrations from Barcelona’s city council to, on a more parochial level, Frome’s experiment in governance by popular assembly.

It is with good reason that one of Rojava’s most prominent advocates in the UK is Blue Labour’s Lord Glasman, a frequent visitor to northeastern Syria, who has discerned in the region’s fledgling political order a potential model for post-liberals here at home.

To cite a provincial region of war-torn Syria as a model example of good governance generally, I can confidently attest, provokes mirth and disbelief from British post-liberals. Yet the ability of its systems of local councils and radical direct democracy to maintain social harmony and functioning political order in the most ethnically- and religiously-mixed region of a country torn apart by civil war suggests it may have lessons to offer our own country, currently struggling with far less brutal but growing political divisions.

Glasman’s idea of the self-governing church and village hall-centred ’parish commune’, derived from the Rojava experiment, is an attempt to reshape anarchist-inflected thought for a socially conservative but politically radical British context. Indeed it has shared philosophical roots in Britain’s Red Tory and Blue Labour traditions of radical working class politics and robust and ecologically-minded localism, all rooted in a pre-capitalist social order.

This is not a case of convergent evolution but rather of common philosophical descent. The intellectual basis of anarchism, which must be understood as a serious political tradition distinct from the black-clad, window-smashing stormtroopers of liberalism derisively dismissed by Bookchin as “lifestyle anarchists”, originates in the same romantic appreciation of the pre-liberal order as the medievalising tendency in British conservative socialism. It is not by accident that the major anarchist theorists Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta descend from decayed aristocratic families whose pre-modern utopia was shattered by base and vulgar bourgeois capitalism.

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For Kropotkin, the medieval guild presented a vision of the anarchist future, where each “had its own self-jurisdiction, its own military force, its own general assemblies, its own traditions of struggles, glory, and independence, its own relations with other guilds of the same trade in other cities: it had, in a word, a full organic life which could only result from the integrality of the vital functions.”

For Malatesta, similarly, anarchism in practice would sound more like Burke’s famous “little platoons” than the oppressive structures of state communism he regarded as a certain route to totalitarianism, centred around the “organisation of social life by means of free association and federations of producers and consumers”.

The medievalising tendency in radical politics has its basis in the premodern system of widespread local autonomy through guilds, wards, moots and parish self-governance, a system eroded when the Early Modern state began its long process of centralisation. As noted by historians like Peter H. Wilson in his sprawling chronicle of the Holy Roman Empire, medieval politics can be understood as a series of brakes on the power of the central state, where kings found it difficult to assert their power and local autonomy was stubbornly defended by the people.

Evolved versions of medieval direct democracy are seen in the political systems of Switzerland and Iceland, yet while only a few relics of this lost system of self-governance still exist in Britain, the romantic appeal of this lost social order has influenced thinkers of Left and Right for centuries.

Perhaps its time has come again. A current trend in academic political theory observes that globalisation, by weakening the power of the nation state in favour of transnational and sub-national entities from global corporations to NGOs and international terrorist groups, has plunged us into a “neo-medieval” world of overlapping authority, where ties of loyalty and power reside beyond and beneath the borders of the modern state.

According to this framework, “the political and social order following the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 – resulting ultimately in the nation-state system as we have come to know it in the modern world – is an anomaly, and… the world is reverting back to conditions of fluid borders (now including those found in cyberspace), complex and overlapping sovereignty, a return of religion to the political sphere, and the blurring of peace and war which pre-dated it in the medieval period.” The centralised, statist world of modernity is perhaps already past, then, whether we wish it or not, and what seemed a long-forgotten past has become our future. 

Given this neo-medieval drift within postmodernity, is a High Tory anarchism of autonomous town and village councils, a radical localism of “every field and hedgerow,” a viable political system? No less a reactionary than Tolkien believed so. In a 1943 letter to his son Christopher, the romantic visionary of Deep England remarked that: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!”

Similarly George Orwell, another idiosyncratic political visionary of a type only England can produce, stated his politics were those of the “Tory anarchist,” a political category defined by the political theorist Peter Wilkin as “a form of cultural dissident, out of step with and in opposition to many features of the modern world” displaying “respect for privacy and the liberty of individuals, a fear of the state and its expanding power over social life; a nostalgic and melancholy temper that laments the passing of an ‘Old England’; criticism of social conformism; and a pervasive sense of pessimism about the fate of the modern world.”

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Many British conservatives will recognise themselves in this description. The sad truth is that the Westminster system, despised by the majority of voters, has done little to defend the common good and much to accelerate the economic and social harms that have fractured British society. It is an unfortunate political reality for British conservatives that the space for Burkean little platoons has been filled not by organic local guilds and associations but by a state-funded quangocracy of NGOs and deliberative bodies, almost exclusively staffed by liberals, which stifle any opportunity for meaningful political change and accelerate the total political victory of liberalism even where conservatives win elections. The total capture of the civil sphere by liberal ideologues of Left and Right has left British conservatism with a hollowed-out intellectual tradition and a beaten-down sense of failure and loss. How can you be a conservative when there’s nothing left to conserve?

Perhaps the only solution is a radical conservatism, following the meditative dictum of the Prince of Salinas in Lampedusa’s Italian novel The Leopard that, “for things to stay as they are, everything must change.” There are two possible paths for conservatism, now that the centre ground has been destroyed by fundamentalist liberalism: the first is the conversion of conservatives to vengeful reactionaries, seeking to dramatically overturn unwanted change rather than slow it; the second is to reset the arena of political conflict entirely, abandoning a battlefield so heavily stacked against conservative victory, and creating a new one where democratic victories can be fairly implemented by the very people who themselves demand them.

The anti-modernist roots England’s unique and idiosyncratic utopian High Tory tradition shares, counterintuitively, with anarchism hint that British conservatism could, like northeast Syria, adapt the few aspects of radical left thought that actually work to its own cultural and political context.

With one stroke, the dead hand of the managerial para-state would be severed, freeing conservative politics from the stultifying grasp of quangos, lobby hacks and politicised civil servants. The pitfalls of populist anger directed at a distant and dysfunctional Westminster could be avoided by removing Westminster from the equation almost entirely, continuing the unfinished business of devolution and its unresolved English Question, and reintegrating the long-neglected regions into a functioning political whole.

Though he would no doubt recoil from the term anarchism, the Conservative MP Matt Warman suggested just such a scheme for radical localism in a little-noticed 2017 policy paper urging the “relentless devolution of powers and responsibilities down the democratic food chain to the lowest possible level,” emphasising “that’s not about shifting power from Whitehall to county councils and unitary authorities; it’s about asking what can parishes take from districts, and making clear to devolved administrations that devolution doesn’t end when power moves from Whitehall or Brussels to Holyrood.”

A radical reordering of British politics along these lines might work as follows: only the great issues of state like defence, foreign policy and finance would be overseen by Whitehall, with responsibility for health care, taxation, education, policing devolved to genuinely popular assemblies at county, town, district and parish level. This might do much to assuage the growing and dangerous disconnect British voters feel between their needs and the state’s response. In northeastern Syria, a far more divided society than the UK, a fragile political harmony has been achieved by the proliferation of local assemblies with genuine capabilities for self-governance, winning popular support by incorporating hitherto marginal communities in the business of politics.

Similarly, Covid-19 has shown that smaller political units, from the German länder to American states and tiny Baltic and central European countries, have consistently performed better dealing with the crisis than flailing central governments in the UK and US. “Small is beautiful,” as the economist E.F. Schumaker noted in his call for a return to the local scale, and as the fragility of the global system shown by Covid-19 as well as the sudden resurgence of local food and mutual aid networks as a result both demonstrate, perhaps a more robust and sustainable future politics can be found in the radical localism of our past.

Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.

This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:

“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”

Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.

One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.

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In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.

If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.

The proliferation of information produced by the internet has made it easier to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. Conspiracy theories increasingly fill the void where ideology – and certainty about the future – used to be. When there are so many competing truths that few individuals have the time to adequately parse, we are inclined to accept the narrative (however far-fetched) that chimes with our emotional predispositions.

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The triumph of contemporary identity politics has helped to turbocharge this notion that feelings are more important than facts. The ethos of the Sixties trumpeted “feelings as an antidote to corporate and bureaucratic rationality”, as Pomerantsev puts it. Objectivity is merely subjectivity in disguise, according to the purveyors of this identitarian creed.

Of course, this great transformation in our politics would not be possible without the highly specific model of laissez-faire capitalism that triumphed 40 years ago. It is within this framework that identity has become a marketable commodity. We each choose our own ‘truth’ – our sacred cause to rally behind – just as we choose from ten different brands of soda in the supermarket.

This “future-less present” arrived first in Russia in the 1990s. During this chaotic decade, people behaved according to rules they made up for themselves. “The image of a common mankind is impossible, and no alternative has emerged,” writes Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin-doctors. “Everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”

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It isn’t hard to see how this personalised, identity-specific (and highly subjective) notion of reality has ignited increasing political polarisation across the developed world. Individuals are no longer the vehicles through which political ideas are transmitted. Instead, ideas are interwoven with identity. To disagree is increasingly a personal affront – a ‘microaggression’ – rather than a mere argument over competing visions of the future.

Social media amplifies this trend by encouraging individuals to stake out extreme positions in order to stay relevant and boost their personal brand. As Pomerantsev writes, “Social media is a sort of major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

A highly subjective version of reality has been adopted by states too. In the contemporary era states make up their own rules and “murder people and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic,” Pomerantsev writes, drawing on the work of the Russian historian of the Holocaust Mikhail Gefter. We can see this logic play out everywhere from Syria to China to Myanmar.

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The success of political leaders such as Trump, Erdoğan and Orbán rests on the “anarchic liberation” from constraint they provide to their followers. That crude rejection of civility is comparable to the “suicidal escape from reality” Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Yet unlike the tyrannical regimes of the 20th century, authoritarian governments no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead they pretend there is no objective reality, only competing visions.

In depicting one man’s struggle against a totalitarian state, George Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. Unlike Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, the danger we face is not centralisation. We are slipping into a world not of a single truth set down by an infallible one-party state, but of an infinite number of truths that are impossible for the ordinary citizen to navigate.

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To counter this, we must become better as individuals at distinguishing between information that is accurate and information that merely confirms our biases.

But ‘the West’ – for want of a better term – must also rediscover a sense of purpose if it is to combat the threat of disinformation. Liberal democracies are more amenable places to live than societies that have come before and are likely to come after. We live longer, are freer, and however mediocre the current political crop of political leaders are, we do at least have a realistic chance of removing them.

This is not mere propaganda, to paraphrase the title of Pomerantsev’s brilliant and unsettling book. The threat to democracy may have changed since Orwell’s time but it is nevertheless real. Freedom is still the freedom to point out that objective reality exists – regardless of how you or I or Vladimir Putin may feel about it.

George Orwell was wrong.

About class, that is.

His most important book on the subject is The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937. The first half is an eye-witness account of working class life in the industrial North and Midlands. Unflinching in his descriptions, he left his readership in no doubt about the misery he saw.

And yet it was the second half of the book that proved the more controversial – not because he saw socialism as the answer, but because of who he identified as one of the great obstacles to the achievement of socialism: his fellow socialists.

The doctrinaire, priggish, pretentious cranks of the Left-wing intelligentsia were turning potential allies into opponents, Orwell said. He argued that the “humbug” of “bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois themselves” was making enemies out of people who were economically working class, but culturally middle class:

“The very last person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or a commercial traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the ‘proletarian’ cant with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order to symbolize the class war, there has been set up the more or less mythical figure of a ‘proletarian’, a muscular but downtrodden man in greasy overalls, in contradistinction to a ‘capitalist’, a fat, wicked man in a top hat and fur coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no one in between; the truth being, of course, that in a country like England about a quarter of the population is in between.”

By cutting the proletarian cant and including this quarter of the population among the oppressed, the fight against the oppressor and for socialism could be won, he believed.

And that’s where he was wrong. He portrayed this group as the “sinking middle class” – composed of people like the “the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns”. Counting himself among their number, he invited them to let go and “sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong… we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”

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The alternative to Orwell’s inclusive socialism was a dreadful one:

“It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”

The middle class, however, had other ideas. It would sink neither into socialism nor fascism, thank you very much. Instead, it would rise ever higher on a flood tide of prosperity. Furthermore, and as if to prove Orwell completely wrong, great swathes of the working class would breakaway to join them.

This is the history of millions of British families – including my own.

*

George Orwell was born in 1903; my paternal grandfather was born two years later. The former was born in India – the son of a British civil servant; the latter in the East End of London – the son of a cabinet maker.

The Orwell family was therefore middle class; my family working class. But we can refine those categories. Orwell’s grandfather was a clergyman and his great-grandfather was landed gentry. So, not just middle class, but upper-middle class. At the same time, we can see a story of wealth diminishing down the generations, which is why Orwell described himself as “lower-upper-middle class” – “the correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money.”

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I’m afraid the Franklins cannot trace their ancestors as far back as the Orwells. People born in the poorest part of Victorian London didn’t have family trees. Presumably at some point in the 19th century, or perhaps before that, an ancestor left the countryside to find work in the Great Wen. But there’s no memory of it, and so the story begins with my great-grandfather. Being a skilled craftsman, he wasn’t just working class, but upper-working class – not that he’d have described himself that way.

His son, my grandfather, left school at 14 to follow his father’s trade. That would have meant a long apprenticeship in the same workshop, ensuring the skills necessary to making furniture were deeply ingrained by doing the same tasks over-and-over again. As an apprentice he would have been paid a pittance, but by the end of it he could cut a dovetail joint with his eyes closed. Thus as a young man he’d have earned a half-decent wage, enough to save a few shillings each week. By the 1930s, he’d saved enough not only to get married, but to realise two previously inconceivable ambitions – to own his own home and to get out of the East End.

An opportunity presented itself: about half-an-hour’s train ride away, in Essex, farm land was being auctioned off in small plots to the highest bidder. My grandfather bought four of them at £5 each. And then he built a house – in his spare time (he was still working his day job in the East End). It took him two years of early mornings, late nights and weekends, but he did it – he had a home, fresh air and a family.

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But before this turns into the Essex version of The Darling Buds of May, I should point out the less-than-idyllic realities. Firstly, the strain of building a house while holding down a job took a toll on my grandfather’s health. Sawing through sheets of asbestos roofing material wouldn’t have helped either.

As for the rural setting, the plotlands were never fully serviced – and later plans to change this were interrupted by the war. My dad and his sisters therefore grew up in a house with no electricity and no running water (there were standpipes further down the unsurfaced road). That said, they were luckier than a lot of their neighbours. Before the war, most of the plots were used as weekend getaways – and contained caravans and shacks as opposed to anything that could be called a house. But once the Blitz started, these filled up with families living there full-time in all seasons.

These days we’d call it a shanty town, but to those who made their new lives there it meant safety, freedom and a stake in the future.

Nothing much remains of the plotlands: what hasn’t been swallowed up by suburbia is now a park.  A single house – ‘The Haven’ – is preserved as a testament to a vanished way of life. 

In the post-war period, the rest were cleared away, with people moving out to new towns like nearby Laindon and Basildon. That’s where my father went to school – and where he went to work, aged 16, in a council drawing office. His employers trained him up as a land surveyor – both on the job and at evening classes in a local college. This led to other jobs, with increasing managerial responsibility, until he and my mother started their own business and bought their own home. By the time my brother and I came along, it was simply assumed that we’d do A-levels and go to university, which duly we did.

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Things that were simply unimaginable to my great-grandfather became run-of-the-mill to my generation.

*

I don’t tell this story because it’s exceptional, but because, details aside, it’s the story of middle England.

At the beginning of the 20th century only 10% of homes were owner occupied; by the Millennium, it was 70%. As recently as the 1960s, fewer than 5% of school leavers went to university; the figure now stands at nearly 50%. As for what proportion of people call themselves middle class, that depends on the survey and how it phrases the question. But if one looks at occupation, the non-manual professions accounted for only a third of households in the late 1960s, but more than half after 2000.

Despite two World Wars and the Cold War, the 20th century was a time of expanding opportunities for ordinary working Britons. Writing from the perspective of the 1930s, the industrial North and his own straitened circumstances, Orwell can be forgiven for missing the trend, but he was unquestionably wrong: the middle class wasn’t sinking, it was recruiting.

In the post-war period, the cultural elites couldn’t deny what was happening – so they tragedised and satirised it instead. In America, there was Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play about the shattering of middle class delusions. In his autobiography, Miller wrote that his purpose had been to condemn a “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”

In Britain, there was John Brain’s 1957 novel Room at the Top, in which the working class protagonist plots his social ascent by impregnating the daughter of a well-to-do family and casting aside his true love. By the 1970s, the collision of the classes was being played for laughs – Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh being a classic of the genre.

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Well, fair enough – social pretension provides a worthy target for the social critic. But for the most part, social mobility is not ridiculous, it is glorious. For the first time in history, it wasn’t just the fortunate few who could dare to dream – and work hard to make those dreams come true – but the great mass of the people. So, never mind the drama and the comedy, where’s the celebration?

*

What we gained in the 20th century, we risk losing in the 21st – perhaps because we’ve placed so little value upon it.

These are not optimistic times. The young no longer expect to be richer than their parents. In part, that’s due to economic stagnation. Growth rates are slower now than they were in the post-war decades and wealth is more unequally distributed. Room at the top is not being created the way it used to be.

But we’re also making it harder for people to make their way up. The grips and footholds that allowed my family to better their lot have been chipped away. The land my grandfather built his house on cost £20 – about 10% of his annual earnings. What would it cost to get a building plot in the commuter belt in 2019? A multiple, not a fraction, of a half-decent salary – and that’s assuming you could get planning permission.

Then there’s the training my father got to become a land surveyor – which didn’t cost him anything. In fact he was being paid and, in the latter stages, given time off for formal instruction. Today, you have to go to university to become a land surveyor – or to undertake a whole range of once non-graduate professions. At least when I went to university there were no tuition fees, unlike the present era when you can expect to be charged the best part of £30,000 – whether you go to Oxbridge or an ex-poly.

*

My grandfather left school a hundred years ago. Over that time, the nature of work has changed beyond recognition for millions of people. In the space of just three generations, my family went from building things, to making accurate drawings of them, to writing about them for websites. As a society, we have dematerialised production, disembodied knowledge and placed value in the abstract.

And yet economic inclusion still depends on the same fundamentals – learning how to do something useful and finding a place to call your own. These are the twin paths to prosperity, but after a century of progress, we’ve placed tollbooths across both of them.

Click here to read the rest of our series, Class Wars, in which we asked contributors to address what is often a vexed question: what does class mean to you?

I have exhumed Orwell myself on occasion. It is hard not to; Orwell is one of the great twentieth century writers. As such, his influence is everywhere. To mull over a certain set of political questions in print – war and peace, freedom versus authoritarianism, socialism or capitalism – is invariably to tread upon ground previously walked by Orwell. And so while it has become something of a cliché to quote Orwell, it is also a sin of omission not to.

Columns and polemics that begin by asking ‘What would George Orwell do?’ (WWGOD) are ubiquitous. To see what I mean, type ‘Orwell and Brexit’ into Google – you’ll find page after page of articles purporting to know what Orwell would have made of the 2016 referendum.

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Brexit is only the latest incarnation of WWGOD. Casting an eye back more than a decade ago to the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, pro- as well as anti-intervention pundits frequently sought to borrow Orwell’s perceived moral authority to push their own respective positions.

One of the favoured Orwell-isms deployed by proponents of the war was that pacifism was “objectively pro-Fascist” – a phrase Orwell used in his correspondence with Alex Comfort, a pacifist who drew parallels between Nazi concentration camps and the British wartime state. Yet Orwell himself recanted on the phrase, later describing it as one of the “propaganda tricks” that “I have been guilty of… myself”.

More recently, Orwell’s famous jibe at fellow socialists has been applied to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

There is undoubtedly some truth to any comparison of Corbynism – with its conspiratorial thinking and flirtation with antisemitic tropes – to the cranks who flocked to socialism “like bluebottles to a dead cat” during Orwell’s day. One can also imagine Orwell being appalled by the gruesome communist apparatchiks that Corbyn has chosen to surround himself with.

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Yet Orwell remained a committed socialist until the end of his life, and his insistence that he “belong(ed) to the Left and must work inside it” has little in common with those who have chosen to ‘resign’ from the Left rather than stay and fight against a new generation of communist fellow travellers.

Orwell today is all things to all people. As Orwell himself wrote of Charles Dickens, but which might as easily be applied to himself, “The Marxist claims him as ‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat”.

In Orwell’s case this is partly a consequence of his political inconsistency. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense. On the contrary. The very worst quality in a political writer is an unwillingness to change his or her mind or to hold rigidly to some point of view or doctrine that has long since ceased to be applicable.

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Orwell was “a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies”, as Orwell himself wrote of Dickens in the same essay about the great Victorian novelist, precisely because he was prepared to change his mind about things: “when the facts change[d]”, as his contemporary John Maynard Keynes famously remarked.

This is why communists detested Orwell; but it is also why neoconservatives feel able to distort the meaning of his two great novels – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – in order to adopt him as one of their own. If you look at Orwell long enough, you can find whatever you are looking for.

Orwell arrived late at many of his arguments. As the English were reconciling themselves to the prospect of war with Germany, Orwell’s position was about as “objectively pro-Fascist” as he would go on to accuse others of being. Until March 1939 he was in Marrakesh “writing a pacifistic novel in his shirtsleeves”, as Orwell biographer Robert Colls puts it.

For far longer than many of his more clear-sighted contemporaries, Orwell viewed fascism in orthodox far-Left terms as merely capitalism in extremis. This is hardly the visionary George Orwell we are so used to hearing about.

Yet this apparent inconsistency does not detract from Orwell’s qualities as a writer. Indeed, Orwell’s value lies in the fact that he held firmly to first principles, extrapolating his practical ideas – which he was notoriously reluctant to thrash out comprehensively – from these broader starting points: solidarity with the oppressed, opposition to totalitarianism, and the beauty of “solid things” over abstract teleology.

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Orwell was a pessimistic pragmatist at root – but one who was nevertheless given to ideological flights of fancy characteristic of the Left-wing literary intelligentsia of his day.

Thus Orwell detested poverty and sought to understand the experience of the lower classes – yet he knew from his own experience in Spain that a state espousing altruism could easily turn into a repressive Leviathan. (Orwell witnessed first-hand the Russian-backed communists crush a genuine working-class revolution).

He saw war as a “racket” – yet he came to understand that peace depended on defeating Hitler’s Germany with bombs and bullets. He hoped to see a “Socialist United States of Europe”, viewing it as the “only worthwhile political objective” – yet he had few illusions as to the likelihood of such a federation coming into existence during his lifetime.

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Camus' rejection of tyranny is worth remembering today

By James Bloodworth

For all his inconsistencies, we can, however, be fairly certain as to who Orwell would have been interested in were he alive today: the homeless, the working poor, those suffering under the auspices of fashionable dictatorships. But then, it is only the ideologue who is uninterested in such people.

Orwell was never one of those. Which is why those who try to claim his spirit in our own age are as misguided as those who tried to fortify their arguments back in Orwell’s day by resurrecting the ghost of Charles Dickens. We know who Orwell would’ve sided with in the broadest sense – the poor and downtrodden – but extrapolating a doctrine or policy position from this and seeking to apply it to the present day is a form of shabby demagoguery.

Orwell’s brilliance lay in his willingness to re-think arguments he’d made just a few years earlier. Such people are rare; their inconsistency is arguably their greatest strength, and they can never be truly claimed by anyone. In today’s ideologically tribal atmosphere, that is the greatest lesson we can take from Orwell the writer.

How wrong I was. The person making the extraordinary claim that biological sex has nothing whatsoever to do with feminism was Sally Hines, Professor of Sociology and Gender Identities at the University of Leeds. In other words, someone responsible for the education of our impressionable youth.

Very much looking forward to a lovely lazy Xmas break and then to cracking on with my article about why ‘sex’ (as in ‘biological’ not desire) is no longer applicable to contemporary feminist theory and activism.

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) December 15, 2018

In recent years, the trans debate has produced some crazy views: that men can get pregnant, for example, and that boys can get periods. We women are told to use certain terms to describe our bodies, such as chest feeding, and ‘front hole’ so as not to exclude or offend transgender people.

But this tweet was the clearest example I have seen of the Orwellian double-think employed by a growing number of academic trans-allies: conflating the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. It’s a plank of extreme transgender ideology to deny that there are real and tangible differences between male and female biology, in order, I assume, to make the mantra, ‘trans women are women’ sound less extreme.

Fact and logic – the very bedrock of academic study – are increasingly disappearing when the issue of transgender ideology is on the table. As Kathleen Stock, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex explains, it is currently quite fashionable among certain academics to promote the view that biological sex is a social construct.

“Biological sex has a social meaning (gender), but that doesn’t remove the underlying material facts – the social meaning wouldn’t last for long if the biology wasn’t there to underpin it,” says Stock. “To deny this is insulting to those millions of females all over the world who are exploited for their reproductive capacities, or punished for the lack of them.”

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The media could make a serious difference to trans lives – why won't it?

By Owl Fisher

We women are oppressed on the basis of our biological sex, which is why feminists refer to our status as a ‘sex class’ (like the Marxist analysis of ‘working’ and ‘ruling’ class). Biological sex is the bedrock of women’s oppression. Females in every country in the world are abused and treated as second class citizens because of our biology. Unintentional pregnancy, criminalised abortion, death during childbirth, being left with the burden of caring duties… all this happens to us because we are female, not because of how we identify. Female genital mutilation, bride burning, sex selective abortion, rape, sexual harassment, anorexia, these are all part of the human female condition.

And that is why we would argue so strongly against those who would prefer to have it believed that biological sex does not exist. Look, for example, at this recent article in the New York Times. The writer correctly states: “Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.” What on earth does gender have to do with genitals? Genitals determine our physical, biological sex, and indicates whether we are male or female, not whether we are destined to like pink or blue.

No one, medic or otherwise, can ‘determine’ gender because it has no basis in material reality. It is comprised of sexist stereotypes. It is a tool of the patriarchy, made up to keep girls and women in place, and to privilege men. Girls are railroaded into playing with tea-sets and wearing pink dresses, and boys and encouraged into rough-and-tumble games and told they can grow up to be soldiers. These are rather crude examples of how boys and girls are socialised into behaviours that are seen by almost everyone – except feminists – to be appropriate to their sex (male or female).

Further reading

When did women's rights stop being human rights?

By Jo Bartosch

Gender is a social construct to keep girls and women subservient to men and boys. But sex is biology. And yet here we have an academic writing about how it is no longer applicable to feminist theory. How can female biology be irrelevant to feminism? When a pregnant woman is not hired, or sacked, this is down to sexism based on our biological functions. If a woman is infertile, or chooses not to have babies, she is often seen as worthless and a failure. Surely it is the job of an academic to explore and interrogate material reality? How is it that a professor of sociology can make such an Orwellian statement? Every female on the planet suffers as a result of the way her body and reproductive functions, in other words her biology, is treated by men under patriarchy.

The oppression and subordination of women, also part of our condition, is prevalent in every society, every nation, and across class, ethnic and cultural groupings.

Claiming that biological sex has nothing to do with the status of females is akin to claiming that the earth is flat. The difference is though, no-one appears to be afraid of laughing at flat-earth fantasists, but most people are still, despite a raging, public debate, are scared to challenge the transactivist extremists.

As its influence spreads, so too does its vocabulary. You can see it all over social media. There are Alphas, Betas, Cucks; there are those who have been “Red-Pilled”, as well as those who live in a state of blissful ignorance, asleep to the civilisational threats the alt-Right is fixated on.

The terms aren’t their own. They’ve been borrowed from popular culture, from films or books that have  struck a chord with converts to the cause. There’s something about these works that speaks to those who wish to upend liberal democracy, who feel shut out of the mainstream. Their concepts empower and embolden those on the political fringes. I think if we can understand that attraction, we can better guard against it. Here are their top three primary sources.

Brave New World

At first glance, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 dystopia is the average alt-Righter’s worst nightmare. Dystopias are unpleasant – that’s sort of the point – but Brave New World, in particular, encapsulates some of the alt-Right deepest fears. Inhabitants of Huxley’s futuristic world state – the very concept a rejoinder to nationalism – enjoy a level of sexual freedom at odds with the moralising traditionalist doctrines of the alt-Right. There is even erotic play between children – encouraged by the state – that would disturb the sensibilities of the far-Right, which, even more than your average man on the street, has historically been obsessed with unearthing paedophiles.

The docility of the populace in Huxley’s World State is maintained through a diet of consumerism and regular doses of Soma, an anti-anxiety, hallucinogenic drug of which “one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments”. The drug is said to contain “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol” but with “none of the defects”. It is the opium of the people in a literal sense.

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By Douglas Murray

A blissed-out population too dull and stupid to see what is being done in its name is a recurring theme on the political extremes. Even George Orwell, the supposed champion of the ‘common man’, had his ‘proles’ purring away in stupid contentment to the ditties turned out by the Stalinist ruling class in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “He really did believe that capitalism controls the ‘proles’… not by physical oppression, but by bread and circuses,” wrote Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick.

But at the same time Brave New World embodies several favoured alt-Right dictums. For a start, the World State’s motto is the distinctly fascistic Community, Identity, Stability. There is no impetus toward equality – something the alt-Right views as anathema to the “hierarchy of competence”, as Canadian professor Jordon Peterson calls it – but instead there is a rigid caste system, in which citizens are hatched in a “social predestination room” in order to fill specific social roles. People are trained not only to accept their inescapable social destiny, but to rejoice in it. There are those at the top of the food chain, and there are those languishing at the bottom. Each is indoctrinated to accept his or her allotted role.

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By Jenny McCartney

Through its depiction of strict social hierarchies (though in the book class gradients originate in the laboratory rather than from nature) Brave New World is where the alt-Right takes some of its favourite terms. This includes its labels for men who are said to be naturally superior – “alpha males” – and those who are subservient to them – “betas”. In other words, the world is divided along rigid hierarchical lines to the extent that fixed hierarchies exist within fixed hierarchies. Richard Spencer, an alt-Right figurehead who hopes to turn the United States into a white ‘ethno-state’, told Rolling Stone last year that women gravitated to the alt-Right in order to find partners with “alpha genes” and “alpha sperm”.

Key terms: Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, Epsilons, Soma, World State.

The Matrix

“The Matrix is a system… That system is our enemy… You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

The Matrix features lots of pseudo-profound monologues like this. The inhabitants of The Matrix are not ready to be ‘unplugged’, just as the inhabitants of Huxley’s World State are not ready to be weaned off the drug Soma. The populace is asleep, and it is the job of a band of revolutionaries – or counter-revolutionaries in the case of the alt-Right – to wake them up to what is really going on.

Neo, The Matrix’s nerdy protagonist, is offered a Red Pill as a gateway out of The Matrix by rebel leader Morpheus. If he takes the pill, he can escape the computer simulation in which most of humanity lives, but in the process he must confront a truth that is much harsher than the comforting illusion most people take for granted. On swallowing the Red Pill, Neo can never return to his prior state of ignorance. In other words, he can never un-learn the things he is about to see.

The Alt-Right love to use the Blue Pill/ Red Pill metaphors – the Blue Pill is the existing state of blissful ignorance – to describe when a person converts to their nationalist worldview.

The “red pill” is not just a gradual thing, it involves a fundamental change of perspective and basic principles. Whether Tucker will ever undergo this change—or remain a transitional figure—is all up to him.

— Richard Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) October 2, 2018

It’s a favourite trope, too, for anti-feminists, INCELs and PUAs. For them all, to be ‘red-pilled’ is to be suddenly awakened to a vast conspiracy propagated by women, minorities and ‘cultural Marxists’ against white men.

Alt-right misanthropy also emphasises the way the masses are trained to enjoy the bondage of the simulated world they inhabit, in the manner of consumerism. “Ignorance is bliss,” says a character named Cypher as he relishes a juicy steak that he knows is not real.

This, for the extremists, is a metaphor for humanity’s plight under consumer capitalism. We pump ourselves full of synthetic food and we passively imbibe a diet of ‘info-tainment’ and ‘fake news’ from the hated ‘MSM’ (mainstream media). Yet because ignorance is bliss, most of us are unwilling to snap out of this walking daze.

Key terms: Red pill, blue pill.

The Lord of the Rings

J R RTolkien is one of the alt-Right’s favourite authors. Poor Tolkien; he spoke out against the fascism of his day. However, his antipathy to 20th-century totalitarianism – he called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus” – was a rejection not only of fascism’s barbarism but also of its peculiar modernity. The central tenets of Tolkien’s stories are hierarchy, tradition, loyalty, agrarianism and clan loyalty. Thus Tolkien’s work captures several ultra-traditionalist themes that find favour on the alt-Right.

In the Lord of the Rings, an ultra-conservative and bucolic social order is threatened by Orcs, who reside in squalor and poverty. More broadly, the story hinges on worship of the past. A rigid social structure was once presided over by kings, wizards and an elite of Elves. However this social structure is constantly threatened by hordes of foreign and grotesque invaders from the lower orders. The story is one of degeneration, but also of violent cleansing and potential rebirth through the restoration of lost ideals (sound familiar?).

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Why does the Left hate Tolkien?

By Peter Franklin

Steve Bannon, ideological foot soldier of the alt-Right, is fond of making references to the Lord of the Rings. “The Hobbits are going door to door in the shire, and they’re getting everybody out,” Bannon said of the campaign last year to elect Roy Moore as the Alabama Senatorial candidate. In a similar vein, NRA spokesperson and conservative radio host Dana Loesch said that Moore had “pushed back against the forces of secularism and he said, just like in Lord of the Rings, ‘You shall not pass’”. She also called Moore the “Gandalf of Alabama”.

Stories which posit a lost golden age are highly attractive to the adherents of extreme and millenarian ideologies. For the Nazis there was the Volk, an imagined community in which German landowners and peasants had supposedly lived in an organic ‘people’s community’. For the Bolsheviks, before capitalism and feudalism men and women had lived under ‘primitive communism’. In the Lord of the Rings, the plot hinges on the restoration of a feudal structure where authority is worshipped and an absolute ruler wields that authority on the basis of blood-line. No wonder, then, that LotR finds favour on the alt-Right.

Key terms: Middle Earth, the Shire, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Wizards, Orcs, Gandalf the White.

***

There are certain universal truths contained in these three stories. Ones which you might accept regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. Consumerism can occasionally act as an unhealthy substitute for a life of meaning. As a society we often reach for drugs and medication (Soma) instead of dealing with the root causes of our alienation. Societies also tend to perpetuate convenient myths for the sake of social harmony (the blue pill), even when the premises on which these myths are built are suspect.

But swallowing such themes tout court is the mark of a conspiracy theorist. We do not live a vast computer simulation ala The Matrix. Nor are human beings rendered entirely passive by a diet of consumerism as they are with Soma in Brave New World. But something close to these beliefs do exist on the alt-Right, where reality itself is an imposition, behind which stands a sinister and powerful cast of manipulators and puppeteers. Tear away the illusions, the alt-Right tell us, and you will finally grasp the awful truth.

It is a seductive idea, but one that is closer to fiction than hard reality. On a moral level, we ought to deplore those who decide to join the alt-Right, a racist and misogynist movement that wishes to burn pluralism and tolerance to the ground. On a practical level, we should ask ourselves why so many young men are in a place where they are attracted to literal interpretations of dystopian fiction over liberal democracy.

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Here's what to read and watch if you want to understand the 'new left'

By James Bloodworth

Aren’t we lucky that we don’t live in a world like that?

Only here’s something to bear in mind: this month, John Hancock, an American life insurance company, announced that it would be expanding its Vitality programme, which enables policy holders to “record [their] everyday healthy habits, like taking a walk, to earn points and gain extra savings and rewards”. The recording is achieved through the use wearable fitness trackers, smartphones and other bit of kit.

Writing about the story for Vox, Cheryl Wischhover points out that a life insurance company has an obvious interest in its customers’ continued good health:

“….life insurance companies want to keep you alive as long as possible so that you keep paying your monthly premiums. It’s a double whammy for them when you die: not only do they lose your premiums, they have to pay your survivor(s).”

I’d say it’s also a great marketing strategy. There’s a growing number of self-quantifying health fanatics who don’t actually need much persuading to strap on a fitness tracker; rather, what’s lacking in their lives is anyone who actually wants to know how many steps they’ve walked that day. John Hancock is pressing all the right buttons.

It should be stressed that the company is not forcing anyone to take part or share their fitness data. Furthermore, they are rewarding healthy habits not punishing unhealthy ones; and if you hate the idea anyway, other life insurance providers are available.

But what if a special feature of one life insurance provider’s products becomes a general feature of all health insurance provision? Being without health insurance in America isn’t much fun – so anything generally required of policy holders is pretty much compulsory.

How does a potential choice between wearing a tracking device or losing your health cover grab you? A tad dystopian, perhaps?

Well, that might not be the half of it. Wischhover reminds us that the insurance companies could use the device data to “potentially weed out bad health-risk customers.” And let’s not forget that health monitoring technology is getting more sophisticated all the time:

“Apple announced on September 12 some new health features in its Apple Watch, including that it will be capable of taking electrocardiogram readings of your heart… Surely some for-profit health entity — like an insurance company! — will figure out how to monetize this.”

Then there’s all the health-related information that can be gathered through your online activity. What if the health insurance companies of the future require you to share data about your online purchases? Just make sure you pay for that box of donuts in cash.

Is this dystopia for Americans only? Perhaps not. Countries with socialised models of healthcare might also be vulnerable to the hi-tech enforcement of healthy lifestyles. Instead of the profit motive, the driver would be the need to keep public spending under control. One could imagine hard-up governments offering discounts on social insurance contributions or rebates on taxes in return for verifiable evidence of responsible behaviour.

So who will take this furthest – the American healthcare industry or the welfare states of Europe?

My money is on the latter. As CS Lewis said, “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive”.