Now, along comes artificial intelligence.

A major question — and source of anxiety — provoked by AI concerns its effects on economic outcomes: who will thrive, and who will be displaced? Will firms require far less human labor to produce greater output, consigning vast swaths of workers to the margins? Or will entirely new forms of work emerge, sustaining broad-based prosperity?

These are important questions. But they aren’t the most fundamental ones. The deeper issue is how artificial intelligence will interact with natural human intelligence — and thus how it will reshape the relationship between cognitive ability and economic reward.

Crucially, this isn’t simply a question about what AI is, as a technology. It is a question about how it is used, and by whom. Whether AI widens or narrows inequality will depend not only upon its technical capabilities, but on the social and developmental conditions that determine who is able to use it effectively.

Economists capture this distinction by asking whether two inputs are complements or substitutes. If artificial intelligence is a complement to human intelligence, it makes capable people more productive. Those who are already skilled can use AI to extend their reach, scale their output, and outperform others by an even greater margin. If, by contrast, AI is a substitute, it performs tasks that previously required human intelligence, thereby reducing the advantage of being especially smart. Work that once demanded elite cognitive ability becomes accessible to a much broader range of people.

The difference matters enormously. In one case, inequality widens; in the other, it may narrow.

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Much of the anxiety surrounding AI assumes the first scenario. People fear the emergence of a permanent over-class of AI-enhanced cognitive elites, with the majority relegated to precarious and lower-value work. That outcome is certainly possible. But it isn’t inevitable.

Even those closest to the technology appear uncertain. Some suggest that AI may erode the value of highly specialized technical skills while elevating more general capacities — judgment, communication, adaptability. Others anticipate the opposite: that those best able to harness these tools will pull further ahead. These conflicting predictions aren’t especially informative in themselves. But they do highlight a central point: how we implement the AI revolution will determine whether machines will primarily amplify human intelligence or replace it.

To see what is at stake, consider how technology has historically amplified talent. As the economist Sherwin Rosen demonstrated, prior to the advent of music streaming services, a slightly better singer could reach millions more people than her nearest competition. A top singer would have access to resources, such as record deals, radio airplay, television appearances, and prime concert venues, that the second-best singer might not, translating a marginal edge into a massive payday. AI might operate on the same principle — as a “superstar” enabler. 

A top-tier lawyer, equipped with AI tools, can survey vast bodies of case law, identify relevant precedents, and draft arguments more quickly, while still relying on unique human judgment to determine what matters. A skilled programmer can generate, test, and refine complex systems at unprecedented speed. In such cases, the technology doesn’t replace human intelligence; it amplifies it. Those who are already highly capable benefit the most.

In this world, where AI and human intelligence are complements, exceptional minds multiply their output, while routine cognitive tasks — data entry, basic analysis, even portions of coding — are increasingly automated. The result is a steeper earnings curve, with modest differences in cognitive ability yielding large differences in income. We’ve seen glimpses of this already. Tech giants like Google and OpenAI are hoovering up talent, paying premiums for the brightest, while entry- and mid-level jobs in fields like journalism or graphic design face AI encroachment. At the same time, the economic rents generated by frontier AI systems may accrue disproportionately to a small number of firms and their owners, further concentrating rewards.

But there is another possibility. Artificial intelligence might instead function as a substitute for certain forms of human cognition. In that case, it would reduce the premium placed on raw intellectual ability by making high-level performance accessible to a broader population.

An analogy may help. Eyeglasses once revolutionized life for the visually impaired. They didn’t turn everyone into hawks with perfect vision, but they prevented poor eyesight from being a lifelong handicap. Bad eyes no longer meant exclusion from reading, driving, or fine craftsmanship. Now, with a few exceptions, poor eyesight is irrelevant to one’s employment prospects. AI could do something similar for intelligence, acting as a corrective lens for the mind. It might not make us all geniuses, but it could mitigate the penalties of average cognition, allowing more people to compete on equal terms. A nurse practitioner using diagnostic tools might approximate aspects of specialist judgment. A small-business owner could perform functions that previously required multiple professionals.

In such a world, what matters less is the speed or depth of one’s unaided reasoning, and more the ability to deploy these new tools effectively — to exercise judgment, to work reliably, and to integrate machine outputs into meaningful action. Traits like discipline, judgment, and social intelligence could become relatively more valuable.

It is tempting to think that whether AI complements or substitutes for human intelligence is a fixed property of the technology itself. But this is misleading. The same tools can function differently depending on the context in which they are used. Where individuals are well-trained and capable of directing these systems, AI will tend to amplify their abilities. Where such capacities are lacking, it may instead replace them.

My own expectation is that, at least in the near to medium term, AI will function more as a complement than a substitute for high-level human cognition, thereby intensifying inequality before any equalizing diffusion takes hold.

Even so, markets don’t stand still. People and institutions adapt. As the value of certain skills rises, individuals respond by acquiring them, and organizations adjust how work is structured accordingly. Over time, these processes may soften the initial effects of technological change. This raises another issue — one that is emphatically social, not technological.

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Adaptation is sure to be uneven. Families with resources — stable homes, access to quality education, and strong social networks — are better positioned to respond. They are more likely to cultivate the habits and dispositions that make effective use of these new technologies possible. Others may lag behind not because they inherently lack relevant abilities, but because they lack access to environments that support their development.

A key constraint, then, isn’t simply access to AI tools. It is access to the conditions under which people learn to use those tools well. The relevant “skill” here is judgment — knowing when to rely on the machine, when to question it, and how to integrate its outputs into meaningful action. Consider a junior analyst using an AI system to generate a financial report. The machine can produce a polished document in seconds — complete with charts, projections, and plausible-sounding explanations. But the real task is not producing the report; it is knowing whether the underlying assumptions make sense, whether the data are reliable, and whether the conclusions follow. A less experienced worker may accept the output at face value. A more seasoned one will probe it, adjust it, and in some cases reject it entirely. The difference is not access to the tool, but the judgment required to use it well.

The question, therefore, is not simply what AI will do to us, but what we will do with it. If it becomes a tool that extends the reach of those already advantaged, inequality will rise. If it becomes a widely usable aid to competence, it may narrow the gap.

Either way, the decisive factor will not be the machine itself, but the social arrangements through which human capacities are formed and deployed. For despite AI’s power, it cannot determine how we use our new and improved vision. But it will force us to reckon with the world we’re building. The degree to which AI polarizes or equalizes us will depend upon our values and our foresight. Major technological disruptions inevitably reveal our flaws — in social organization, in the ways we apportion rewards, in our determination of virtuous living — but technology alone does not determine our fate. That’s the difference between us and our eyeglasses.

Censori’s outfits have been growing increasingly in need of censorship for some time. In 2023 she was photographed in Florence, trailing after West, clad only in a sheer bodystocking and clutching a purple pillow like a child’s teddy. Then there was the claustrophobic Maison Margiela shroud, all sheer full-face covering and a tire-like collar.

West, meanwhile, stalked next to her in shoulder pads and tights, like a Judge Dredd terrorist with a hooded hostage ready for necklacing. He seems to relish displaying Censori’s beauty, vulnerability, and pliancy, as a foil to his own vaguely paramilitary-tinged and always fully clothed aesthetic — often in dark glasses, and often masked, too, like a bodyguard or executioner. We’re to treat it as high fashion; but her huge eyes, blank face and awkward, near-naked discomfort cry out that something is off.

Creative passion or abuse? Opinion is divided. Early in their romance, West wrote a febrile song called “Censori Overload”, lamenting “no more sex till marriage, and no more drip till Paris”. She has been described by some as West’s “muse”: an inspiration and living artwork. Others find the outfits degrading, and worry that the relationship is abusive.

Perhaps the most liberal interpretation is that it’s just kinky, with West as the “dom” and Censori in the “sub” role and the whole dynamic subject to an unusual degree of public exposure. Certainly West has form for enjoying power and control in relationships: often dictating the wardrobe choices of women he dates, even clearing out ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe on camera. He reportedly employs a whole “secret team” to create Censori’s outlandish outfits, as though she’s a living doll, and announced early last year that she would wear “no pants this year”. He gropes her publicly — and, it appears, sometimes demands still more intimate public sexual favors: a 2023 incident in a water taxi in Venice saw West photographed seemingly with his trousers at half-mast and Censori’s head in his lap — prompting local police investigations. At the Grammys over the weekend, West reportedly ordered her to drop the coat with the three words “Make a scene”.

This is all still, more or less, at least arguably within the scope of “lifestyle BDSM”, which is to say a form of long-term couple relationship that never breaks out of “dominant” and “submissive” roles. But advocates of BDSM emphasize that while participants in a “kinky” partnership may agree to a “power exchange” even 24/7, the dynamic itself should be consensual, pre-negotiated and based on mutual trust and communication — with “safe words” giving the submissive party an escape route if it all gets too much. That doesn’t sound like it’s happening here: West reportedly screens her social media, controls what she eats, and even tells her when to go to bed.

So are West and Censori just kinky, or kinky and playing without safe words? And if so, what’s the difference between that and coercive control? But when we set BDSM itself into context, it becomes clearer that its safe, sensible rules for rational perversion can’t be made to apply in this case. Rather, they serve to distract from what’s actually off about this scenario.

As a cultural phenomenon, BDSM only only emerged alongside liberalism itself. As the writer Andrew Klavan has noted, one of the great early innovators in the relativist philosophies that underpin modern liberalism was the Marquis de Sade: also a notorious sexual degenerate and origin of the “S” in BDSM. Downstream of (among other liberal thinkers) his trailblazing, amoral, often sadistic (they named it for him!) advocacy of radical sexual libertinism, a liberal worldview has steadily emerged in which sexual and social norms may be discarded in favor of individual freedom and will.

Especially since the Sixties, we have leaned into that Sadean social picture: one that decries moral absolutes and rejects baked-in asymmetries and social givens, asserting, instead, the freedom of every individual to do what he or she wishes. Among less amoral liberals than de Sade, this tends to come with a side-order of egalitarianism and strictures on harming others. In other words: we should be able to do what we want, provided everyone consents, and we’re all working meanwhile to abolish real-world asymmetries of power.

This is the context in which BDSM makes sense. For it’s a good rule of thumb that whatever is most forbidden will seem especially enticing. It’s thus most committed to egalitarianism — broadly, liberals — who are also most likely to fantasize about domination and submission. The practice of “BDSM” within its usual “safe, sane, and consensual” boundaries, complete with safe-words, creates a space to enjoy the frisson of power asymmetry for liberals otherwise committed to the flattening and disavowal of all such differences.

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And what’s so icky about West’s decision to sculpt his personal life into a de Sadean tableau is that he’s taking full advantage of the now-widespread culture of liberal sexual permissiveness that views BDSM as so perfectly fine it has a UK Ministry of Justice advocacy group. In this culture, Bianca Censori’s treatment can be read as merely “kinky” — and yet West’s treatment of her exploits the fact that social hierarchies never really flattened. Or, rather, that flattening has gone into reverse. Kanye West stands among an emergent post-liberal phenomenon of lords and princes: billionaire titans of a new Gilded Age, who live out, very literally, the internet assertion that you really can “just do things”.

In this context, what’s off about West and Censori isn’t the sexually explicit outfits, or even waterborne BJs. It’s not even West’s evident relish for exposing and exhibiting his obedient consort. It’s the fact that he has selected someone to serve as his counterpart who is unable to play at his power level.

The bestselling soft-porn fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey thrilled countless normie housewives with its romantic-yet-kinky account of the love-affair between dominant billionaire Christian Grey, and loving, submissive Ana. In that book it all ends happily, and Christian Grey falls deeply in love with Ana and doesn’t make her wear a see-through bodystocking in public. But the reality of real wealth disparity in the postmodern age is that, like the aristocrats of the pre-liberal age, the super-rich are “equals” only with others of their own kind. Relative to normies, the idea of “equality”, or even “consent”, is largely an abstraction. They really can just do things, and we can’t. In terms of what this looks like in practice, for socially asymmetric romance, a better mythic model than Christian Grey is the (from a modern perspective, rather rapey) Greek mythology of Olympian gods seducing mortal women: a grab ‘em by the pussy world of simply taking what you want, all horny swans and abduction by bull.

West appears to have come upon Censori somewhat like an Olympian seducing a nymph. Not long after they met, he “married” her, in a private, possibly-not-legally-binding ceremony — a scant few months after finalizing his divorce from fellow-Olympian Kim Kardashian. And the contrast between the two women says it all. Conservatives may curl a lip at the flashy, new-money excess of the celebrity super-rich class, preferring the understated grandeur of old European money; but in the weird world of “high net worth individuals”, Kardashian — who is also a billionaire — is indisputably in the same league of aristocracy as West: postmodern influencer royalty.

By contrast, Censori has neither obviously abundant family money, nor particularly extensive business interests of her own beyond serving as architect-turned-model-turned-living-doll. She is, figuratively as well as literally, all fur coat and no panties. Combined with the ambivalently binding “marriage”, this relative poverty makes her acutely vulnerable: a situation in which domination and submission is less a fun game to play at weekends, than an all-enveloping reality. In theory, she could surely walk away any time; but as the journalist Tina Brown observed recently, there is nothing more corrupting than private jets. So unlike for Queen Kim, it’s easy to see how the costs to Censori of walking away from her controlling prince and his creepy fashion thing could lead her to tolerate more, or indeed wear less, than she would really prefer.

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In this new age of yawning wealth disparities, West’s remodeling of Censori from employee to chattel-wife takes objectification to new levels — all while presenting Censori as wife, controlling her as if she were still an employee, and smuggling the whole queasy cocktail under the cover of possibly-“kinky” sexual liberalism.

In old-money aristocratic terms, then, we might compare West’s choice of Bianca Censori as his project to a duke seducing a maid, then parading her half-naked in public — simply because he can. The new-money volume of objectification and media spectacle makes it something still worse. If we lack the language today to express our disgust at the obvious misuse of power this all entails, it’s because the liberal world has forgotten how to think about real, substantive class hierarchy. With a post-liberal one now fully upon us, in the Second Trumpian Epoch, it might be time to remember.

Such harrowing accounts are all too common in the vast wilds of Northern California, uniting residents urban and rural, rich and poor, Right and Left. Lands that were filled with fire-tolerant glades of oak under Native American stewardship are now dense pine forests brimming with flammable biomass. Everyone here has a story about forest fires. Locals’ accounts are served with strong opinions on the political failings of both the Californian Democrats under Gavin Newsom and the Trump-led national GOP. Over the last decade, the West Coast has given us a glimpse into the future of ecological calamity. Now, as the islands of Greece crackle and fume, and as California’s latest wildfire sweeps into Nevada, we can already intimate how these infernal events can reshape a community, igniting all of its underlying social ills. 

Judging by California’s experience, one’s chances of recovering from a forest fire diverge greatly along class and geographic lines. Despite some palliative measures, the California and Federal government, ostensibly committed to the victims of climate change, is visibly asleep at the wheel. Sacramento is leaving its urban and rural peripheries, poverty-stricken inner-city sectors and remote townships to suffer the brunt of escalating fire destruction. The Carr Fire was succeeded by the even greater August Complex Fire in 2020 (which engulfed 379,613 hectares to become the largest fire in Californian history). But August’s damage is dwarfed by the relatively small Camp Fire in 2018. The Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest, killing 85 people and bulldozing the town of Paradise. Many of the smaller settlements I drove through still seem like ghost towns: depleted of life not only by fire but reactively high rents and rocketing insurance premiums.

At the site of the Carr Fire, victims talk of a “fire tornado” ripping through their homes. Its path took it through the small Gold Rush settlements of Whiskeytown, Old Shasta, and French Gulch, and towards the heart of Redding. The Carr formed part of a new wave of fires produced by a combination of climate change, human population, dodgy infrastructure, and the hot Diablo Winds that blow in from the eastern mountains and deserts. California has, always, faced forest fires — but these are new beasts. Together, environmental and human forces have transformed wildfires from manageable occurrences into cataclysmic disasters, rampaging through the dense biomass of pine forests and chaparral shrubs that overgrow without controlled burn operations.

There, I meet Jennifer Gibson, the post-wildfire coordination ecologist for the National Parks Service who lost her own home to Carr. Starting in the centre of Redding, we drive out to Whiskeytown Lake. Vast clusters of blackened pines jut up along mountain lines in what used to be dense forests; what once resembled an alpine vista now appears as a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And the people here have a dystopian choice to make. Some choose to stay, embracing the pioneer spirit, rebuilding their houses in less-flammable material. Others believe that much of California will one day be uninhabitable and leave, seeking more northerly and temperate lands to settle. “You could hear the propane tanks going off, the sky was red, ashes were raining down. I wake up, and it looks like a war scene,” Gibson says. “After the Carr Fire, I don’t know where to live in California that would feel safe.” But Gibson’s experience is an economic issue too: the combination of the Carr and Camp fires has pushed up construction contractor prices and rents, forcing many to move inland to Idaho and Montana, where costs are lower.

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We walk up to Gibson’s house — a burnt-down log cabin, with only the stone foundations remaining. “The wind up here was like giant bellows, feeding the fire into a frenzy. All the houses around here were burnt down,” she says. “It hurts coming back, I’m thinking about selling the land.” Dowling tells me that poor government and insurance company responses have led to general resentment, and even conspiracy, against the state and large corporations. “Distressed people have suspicions… a lot of people would substitute the term ‘insurance company’ for ‘the government’… they blame the system.”

It’s not an unfounded sentiment: upon examination, California’s fire problem soon becomes a problem of state capacity. Across much of the American West, fighting wildfires has become a complex and inefficient bureaucratic system of local, state, federal, park and even private services. But the problem spirals well beyond the remit of firefighters. Wildfires are a profoundly political problem, intersecting with high homelessness rates, rural and urban divides, declining corporate-run infrastructure, and conspiracy theories around politically motivated arsonists.

The specific ignition that started the Camp Fire had corporate origins, coming from a faulty powerline owned by California’s largest utility firm, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Ensuing lawsuits for liabilities of $30 billion bankrupted the group. Indeed, systems failure in outdated infrastructure is an increasingly common cause of wildfire and other environmental disasters, such as the recent Ohio Derailment. As the California historian Mike Davis points out in his essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”, Californians live in a “separate and unequal” system of fire prevention funding, regulation, and media attention. The wealthy in the Hollywood Hills, and what Davis calls “the fire coast” of the Santa Monica Mountains, continue to rebuild larger and larger houses after each wildfire while mouthing shallow support for “green” causes.

In contrast, LA’s urban working classes and peripheral rural towns such as Paradise suffer broken infrastructure and displacement. Some leave California permanently while others, rendered homeless by fires, live in encampments that themselves increase the risk of fire because cooking there is done on open flame. Across both LA and Northern California, I saw huge encampments established in the dry scrublands, where urban infrastructure meets the forest. Many homeless people mention that these areas near flammable scrub are the only places not actively swept by the police or subject to complaints from wealthy house owners. These homeowners, often Nimbys, also reject the planned densification of social housing, and rezoning — all policies that might reduce the likelihood of ignition by safely housing those in encampments.

Many, such as Davis, have tended to see California’s forest fires not just as an ecological problem, but a deeply political one. Davis took aim at policies stoked by an elite that had distanced itself from material and environmental realities. The state capacity built between FDR’s New Deal and Nixon’s environmental legislation has been slowly eroded. Consequently, an incredibly complex and failing system was unleashed by deregulation and a Democratic Party that prioritised its elite urban constituents. Davis, writing presciently at the high watermark of California’s reduction of state capacity in the Nineties, argued that the state was caught in a now-familiar doom loop: “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land-use regulations, and sometimes even the fire code, were relaxed to accommodate victims [prompting further fire].”

Indeed, the irrational zoning laws, prohibition of multifamily apartments, lack of social housing, and high rents across California have led some to identify homelessness as a key ignition factor in itself. “There are social issues we need to take care of,” says Assistant Chief Scott Corn of the Shasta-Trinity Unit of CAL FIRE. “Homelessness and drug abuse — we have seen fires start from those two sources exponentially. People will intentionally light fires because that’s the state of mind they’re in [on opioids and meth]. They’ll willingly tell you: ‘I lit the fires because the voices told me to.’” He explains that most of the fires used to be accidental. “Now, when we go to a fire where no crime was involved… that’s a pretty rare thing.” Illegal, energy-intensive marijuana operations can also malfunction and start blazes — to the extent that local conservatives have formed militias and other groups to shut them down and protect farms.

I head into the mountain ranges around Redding with Dan Dennett, another assistant chief in charge of fuel reduction operations in the area. As we climbed in altitude, lines of black pine stumps and desiccated oak trees filled the horizon. Bundles of underbrush, stacked like funeral pyres, burn on the roadside. Dennett is a strong advocate of a more interventionist approach to the problem: fuel reduction through logging, removing undergrowth, bulldozer CATlines, and fuel breaks. These are all techniques which have been controversial with environmentalist groups and scientific studies, who argue that denser forests actually retain flame-retardant moisture better. “The California Environmental Quality Act had good intentions, but it really handcuffed the timber industry,” Dennett says. “Without logging, there’s too much biomass, and the access roads for the fire service aren’t maintained.”

There’s no consensus on protecting California from fire, only an intense debate, which rages inside the fire-fighting institutions themselves. A number of its participants are engaged in political and economic lobbying, advocating different solutions such as technological fire suppression, controlled burns, rewilding approaches, and what has come to be known as TEK (traditional ecological knowledge). However, defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, who make many of the Forest Service’s aviation tools, compete against these organisations, along with logging consortiums and rancher associations. Despite this, attitudes towards total fire suppression have been souring as many locals embrace more holistic forest “management” techniques such as controlled burns. Some note that as forest fire frequency declines, acreage, time scales and destruction rates skyrocket.

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I later speak to Jaime Tarne, who has been involved with wildland firefighting and the science behind fire management since her first season in 1975 with the Forest Service. Instead of hardware, Tarne focuses on the need for auxiliary aid, mental-health services, and community support, as fires become more frequent and deadly every year. “This is something that, during my career, was ignored. You’re away from your family; you have friends who die. You don’t walk back into your home life. It’s not normal. If you make a career out of [wildland firefighting] you will lose friends.” Tarne says this has less to do with funding than human errors in high-stress situations: “People die because mistakes are made. Mistakes are made about how to fight the fire. Mistakes are made about when to leave. There’s a lot of ego in firefighters — there’s a machismo attitude. There’s an issue of not wanting to say no. But climate change is radically changing the severity of fires.”

Despite the difficulty of these working conditions, technological capacity, sponsored by aerospace companies, is only growing. Out in the remote ranchlands of Shasta County, I witness a hugely complex and coordinated set of aerial drops. Several light aircraft and helicopters circulate over a practice fire, dropping large amounts of water and flame retardants in a billowing orange haze. Both CAL FIRE and the Forest Service seem keen to show me these eye-catching displays. However, access to average firefighters was restricted. The aerial firefighters and smokejumpers I did meet only gave vague outlines about their training schedules.

Firefighters’ first mandate is to prevent property damage and save lives — an admirable mission. But, beyond the short term, many see a “war” against fire as merely palliative, if not inflammatory in the long run. The Biden administration is slowly starting to turn its gaze towards the issue of state capacity, especially concerning the environment. However, the encouragement and funding of what has been termed a “fire-industrial complex” may lead to unintended consequences as corporations funded by government contracts look to maintain the profitable problem of fire just as they once did war. Yet, at the same time, long-term holistic solutions to fire are often not vote-winners for average citizens understandably concerned about their houses, farms, cattle, and livelihoods.

Whichever angle you approach California from, whatever your social priorities, fire is nearby. More and more, conflagrations are becoming a symptom of the wider problems of the Golden State, from the hollowing-out of local government, to the venal corporate agenda that has come to replace it. In this regard, even as fires blaze across the globe, California still leads the pack.

It was into this context that a 700-page book about rentiers, wealth elites, inheritance, war, and taxation, over the previous two centuries, became an extraordinary publishing sensation. Few had heard of Thomas Piketty when Capital in the Twenty-First Century appeared, but his publisher, Harvard University Press, would soon be struggling (and failing) to keep up with demand for the book. Hundreds of thousands of copies were shifted over the summer of 2014, while A-boards appeared outside the luckier independent bookshops in hipster neighbourhoods around the world declaring “PIKETTY IN STOCK!”. Sales figures topped two million within a couple of years.

Inevitably, much of the media commentary descended into banality and crass comparison. Piketty himself was instantly declared a “rock star economist”, and compared with Karl Marx, presumably because he had published a doorstopper with the word “capital” in the title. Those who’d bothered to read (at least some of) Capital in the Twenty-First Century were surprised and impressed to discover, amid lots of graphs, references to Balzac and Jane Austen in a book notionally of economics. This was clearly more intriguing than the “economics 101” that was taught at school and university.

From the perspective of the trade publishing market, the book also had the merit of being beautifully simple to understand. Capital in the Twenty-first Century is ultimately a piece of historical statistical description, containing no real theory or mathematics to speak of. Its famous formula “R>G”, which even came to adorn t-shirts, refers to the long-standing tendency (Piketty has been adamant it’s not a “law”) of returns on capital being higher than growth in income from production. As anyone who has owned an asset (such as a house) might have noticed, its value tends to rise faster than one’s pay. Scale that up to an economy as a whole, and you have a situation where existing stocks of wealth are growing faster than GDP.

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Piketty’s thesis clearly chimed with narratives about inequality that had been developing on the Left since the 2008 financial crisis. The book’s focus upon the rising incomes and wealth of the top “1%” echoed the language of the Occupy movement, language which had itself been borrowed from the study of “top incomes” that Piketty had helped pioneer some years earlier. One of Britain’s most eye-catching political reactions to the banking crisis was UK Uncut, which was founded in 2010 to campaign against corporate tax avoidance, at a time when brutal cuts to benefits, higher education and local government were being unveiled. Fred “the shred” Goodwin, the CEO of RBS that had been bailed out by the British taxpayer and who had then resigned with a knighthood and a £700,000 pension, became a symbol of something morally rotten in capitalism. There was a widespread sense of an economy that was rigged in favour of the rich, which Capital in the Twenty-first Century did much to empirically substantiate.

But the extraordinary success of the book cannot be wholly explained in terms of media hype or the immediate fall-out from 2008. No doubt, the sentiments expressed by Occupy and UK Uncut remained potent ones, contributing some years later to the unexpected rise of “Left populists” such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Piketty has expressed some political sympathy with those movements, but if one were looking for a rousing, polemical denunciation of neoliberal capitalism around which to mobilise, one probably wouldn’t turn to Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Its resonance requires some deeper explanation.

The scientific study of “top incomes” originated in the early 2000s, led by the late British economist, Tony Atkinson, who struck up a collaboration with Piketty, based in Paris, and Emmanuel Saez in Berkeley. This yielded a series of academic articles and edited volumes, which passed under the radar of general readers or the media, back when nobody had ever spoken of “the 1%”. One distinguishing feature of this programme was a willingness to use novel sources of empirical data, namely tax records. Another was the study of very long-term historical trends, over not just decades but centuries. “The Top Incomes Database”, which first presented the kinds of graphs with which Capital in the Twenty-First Century is littered, was launched at a conference hosted by Atkinson and Piketty in Paris in 2011.

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Given the extraordinary historical reach of this research field, there was nothing explicitly contemporary about its findings or implications, especially during those years when few politicians or commentators were worrying about inequality. Most people had a general sense that inequality had been rising since Thatcher and Reagan came to power, but political attention under New Labour was squarely focused on alleviating poverty, and not on the other end of the income spectrum (which, famously, Peter Mandelson was “intensely relaxed” about).

The global financial crisis did disrupt that complacency, but not simply because of “Fred the Shred” or because George Osborne took an axe to various social safety nets. Piketty and his publishers lucked out because the macrofinancial paradigm of the post-2008 world suddenly rendered the “R>G” tendency (which Piketty argued had been around for at least 200 years) impossible to ignore. Britain in particular experienced its longest period of wage stagnation since the industrial revolution, while asset prices (including housing) soared. Quantitative easing poured boundless cheap money into equities, facilitating the sharp ascent of BlackRock and other giant asset managers. Fiscal tightening and unprecedented monetary loosening combined to offer as devastating a demonstration of Piketty’s thesis as he could possibly have imagined.

In this Pikettyan dystopia, the wealthy didn’t need to take any risks or become Gordon Gekko to swell their portfolios further; they simply needed to take advantage of the glut of cheap credit and hire a wealth manager. Capital in the Twenty-First Century arrived with a historical account of a phenomenon that had been largely forgotten about: the idle rich, living off passive investments and inheritances. Everything that Marx had admired about capitalism — its modernism, its upheaval, the insatiable hunger for productivity gains — was nowhere to be seen. In his rather nerdish, atheoretical manner, coolly tracing the ebbs and flows of wealth since the Enlightenment, Piketty held up an image of capitalism that was less characterised by class conflict, exploitation or upheaval, and more by the sheer durability of estates and portfolios over time.

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How landlords became monsters

By Nicholas Harris

Marxists scoffed. After all, where had all this wealth originated from, if not from relations of production that were essentially exploitative? But Piketty’s analysis spoke to a range of other struggles and injustices that often had little to do with production and employment, but which became increasingly prominent as the decade wore on. Piketty’s definition of “capital” (“the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market”) decentred productive capital, but shone a fresh light on how wealth in general is protected and passed on, via inheritance, tax avoidance, “philanthropy” and other forms of gift-giving, all of which were politicised in the 2010s. Social scientists were soon filling in the blanks, with fascinating studies of the legal services, “family offices”, elite schools and offshore trusts that insulated the new oligarchy from political interference.

Political-economic conflict now seemed less about class, in a Marxist sense, and more about intergenerational unfairness and the sheer luck of which family (with what sized “bank of mum and dad”) one happens to be born into. One of the remarkable implications of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that, due principally to its very high levels of top marginal income and inheritance tax, the post-1945 Keynesian era is the one phase of capitalist history in which the promise of meritocracy has ever been close to being realised. By fiscally suppressing “R>G” for 30 years (and because so much capital had been destroyed by war), people were able to work their way towards wealth ownership. The baby-boomer generation that benefited from this was the same generation that would later benefit from surging house prices, pay off their modest mortgages, and vote for Brexit. It has taken a while to recognise how much societies such as Britain have been reshaped by long-run trends in asset ownership and asset prices, but Capital in the Twenty-first Century was a key moment in this awakening.

Where has this got the Left? Piketty identifies as a “socialist”, and has produced a number of thoughtful proposals to tackle wealth inequality, such as a global wealth tax and (in his subsequent Capital & Ideology) a “citizen’s inheritance”. One could no doubt build a political movement dedicated to reversing the power of rentiers and wealth elites, as Jeremy Corbyn occasionally hinted at, launching his 2019 manifesto with a promise to go after “150 billionaires”. Tactics oriented around asset ownership, such as rent strikes, might form part of such a movement.

But Piketty is also a mild-mannered liberal technocrat, an heir to Keynes rather than Marx. Piketty anticipated the anxiety of liberals today, who believe in “hard work” and “enterprise”, but can see quite clearly that this economy rewards neither. In the decade since Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, that has virtually become an orthodoxy. Even some of capitalism’s most passionate defenders are concerned by the rising number of young people living with their parents into their 30s due to spiralling housing costs, by the creeping power of surveillance capital, or by the rise of “universal owners” such as BlackRock. These are all symptoms of a society governed wholly in the interests of asset owners. Some have even questioned whether it is still “capitalism”, given it no longer relies on productivity gains, or whether we are descending into “neo-feudalism”.

The political question, looking back on the decade that followed Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is why this groundswell of opposition has still not translated into a genuinely transformative political program that puts these tendencies into reverse. Piketty cannot be held responsible for that, and he has done his best to identify the necessary measures that might reduce inequality. But there is nevertheless a slight unworldliness about his perspective and its emphasis upon very long-term statistical trends, which while never inevitable, come to feel almost natural and unsurprising. Even if “R>G” is merely a trend, and not a law, it expresses a slight air of fatalism, that (combined with so much other environmental and political news over the past decade) makes progress feel impossible. Like the proverbial frog in the ever-heating water, there is no moment of crisis when it might become necessary to jump out. In one of Capital in the Twenty-First Century’s most evocative phrases, Piketty describes how the “past devours the future”, as past accumulations of wealth overshadow our options in the present. This is not a fertile mood for progressive politics.

When Occupy first raised their banners declaring “we are the 99%” in Zuccotti Park and on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, “the 1%” was felt to be nearby, in the banks of Wall Street and the City of London. These encampments were putative acts of democracy. But as empirical attention to wealth, asset management and “high-net-worth” individuals has grown, their distance from the rest of us has come to feel ever more unbridgeable. At their best, studies of the super-rich illuminate the impacts of extreme wealth upon cities, democracy and culture, to aid public understanding. But the sheer exoticism of Elon Musk, Mayfair hedge funds and Monaco superyachts can also become a spectacle, which reduces the observer to passivity.

Piketty was right to divert attention away from the sphere of productive capital, and towards wealth in general. But this means that political conflict evaporates into the ether of long-run tendencies, asset portfolios and offshore jurisdictions. One of the great strengths (or comforts, if you like) of Marxism is that it focuses political attention upon one specific locus of activity: the workplace. You know what to do and what to demand if you are a Marxist. The same is less true if you are a “Pikettyan”. A return to Sixties-era top marginal tax rates (at over 90% for income and inheritance, even in the United States) would be a start. Piketty has made many radical and optimistic proposals of this sort. The problem is that they suggest a faith in liberal democracy and the current assortment of political parties that few people share in 2024, given the influence of big donors and media. Meanwhile, the long-term tendencies roll on.

Despite its origins in the post-Second World War period, the history of private equity really begins in the Eighties, the decade in which Western countries abandoned Keynesian economic management for the small-state ethos of the neoliberal regime. Coincident with this turn was the start of a long trend of rising economic inequality. This was driven by two broad changes: the rise of the developing world, led by China, which reduced inequality between rich and poor countries. And the widening of inequality within countries, as newly liberated business owners were empowered to drive down wage bills and drive up profits. When plotted onto a graph, the result was the elephant curve. It provided a visual illustration of how, since 1980, the global one percent captured twice as much of global growth as the bottom 50%.

With ever-swelling pools of capital, this rising international class changed the way they managed their wealth. Having previously invested largely at home, spearheading the growth of national economies, the one percent globalised, shifting capital offshore to exploit the even higher returns of low-wage economies. While this stimulated the rise of a middle class in the developing world — the middle “hump” of the elephant — it also fuelled the deindustrialisation of Western countries. The working classes were shattered, one consequence being the “deaths of despair” that have been chronicled by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

Profits, however, surged. This gave owners both more capital to invest but also, in an environment where deregulation was underway, more liberty to deploy their capital in aggressive ways. There arose a new breed of owner who was “private” in that they took over publicly-listed firms, often using borrowed money, then removed them from the stock exchange and the prying eyes of shareholders. Thereby free to do as they pleased, they could lay off workers, close shops, sell assets or transfer any debts they had used to buy the firm onto its books. The leveraged buyout was born, and the Eighties corporate raider would go on to be immortalised in the character of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, his “greed is good” mantra embodying the ethos of the neoliberal age.

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Like the fictitious Gekko, neoliberal intellectuals maintained that enlightened self-interest, as they preferred to call it, would ultimately benefit everyone. As Bill Clinton insisted when pushing back against private equity’s critics — perhaps ominously in an interview with that celebrated do-gooder, Harvey Weinstein — private equity was helping to revive sick firms and thereby reinvigorate the economy. The story private equity’s exponents told of its virtues might have been lifted from an Ayn Rand novel, in which visionary entrepreneurs take over a moribund publicly-traded firm, get rid of the risk-averse technocrats running it, then apply the tough love it needs to turn around.

Yet there was a dark side to this new era of plutocracy. While the ascent of such barons seems reminiscent of the Gilded Age, today’s elite tend to favour a different business model from their entrepreneurial Victorian predecessors. Whereas the latter were profiting off the wrenching transition of agricultural societies into industrial ones by building things — in particular, railways — today’s elite appear parasitic by comparison. In many cases, what private equity delivers amounts to asset-stripping or consolidations that leave most people worse off, yet add little new output to the economy. This has been called “conspicuous destruction”.

A popular strategy is to acquire a firm using borrowed money, transfer the debt onto the firm, and then run down the firm to pay hefty dividends. Pioneered in the US airline industry after its late-Seventies deregulation, the Eighties would see Carl Icahn buy Transworld Airlines, load it with debt while paying himself hefty profits, and then gradually sell off its assets until it went bankrupt. That same decade, Frank Lorenzo would acquire Eastern Airlines, transfer its assets to another non-union airline he ran, then shut it down.

Of course, you don’t need a private equity front to do this, as any long-suffering Manchester United supporter will tell you (and Lorenzo similarly kept his companies public). But a big advantage of the private equity model is that, unlike United’s much-reviled owners, the beneficiaries remain hidden from public view. By the time the sewage from a privatised utility shows up on public beaches, or tenants are evicted from a council estate after its new owners convert it to luxury condos, the damage has been done.

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As was the case in the original Gilded Age, today’s barons benefit from the collusion of politicians. The shift to a neoliberal policy regime made credit easier to access, deregulated the way businesses operated, and sold off state assets in the name of greater efficiency. A little-known fact of the era of low taxes is that governments were able to contain their spending by selling off the family jewels, then spending the proceeds. As a result, most Western governments now show a net negative worth on their balance sheets. Given that private equity has been a keen participant in this transfer of state assets to private hands, it looks like a terminal phase of Western capitalism, as public spaces are run down to line private pockets and poor people are squeezed hard to support the rich in their glamorous lifestyles.

But it’s actually more complicated than that. Although the growth of private equity has coincided with widening inequality, the latter has not been the sole driver of the industry. There’s another thing that has accompanied the rise of private equity: ageing societies.

When Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were elected, roughly a tenth of the population in developed countries were retired. Today that share has doubled. Meanwhile, improved health and nutrition have meant that people are living longer. Whereas the average life expectancy in Western countries was about 10 years past retirement in 1980, today that figure has more than doubled. Several Western societies have now crossed the threshold beyond which some people spend more time collecting a pension than they did working for it.

As a result, more and more people now have to be supported by a workforce which, in relative terms, is contracting. This would be challenging enough. What makes it even tougher for Western governments is that the growth of labour productivity, which was rising steadily throughout the post-war period, has now slowed to a crawl. So the hope that fewer workers could support more people by producing more is looking decidedly Pollyannish. Instead, more must be squeezed from the working population.

This can only go on for so long before something breaks. One obvious solution is to reform the pension system, by reducing benefits or raising retirement ages. But given that pensioners are among the most politically engaged in the population, politicians shy away from such decisions. Instead, they’ve tended to move in the opposite direction, as Britain has done by raising benefits. Western governments have funded the increased largesse with tax rises or cuts to other public services and, to bolster private pensions that get no state funding, policies that juice returns on asset markets, such as the loose monetary policies, privatisation and deregulation that have transferred assets to private equity.

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In recent years, pension funds have collectively become the biggest investors in private equity. When tenants of a London council estate organised a rebellion against their eviction, they discovered that the new landlords were a private equity firm owned by American pension funds. Canadian pension funds occupy a similar role in Britain’s privatised water utilities, which have allowed sewage to flow into seas and rivers. In effect, tenants and workers are getting squeezed in no small measure to keep retired teachers and civil servants in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed.

It always astounds people, but it’s true: the one percent don’t exist in mythology but in our neighbourhoods, dining alongside us at our favourite restaurants and bumping into us as they walk their dogs. That’s because, statistically, any homeowner with a defined-benefit pension is part of the one percent that sits atop the global economy.

Life has recently become more difficult for private equity, as central banks abandon their easy-money policies. Returns are falling and new money is drying up, but demands for cash from investors continue. As a result, private equity firms are resorting to increasingly opaque deals, such as transferring assets across their own funds, to meet investor demands for cash. Given how unregulated private equity is, it could be storing up some nasty surprises should the markets turn sharply.

Private equity is thus coming into the crosshairs of politicians and regulators. As our leaders come face to face with the pension funds that invest in private equity, they will confront tough choices. Would private equity be too big to fail? Nobody wants to be blamed for pensioners being told their monthly payments will be frozen for the foreseeable future — but the alternative, of boosting fund values with the time-worn method of easy-money policies, looks ever less likely in an environment of persistent inflation. Major problems may therefore be brewing in the pension industry.

Indeed, pension pots would be a possible target for a tax raid, as collapsing public services across developed economies are forcing politicians to fund spending rises. Before singling them out, though, it’s worth noting that while the one percent have benefited more than most of us from the neoliberal age, their gains pale in comparison to the 0.1%. If we’re to start taxing the rich more, this would be the better place to look.

Whether or not politicians want to tackle topics such as inter-generational justice or the sustainability of the pension system, events in markets may force the question of retirement’s future onto the public agenda. Higher interest rates have begun to knock down asset values and hit profits. If this continues, fund managers will eventually have to deliver the news to their clients. That may turn out to be the nastiest surprise private equity is storing up.

In the eyes of sceptics, Mill has lost his relevance. The campaigns in which he fought have been won, and the ideas he defended — namely, free speech and female suffrage — have become widely embraced, elaborated, refined and transcended. Furthermore, aspects of his writings grate on current sensitivities. To many, his career in the East India Company reveals not only a thoughtless acceptance of colonialism but also a complacent conviction of the superiority of British society. His proposals to grant extra votes to the well-educated demonstrate a casual elitism, as does his emphasis on higher pleasures: on poetry rather than pushpin. What’s more, the negative picture of liberty he defended — focused on insulating people’s lives from outside interference — can be used today by libertarians and other boosters of minimally regulated markets; perhaps Mill was even a closet libertarian himself. Clear-headed charity should allow him to fade gracefully into the (Victorian) wallpaper.

All this, I believe, is profoundly incorrect. Mill was a far deeper thinker than many of his readers today recognise. He was a progressive, not a neoliberal, someone who has much to teach us about our own society and its conflicts.

These common misconceptions of Mill will no doubt be articulated in a future canonical text entitled Mill for Dummies. When this book is written, it will tell us what “everybody knows” about him. First, he was a utilitarian. To act rightly, he claimed, is to maximise happiness. Following Jeremy Bentham in this thesis, he added a new twist: some pleasures are “higher” than others. Reading poetry supplies more units of bliss (hedons) than you derive from playing childish games in your local tavern. Second, he was an ardent defender of individual liberty. The most important freedom, he tells us, consists in your choosing and pursuing your own good in your own way. Intervening in other people’s lives is warranted only to prevent their harming other folk. These two ideas are the major themes of his most important works: Utilitarianism and On Liberty.

Unfortunately, Dummies probably won’t address the obvious question: How do these two ideas fit together? To find an answer you’d have to go back to On Liberty, where Mill tells us that his defence of freedom will not involve any concept of rights that are independent of utility. He continues by explaining what he means: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” The authors of Dummies, who identify utility in terms of happiness with an elitist additive, will see this as obfuscation rather than clarification — a lapse into flowery Victorian rhetoric.

Yet the thought of human progress, together with a commitment to promoting it, is all over Mill’s writings. It is expressed in the closing pages of A System of Logic, in The Subjection of Women, throughout On Liberty, and in the Principles of Political Economy (a work roughly four times as long as Utilitarianism and On Liberty combined, and which went through eight editions in his lifetime). In fact, whenever Mill takes up any issue of social policy, he always asks first about how to make progressive changes in individual lives and in the conditions of society that foster or impede such advances. If he mentions happiness at all, it is an afterthought.

The “only freedom which deserves the name” — the ability to choose and pursue your own good in your own way — is at the core of his concept of progress. People’s lives are better when they have more opportunities for figuring out what kind of life they want to lead, more developed cognitive and emotional capacities for making choices about their aims and aspirations, more support in trying to attain their selected goals. When societies restrict options — when, for example, they deny women any chance to obtain university degrees or to own property or to engage in public activities allowed to men — they are interfering with human progress. Advances come when these kinds of restrictions are abolished. It is hardly surprising that Mill would oppose de jure restrictions on the kinds of activities women can pursue; he is, after all, the apostle of non-interference.

Once progress is understood in terms of freedom (real freedom), however, things get more complicated. A poor but talented black American child may dream of becoming a lawyer, perhaps even a judge, or a Supreme Court Justice. But if that child is being raised by a single parent, sometimes homeless, often hungry, and sent to a dangerous and underfunded school staffed by a rotating corps of disillusioned teachers, he may in principle have a chance to realise the dream of giving eloquent speeches in a courtroom, but, even with the most determined effort, his chances of success are slim. What the law allows is negated by the facts of the child’s life. In the absence of public goods — education of the quality available to their more fortunate contemporaries, or a “safety net” that protects against severe poverty and homelessness — the odds are against success for even the most gifted and diligent of children.

Despite popular assumptions, Mill’s conception of human progress does not write off the children of the poor. Throughout his entire career, he advocated Bentham’s famous dictum, “Each to count for one, and none for more than one”, elaborating it in a conception of human well-being that went far beyond his predecessor’s limited focus on momentary pleasures. To ground utility in “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” is to demand providing resources to support the many members of affluent societies who are allowed to fall by the wayside.

Mill’s educational commitments go even further. If someone is to make a wise choice about how they want their life to be, they must be able to discover their talents and to understand the options for developing and exercising them. They require the emotional and social capacities to understand how their aims might have a positive impact on the lives of others. To improve individual lives is thus to fashion educational institutions that develop self-understanding; and to produce citizens who can work cooperatively together. A Millian society emphasises two kinds of liberty: not only freedom from the interference of others, but the freedom to become reflective and sensitive people as well.

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Mill’s emphasis on the “cultivation” of the individual is evident in On Liberty, especially in its third chapter. There, the idea of “making the [human] race infinitely better” is tied to “furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race”. Similarly, The Subjection of Women argues that allowing women “the free use of their faculties” and “the free choice of employments” makes social progress both through correcting an injustice and through doubling the power of individuals to contribute to society. Yet Mill’s most obvious break with libertarianism, and, indeed, with the dominant socio-political conceptions of our day, comes in the work in which he figures as one of the great predecessors of contemporary economic thinking: the Principles of Political Economy.

His purely economic writings are pervaded by judgments about what is most valuable in human life. For Mill, political economy consists in engaging the best ethical thought with investigations in the social sciences. Although that engagement appears in the work of other classical political economists (notably Adam Smith and Karl Marx), nobody pursued it more deeply than Mill. It figures prominently in Book 2 of the Principles, with its astonishing title and theme: “Distribution”. From the perspective of prior political economy, there should be no need to discuss how income and wealth should be distributed: the task is to understand how aggregate wealth is amassed and how societies prosper. After that, the chips — the bullion and the banknotes — fall where they may. For Mill, that is not good enough. The distribution of wealth must allow for as many individual lives as possible to flourish.

Hence, he is an early advocate of what contemporary libertarians call “death taxes”. With his respect for liberty, Mill gives inheritance law an interesting twist: the amount any person can gain via inheritance is to be limited; donors can decide how to spread their prosperity among a large number of recipients (Mill conjectures that they will often opt for providing public goods, apparently foreseeing the coming of Andrew Carnegie and his like). In each generation, he believes, differences in talent, industry and, he points out, luck will produce inequalities in wealth. But, as resources pass down the generations, a death tax results in more equal distribution, benefiting both those whose ancestors had little to leave them and the potentially pampered children of the rich, whose motivation to exert themselves would otherwise be sapped.

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JS Mill and the despotism of progress

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Nor is Mill obsessed with productivity and growth as primary economic imperatives. The progressive interests of humanity are not fostered by intensifying competition. In the section of Mill’s Principles entitled “Of the Stationary State of Wealth and Population”, he wrote: “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” If capitalism is superior to socialism — and that is a question Mill takes very seriously — it must be capitalism with a human face.

The narrative that will be contained in Dummies, then, sells Mill short. He is neither a peculiarly elitist utilitarian (indeed, it is doubtful whether he is any kind of utilitarian), nor is his concern for liberty consistent with even the slightest move in the directions that libertarians favour. Instead, he draws on a rich and complex approach to human progress, suggesting reforms both for his own society and for our own.

Were he alive today, Mill would remind us that freedoms are for all, not simply for a privileged few; that democracy requires taking the perspectives of all people seriously; that minimally regulated markets produce consumer goods cheaply at enormous personal and social costs; and that ethical inquiry should be the foundation of socio-political decisions. Much contemporary political “thought” would be subjected to the rebuke he directed at Bentham: politicians and pundits today see in human life “little but what the vulgarest eye can see”. In this, Mill belongs at the progressive end of the progressive parties of the modern world. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should welcome their ally — Mill the progressive.

It has been gruelling stint, taking in not only the pandemic, but also the biggest terrorist attack in her nation’s history and a volcanic eruption that claimed 22 lives. Having faced  sustained vitriol from some of her opponents, and with a young daughter born while she was in office, it’s perhaps understandable, if disappointing, that the inspiration for working mothers the world over might now want to leave politics to spend more time with her family.

Ardern insists that she is standing down for personal reasons, and not “because it was hard”. But her political woes must have made that decision easier. Ardern’s popularity has been sinking for over a year, the country faces a crippling cost of living crisis, and her Labour government faces a daunting election this year against a resurgent centre-Right National Party. It is a far cry from 2020, when she was re-elected to become the first NZ Prime Minister to win an outright majority under an electoral system designed specifically to preclude such an outcome.

This is the leader who inspired “Jacindamania” and became an international progressive superstar. How did she fall from grace so spectacularly?

Covid-19 did play a part, but not in the way generally understood. Ardern’s Zero Covid strategy was driven by the cold reality of a health system that wouldn’t stand up to even a mild outbreak after decades of austerity. And contrary to critiques from abroad about “Covid dictatorship” and “never-ending nightmares”, the policy was actually successful. Within three months, New Zealand eliminated Covid, lifted all restrictions except closed borders, and life in the country returned to normal while the rest of the world descended into chaos. No wonder her pandemic management strategy was wildly popular, supported by 75% of the population as late as July 2021.

The problem, though, was the government’s failure to prepare an exit strategy. Complacency meant that vaccination roll out was slow, and the country was unprepared for the next wave: the Delta variant’s arrival, in August 2021, sparked a three-month lockdown in the largest city, Auckland. Once it became clear that the country’s success relied on luck and ad-hoc measures rather than enlightened leadership, Ardern’s popularity tanked.

The plan for re-opening once high vaccination levels were reached was similarly poor. Despite having watched Australia’s failures, New Zealand repeated many of their mistakes, with shortages of testing leading to an explosion of cases at the end of 2021, as well as staff shortages in shops and hospitality, and supply chain disruptions, and a health system still on the verge of collapse.

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More controversially, New Zealand relied on vaccine mandates; Ardern described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom”. When the mandates sparked a protest movement that occupied the lawns in front of Parliament, the government refused to engage. The weeks-long standoff ended in violence when police moved in to clear the protesters, and it has rent the country’s social fabric, with 64% of New Zealanders believing the country is now more divided than ever.

It is this division, more so than any pandemic mis-management, that ultimately toppled her — it’s a division she was elected to address.

Ardern’s initial victory, in 2017, was based on promises to fix the widespread socio-economic disadvantage plaguing the country following four decades of neoliberalism and post-2008 austerity that would make even George Osborne blush. At the time of her election, over one in five children lived in poverty and inequality was high, with the wealthiest 10% owning 59% of all of the country’s assets, while the poorest half owned 2%. Housing affordability was a perennial issue — the average house would cost seven times the median income — while the country had the worst homelessness rate in the OCED, with almost 1% of the population living on the streets or in shelters.

Yet, almost six years on, what’s changed? Child poverty rates remain unchanged, while inequality has increased. House prices have increased by 58% over the past five years, with the average house now costing 8.8 times the average income. New Zealand, according to one economist, is now a country of “the landed gentry”, which dominates wealth and housing opportunities. Meanwhile, homelessness has worsened considerably, with more than 26,000 people waiting for social housing, up from 5,000 five years ago, as targets to build social housing have been badly missed. Even sympathetic commentators are examining Ardern’s legacy and asking “what was the point of all that?”

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Undoubtedly, the pandemic thwarted some of her ambition and the government’s response exacerbated some of the problems. Record high inflation won’t have helped. But Labour was struggling to make progress with its agenda well before Covid struck. Indeed, this was the reason it was trailing in the polls in late 2019, which the pandemic masked for a while: a failure of imagination.

On housing, for example, Labour backtracked on closing tax loopholes that only benefit investors and drive up prices, while its grand plans to build 100,000 “affordable” homes in the decade came to nothing, as it struggled to incentivise the private sector to do so. Likewise, the solution to the homelessness crisis has been to put people in emergency housing, usually motels. With scant progress on building new social housing, the average stay in this “transitional” system has increased from 3 to 21 weeks over the past five years. On child poverty, it has relied on inadequate increases to welfare spending, rather than any structural changes that would address poverty and inequality.

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This, then, will be the legacy of Jacinda Ardern: a missed opportunity. Ardern recognised the need to address the socio-economic disadvantage brought by 40 years of neoliberalism, and made bold promises of state action to do so. Yet when it came down to it, neither she, nor her government were able to break free of the Blairite Third Way mentality.

Despite talking a big game where the “days of thinking that the state can be a passive bystander and the market will provide…are over”, her government relied on short-term fixes, deferred to the private sector, advanced the interests of the asset class, and tinkered around the edges of child poverty or homelessness. Ardern leaves her country facing a cost of living crisis, and her party with no clear successor with fresh ideas how to address it, or the other social ills crippling it. Despite being hailed as the harbinger of a new, progressive Left, Ardern simply turned out to be more of the same.

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress this week, Xi Jinping will be nominated for a precedent-defying third term of office. But his grasp on power has not gone unchallenged. Days before the Congress began, a rare protest took place on Sitong bridge in Beijing, calling for the removal of “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping”. “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” read one banner.

The second issue is Common Prosperity. Resurrected in 2021, Common Prosperity is a political slogan and a theme that Xi has described as an essential part of socialism. It is designed to capture the government’s intention to improve the quality of life for China’s middle class and its aspirant members, including owners of small-businesses, migrant workers, and farmers. Its alleged goal is to lower those income and regional inequalities that have blighted China’s economic and social progress, and which might, if unaddressed, trigger social stress and unrest.

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There is no question that China has a major problem with income inequality, which is not only high now, but has remained persistently high over time. Its Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality where 0 equates to perfect equality and 1 to total inequality — was about 0.54-0.55 in 2019, according to the China Family Panel Studies survey. This was far higher than in most developed economies. The top 20% of income earners receive about 46% of income, virtually unchanged over the last decade or so, while the bottom 40% get slightly more than 13%. Until now, Chinese citizens have been willing to accept that the CCP would continue to enhance living standards and prosperity for future generations, but if citizens begin to doubt this, the government will have to watch out.

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One of the most pressing tasks is to increase educational attainment and employment opportunities for China’s citizens, especially those who live in rural areas. Whereas in the past, China needed workers who were simply numerate, literate, and disciplined, it now needs workers who are educated to much higher levels and who can compete in an increasingly technological and digital work environment. But the trend is going the wrong way: in 2020, around 60% of Chinese workers in urban areas were employed in the informal sector where low skills and poor pay prevail, up from 40% about 20 years ago.

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Lord Hailsham famously wrote that Toryism was about fox hunting and religion (by which he meant the Anglican religion of the Book of Common Prayer). More generally, Conservatives were united by a moral belief that people had the right to dispose of their property and a practical sense that capitalism was likely to provide people with the most property to dispose of. Most of all, Conservatives believed in inequality. They thought that some people deserved to be richer, more powerful and more respected than others.

Well, fox hunting and the prayer book have both gone and no Conservative government is going to bring them back. The positions of capitalism and property are more complicated. Boris Johnson must have been the first Conservative prime minister who would not have been mortified to see it reported that he had said “fuck business”. This is partly because the Conservative Party has changed. Its leaders are relatively young, and if they pursued any career outside politics, it is likely to have been journalism.

It is also because capitalism has changed. Once it could be taken for granted that captains of industry were Right-wing in ways that bore no direct relation to their business interests. In 1977, when the CBI was asked to canvas opinions from its members about what a Conservative government should do, suggestions included restoring national service, controlling immigration and deterring couples from “living in sin”. Such opinions would be unimaginable now.

Toryism and capitalism were once joined together in institutional terms. The heads of large companies who funded the party took it for granted that their opinions would be sought and that they would count for more than rank-and-file party members. Today, however, the whole nature of business has changed. The very notion of a British company seems quaint. Note the studied vagueness of BP about what the “B” stands for and remember Margaret Thatcher’s fury when British Airways replaced the Union Jack on the tailfins of its planes with an abstract design.

Most of all, though, the Tories have lost contact with the central core of their beliefs, from which everything else springs: inequality. Just before the election of the Thatcher government in 1979, the historian Maurice Cowling edited a collection of conservative essays in which he dismissed the idea, which had become widespread during the Cold War, that Conservatism was about the defence of freedom. Conservatives, he insisted, only believed in freedom as a means to create inequality or defend existing inequalities.

I doubt if the smooth young men in Conservative Central Office would have put it in such blunt terms, but they (especially those who had recently been taught by Cowling) would have understood what he was driving at. Conservatives are less likely to defend inequality now. This is partly because nothing makes rich people more uncomfortable than the discovery that some people are even richer than themselves. Globalisation has created, and made visible, a class of super-rich people who make a Chancery QC feel like a pauper. Rishi Sunak must surely be the first Conservative politician whose career has been damaged by the fact that he is, in the eyes of many party members, too wealthy.

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By Richard Vinen

Real Tories believed in inequality for reasons that went beyond economics. They lived in a world of hierarchy and authority. It was a world in which tough-minded magistrates gave stiff sentences to poachers. It was underwritten, for much of the 20th century, by military experience. No institution in England reflects the class system more faithfully than the army and no social distinction is more ruthlessly policed than that between “officers” and “other ranks”. The two World Wars and the retention of conscription until the early Sixties meant there was a time when most British men had military experience. This did not make them all Conservatives — servicemen gave the Labour Party a large majority in 1945. What it did mean was that those people who were already Conservative had their belief in hierarchy reinforced.

Conservative leaders — captain Macmillan, lieutenant colonel Heath — derived much of their prestige from military rank, as did the local notables who organised the party at local level. Yet only a tiny fraction of the population has military experience now. In spite, or because, of this, Conservative fantasies focus ever more on a certain image of the military — but it is an image that is, in its odd way, democratic rather than hierarchical. For instance, one of the strongest themes in Conservative thinking now involves not the imposition of authority but the defence of relatively low-ranking soldiers who have infringed criminal law or military regulations — hence the campaign against soldiers being prosecuted for their actions in Northern Ireland or Afghanistan.

The decline in military experience goes with a more general change. Grassroots supporters of the Conservative Party have always been relatively old but the party used to have complicated relations with this group. An internal document from the early years of the Thatcher government suggested that the party’s support among the retired was a source of problems: “The Government’s economic policy is a long-term policy and the elderly do not think long term.” Of course, real Tories used to think long-term because they saw themselves as part of institutions that would continue beyond their death or simply because they spent a great deal of energy devising trust funds to benefit their grandchildren.

But this kind of long-term thinking is rarer now. Almost the defining feature of Conservative policy — with regards to everything from public debt to fossil fuel — is a slash-and-burn attitude that focuses on material gains to be made in the short term. I sometimes think that the only real Tories are the dreadlocked activists of Extinction Rebellion: people who understand that politics is about debts that might be owed to generations yet unborn and who display a commendable indifference to the short-term vagaries of electoral politics.

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In any case, old age is not what it used to be. Life expectancy and early retirement have both increased — so a disconcertingly large proportion of Conservatives have not worked for many years. A person born in 1926 could claim, with some justification, that they had had a harder life than their own children and might, therefore, have been exposed to harsh realities. This is conspicuously not true of someone born, in, say 1948. These are people who were born into peace and the welfare state. They bear a disconcerting resemblance to their contemporaries who joined student protests in 1968. A part of the press serves the same function for Tory activists that hallucinogenic drugs served for the soixante-huitards: the Mail and the Express are now so removed from reality that their readers might as well be getting their information from the website of David Icke. In fact, the most notable feature of Conservative supporters is often their reluctance to grow up — which may explain why they have, in the past few years, been prone to identify with young or, in the case of Johnson, ostentatiously juvenile, leaders.

A belief in inequality co-existed awkwardly with the extension of democracy. The third Marquess of Salisbury once wrote that it would be absurd if the votes of “two day-labourers” counted for more than that of the Baron de Rothschild. What made the Tories successful in the age of universal suffrage was deference. A political scientist working in the Sixties found that many working-class Tories believed that an Etonian would make a better prime minister than a grammar schoolboy.

The problem for Conservatives now is that democracy has become far too egalitarian. Social media has encouraged the idea that everyone who can hit a keyboard has a right to have their opinion respected. Class divisions count for less as everyone affects a plebeian air — Boris Johnson seems to have been popular with working-class voters not because he is an Etonian but because they think he is “like them”. Worst of all, democracy has infected the Conservative Party itself. It seemed like a revolution when, in 1965, Tory MPs were first given the chance to elect their leader (rather than having him — it always was a him — imposed by a “magic circle” of party elders). Now, power has passed from MPs to party members, and this summer the party members imposed a leader that the majority of MPs did not want.

In easier times, Liz Truss might have been the leader to restore Conservatism. Her own origins are on the Left and her beliefs are probably those of a classical liberal, but, perhaps for that reason, she sometimes seems to understand the traditions and style of Toryism better than people who were born into Conservatism. Most of all, Truss believes in the one thing that has most embarrassed Tories in recent years: inequality. Cutting taxes for the rich would have been as Conservative as cutting benefits for the poor.

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By John Oxley

As it is, things do not look good for the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects but those of us who feel nostalgic for real Conservatism should not despair. Winning elections is over-rated. Toryism was, for much of its early history, a movement of opposition. True conservatism has, of necessity, a pessimistic, almost Sisyphean, quality: its practitioners know that they cannot really hold back change and that they will always be fighting a doomed rear-guard action.

Pessimism can produce two different forms of Conservatism. One emphasises the need to keep things going with as little damage as possible and therefore to hold on to power at all costs; the other appreciates the symbolic value of the hopeless fight. The conflict between the two approaches was incarnated in the bitter rivalry between the managerial Edward Heath and Enoch Powell, who could not see a three-line whip without voting against it or a ministerial office without resigning from it. Margaret Thatcher managed, at least when she was most successful, to combine pragmatic action with principled rhetoric — so that she sometimes seemed like the leader of an opposition to her own government.

If the most dramatic opinion polls of the last few days are correct, the Tories might not just cease to be party of government; they might not even be the Official Opposition. This would be no bad thing. Fifty or sixty Tory MPs would be just the right number. They could make their voices heard without any serious chance of controlling the commanding heights of policy. If they concentrated their efforts, they might even succeed in bringing back fox hunting.

The picture built up by Nathaniel McBride’s documentary drama is one of unremitting institutional failure on the part of the local authority and the quango responsible for housing in the borough. The well-documented failures of fire safety in the years running up to the tragedy date as far back as 2010, when the ventilation system was exposed as not good enough after a fire melted a front door.

In 2013, Grenfell residents experienced a night of power surges and the threat of a serious fire when laptops and computers in some of the flats “literally exploded”. Their desperately concerned emails to the council were met with denials of responsibility and claims that no one else had reported such occurrences.

In 2015, the infamous contractor Rydon was tasked with refurbishing the tower, installing the flammable cladding, new boilers, and defective windows. This is when the pivotal decision was taken by the Kensington & Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) to switch from fire resistant zinc cladding to the cheaper, but lethal, aluminium, to cut costs. Shockingly, a test on the safety of the cladding was performed but discontinued because it was deemed too dangerous.

A year later, the KCTMO carried out its own very positive review of the work they had commissioned; but in April 2017, just three months before the fire, the Fire Brigade warned that the building facades were not compliant with health and safety regulations. Over in Westminster, David Cameron’s promise to wage war on excessive health and safety set the tone. “We need to realise, collectively, that we cannot eliminate risk and that some accidents are inevitable,” the former prime minister said. The late David Amess, the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on fire safety regulations asked for fire regulations to be reviewed a heroic 13 times, but his calls fell on deaf ears.

The two questions running through the play are: why did Grenfell fire happen, and could it happen again? The Government’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry is making it very clear that there were many instances of specific failure related to fire safety and building regulations. There is relief that there is now a ban on combustible cladding on tall buildings but that is set against the difficulties of achieving that ban, with the Government initially resistant to it.

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And while mitigating steps relating to cladding have been taken, other significant risks remain. There are serious concerns about lightweight timber frame construction, while the UK remains an international outlier by continuing to permit single staircases in tall buildings. Peter Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing, believes there are hundreds of thousands of buildings which have similar levels of risk to Grenfell and warns that “we are drifting back to the same attitudes”.

These are the specifics, but the broader question relates to democratic accountability and the failure to listen to residents’ repeated concerns about safety. In a horrifyingly prescient blog post written just months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group stated: “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring to an end the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation.”

The correspondence between the council and the KCTMO reveals the casual contempt with which residents’ concerns were treated. Residents claimed that they were not given the opportunity to comment on the refurbishment and during the works repeatedly said they faced intimidation and harassment by Rydon and the KCTMO, including abusive emails. During this time, one of the residents reporting intimidation was implicitly threatened with eviction when he found out that he was being investigated by the council for the “unclear circumstances” through which he had inherited his tenancy agreement.

Where contrition might have been expected, astonishingly the same attitude to residents continued after the fire, when the contracts manager for Rydon told the government’s Inquiry that residents who raised complaints about fire safety and cladding were “vocal and aggressive” and “regardless of what work was being carried out would still have found a reason to complain”.

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But the complete breakdown of relations between community and local authority is not limited to what happened at Grenfell. It is replicated in many other London boroughs where both homeowners and social housing tenants on housing estates find it impossible to communicate with their councils. In Southwark, a homeowner on the Aylesbury Estate who was opposed to the regeneration of the estate found herself with no electricity, no internet access, no lift services and no hot water or heating, while the postman was told nobody lived at her address. Beverley Robinson, chair of the Aylesbury Leaseholders Action Group, recalled: “I had no heating for weeks and weeks and then they wouldn’t let the people in to fix it.”

Loretta Lees, Professor of Human Geography at Leicester University and former Chair of the London Housing Panel, describes this trend towards open conflict between local authorities and housing estate residents as reflecting the “Rachman-like tendencies” of the state. Peter Rachman was a slum landlord who operated in Notting Hill in the Fifties and Sixties and who became notorious for the exploitation and intimidation of his tenants who lived in terrible conditions.

The bigger picture is that all over London, and in many other cities, residents are failing to benefit from the wholesale regeneration and reconfiguration of their areas. Entire districts are witnessing the demolition of estates, which are replaced by ubiquitous developments of luxury apartments. In Elephant and Castle, the Heygate Estate was demolished and replaced by Elephant Park where two-bedroom apartments are on sale for more than £1 million. Roughly 25% of the scheme is designated affordable housing but as the definition of affordable housing has been changed to mean up to 80% of market value, that is far from affordable for the majority of Londoners.

The refurbishment of Grenfell Tower was also part of an area-wide regeneration, laid out in the “Notting Barns Masterplan”, which planned to create “a more successful urban neighbourhood through selective demolition of existing housing stock and the provision of high-quality new homes”. The aim was to drive up land values in the area by making it a more attractive place to live, which is regeneration speak for increasing property prices. The project also included the demolition of the neighbouring Silchester Estate, the leasing of the local library to the £22,000-per-year Notting Hill Prep School and the replacement of a popular community facility, the West London Stables, with luxury apartments, all of which aroused community opposition.

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On the morning of the fire, a features editor emailed me to ask if I would write a piece “on the housing apartheid in London, how London’s poor end up living in death trap towers”. The narrative of poverty-stricken deprivation in a tower block ghetto, a stone’s throw from one of the richest parts of London, persisted throughout the media in the weeks after the disaster, with newspapers running with the need to demolish more social housing like this. It was only through the sheer level of interest in the story that it became clear that Grenfell had not only been structurally sound, but a much-loved place to live with a thriving and mixed community.

When the Government announced its Inquiry into the fire, the local community were disappointed by its limited scope, and demanded that it be widened, to “seek to understand how residents’ voices have been systematically ignored for so long”. Michael Mansfield QC, who is representing survivors and relatives, has highlighted that the Inquiry is only investigating how the fire came about and who should be accountable, rather than looking at the experience of living in social housing. He has pointed out that while the experience of living in social housing is crucial to what happened at Grenfell, it is “off limits”, with families given very limited opportunities to speak or ask questions. The consequence is that they feel excluded from the Inquiry, raising uncomfortable parallels with the reality of living in social housing.

The Inquiry is producing invaluable evidence about what happened and why, which means the likelihood of another incident related to the specific failures uncovered seems unlikely. But the broader question of elected councils listening to residents who voice uncomfortable truths has escaped scrutiny. This means that the next time concerns around potentially fatal issues are raised, there is still no certainty they will be listened to.

Governments of all stripes have long talked about the need to create mixed communities. Grenfell was a successful mixed community which found itself labelled as a ghetto, as part of a narrative of managed decline perpetuated by the institutions which wanted to regenerate the area. This is the end result of treating housing simply as financial asset, which combined with a complete failure to listen to the voices of the community, led to the tragedy of the fire.

They would have recognised that the rhetoric of levelling up can all too easily be conscripted as a clever alibi for the maintenance of the status quo. It implies that those of us who are wealthy do not need to change our ways, that others can aspire to our level, that levelling up for some will not mean levelling down for others. Levelling up doesn’t frighten the rich. It implies that no one is going to take their precious cake away.

Of course, cake is the very last thing that the Prime Minister wants us to be thinking about now. Not only because it has become a symbol of the “one rule for us, another for them” thinking that has come to characterise his premiership. But also because he has ostentatiously broken the golden rule of class camouflage. As Keynes put it: “the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice.” Boris, meanwhile, has his cheeks stuffed full and has crumbs all down his shirt.

So, desperate to avoid all mention of cake, Boris is off to Scotland for the half-term break to promote his levelling up agenda. It’s the great Boris rebranding exercise, a tour of less-well-off places that will benefit from his big plan. That is what we are supposed to think, anyway. It turns out that many of the places that have been awarded early levelling up funds are Tory-run areas that are relatively prosperous. Savid Javid’s constituency of Bromsgrove is set to receive £14.5 million and Nadine Dorries’s neck of the woods of Bedfordshire £26.7 million. Both of these areas are in the least deprived fifth of local authorities in the UK.

Economists like cake too, of course. Some think the important thing is that it is divided up equally. Others that it needs to be grown, with everyone getting a bigger piece even if that means some still get more than others. The Prime Minister — like pretty much all-mainstream political parties, with the possible exception of the Greens — is of this latter view. If the size of the cake remains the same, more for the poor will mean less for the rich. But if we grow the cake, we can support the poor without bothering the rich. One of these options is electoral kryptonite, the other is electoral gold.

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By Aris Roussinos

There is a reason the Greens are the most sceptical about growth. As David Attenborough put it in his latest book: “Our first lesson from nature concerns growth. We have arrived at this moment of desperation as a result of our desire for perpetual growth in the world economy. But in a finite world, nothing can increase forever.” In other words, at some point the cake doesn’t get any bigger. Or rather, it gets bigger at the expense of the health of the planet. We all watch his lovely TV programmes, we ooh and aah at the cute images, we have a bit of a cry, we think of him as a national treasure. But we totally ignore the punchline.

The trouble with the growth is that is has been historically very bad at pricing in all the consequences of our comfortable lifestyles — things like carbon emission and nuclear waste. And if those, like Attenborough, who predict disaster are even half right, then the challenge for the foreseeable future will not be how to level up but how most of us can learn to level down. Levelling up is a luxury we can no longer afford.

No doubt the Tories will point to the fact that the levelling up agenda includes “£26 billion of public capital investment for the green industrial revolution and a transition to New Zero”. Which is another way of saying that the best way to get to less carbon is more and better capitalism, appropriately directed, supported by more and better technology. More gives us less. Of course we should be suspicious.

Tories will also say that Attenborough’s thought is dangerously watermelon-like: green on the outside, red in the middle. Some years ago, the philosopher Derek Parfit gave what is often said to be the decisive argument against egalitarianism: “Suppose that those who are better off suffer some misfortune, so that they become as badly off as everyone else. Since these events would remove the inequality, they must be in one way welcome… even though they would be worse off for some people, and better for no one. This implication seems to many to be quite absurd. I call this the Levelling Down Objection.” Equality, of the sort loved by the Left, makes no sense if it addresses the question of blindness by putting out everyone else’s eyes — so goes the Parfit objection to the levelling down agenda.

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But this only works if we are sure that levelling up genuinely means aspiring to something better. Parfit’s levelling down criticism is an objection to equality as an end in itself. But the argument being put forward by radical Greens isn’t about equality; it’s that some version of levelling down — of the wealthy, even the moderately wealthy, having less, producing less, consuming less — is what we need to achieve in order for us to save the planet from catastrophe.

If Boris’s levelling up agenda is little more than a pork-barrel electoral ploy targeted at floating voters, and one that leaves a dangerous economic complacency intact, then “up” isn’t better, but just another meaningless metaphor — like growth itself — that reinforces our refusal to face what we are doing to the planet. If Attenborough is right, growth is killing us. So “up” isn’t always good. And we need more politicians brave enough to say it: we need to be talking more about levelling down as an aim, not as something to avoid.

Yes, there are very many people who do require a lot more economic support — some of whom live in this country, but most of whom don’t. The reduction of that tiny sliver of cake that this country used to give to the poorest in the world in foreign aid — from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% — is an indication that Johnson doesn’t really give two hoots about levelling up the poorest in the world. So don’t be deceived: his levelling up agenda is just a smidgeon of Left-leaning cosplay to tickle up a few Red Wall voters. We should learn to despise this grinning cynicism.

Yet the proponents of levelling down still feel like grumpy Old Testament prophets, mad Green voices of doom crying in the wilderness. They are telling us something we do not want to hear. Something no one would ever vote for. I suppose Christianity has had a hand in associating “up” with something good and better and “down” with something bad. Up is towards heaven, down is towards the fiery pit and everlasting damnation. But these days, we are being led into fire by the language of more and of up.

But there’s a school of thought that its authors were doomed from the start. If you believe that geography is destiny then the North-South divide can’t be fixed. At best, the government can redistribute resources as a kind of consolation prize. Or, as Victoria Wood’s snooty continuity announcer once put it: “We’d like to apologise to our viewers in the North — it must be awful for them.” 

Except that the lesson of history is that geography is not destiny. Time and again, we see examples in which the relative fortunes of different regions draw level, or even reverse altogether. Take Belgium, whose Northern and Southern halves are distinguished by language as well as location. 

For many years, Flemish-speaking Flanders was poorer and less powerful than French-speaking Wallonia. Following Great Britain, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialise — but because the coal deposits were concentrated in Wallonia, it was a lopsided revolution. The Walloons weren’t just part of a larger linguistic zone — they dominated the economy too. 

All that changed with de-industrialisation. For the Flemings, the cultural and political dominance of the French-speakers was always hard to swallow — but once the latter began demanding subsidies, it became unbearable. Today, Belgium is a rare example of a country in which the ethnic majority has separatist tendencies. 

But perhaps the industrial revolution was a unique moment in history that gave early adopters a one-off boost which then faded away. Certainly we see shifts in the geographical distribution of power and wealth that are too big and began too early to be explained by coal deposits or anything like that. Look at the whole of Europe. In classical times, the Mediterranean was where it was at. Ancient Greece, followed by Ancient Rome, were the dominant powers. To the north lay the abode of barbarians — to be civilised at the point of a sword or walled-off behind fortifications.

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And yet long before the industrial revolution, the balance between the Europe of wine and olive oil and the Europe of beer and butter began to swing the other way. There was an intermediate period in which the south held its own — for instance, the Renaissance had an Italian origin and Spain and Portugal pioneered the Age of Exploration. But by the time of the Enlightenment, it was clear that the future of Europe — indeed the whole world — would be shaped in northern cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow

Of course, I’m describing a mega-trend that unfolded over centuries and millennia. A conscious policy of levelling-up needs to show progress over a much shorter time frame — decades at most. So do we have any examples of that happening?  

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, looks to the Republic of Florence for inspiration. Under the rule of the Medici family, the city-state became the birthplace of the Renaissance. As Gove himself makes clear, there’s a wider range of reasons for its success than the Medicis’ famously lavish patronage of high culture. Nevertheless, a key part of his levelling-up strategy is to redistribute arts funding from London to the rest of the country. 

For a more recent — and more significant — example we need to look east. When the Iron Curtain fell, it revealed a profoundly unequal continent. The ex-Communist countries are still much poorer than the countries of Western Europe, but the extent to which they’ve levelled-up has been impressive. Indeed, in recent years we’ve seen the richest parts of countries like Poland and Hungary overtaking the poorest parts of the UK — much to the horror of British tabloids. 

But from a British perspective, the most relevant ex-communist state is the former East Germany. That’s because since reunification, the story is one of levelling-up within the same country. 

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It’s not been a total success. After three decades of living together, the East is yet to catch-up with the West. But, again, there’s no denying the progress made. Immediately following reunification, economic output per head in the former East Germany was only 60% of that in the former West Germany. It’s now more like 85%.

This has produced a sobering outcome for the British. The fact is that, today, most of East Germany is as rich or richer than most of northern England. Data analyst Tom Forth illustrates this by comparing the English region of Yorkshire and Humberside with the German state of Saxony. At first sight this might not appear to be a fair contest. Saxony had a pretty rough 20th century: in the post-war period it passed from Nazi to Communist rule — until, that is, the Berlin Wall fell and East German industry collapsed.

And yet since 1990, Saxony hasn’t just caught up with the Yorkshire region, it has overtaken it. The crossover point was around 2010. By 2017, GDP per head was €28,000 in Saxony compared to less than €25,000 in Yorkshire.

So what can we learn from the German example? Well, there’s one thing that stands out — but, for a Conservative government, it’s rather awkward: the Germans spent a whole heap of money. According to Kathrin Enenkel of the Centre for Cities, the total sum between 1990 and 2014 averages out at £71 billion a year. She puts the UK’s levelling-up fund at £4.8 billion in total.

Of course, the German challenge was much bigger. After 45 years of democracy versus communism, there was a lot to be levelled-up between the two Germanies. But even if we focus on the policy areas that are relevant to the British situation, it’s obvious that we’ve been out-spent. To return to the Yorkshire example, Forth puts the level of government funding for R&D at €150 per head per year. The figure for Saxony? €450.

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It’s encouraging that today’s white paper includes a promise to increase R&D funding for the rest of the country beyond London and the South East. But by how much does it intend to boost the total? Just one third. The Yorkshire-Saxony comparison would suggest that’s simply not enough. 

Transport is another area in which south-eastern England gets the lion’s share of public funds. So how much levelling-up can we expect from the Government here? Again, not much. In recent months we’ve seen funding for the “Bus Back Better” initiative slashed; the Northern Powerhouse Rail project has been downgraded; and the eastern branch of HS2, which would have run to Leeds and Sheffield, has been chopped. Meanwhile in Saxony, the city of Leipzig has been part of the German high-speed rail network for years. 

The problem with the white paper, then, is what’s not in it: ambition and a sense of urgency. Levelling-up the land is not an impossible dream. The lesson of history is that economic miracles do happen — but only if you put in the investment. 

Following his death, I interviewed one of Ansari’s friends, who said that small business owners along the Boardwalk had spent weeks begging for more police protection to no avail. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time reporting on violent crime in America has heard a version of this story. Contrary to the claims of “police abolitionists”, residents of poor communities often want more and better policing.

This is partly because they happen to live under a far greater threat of violent crime than other communities do: organised criminal networks have a much easier time taking root in low-income neighbourhoods than anywhere else. But this also because residents of low-income communities don’t have nearly as many resources to defend themselves as upper-income communities do.

If Ansari had been rich, he could have simply hired private security to protect himself and his family business. But most Americans aren’t wealthy enough to do that — and, according to a recent paper published in the American Journal of Public Health this inequality is getting worse.

The authors examined violent crime across 13 cities in the United States between March and July in the years 2018, 2019, and 2020. They found that not only was violence much higher in poorer neighbourhoods, but that the gap between low-income and high-income areas in the prevalence of gun violence, aggravated assault, and homicide grew between 2019 and 2020.

One way to address this phenomenon would be to refer to it as “violence inequality”. Just as we track inequality on axes like income, wealth, and health care, we should acknowledge and measure the gap in public safety between the most and least dangerous neighbourhoods.

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Violence inequality exists virtually everywhere in the United States, but it is particularly dramatic in some areas. The Chicago Sun Times recently analysed violent crime data across the city, describing what it calls the “safety gap”. The article notes that West Garfield Park, a predominantly black neighbourhood located in the West Side of Chicago, “has experienced a per capita rate of shootings nearly 20 times higher than downtown”. The gap in homicide rates is even more jaw-dropping. In 2021 so far, “the murder rate in the seven most dangerous police districts rose to a three-decade high of nearly 100 homicides per 100,000 residents — 30 times higher than the rate in the safest seven districts, where the rate fell to fewer than four per 100,000.”

Put differently, poor and minority neighbourhoods are reverting to historically high rates of violent crime at the same time as affluent white areas are becoming safer. The gaps are even worse now than they were in the early Nineties, long considered the nadir of America’s violent-crime problem. As criminologist Aaron Chalfin recently noted, in 1991, the least-safe communities in Chicago had rates of gun violence 13 times higher than those of the safest communities; in 2020, gun violence in the least-safe neighbourhoods was 25 times higher.

Violence inequality appears particularly pronounced when you break down the statistics by race. Homicide has long been one of the the leading causes of death for African American young men, topping unintentional injuries, suicide, and heart disease. The Violence Policy Center estimates that the ‘black homicide victimisation rate’ is six times as high as the overall ‘white homicide victimisation rate’. And yet this form of inequality is barely mentioned by the media, despite their obsession with nearly every other type of racial disparity. Why is that?

One explanation is that ordinary neighbourhood violence doesn’t fit neatly into the prevailing narrative, in which the primary problems faced by minorities are the result of systemic racism and white supremacy. Outside of the conservative media, it’s practically taboo to discuss the levels of violence that exist in parts of the United States without lengthy throat-clearing about how the real culprit is racism, capitalism or the police.

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By Michael Shellenberger

But that’s not the way people who live in these communities describe their own lives. Last summer, as progressive activists waged a sustained campaign to delegitimise the police, Gallup polling found that most African Americans wanted to either maintain current levels of police presence in their communities or expand it.

Still, the fact that addressing violence inequality is one of the most important things that the Democratic Party could do for underprivileged people must be a bitter pill for progressives to swallow (and it is almost certainly the Democratic Party’s job, as the GOP doesn’t look like winning elections in violence-plagued cities anytime soon). Addressing it would almost certainly involve more policing and tougher sentencing for people who have committed violent crimes, many of whom will likely be minorities. This would cut against the progressive project of ending “mass incarceration” and promoting alternatives to policing, and would no doubt feel to many progressives like doubling down on a racist and authoritarian system.

But tackling violence inequality can bring meaningful change to the lives of the people progressives say they care the most about. A March 2019 study published in Demography soberly noted that while homicide remains a leading cause of death for young black men, the dramatic decline in homicide rates that started in the Nineties “led to a 0.80-year increase in life expectancy at birth for African American males, and reduced years of potential life lost by 1,156 years for every 100,000 African American males”. According to the study, the drop in homicide accounted for “17% of the reduction in the life expectancy gap between white and African American males” between 1991 and 2014. In other words, tackling violent crime saved a lot of black lives.

The main obstacle to Democrats getting tough on crime is political. Much of the national media remains fixated on the drawbacks of incarceration and policing; influential political donors are now spending huge amounts of money to elect prosecutors who promise softer sentencing. Joe Biden may have written the 1994 crime bill, but he barely talks about the historic increase in homicides that took place in 2020, perhaps out of fear of alienating his base and playing into the hands of Republicans.

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Yet there are signs that political reality is changing. During the November elections, voters in Buffalo, New York rejected the self-described police abolitionist who won the Democratic primary for mayor, voting instead for the incumbent mayor, who was forced to run as a write-in candidate. Similarly, voters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ground zero for much of 2020’s police reform movement, shot down a referendum that would have abolished and replaced their police department. The mayor-elect of New York City is a former NYPD officer who campaigned on getting tougher on crime.

And in San Francisco, one of the most progressive cities in America, Mayor London Breed recently struck a different tone following a series of high-profile crimes. “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to more aggressive with law enforcement. More aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

It is too early to say whether these developments represent a turning point in policy. But one thing is clear: it’s almost impossible to address a problem we can’t even admit exists. Those who profess to care about the disadvantaged should acknowledge that violence inequality is a deep and growing problem. We shouldn’t forget those Americans who fall asleep to the sound of gunfire.

Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.

Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.

Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20^th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.

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Elsewhere, the German cartels and Japanese zaibatsu both kowtowed to and benefited from fascist state support and contracts. Even today, China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. Since 2000, a hundred billionaires sit in the country’s Communist legislation, a development that Mao would never have countenanced. [1. See Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (New York: Harper, 2010), 206–8; David S. G. Goodman, Class in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 26, 86.]

Capitalist countries have historically resisted such concentrations of power, but this process seems inexorable after a pandemic which devastated small businesses yet saw the ultra-rich grow richer and the largest firms record eye-watering profits. A handful of giant tech corporations now account for nearly 40% of the value of the Standard and Poor Index, a level of concentration unprecedented in modern history.

Companies like Amazon are our zaibatsu, with influence over a vast array of industries, from online retail to cloud computing, the health food business, media and even space travel. Once such firms may have adhered to free market capitalism, but they have increasingly grown to see the value of a larger, more centralised and pervasive state.

This parallels with the alarming transformation of the US Democratic Party, the putative “party of the people” , now increasingly a subsidiary of the corporate elite. Among financial firms, communications companies and lawyers, Biden outraised Trump by five-to-one or more. Today’s oligarchs are particularly keen on the progressive non-profit sector, which provides important support for their political and social advocacy — a means for them to make politically correct statements about climate change, gender and race, while still obtaining enormous profit margins and unprecedented wealth.

But whereas the old fascism sought greater prosperity, its new form, at least in the West, supports only an expanded welfare state that keeps the beleaguered middle and working classes both quiescent and stripped of aspiration. Worthies such as former Bank of Canada and Bank of England chief Mark Carney even embrace “de-growth,” a conscious slowing of the economy and embrace of declining living standards.

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Indeed, the widely hailed Club of Rome report in 1972 — “The Limits to Growth” — was financed not by green activists but by the Agnelli family from Fiat, once a linchpin of Mussolini’s original corporate state.[2. See “Club of Rome a Worldwide Organization,” New York Times Archives, February 27, 1972; Enclycopedia Britannica Online, s.v., “Agnelli, Giovanni,” accessed May 11, 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Agnelli-Italian-industrialist-1921-2003.] The Report predicted massive shortages of natural resources, slower economic growth, less material consumption and ultimately less social mobility.[3. Norman Yoffee, “Orienting Collapse,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 4–5.]

Fast forward to today’s new economic order, and it’s clear that not all economic animals are equal. There are opportunities galore for Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley tech oligarchs, cobalt miners, electric car manufacturers and renewable energy producers through the massive subsidies for producing green.

And these woke oligarchs, like their fascist counterparts before them, see little use for democracy. Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, suggests that to reach the climate goals of Davos, corporations will have to embrace “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship”.[4. Eric Heyman, “What We Must Do To Rebuild,” Deutsche Bank Research, November 2020.] After all, it would be difficult to get elected officials to approve limits on such mundane popular pleasures as affordable air travel, cars, freeways and suburbs with single-family houses, unless they were imposed by judicial or executive fiat.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest losers will inevitably be the poor. Wherever the conventional green policies central to the “Great Reset” have been imposed — California, Britain, Canada, Australia, Greece, Germany, France — the result has been to create high levels of “energy poverty”; the Jacques Delors Institute estimated that some thirty million Europeans were not able to adequately heat their homes during the most recent winter.

But then there are many hypocrisies at the heart of today’s incarnation of Mussolini-style fascism. Our new elites, for example, see no contradiction in supporting claims of “systemic racism” and “social justice” at home, while cooperating with Chinese authorities who abuse basic human rights in Hong Kong or to impose forced labour in Xinjiang. Boldly progressive firms like Airbnb have no problems sharing customer data with China’s security state; nor does Apple show compunction in relying on Uighur labour to build their products.

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But in the battle between the two emergent fascist systems, China possesses powerful advantages. Communist Party cadres at least offer more than a moralising agenda; they can point to the country’s massive reduction of extreme poverty and a huge growth in monthly wages, up almost five-fold since 2006. At a time when the middle class is shrinking in the West, China’s middle class increased enormously from 1980 to 2000, although its growth appears to have slowed in recent years.

Like Mussolini, who linked his regime to that of Ancient Rome, China’s rulers look to Han supremacy and the glories of China’s Imperial past. “The very purpose of the [Chinese Communist] Party in leading the people in revolution and development,” Xi Jinping told party cadres a decade ago, “is to make the people prosperous, the country strong, and [to] rejuvenate the Chinese nation.”

In contrast, the tired capitalism of our corporate elite — who seem to have given up on broad-based economic growth — seems increasingly detached from the interests and aspirations of their own citizens’ needs.

Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, waxes enthusiastically about a “common future in cyberspace” with autocratic China. Wall Street also actively lobbies on behalf of Beijing, hoping to cash in on investments that strip America’s productive capacity but enrich them. Oligarchs like Michael Bloomberg describe China, a country of business opportunity for his firm, as “ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution”.

How do we combat this trend towards fascist structures? The answer is straightforward, if unprescriptive: to resist them with liberal ideals and a renewed commitment to upward mobility. That won’t be easy. As of today, the consolidation of oligarchic power is supported by massive lobbying operations and dispersals of cash, including to some Right-wing libertarians, who doggedly justify censorship and oligopoly on private property grounds.

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Yet despite their riches and technical know-how, the oligarchic elites face widespread and growing scepticism towards both the traditional and social media outlets under their control. Similarly, it’s also unlikely many in the middle class will embrace their programme of race indoctrination, or accept a marked decline in living standards.

But building a coalition against the new fascism requires avoiding destructive nativism and instead focusing on how to restore competition and protect consumers from the overweening power, and vast wealth of the corporate elites.

Will a citizenry, dependent on transfer payments and increasingly voiceless, still put up a fight? To slow fascism’s spread, either from China or from within, requires a re-awakening of the spirit of resistance to authority that has long marked human progress and now seems far too rare.

They treated serious things with irreverence, and irrelevant things with seriousness. They were slavish to America, ignored China and took Europe for granted. Many of them backed the Iraq War and don’t understand why that means they can never be trusted with anything important ever again.

This is a generation that hid, or squandered what intelligence it had. They believed in win-wins and public private partnerships, or giving each others’ talentless children plum jobs. Publicly concerned — no, obsessed — with equality, they presided over a society that became as unequal as the one Horace Walpole lived in. Incredibly, they oversaw a decline in the average life expectancy for the first time in 110 years. They never built enough houses. They thought Will Self was a novelist, and Amber Rudd a future Prime Minister. They answered every policy question with the word “education”, so now our cities overflow with miserable PhD-holding baristas.

Their greatest achievement? Maybe Britpop, or the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, which are both ways of saying they don’t have one. Their lowest moment? The great triggering year of 2016 — which is when they collectively lost their minds. Ever since, these centrist Dads and Mums have faced their cultural twilight and political downfall with whatever the opposite of bravery is.

d’Ancona, whose book Identity Ignorance Innovation came out recently, is a flawless minor representative of this generation, and the age they lived in. He edited the Spectator and wrote columns about Westminster for the Sunday Telegraph. Like so many of his peers, he was a cultural populist, a believer in high-low relativity who never connected the culture of the nation with the court politics he obsessed over. He thought Brexit the “idiot option”.

So, of course, Brexit happened.

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Then, from a new seat at the Guardian, d’Ancona dreamed his hideous dreams of post-Brexit Britain. We were duped. We were becoming a country in the mould of Philip Larkin: wintry, hopelessly nostalgic, ferociously bigoted, and alone — “an absurd and horrible vision”. He was finally finding his conscience as a peddler of big ideas, not backstage tittle-tattle. With Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, d’Ancona successfully landed his vault into the world of sub-TED, high-altitude musing. Post-Truth was one of three books with the same title published in 2017. Each asked how 17 million fools could be so easily hoodwinked by a slogan on the side of a bus. The big idea in all of them was that politicians lie.

Identity Ignorance Innovation is more of the same from d’Ancona. Quite literally: there are whole anecdotes and phrases of the “Ignorance” and “Innovation” chapters that are hard to distinguish from sections of Post Truth. Sometimes, as with sections on racial injustice in Britain or how to make 20-somethings more employable, d’Ancona does a seal roll onto his side and burps his ideas out as bullet points, like a harried junior writing a summary for an executive, not a professional journalist writing non-fiction that retails for a mighty £20.

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Like many writers of his generation, he views his ideas as “fiercely contemporary”. The self-image is that of the truth-teller: the bold intellect riskily crossing the lonely and treacherous frontiers of modern thought. “Countercultural” is the word he repeatedly uses, as if the ideas between the covers of Identity Ignorance Innovation are dangerous, or provocative, or fresh.

What are these ideas? It is hard to say in the sections on “Ignorance” and “Innovation”. The former is a lament about education, and how stupid grade-chasing has made the under-30s. They are “brilliant but ignorant”. Their potential intelligence has been crushed by “the deranged pressures of the digital microsecond” — the what now? Is it bold to think that the young are scandalously dense? No, it’s de rigueur, not just for d’Ancona and his generation, but every one since the Pyramids were built.

Is there a big idea then? Well, d’Ancona argues that liberals should view identity politics as an “entirely constructive adrenaline shot to the body politic”. Despite apologetically declaring himself a “one man privilege carnival”, he wants to grapple with race, cancel culture, Trans rights, statue-toppling and all the other deathless culture wars issues that vex our banana kingdom.

He thinks that these are trip-wire subjects that nobody else will touch and regrets that other commentators have “in the interests of a quiet life… crept away from this particular field of inquiry”. Have they? Has Matthew Parris shied away from writing about these issues? Has Janice Turner? Has Trevor Philips? That’s just a few columnists at The Times. Even people who have only picked up a pen by accident in the last 12 months have probably fired off a thousand word think-piece about J.K. Rowling. It is practically a beloved national pastime for us to argue about these things at this point, like making jokes about Charles assassinating Diana, or letting Michael Portillo make his television shows about train lines in the Balkans.

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Identity politics is, d’Ancona thinks, at “an important and exciting moment in its development”. The rise of movements that place racial, religious and sexual identity at their core has encouraged “a little more humility and restraint”. Well, I read Identity Ignorance Innovation in the week when a group forced a teacher into hiding, and within a few days of David Lammy being told that he was not English by a call-in guest on his radio show. Both incidents were examples of where identity politics is taking us, and will continue to take us, if it is not challenged. Exciting moments indeed!

On behalf of no one in particular, except liberal-ish centrist Dads who he flies a flag for, d’Ancona wants to make an offer to the youngsters who will not “tolerate the quiet bigotries of the past”. Look to America — bastion of racial decency and good practice — and see what we could build as allies together. Affirmative action can be used to nudge cultural norms towards “benign outcomes” on racial issues. If that doesn’t end injustice, d’Ancona assures his younger readers, “stronger medicine” can be taken.

In return for affirmative action (we have to hope that, unlike America, these policies do not summon a splenetic white identity politics into being) d’Ancona would like Gen Z to let him undertake the modernisation projects he has been banging on about since the 1990s. An “overhaul” of parliamentary procedure; “a new second chamber”; “real power to metro mayors”; “a fully codified constitution”.

But these are the reforms of an old Westminster “moderniser”, not somebody who cares about young people. Will overhauled parliamentary procedure or petty tyrant metro mayors build ambitious, beautiful garden suburbs, where the young can live good, decent lives around our major cities? No.

I suspect the last time the young looked this scary was the late 1970s. And the Britpop generation, whether it is d’Ancona or Will Self, Rachel Johnson or Ian Hislop, are getting on a bit. They are approaching the same age Harold Macmillan was when Peter Cook began doing his humiliating impression of the Prime Minister. Nobody has really come after them, but all the material is there: Pooterish social climbing, Partridge-level crap ideas, Fawlty-like exasperation amid a changing world.

Ridiculously, they still carry on like they are hated by an establishment full of port-soaked aristocrats and Thatcherites who want Nelson Mandela to stay in prison. Wrong: all those reactionaries died a long time ago; they are the establishment and have been for decades. They will have their Macmillan moment.

Ultimately, of all the vague and uninspiring proposals in Identity Ignorance Innovation, it is that last one — the codified constitution — that is the funniest. Imagine the d’Ancona constitution being chiselled into stone tablets and hung around the land. His generation’s prejudices would be made into law, to bedevil the British for centuries to come.

It was bad enough to be their children. At least when their grandchildren write the histories of the Britpoppers, they may have enough distance to treat them with the fairness they scarcely deserve.

Lockdown days have a way of blurring into one another, but my year has been marked out by the changing of the hedgerows as I ran along endless miles of footpaths.

Reflecting on that year of Covid is like trying to grasp the layout of someone’s house by peering through the keyhole. It’s difficult to get any sense of perspective when we’re all confined to our homes, with only algorithmically-filtered online newsfeeds to supply information about the outside world. The temptation is to allow every perspective to fall away, save the most personal “I” and the most general “public conversation”.

It would be easy enough to write a review of the year from the “I” perspective: all hedgerows and emotion. It would be as easy to write a breezy roundup of the year’s public conversations, which have been loud (to say the least) and increasingly surreal. But there’s another story of the pandemic’s impact as well, that’s far harder to see in either of these frameworks. This has been the deliberate shattering, in the name of virus control, of what was left of our common life – and the asymmetrical impact this has had.

Between “I” as an individual, and “we” at the largest scale of national or international politics, lies most of human society: clubs, church groups, voluntary associations, the whole organic life of communities great and small. All of this relies on peer-to-peer social connection — and it was all abruptly halted by lockdown.

When the pandemic struck, there was a rash of hopeful articles (including some of mine) about how this crisis might strengthen civil society bonds, and make us more aware of how interdependent we are as a society. This all happened, to an extent. Mutual aid organisations sprang up, often with faith communities at the forefront, seeking to plug gaps and bring help to those struggling under lockdown. There were waves of volunteers to help the NHS, deliver vaccines and pick fruit. But against that newfound voluntarism, we must weigh the impact the last year has had on countless existing institutions, social settings and relationships.

For Covid has accelerated what I think of as the disintermediation of everything. Back in the 00s, when the internet first hit the mainstream with the launch of Facebook, eBay, and their ilk, I was involved in the startup world. There was lots of excited chatter at the time about “disintermediation” — the way groups of amateurs might use the internet to route round intermediate institutions. This, the apostles of the digital revolution believed, would impel a great democratisation and empowerment of smaller players against rigid gatekeepers of all types.

That was the theory. What it meant in practice was centralisation. Instead of local newspapers, now we have one virtual “local newspaper” — Facebook — whose monopolisation of the ad revenue that once went to local papers has made Mark Zuckerberg one of the richest men in the world. Instead of high-street antique shops, we now have one “antique shop” — eBay — that has devastated high-street sellers while it made its founder a billionaire.

As we’ve plunged deeper into the digital era, a pattern has begun to emerge. Not only do digital players centralise and then replace offline ecosystems, but winners and losers on digital platforms also follow a centralising trend. This was recently captured by OnlyFans superstar Aella, who posted a graph showing how much money porn stars on that website earn:

Onlyfans ranking % and how much actual money that corresponds to: pic.twitter.com/0BiL4NKADE

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) December 6, 2020

Aella herself ranks in the top 0.8% on OnlyFans, and in her best-performing month last year made $103,000. Others on the site may make very little, despite posting lots of content. This extreme asymmetry in who benefits from a platform eviscerates everything except the very top of the curve. I think of this dynamic as Aella’s Law – and over the past year, largely thanks to Covid control measures, it has made rapid incursions into real life.

This real world rollout of Aella’s Law was first visible in bricks-and-mortar businesses. Compelled to close by pandemic policy, by June 2020 over 11,000 small and medium-sized shops had gone out of business. One report estimates that 48 businesses closed for good every day in 2020. It’s not just high street shops, either: another report estimates that by September 2020, 240,000 small and medium-sized businesses of all types went to the wall.

But that didn’t apply evenly to all businesses – it fell disproportionately on smaller ones. Online grocery retailer Ocado saw 35% growth over 2020, while Amazon (which holds the kind of leading spot in e-commerce that Aella does in porn) saw 84% growth over the year. Aella’s Law doesn’t just affect groceries either; wherever in the world there were lockdowns, over the course of 2020 small businesses struggled and died, and big ones got bigger.

The assault extends to the voluntary sector as well. As donations have wavered and high-street charity shops been forced to close, one report estimates that even charities face a wave of consolidation, with smaller, more niche bodies folding their sometimes highly specific local remits into the more general one of larger organisations.

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Aella’s Law is even being felt in our churches. The Bishop of Manchester warned in January that Covid will accelerate the closure of yet more Anglican churches, as loss of collection income due to closures meets already-dwindling congregations to render the upkeep of ancient buildings unaffordable. Reports suggest the Church of England is now proposing to increase parish sizes and cull mid-ranking clergy in order to trim costs.

At an informal level, too, there have been many losers. The 10,000 pubs, bars and restaurants that closed their doors for good in 2020 aren’t just a business; each closure represents friends not met, milestones not celebrated with family, stories not exchanged, troubles not shared over a pint.

And here, again, Aella’s Law applies: those with happy marriages, kids and good social lives have limped through the last year with social bubbles and Zoom calls. But anyone without strong social connections, or who is reliant on social institutions for everyday human contact, found even that taken from them. A quarter of UK adults have suffered loneliness and mental health issues during lockdown, and those worst affected have been young people, single parents and the unemployed — in other words, those with the weakest existing support structures.

And nowhere has the shattering of life in common bitten more sharply than for those most in need of support. The last year has been tough on all children, shut off from social contact and struggling with Zoom school. But Aella’s Law is painfully visible in the concentration of worsening child mental health down the socioeconomic scale. And it’s also at work in the impact of remote schooling: children who were already disadvantaged may not just be missing the laptop (or the space, or the quiet, or the support) to engage properly with remote schooling — worse yet, one in five have struggled to concentrate due to hunger.

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Lockdown has also gnawed at quality of life for all but the best-resourced and most well-connected elderly people. A massive 80% of respondents to an Alzheimer’s Society survey reported a dramatic decline in faculties as a consequence of isolation. And there are harrowing stories of the impact isolation in a care home has had, on people with advanced dementia deprived even of visits from loving relatives.

We’ve paid steeply to control this virus. The price has not just been in government borrowing but in the tattered warp and weft of our common life. Maybe the price has been worth paying: even under lockdown, a staggering 126,000 UK citizens died within 28 days of a Covid test over the last year. But the cost has been unfathomable as well, both individually and collectively — and it has not been evenly borne.

Over the past year, I ran more than a thousand miles. I counted my blessings with every step. Compared to many I have been lucky. I kept running as the hedgerows blossomed, greened, fruited and blew bare, and the world outside came increasingly to resemble a bleak and hallucinatory shadow-show. Even if everything else has seemed insubstantial, the paths under my feet stayed put: unchanged except by the seasons coming and going.

It’s easy to conclude that it’s all unreal, and to turn away. But the point is precisely that that out there is not a shadow-show: it’s an emerging new normal. It’s just difficult to see, because everything now, from our media to government lockdown policy, seems geared toward “just me” or “everything” — but nothing in between.

Who cares about local life, now our public conversation happens online, at colossal scale, in terms set by Chinese ambassadors and Ivy League social justice evangelists and massaged by algorithms? The answer has to be: us. We care. Even as it’s grown harder to see our life in common, we need it more than ever. The alternative is a future governed purely by Aella’s Law: an unjust, atomised, deeply inhuman place.

Today’s urban promise is, however, vastly different — not only in New York, but San Francisco and Los Angeles, London and Paris. No longer cities of aspiration, they are increasingly defined by an almost feudal hierarchy: the rich live well, protected by private security and served by local coffee shops and trendy clubs.

Meanwhile, the working class struggles to pay rent, possesses no demonstrable path to a better life and, as a result, often migrates elsewhere. Crime rates are spiking and homelessness, once an exception, is increasingly widespread. Those very streets once said to be “paved with gold” are now are filled with discarded needles, excrement and graffiti.

Indeed, what we are now witnessing is the decline of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s description of the city as “a luxury product”. Today, that sense of “luxury” has all but vanished, with modern urban economies promoting class divisions rather than upward mobility. Amid all the hoopla about urban revival, the truth is that entrenched urban poverty in the US — places where 30% or more of the population live below the poverty line — actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, from 1,100 to 3,100 neighbourhoods.

Even the New York Times admits that, in the past decade, cities have gone from “engines of growth and opportunity” to places where class relations are increasing fixed, with only the upper end of the income spectrum doing well. Gotham’s one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income. That’s almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country. But such class disparity is becoming the norm; in the tech haven of San Francisco, which has the worst levels of inequality in California, the top 5% of households earn an average of $808,105 annually, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.

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Predictably, those at the bottom of this new feudal structure suffer the most; today, the old saying that “the city air makes one free” all too often means freedom to be poor, to experience endemic homelessness, collapsing public infrastructure and rising crime.

And that was before Covid hit. Already many poor urban residents subsisted on transfer payments or worked in service industries. They were paid, usually poorly, to clean now-empty offices or work in restaurants and hotels. The lockdowns, whether justified or overwrought, have since pummelled these low-income workers; roughly 40% of Americans earning under $40,000 a year lost their jobs last March.

Unlike workers who occupy “the commanding heights” of finance, tech, marketing, and media , these people did not have the option of working from their kitchen tables or moving to suburban locations or smaller cities. Nor could they count on education systems to work their magic; most schools in American inner-city districts, in contrast to many suburbs and smaller cities, remained closed.

All of which meant America’s urban districts were ripe for civil unrest when George Floyd died last May, and these festering conditions exploded into the worst national rioting in decades. Parts of many cities went up in flames, the damage of which was obscured by mainstream media’s mantra of “mostly peaceful protests”. The constant rioting and demonstrations in Portland, once seen as a paragon of new urbanist-led revival, has all but destroyed its downtown, which is now largely bereft of pedestrians.

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Remarkably, despite the dramatic rise in homicides, the city seems likely to continue its programme of de-funding the police. In many cities — Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, New York — “progressive” district attorneys have worked assiduously to restrain law enforcement. In California, where it is no longer considered a felony to steal anything worth less than $1,000, there has been a surge in property crime, including a huge rise in car thefts. San Francisco, for example, has seen the drug store Walgreens close ten outlets since 2019, citing elevated levels of theft and weak law enforcement. Meanwhile New York’s bodegas, small markets in ethnic neighbourhoods, experienced a 222% increase in burglaries last year.

The repercussions of this extend well beyond the criminal and judicial spheres. As cities slowly fall to pieces, they are increasingly becoming no-go zones for investors and business, except for those who see opportunity investing in suddenly distressed properties; barely ten per cent of US companies are interested in investing in large urban areas. A friend who runs a biomedical company had his warehouse burned down in the post-Floyd Minneapolis riots. When I asked him whether he would rebuild, he said yes — but in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta.

Yet a number of progressives insist that the current urban exodus of wealthy residents is not a cause for concern, as it allows a more fair society to be “reborn”. Such a naïve approach forgets that there is one problem with expelling the rich: in New York, for example, the “one per cent” pay 43% of the city’s income taxes. The same is also true in California, where the top 1% of the population pays half of all income taxes. Even London now depends almost entirely on the wealthy to keep its economy afloat.

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But today’s activist Left does not seem to be concerned with economics — or, for that matter, much of the real world. In New York, activists have helped put an end to proposals for new jobs from Amazon, as well as a recent “Industry City” proposal in Brooklyn. In Seattle, the doggedly radical city council is working overtime to also push out Amazon — the company that has driven much of the region’s economic growth — to the surrounding suburbs and other regions.

But expelling tech oligarchs will not stabilise cities, improve the schools or lure business development. It certainly will not correct the fiscal crises faced by many cities, nor generate upwardly mobile jobs. Cities do not thrive by having more cutting-edge coffee shops, trendy restaurants and edgy boutiques; they need safe streets, decent schools and jobs for middle and working-class families.

Wishful thinking will not spark an urban revival. Yes, the decline of first-tier conurbations might enliven smaller cities. But overall, society as a whole will still lose. Dense urban places have always been critical in the development of culture and social behaviours. They remain crossroads of trade for goods as well as ideas, in ways that more dispersed places, even in the internet age, are not always suitable. Our cities are far from perfect. But a post-urban future could be even worse.

Pull off somewhere, anywhere. Years ago, my family and I eased our lumbering people carrier down an exit ramp a few hundred miles south of Washington DC, close to Charleston, South Carolina. There was a McDonalds with a huge enclosed playpen for young children. Coffee refills were free on weekdays. No spitting was allowed.

Outside, underneath an impossibly huge Stars and Stripes, the seediness of America was spread out as far as the eye could see. Gas stations, tattoo parlours, Bojangles Pizza, Dunkin Donuts, $30-a-night motels, car showrooms, gun shops; the air was filled with the smell of sweat and fried chicken and car oil.

I realised that afternoon that I was in love with it all. In love with the seediness; but in love too with the gentle, beaten-up faces of the folks who lived in these parts or were passing through. I should offer up a BBC series on McDonalds, I thought (I was the Washington Correspondent at the time) — just hearing from all the people who worked in them, ate in them, wandered through en route to start a new life or leave a lover or escape a jail bond.

Damn. I forgot to do it. Got excited about Obama and busy with stuff. And now the market has been cornered by Chris Arnade, author of Dignity. A book, he says, about “poverty, dignity … and McDonalds.” I wrote about it when it was was published in 2019, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

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Arnade is a former Wall Street guy who photographs people at the bottom of the American pile. Trust me: that is a very long way down. You will need to have teeth missing to get into Arnade’s books — teeth and a lot else you can’t even remember you had.

But you will also be more relevant than you know. That is the 2021 truth. Anyone who thought the Trump moment was going to be the last time a Manhattan-based journalist was going to have to visit a West Virginia diner is going to have to think again.

In his writing, Arnade has a single crystallising insight. In a nation we associate, rightly, with striving — a nation born with ants in its pants, laying waste, refashioning, rethinking, now even inventing its own facts — there is a very large group of people doing none of these things.

They are just getting by, or trying to. Great swathes of America, huge numbers of Americans, often with rheumy eyes and saggy faces, are not going anywhere. And here’s the kicker: They don’t want to go anywhere. 

In a piece written recently for the American Compass think tank, which campaigns for community to be at the heart of the Republican message, Chris Arnade recalls a typical scene:

 “The young man and older women working the afternoon shift alone in a Louisiana Waffle House, her serving, him on the grill, gossiping about work to pass the time. After he complains about everything and everybody for ten minutes, ending with a threat to quit, she matter of factly asks him, “Well, what do you want with your life?”, to which he responds, “Job that pays enough to get a home, have a family, and do my hobbies.”

Arnade points out that this is an inexplicable response to those at the top of American society, both Democrats and Republicans. They don’t understand the experience of ordinary Americans who work with their hands:

“Work is something to endure, and most do endure it, with an impressive resiliency. Our technocratic class, politicians, and the elite media rarely see this, and if they did most would be hard pressed to understand it, because their resume and career define who they are. They are careerists, so they assume everyone else must be a careerist, and they look at everyone else working, including the guy in dirty clothes driving the F150, and assume he is a careerist as well, just one in a different and mostly icky career.”

An F150, by the way, is a basic and rather boring pick up truck.

The politics of the Arnade insight is simple but I am not sure all Democrats take it fully on board. If he is right, they need to appeal to people who are not going anywhere and do not want to be told they can, or should. Campaigns of social betterment look fake to these people, because they often have been.

He certainly seems to be onto something: Democrats’ margins of support among those earning less than $30k per year have dropped every year from 2008 through to 2020. Obama won these voters by a whopping 33 percentage points in 2008. By 2020, even with blue collar friendly Biden at the top of the ticket, the Democrats’ lead was down to 8 points.

When Hillary Clinton talked of breaking glass ceilings, what did that really mean in the Waffle House? Nothing. She may as well have been addressing the populace of a different galaxy altogether.

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The Democrats’ problem in widening their appeal is often portrayed as a nervousness about the identity politics pursued with such vigour by some Left-wingers. But that’s not quite it. The problem is not really an objection to anti-racism or anti-sexism. People in Waffle Houses do not want to be victimised any more than anyone else.

The problem is the idea that it can be drummed up into a movement in which you must take part. The assumption that you want to make your own life perfect. You want the job! You want the corner office! You want power! Freedom! Sex with anyone who consents!

In the Waffle House, in McDonalds, in the front seat of the pick up truck, it just feels fake. It feels like talk from another planet. It doesn’t unite: it separates. It creams off all the “deserving” strivers from everyone else and it makes everyone else sullen and angry. And apt to vote for Donald Trump or one of his acolytes or children. Not because you like them but because you know the Clinton pant-suit brigade don’t. That’s good enough for you.

The point that some in the Democratic party are making is that the choice — in constructing a determined effort to win these people back — is not between Left and Right. It is possible to be Left but not woke, just as you can be Right but not against government spending. An obvious example is the campaign for a high federal minimum wage. This matters in the Waffle House. It matters for people who are not energised by anything more than earning decent money.

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Ah, decent money. Not knocking down the civil war statues or changing the names of schools or refighting battles about transgender children winning girls’ races on sports days.

According to the think tank The People’s Policy Project, if you took all the wealth in America and divided it up equally per person every family of four would get $1.2 million in the bank and an income of $208,000 a year.

Of course, there’s no end of all-American reasons for not doing this, but it’s a surprise, to put it mildly, that given all the riches there are in America, and the level of inequality, the argument for redistribution is so far outside mainstream debate. The project campaigns for a high minimum wage and universal child benefit. It’s not exactly communism.

Will the Democrats run with these ideas now? Does the threat of Trump-style politics mean that the non-strivers, the low achievers, finally get a look in? There are hints that it could happen. In his CPAC speech last Sunday Donald Trump hit notes he’s hit before, in particular on illegal immigration. If you are down on your luck in Oklahoma City it may well have made sense to you.

But turn over the TV and what do you see? On the same day as Mr Trump made his speech, Joe Biden released a video with a striking new message. Around 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama are voting on whether to join a union. Mr Biden took the time to support their right to do it.

“Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organise a union in their workplace,” said the President. “This is vitally important — a vitally important choice, as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race — what it reveals is the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”

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What makes the Biden intervention especially delicious is that Jay Carney — Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon — is the very same Mr Carney who was then-Vice President’s Biden’s director of communications and later President Obama’s press secretary.

Carney’s move, since the days of Bill Clinton, has been the modus operandi of the well-heeled Democrats. When things get rough in DC you hop off to the West Coast. You fly over the (many) diners on the way. And when you get back into office you fly east again, sometimes getting your jet to write “Screw you” in vapour trails in the big sky high above the duel carriageways and corn fields of middle America.

Well, metaphorically anyway. But now — well, who knows?

As well as backing union membership, Biden is proposing a doubling, in four stages, of the minimum wage. This — if it happened — would transform life for people in those bits of America that Jay Carney and other top Democrats only notice at election time.

In the great greasy wastes of land sprawling for miles around the intersections of roads. In the McDonalds, in the Waffle House, they are approaching the counter for a refill. Perhaps politically they might do the same. And Joe, the fill-in candidate, the elderly man keeping the Oval Office desk warm — Joe from whom the smartest Democrats expect nothing — might be preparing something rather extraordinary.

Extraordinary because it is ordinary. An abandonment of the hifalutin. A repudiation of the Twitter blue ticks.

Joe Biden might greatly assist his party and millions of Americans if he delivers something modest but massive. Dignity. That’s all.

It isn’t just the ease of international travel that makes Eat, Pray, Love seem like a document from another era. It’s also the book’s unselfconsciousness about economic inequality — about the fact that you can only have this sort of adventure when you happen to have received, say, a $200,000 book advance. And if the book was “a voyage of self-discovery” (a phrase Gilbert used with hardly a trace of irony), it was also an ode to consumerism: the dream held out by travel agents — sunshine, hedonism and enlightenment rolled into one — has rarely found a more persuasive salesperson.

And yet for all that, Eat, Pray, Love possessed a kind of absurd magnificence. At the start of the book, Gilbert’s marriage is in crisis, and as she collapses onto her bathroom floor at 3am, sobbing uncontrollably, something wholly unexpected happens, like “one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts”. For the first time in her life, she finds herself crying out, in fear, in desperation, in hope, to the creator of the universe.

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What happens next isn’t quite Augustine’s Confessions. But there was an appealing sense in Eat, Pray, Love — a sense never quite lost even as Gilbert moved relentlessly onwards through the world’s finest gelaterias, yoga studios and beach bars, distributing her publisher’s vast wads of cash — that life itself is a stupendous gift. You have a body, so feast! You have a soul, so how could you possibly spend less than four months on trying to unlock the mystery of prayer? You have the capacity to love, so why not travel halfway around the planet for it?

Fiffeen years on, self-help has become a far more sensible affair. Or rather, it has been supplanted by “self-care” — those miniature, fine-tuned adjustments to soothe you through a demanding day. Instead of going on a voyage of self-discovery, people download mindfulness apps called things like “Ten Per Cent Happier”. Whereas Elizabeth Gilbert searched for a God who is “an experience of supreme love”, we have Marie Kondo telling us to throw more stuff away and Sarah Knight offering The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F***. The new mood was anticipated by the ironic subtitle of Oliver Burkeman’s 2011 post-self-help book Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.

To the generation which has acquired its disposable income since Eat, Pray, Love appeared, Gilbert’s scheme must appear pretty dubious. Eat? No thanks — I’m fine with this kale juice. Love? Not likely: according to a recent survey, 20- and 30-something travellers “would rather improve mental health (30%), learn a new skill (29%) or get fit (24%) than find love (12%).” Pray? Well, in the next few weeks a book will be published which is in certain ways the opposite of Eat, Pray, Love.

True, Sarah Sands’ The Interior Silence: 10 Lessons from Monastic Life would also cost a fair amount to emulate: flights to Japan aren’t cheap, and nor, one imagines, is a stay at a Buddhist monastery in Koyasan. For Sands’ other nine lessons she visits religious houses of various, mostly Christian traditions in Italy, Spain, Egypt, Bhutan, France, Germany and Greece — and, as lockdown restrictions start to bite during the writing of the book, in Britain too. Even so, Interior Silence is less an extravagant journey in pursuit of sublime knowledge, more an accumulation of useful habits to help stay afloat.

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From the harmony of the Japanese monastery, Sands concludes that tidying her handbag could be the key to a more ordered life. At the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque, she discovers that giving up caffeine and alcohol “brings a quietness of mind”. Sands’ monks and nuns teach her to ignore the news cycle, to practise patience, to enjoy simplicity. These are the small, familiar steps of self-care — and it’s not entirely clear how much Sands’ newfound tranquillity is the result of drinking deep from the wells of ancient knowledge, and how much it is just the usual effect of a really nice holiday.

Nevertheless, the book is gripping, both because of Sands’ witty, sometimes poignant prose, and as a fable of our times. In the 21st-century meritocracy, whose greatest prize is to have a fun, well-paid job which impresses strangers at social events, Sands is unquestionably one of the winners. As editor of the Evening Standard from 2012-17, she spends “every evening in theatres or restaurants or at parties” — some of them at the proprietor Evgeny Lebedev’s Umbrian castle:

It was my job as editor of the London newspaper to deliver Boris Johnson to these weekends. The preparations were elaborate, and our welcoming party would breathe more deeply when our cars finally accelerated up the avenue of cypresses, taking in the jasmine air, and preparing for a weekend of medieval splendour: feasting, dancing, boar hunting. I have a memory of a dishevelled Johnson chasing Evgeny’s wolf, also named Boris, because it had eaten his computer dongle.

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Then, as editor of the Today Programme, Sands covers the edge-of-your-seat drama of post-Brexit politics, rising at 4.30 to “a frenzy of news wires and Twitter”, only returning home in the evening to catch up on emails. And how does it feel, this thrilling life at the centre of glamorous invite-only occasions and world-shaking political stories? Terrible, of course. The news becomes a numbing addiction. Sands’ mind fills with “noise, chaos and anxiety” to the point where she struggles to sleep. And then, among monks and nuns, she realises that with their lack of ambition, their small needs and simple lives, these people seem to have found happiness.

At moments, Sands hints that monastic living may have more to teach us than just some novel approaches to self-care. The book circles around the possibility of divine revelation, without quite deciding what to make of it. Sands quotes a phrase from St Thomas Aquinas, “the light of faith”, but doesn’t mention that he tends to use it in a fairly blunt way: by that light, he comments, “the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others.” Sands adopts a very different tone, as she looks out onto the old convent wall at the bottom of her garden:

I think of what St Thomas once called “the light of faith”. If there is a divine truth beyond knowledge and reason, then my wall, bright behind the silhouette of the yew tree and the big dark sky, seems a testament to it.

Like Eat, Pray, Love, Interior Silence is haunted by the possibility of finding God. But here the possibility fades away into a beautiful image, just as in the earlier book it dissolved into a consumerist paradise. Perhaps there are some questions which the self-help genre just isn’t designed to answer.

Even amid rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19, it’s possible if you look closely to see the first chapters of a new story about Britain and its prospects in 2021 being written. It’s a story of a new Roaring Twenties, a time of national cheer, celebration and even indulgence.

It’s also a story that I find more than a little unnerving.

Ever since the first effective vaccine to the virus was confirmed, optimism about 2021 and beyond has been rising, with financial markets the epicentre of the outbreak. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that the closer a person is to the City and financial services, the more likely they are to be looking forward to 2021 as a year when the champagne starts to flow again and the fun resumes.

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That’s a generalisation based on anecdotes, but it’s also borne out by wider evidence from the markets and their related industries. Depending on how you measure it, share prices are now as high as they’ve ever been and the gap between those prices and the actual earnings of the companies concerned as wide as at any point in history.

A lot of that comes down to the most important public policy that almost no politician talks about these days: central banks pouring cheap money into economies to keep businesses and households afloat. All that money has to go somewhere, which means higher share prices, more mergers and takeovers (private equity deals are now at their highest levels since 2007 ). A lot of City types will tell you, in terms, that There Really Is No Alternative to putting money into things like companies and property.

All this will inevitably mean more pay and bonuses for the people involved, money that will, in part and unevenly, cascade out through the economy: UK house prices are up almost 10% in 2020, and London estate agents are full of excitement about next year.

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Economic exuberance isn’t wholly irrational. After all, as long as mass vaccination programmes go OK, there’s every chance of a return to some sort of normal economic life starting in the second or third quarter of 2021. Companies that have survived the long winter and make it to Easter may find a good number of optimistic customers with cash on hand and a desire to spend it.

Household finances are another thread in the story of optimism and hedonism in 2021. For some people, 2020 has been annoying and inconvenient but also quite financially advantageous: if you have the sort of job that involves sitting at a keyboard and talking to people on Zoom and you’ve kept that job through the pandemic, you’re probably better off than you were a year ago, because your costs have fallen. No more commuting, no more Pret sandwiches, no more drinks after work.

Andy Haldane at the Bank of England reckons that adds up to £100 billion in extra savings piled up, money that could start to flow in 2021 as the Zooming class starts to spend at least some of their week back in the office and start feeling confident enough to go out to dinner, buy a new car, take a holiday.

That’s the economics. The politics of the New Roaring Twenties are more obvious still, and start at the very top.

Boris Johnson is a booster. The Prime Minister thrives on, trades on, optimism. His life and career have been built on telling people — voters, colleagues, friends — stories of how things will be better, if they only just let him have his way. Throughout the pandemic, he has been visibly desperate to tell another story of the sunlit uplands that await us when the darkness finally passes.

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So it is no insight to say that the PM will want to tell a story of a new “golden age” for Britain, with Brexit “done” and the pandemic fading in the rear-view mirror. His legacy, his possible re-election and his personality — a war between depression and exuberance — demand that 2021 is a year of celebration that buries the memory of 2020.

My suspicion is that a lot of voters will want to buy what Johnson will be selling next year. As I wrote here before Christmas, a fair chunk of the electorate has given him and his Government the benefit of the doubt during a bad year for Britain. Imagine what his ratings could look like in the summer if growth is rebounding, consumer spending is booking and the sun is indeed shining again.

The other significant players in the narrative of national happiness are found in the media. Fleet Street isn’t what it used to be, but it still matters, and some of its players are itching to tell their readers a tale about a new era of jubilation and consumer spending on stuff their advertisers sell.

So what am I worried about? What’s the problem with a national mood of optimism and good cheer? Well, to be very clear, I’m not making a political point here: I’m a tiresome, equivocating centrist who really doesn’t take sides in contests between parties. I have no view on whether the sun should shine on Boris Johnson rather than Keir Starmer. Nor am I a professional doom-monger, though I accept it’s rarely difficult to distinguish between me and a ray of sunshine.

No, what worries me is that the national story of the New Roaring Twenties won’t actually be a national story. It will exclude and overlook a significant number of people, and in so doing store up more trouble to come.

Simply, the fact that people who read upmarket newspapers, write for newspapers and get written about in newspapers will spend the second half of 2021 going out to dinner in restaurants again isn’t the same thing as a roaring recovery from an economic shock. Yes, it will make those people happy and make them feel like things are getting back to normal. Yes, it will be good for some people who lost their low-wage jobs in hospitality this year, who will find some of those jobs come back into existence. It is in no way a bad thing. But it will be far from enough to address the economic and social harms done by the pandemic and its consequences.

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Those harms include unemployment, some of it structural, thus requiring people to move sectors and places to work again. That means scarring: the older someone is, the greater the lasting damage done to them by unemployment. Women who worked part-time in retail and hospitality, sometimes because they’d secured shift patterns that fitted around children and caring, may face some of the biggest challenges in the new UK labour market.

Low-income households won’t be adding to the release of “pent up demand” next year either. National aggregates for saving conceal big variations: the Zoom classes may have piled up cash, but people at the bottom of the wage ladder ate into their modest savings just to get by.

Poor children won’t see 2021 as a golden year either, even if ministers do the sensible thing and maintain the £20 a week uplift in their parents Universal Credit. Those kids’ educational prospects took a heavy blow during the first lockdown, meaning some will fall further behind better-off peers and never catch up. Some children took physical blows and worse too: some social workers and child protection officials fear abuse and neglect rose largely undetected during 2020.

The importance of place will only grow in an uneven return to “normal”. The experience of previous economic shocks is that bigger, more prosperous places tend to bounce back more quickly than smaller ones with fewer connections and fewer high-skill, high-wage jobs. It’s a statement of the obvious that the pandemic makes those nice-sounding promises to “level up” Britain’s lop-sided economic geography all the more relevant. That also means the cost of failing to deliver on those promises will be all the higher.

Sadly, there is little confidence among officials and expert veterans of regional and industrial policy that this Government has a plan to deliver the rebalancing that has eluded previous administrations. And while it’s perfectly possible that this expert establishment view is wrong, even the PM’s most optimistic fans should concede that his plans are unlikely to smooth out decades of uneven development in a few months, let alone months that fall immediately after the biggest economic shock in peacetime history.

There are all sorts of economic worries that will persist next year and beyond, including some I haven’t even mentioned yet: epic public debt; corporate debt that holds back investment; dismal and uneven underlying productivity; the ongoing search for a post-EU economic model.

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But in the end, my fears about the new Roaring Twenties are social and political, about the way we talk and feel as a nation.

A 2021 where champagne flows in the more expensive bits of London and the PM talks about a new golden age will be a bitter year for a lot of people who feel far, far away from the exuberance of the better-off and better-connected.

In the past few years, such feelings of distance and disenchantment delivered economic and political disruption and outright rupture: Brexit; Corbyn; Trump. Those things, blended with the poison of social media, have created divided and divisive conversations, where both media and political voices take sides and damn those on the other side of the line.

Even from this distance, I find it all too easy to see a post-pandemic Britain where one side cheers and orders another round while scorning the gloomsters who talk Britain down. And between the two imposters of outright triumph and utter disaster, a country that feels less and less like one nation.

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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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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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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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.

These are among the alarming stats cited by Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, published earlier this year just as lockdown sped up some of the trends he chronicled: increased tech dominance, rising inequality between rich and poor, not just in wealth but in health, and record levels of loneliness (4,000 Japanese people die alone each week, he cheerfully informs us).

Kotkin is among a handful of thinkers warning about a cluster of related trends, including not just inequality but declining social mobility, rising levels of celibacy and a shrinking arena of political debate controlled by a small number of like-minded people.

The one commonality is that all of these things, along with the polarisation of politics along quasi-religious lines, the decline of nationalism and the role of universities in enforcing orthodoxy, were the norm in pre-modern societies. In our economic structure, our politics, our identity and our sex lives we are moving away from the trends that were common between the first railway and first email. But what if the modern age was the anomaly, and we’re simply returning to life as it has always been?

Inequality was almost universal from the agricultural to the industrial revolution, and medieval Europe would have had a GINI index higher than modern Latin America, with a handful of families owning up to a quarter of land in England, and the monarch a similar share.

Most of the medieval left-behinds would have worked at home or nearby, the term “commuter” only being coined in the 1840s as going to an office or factory became the norm, a trend that only began to reverse in the 21^st century (accelerating sharply this year).

Although I imagine most people will return to the office after the vaccine, unemployment patterns will continue on their pre-modern course. One of the peculiar features of the modern world is the shortage of labour, while the medieval era was characterised by mass underemployment, except in times of harvest, which is why land was so valuable relative to labour.

The industrial revolution increased the demand for labour and helped drive up wages, which rocketed in the 18th century, but with automation increasing numbers will be unemployed or underemployed; while government policies used to focus on creating work, the seemingly inevitable logic of Universal Basic Income reflects the fact that we may have to give up on that dream.

Along with income stratification, another pre-modern trend is the decline of social mobility, which almost everywhere is slowing (with the exception of immigrant communities, many of whom come from the middle class back home).

Social mobility in the US has fallen by 20% since the early 1980s, according to Kotkin, and the Californian-based Antonio Garcia Martinez has talked of an informal caste system in the state, with huge wage differences between rich and poor and housing restrictions removing any hope of rising up. California now has among the most dystopian of income inequality, with vast numbers of multimillionaires but also a homeless underclass now suffering from “medieval” diseases.

Unfortunately, where California leads, America and then Europe follows.

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Social mobility was not unknown before the modern age, but it was rare and mostly only possible through the Church or war. William of Wykeham was the son of a Hampshire freeman and rose to become Bishop of Winchester and also Chancellor of England, founding Winchester College, the oldest public school in England, with its famous motto “Manners makyth man”. But Wykeham was fortunate to have received patronage from two wealthy men, which was necessary before the age of welfare and free education.

Patronage has made a comeback, especially among artists, who have largely returned to their pre-modern financial norm: desperate poverty. Whereas musicians and writers have always struggled, the combination of housing costs, reduced government support and the internet has ended what was until then an unappreciated golden age; instead they turn once again to patrons, although today it is digital patronage rather than aristocratic benevolence.

A caste system creates caste interests, and some liken today’s economy to medieval Europe’s tripartite system, in which society was divided between those who pray, those who fight and those who work. Just as the medieval clergy and nobility had a common interest in the system set against the laborers, so it is today, with what Thomas Piketty calls the Merchant Right and Brahmin Left — two sections of the elite with different worldviews but a common interest in the liberal order, and a common fear of the third estate.

This new age of liberal inequality is dominated by and defined by tech, with the four big firms, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, having a GDP equal to France. Tech accounts for eight of the 20 richest people on earth, as well as nine of the richest 13 under-40s, all of them based in California.

Tech is by nature anti-egalitarian, creating natural monopolies that wield vastly more power than any of the great industrial barons of the modern age, and have cultural power far greater than newspapers of the past, closer to that of the Church in Kotkin’s view; their algorithms and search engines shape our worldview and our thoughts, and they can, and do, censor people with heretical views.

Rising inequality and stratification is linked to the decline of modern sexual habits. The nuclear family is something of a western oddity, developing as a result of Catholic Church marriage laws and reaching its zenith in the 19^th and 20^th centuries with the Victorian cult of family and mid-20^th century “hi honey I’m home” Americana. Today, however, the nuclear household is in decline, with 32 million American adults living with their parents or grandparents, a growing trend in pretty much all western countries except Scandinavia (which may partly explain the region’s relative success with Covid-19).

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This is a return to the norm, as with the rise of the involuntarily celibate. Celibacy was common in medieval Europe, where between 15-25% of men and women would have joined holy orders. In the early modern period, with rising incomes and Protestantism, celibacy rates plunged but they have now returned to the medieval level.

The first estate of this neo-feudal age is centred on academia, which has likewise returned to its pre-modern norm. At the time of the 1968 student protests university faculty in both the US and Britain slightly leaned left, as one would expect of the profession. By the time of Donald Trump’s election many university departments had Democrat: Republican ratios of 20, 50 or even 100:1. Some had no conservative academics, or none prepared to admit it. Similar trends are found in Britain.

Around 900 years ago Oxford evolved out of communities of monks and priests; for centuries it was run by “clerics”, although that word had a slightly wider meaning, and such was the legacy that the celibacy rule was not fully dropped until 1882.

This was only a decade after non-Anglicans were allowed to take degrees for the first time, Communion having been a condition until then. A similar pattern existed in the United States, where each university was associated with a different church: Yale and Harvard with the Congregationalists, Princeton with Presbyterians, Columbia with Episcopalians. The increasingly narrow focus on what can be taught at these institutions is not new.

Similarly, politics has returned to its pre-modern role of religion. The internet has often been compared to the printing press, and when printing was introduced it didn’t lead to a world of contemplative philosophy; books of high-minded inquiry were vastly outsold by tracts about evil witches and heretics.

The word “medieval” is almost always pejorative but the post-printing early modern period was the golden age of religious hatred and torture; the major witch hunts occurred in an age of rising literacy, because what people wanted to read about was a lot of the time complete garbage. Likewise, with the internet, and in particular the iPhone, which has unleashed the fires of faith again, helping spread half-truths and creating a new caste of firebrand preachers (or, as they used to be called, journalists).

Most of us grew up in the industrial age of politics, when the great divide was over class and economics. But that is something of an anomaly — and the culture wars that were first identified in the mid-90s are just the return to normal, of people screeching at each other about their sinful beliefs.

English politics from the 16^th to the 19^th century was “a branch of theology” in Robert Tombs’s words; Anglicans and rural landowners formed the Conservative Party, and Nonconformists and the merchant elite the core of the Liberal Party. It was only with industrialisation that political focus turned to class and economics, but the identity-based conflict between Conservatives and Labour in the 2020s seems closer to the division of Tories and Whigs than to the political split of 50 years ago; it’s about worldview and identity rather than economic status.

Post-modern politics have also shaped pre-modern attitudes to class. In medieval society the poor were despised, and numerous words stem from names for the lower orders, among them ignoble, churlish, villain and boor (in contrast “generous” comes from generosus, and “gentle” from gentilis, terms for the aristocracy). Medieval poems and fables depict peasant as credulous, greedy and insolent — and when they get punched, as they inevitably do, they deserve it.

Compare this to the evolution of comedy in the post-industrial west, where the butt of the joke is the rube from the small town, laughed at for being out of touch with modern political sensibilities. The most recent Borat film epitomises this form of modern comedy that, while meticulously avoiding any offence towards the sacred ideas of the elite, relentlessly humiliates the churls.

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The third estate are mocked for still clinging to that other outmoded modern idea, the nation-state. Nation-states rose with the technology of the modern day — printing, the telegraph and railways — and they have been undone by the technology of the post-modern era. A liberal in England now has more in common with a liberal in Germany than with his conservative neighbour, in a way that was not possible before the internet.

Nations were semi-imagined communities, and what follows is a return to the norm — tribalism, on a micro scale, but tribalism nonetheless, whether along racial, religious or most likely political-sectarian tribes. Indeed, in some ways we’re seeing a return to empire.

The common theme running through all these trends is the decline of the middle class, a group who were unusually strong in the industrial age but are struggling in the tech era. The mid-century United States may have been the best time ever to be the average man, although as always one form of equality clashes with another; egalitarianism between men went with reduced opportunities for women, as well as racial exclusivity.

The middle-class age meant the triumph of bourgeoise values and the decline of the middle class has led to their downfall, widely despised and mocked by believers in the higher-status bohemian attitudes. Now the age of the average man is over, and the age of the global aristocrat has arrived.

In normal times I might shrug and attempt to rectify the situation by taking the stairs, instead of the lift, or with a lazy trip to the shops in search of a bigger waistband. But, alas, these are not normal times; according to new research from the Government, the more bulk I put on, the greater my risk of becoming seriously ill if I contract Covid-19. I’ve no choice but to lose this extra upholstery — and swiftly.

I’m not alone. A study by King’s College London found that almost half (48%) of those questioned admitted they had put on weight during lockdown. Boris Johnson, too, says he was “way overweight” when he contracted the virus. And just under two-thirds (63%) of adults in Britain are officially classed as overweight or obese; the UK has consistently ranked as one of Europe’s fattest nations.

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Following his brush with death, the PM has undergone something of a damascene conversion. Once at the head of the charge against the nannying approach to tackling obesity; now he is wringing his hands, urging us to “do our bit” and fight that flab.

Partly in response to the pandemic, but also concerned with the nation’s health as a whole, the Government has unveiled a series of measures to tackle this obesity ‘time bomb’. So we have a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm ‘watershed’, along with a prohibition on supermarket two-for-one offers. Calorie counts will also need to be added to menus in chain restaurants and cafes that employ over 250 people.

Tackling the junk food ads must have looked like an easy win. They currently appear up to nine times an hour at children’s peak viewing times. And kids who watched over three hours of television per day were almost three times more likely to buy junk food products than children who watched little or no television.

The usual caveats about correlation not implying causation apply, but if this advertising were not effective, food manufacturers wouldn’t spend such vast sums pumping it out — and targeting children in particular. Pester power is strong. I remember tugging on my own mother’s arm as a boy: pleading with her to buy me sweets and crisps after I had seen advertisements by cartoon characters with catchy theme tunes in-between episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine and Rainbow.

But it does feel rather like a tinkering around the edges. Of course a clampdown on hawking junk food to children is to be welcomed, but it also completely ignores the fact that people pile on weight for reasons beyond mere awareness of the existence of the biggest junk food brands.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the Government’s new zeal for fat fighting, though, is how it fights against its strategy to pump life back into Britain’s moribund economy. We have been urged, of late, to ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ and have been offered cut price grub in restaurants. But surely encouraging people to up their spending and consumption (quite literally) is at odds with asking them to also slim down. And, in a further contradiction, the Government’s own ‘Enjoy Summer Safely’ radio ads are encouraging people to “grab fish and chips on the beach”. It’s true that eating out needn’t be synonymous with eating unhealthily; yet it very often is.

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The chaotic response just shows that the Government doesn’t have a clue about our everyday lives and what we do — or don’t — have on our plates. Tackling overeating is actually much far more complicated than simply telling people to make healthier food choices and eat less. Take the King’s College survey which found us eating more during lockdown. It also determined that the same percentage of us (48%) are feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. We’re stressed, often without productive work, and generally confined to the house. As a consequence, we’re more likely to pig-out.

The relationship between enforced worklessness and obesity won’t come as news to some parts of the country. Britain’s fattest regions tend to be those places where industry was wound down at break-neck speed in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the north east and the west midlands. Conversely, Britain’s thinnest areas are the affluent London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea and Richmond upon Thames.

As our working lives have changed, so our eating habits have evolved. We work some of the longest hours in Europe and it tells: British households spend around half as much time preparing an evening meal today as they did in the 1980s. Researching my book on low-paid work in 2016, one of the most striking aspects was the steady deterioration of my diet. As I wrote in Hired:

“When we walked through the door at midnight at the end of a shift, we kicked off our boots and collapsed onto our beds with a bag of McDonald’s and a can of beer. We did not… come home and stand about in the kitchen for half an hour boiling broccoli.”

The paternalistic Left feels that healthy food is ‘more expensive’. Yet the main difference is really found in the time and knowledge it takes to prepare nourishing food. One in four people in Britain knows only three recipes and one in 10 cannot cook at all. Many of those asked blamed hectic lifestyles for their lack of culinary knowledge. Calory-dense food is not necessarily cheaper but it is usually easier to stick in a microwave with minimal fuss or boil quickly on a hob.

This is not to say that poverty does not have a direct impact on what people eat. Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy argues that “the best way to tackle food poverty is to tackle poverty”. It adds: “When funds run short, it is often spending on food that gets cut first”. It also warns of a new wave of poverty as firms let large number of workers go because of the Covid-19 downturn. “The data already show an alarming increase in food insecurity,” the report warns. “The number of people saying they could not afford enough food rose slightly over the same period, from 1.7 million to 1.8 million in May, presumably as redundancies started to be made.”

Junk food advertising may influence our buying habits but the main drivers of obesity are overwhelmingly structural. The type and amount of food we eat is an individual choice; however every choice is made in a wider environmental context. How much you weigh is determined more by where you live and what type of job you do than how many adverts for hamburgers and Mars bars you are exposed to in-between episodes of Coronation Street.

Structural change is a longer game though. And with another round of a deadly virus on the horizon, time is not something the Government has in abundance; no wonder sanctimonious compulsion is the order of the day.

And the announcement by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, came not a moment too soon. The headlong rush into mass academic higher education, leapfrogging even the US, happened faster in the UK than in most other comparable countries and it seemed to happen on automatic pilot, with remarkably little thought given to the economic or social consequences. The only serious debate we ever had was on tuition fees.

Already about 30% of school leavers were heading to university when Blair made his pledge in 1999, but the accelerated push for 50% (which on some measures was reached last year) has turned out to have very significant unintended consequences, many of them negative.

Consider the following: more than a third of UK graduates are in non-graduate employment more than five years after graduating and the graduate pay premium is shrinking to below 10% for nearly half of male graduates; meanwhile employers are desperately short of people with higher manual and technical skills and there are big shortages in both the skilled trades and the care economy. At the same time, more than a third of all jobs, and most of the good ones, are graduate only, shutting out people without degrees. And in the period when the proportion of graduates in the adult population has risen to 35% (and around 45% among the under-30s) productivity has declined, social mobility has at best flat-lined and cultural divides have grown starker.

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Yet we are so used to thinking of a university education as an automatic good and a passport to a successful life for pretty well anyone that the powerful university lobby still has a powerful grip on the country’s imagination. It is sure to hit back at the new course that the Government is setting as it attempts to re-set the economic and cultural signals away from the classical university to a much wider variety of post-school options.

Jo Johnson the former Tory universities minister complained last week that there was no evidence that sending fewer young people to university “is the route to a more productive economy”. That may be so, but there is no evidence on the other side either (causality in such matters is notoriously difficult to establish) and it is a simple historical fact that the most rapid post-war economic and productivity growth happened when barely 10% of school leavers went to university in the 1960s.

There is an extraordinary amount of magical thinking about the beneficial impact of higher education on productivity, economic growth and social mobility, (the education writer Alison Wolf compares it to the Soviet Union ’s irrational belief in capital goods). In fact, to repeat, all of these things have been stagnating in the years that university enrolments have been roaring ahead and rich countries with very different numbers of graduates can produce very similar growth and productivity numbers.

More graduate teachers and doctors, and other public service professionals, were required with the big expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s. And there was strong demand for graduates when the knowledge economy took off in the 1980s. All of this helped to create today’s more open and democratic mass professional elite. It is also true that the UK saw a productivity surge in the 1980s and 1990s, as graduate numbers were rising, (though that was largely thanks to the Thatcherite elimination of the least productive companies and even sectors).

In more recent decades it has been a very different story. The American economist Robert Gordon, in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, says that innovation has been nose-diving in the era when there has never been more investment in research universities. Productivity has been in particularly sharp decline in those parts of the economy that are graduate-dominated. And some analysis even sees professional bureaucratization stemming from mass higher education as an active drag on productivity.

Moreover, higher education has done nothing to reduce inequality and its expansion in recent decades has clearly widened the value and cultural divides that have contributed to the votes for Brexit and Trump. This is particularly true in the UK which is an international outlier both in the high number that go to residential universities and the lack of a prestigious technical college alternative to university (after the polytechnics were abolished in 1992).

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One reason that the rapid expansion of higher education, to half of school leavers, seemed self-evidently desirable to those in the room when the decision was made is that all of them were graduates — a classic case of groupthink.

One man in that room and closely involved in discussions over Labour’s 50% target was David Soskice, the LSE political economist and son of former Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice. When I spoke to him about the target he can remember nobody in government involved in the decision raising any objections. The economy seemed to want more graduates, judging by the (then) graduate income premium, and university was regarded as a ladder of social mobility for those from middle- and lower-income groups.

What I call the 15/50 problem does not seem to have been considered: the idea that when 15% of people in your class or school or town go to university and you don’t, it does not create a ‘left behind’ problem, but when 50% go to university and you don’t it does create such a psychological problem.

And it is absurd that so much higher education spending is focused on those aged 18 to 22. Many of them have acquired useful life experience and grown into young adults away from home for an extended period for the first time. Many have also acquired useful professional skills or pursued intellectual interests for the sheer joy of it. But far too many have learned little of value, and what they have learned they have quickly forgotten, their degree acting primarily as a signal to a future employer that they have the right personal characteristics to enter the bloated cognitive class. It is a ranking system and, in the UK, it is reinforced by the physical and social separation of the residential universities. And the sorting hat of higher education creates a qualification treadmill requiring ever more differentiation, with post-graduate degrees now booming.

Some people argue that more or less everyone should go to something called a university and the colleges should then specialise in different kinds of education and vocational training. Such people point to the fact that around 40% of university courses, and even more in the post-1992 universities, are essentially vocational — whether traditional, high-prestige, vocational courses such as medicine, law and engineering, or newer university degrees such as nursing, quantity surveying or marketing.

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Yet the relevant question for the UK is this: is a classical university — with its bias towards academic essay-writing skills, and lecturers who are often researchers first and teachers second — the best place to deliver the kind of higher vocational skills that many individuals want to acquire and that the economy, especially in the UK, so badly needs? Public opinion in the UK clearly does not think so. A survey by the think tank Onward found that 66% of respondents agreed that more people going to university and fewer gaining technical qualifications had been bad for the country overall; 34% said it was beneficial.

Yet the current incentives in the UK, from very tangible financial ones to less tangible cultural ones, focus on three- or four-year fulltime courses for 18–19-year-olds, usually at residential universities which is very expensive both for the country and the individuals concerned and not always an effective use of someone ’s time. And those incentives tend to discourage part-time study, mature students, shorter diploma-type higher vocational courses. Moreover, thanks to the student-demand-led higher education funding system the UK was in the bizarre position, in the 2011–17 period, of increasing university teaching funding in physics by just 6% per student, compared with 27% for business degrees and 34% for sports sciences.

It is not that we are investing too much in education in general, but too much is going on signalling efforts for the higher-level exam-passers and not enough on the vocational, professional and technical skills, and indeed the lifelong learning, that most of the population, and the economy, need to flourish. It is a bit like acquiring a state-of-the-art nuclear weapon while your tanks and artillery decay.

If, thanks to an oversupply of graduates, advertisements for teaching assistants or accounting technicians begin to routinely require a degree, it is common sense for individuals who wish to work in these fields to obtain one. But it would be better for both individuals and society if the arms race could be called off and access to such jobs restored to conscientious school leavers and apprentices, as used to be the case.

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Moreover, today’s graduates, as Paul Lewis of King’s College, London, argues, tend to have unrealistic expectations of high-status, well-paid jobs and when they are actually employed in the middling technical or junior manager jobs that their non-graduate parents might have done they quickly become dissatisfied. The system is producing the wrong mix of skills, with too many graduates and too few actual technicians and skilled trades jobs especially in construction, health and information technology from coders to web designers. UK employers in 2017 complained that they had trouble filling more than 40% of skilled trades vacancies.

We are suffering an epidemic of square pegs in round holes. And these disappointed graduate expectations may lie behind some of the more extreme campus identity politics and eruptions of political emotion from the Corbyn movement to Black Lives Matter.

It is true that longer, residential courses are popular with students — many are naturally attracted to three years fun and freedom away from parents at age 18/19 — but the high cost (both for the individual and the taxpayer) and disappointing returns is starting to shift attitudes. And if Covid-19 is going to mean a permanent reduction in the flow of international students, whose high fees have helped to subsidise the system in the UK, this middle-class rite of passage may be a luxury the UK can no longer afford. The residential experience can be a useful one in learning how to cooperate and rub along with people from different backgrounds but there must be other ways of providing that experience through residential apprenticeships or civic volunteering schemes.

The obvious point is that university does not produce the best outcomes for everyone. It makes no sense for many young people, from all social classes, who do not flourish in the rigorous academic environment that a university should be (but increasingly is not). And it makes even less sense for an economy that requires a range of skills and aptitudes many of which are better acquired in workplaces or other kinds of post-school educational institution.

And it is surely just self-defeating to assume that the answer to our growing education-based status (and income) divides is to send even more people to university. People from all backgrounds, especially less privileged ones, should be encouraged to go to elite universities if they have the aptitude for it. But in Germany it is perfectly normal for middle class children to do an apprenticeship or go to a technical college. And congratulations to Gavin Williamson for declaring he would be very happy if one of his children were to take a non-university path after school.

In my observation too much of the case for mass higher education is based on an indiscriminate spirit of not wanting to kick away the ladder on the part of people who have had a valuable university experience themselves. It is a decent instinct but it also contains within it a kind of narcissism that says: be like me, pass exams at school, go to a Russell Group university and enjoy a successful professional career.

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But there are strict limits on the number of people who can do that, even if everyone in the society had exactly the same level of cognitive ability. There is also a strict limit on the number of higher professional jobs. Indeed, it turns out that the knowledge economy doesn’t need so many knowledge workers after all; AI is now coming for the middling cognitive jobs that university expansion was designed to train people for.

And isn’t it better to widen the sources of achievement and try to raise the status of ‘not university’ rather than send as many people as possible to university, and in the process raise expectations of professional success that in many cases are likely to be disappointed, while starving the economy of the middling, technical skills it needs?

Tony Blair’s target has turned out to be bad economics, bad politics, and even bad for academic standards, as the value of a first class degree or 2:1 has plummeted.

There is no need for the Government to actually close universities. But thanks to the Covid crisis and an imminent demographic bulge, which would require another 20 or 30 universities to keep to the current proportion of undergraduates, it can encourage university mergers and just allow the proportion of school leavers going to university to slip back down to 30 or 35%, roughly the level when the Blair pledge was made.

Meanwhile if the Government gets its reforms right many more school leavers will find more satisfying, and more economically relevant, alternative forms of non-academic post-school education.

What struck me was not so much the squalor of his situation: we’re all familiar with the pornography of street life — the dirt and the poverty. What was extraordinary, though, was the suddenness with which Gary had fallen through society’s floorboards. One minute he had a reasonably decent job, a relationship and a flat; the next, everything had unravelled like a poorly knitted scarf. By the time I met Gary he was eking out his existence in a rank doorway, unseen by the thousands who trod the pavements each day.

Yet Gary’s experience was not an unusual one. Before Covid, the situation for working renters in Britain was precarious: almost half of them were just a single pay cheque away from homelessness. If you were lucky, you could ‘couch surf’ at the house of friends and relatives or, if you weren’t on friendly terms with any good samaritans, then the streets beckoned. As wages stagnated, and the cost of renting increased, so too did the numbers of men and women bedding down in shop and restaurant doorways; rough sleeping in England rose for seven consecutive years up to 2017.

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The most up to date figures show that from April to June 2019, 68,170 households were either homeless or threatened with homelessness — an increase of 11% on the previous year. This doesn’t take account of the so-called hidden homeless: those couch surfers, squatters and those who bed down each night in filthy and overcrowded doss houses.

Homelessness now blights every large British town or city — and the public have tolerated it by and large. Or, at least, they have turned out to polling stations to vote for politicians who have tolerated it: David Cameron and George Osborne, for example. But their version of modern, caring conservatism seemed to view poverty through a decidedly Victorian lens. Responsibility was placed on the individual — “and having located the responsibility, society goes contentedly on about its own affairs”, as Jack London wrote in The People of the Abyss, his journalistic sojourn among the homeless in turn-of-the-century London. And since 2016, all politicians of all stripes have been preoccupied almost entirely with Brexit.

But crises are funny things. As Covid-19 reached Britain, it started to dawn on politicians that the homeless were no longer a mere inconvenience to be edged past on the rush to the office, but potential super-spreaders of a highly infectious disease. So, on March 26, the Government issued its ‘Everybody In’ directive. Local authorities were instructed to provide immediate accommodation for anyone who was sleeping rough. Councils were handed a total of £3.2m to place them in hotels and B&Bs. Homelessness was abolished at the stroke of a pen.

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To be fair to Boris Johnson, he had just announced new money to tackle homelessness before Covid arrived. In a break with its austere predecessors, the Government, in December, set up a £63 million grant scheme to help the homeless in England into accommodation.

However, as we ease out of lockdown, the Government is no longer directing councils to accommodate the homeless beyond their statutory duty. And the problem will spike massively as the pandemic abates. Crisis chief executive Jon Sparkes told me: “At this very minute tens of thousands of people across Great Britain are struggling against a rising tide of job insecurity and high rents, all of which threaten to push them into homelessness”.

Against this ominous backdrop, though, there is much talk about the nature of the post-pandemic landscape. And a quiet revolution seems to be taking place. The number of people who see Britain as a society in which we look after each other has tripled since February. Since the referendum, conventional wisdom had it that Britain was a deeply polarised place. Yet more than half (57%) of Britons now believe the country will be united once the pandemic has receded.

We may, in other words, be undergoing what former prime minister James Callaghan called a “sea change” in attitudes: “a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of”. Perhaps the sight of ragged men and women wandering submissively through British streets, paper cups gripped tightly in emaciated outstretched hands, may be intolerable to the nation that emerges from lockdown: a nation which feels itself both more united and more uneasy about the spread of disease.

But putting a roof over someone’s head is in some ways the easy part. And in any case, the the idea we might ever totally eliminate homelessness is a pipe dream. Many are sleeping rough because of debilitating drug addictions. Nearly a third (32%) of all deaths among homeless people in England in 2017 were a result of drug poisoning. And many are there because of mental health issues or complicated social factors.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

Turning someone who has existed on the margins into a functioning member of society — capable of holding down a job and paying the rent on time – is a bigger challenge. As the founder of the Big Issue John Bird wrote in 2017: “The people I have spoken with or noticed recently know what they want. They want a further high. But that is the worst thing for them. Their decision-making has been robbed from them. Cogent and rational behaviour has been stolen away.”

But ensuring that every person in Britain has a roof over their head is something to shoot for at least. Money, too, is infinitely more useful than moral sanctimony when it comes to rehabilitating drug users.

The record of the previous Labour government is impressive in this respect. It also presents a historical refutation to the idea that blame for homelessness can be laid at the feet of the individual. Homelessness rose exponentially in the 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in the infamous ‘cardboard cities’ scattered around London. Unemployment played a big role, as did the increased availability of drugs. But the political will to reduce the problem just wasn’t there.

In contrast, when Labour came to office in 1997 there was a conscious drive to end rough sleeping. They didn’t quite achieve that — I’m doubtful that any government ever has — but there was a reduction by two-thirds in rough sleeping between 1999 and 2002, taking 1,147 people off the streets. This looks all the more impressive when set against the lethargy of recent years. The number of rough sleepers has gradually risen from 1,768 in 2010, when Labour left office, to 4,677 in 2018.

Today, there are a range of new factors driving people onto the streets. The ‘gig’ economy, for example, has become synonymous with chronic underemployment, while waves of migration from Eastern Europe have resulted in begging as newcomers discover that British streets are not paved with gold. Moreover, government cuts to local authority budgets, the introduction of Universal Credit along with house price inflation sent many more fanning out into the streets.

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Can poorer nations survive Covid-19?

By Dan Knowles

There are signs the public is growing tired of it — fed up of the sight of filthy mattresses and sleeping bags nestled under every underpass and alcove. Some of the shift in attitudes towards the homeless at the turn of the 1990s was motivated by an outburst of warmth for fellow man — the view that people were poor because they were simply unlucky gained public traction following the recessions of the the time.

But many just wanted the streets tidied up. They were sick of seeing the destitute sprawled across the pavement each time they walked along a busy street or opened up a shop or restaurant. With contagion likely to be an ongoing existential concern once the pandemic has loosened its grip, it’s hard to see how the status quo of recent years — the uncaring attitude that dismisses the street-dweller with a contemptuous wave of the hand — can continue in perpetuity.

Some have compared the coronavirus crisis with the Second World War. The Queen even nodded to Vera Lynn during her April 5 Coronavirus broadcast. These parallels can be pretty overcooked. For one thing, it’s extremely unlikely that Boris Johnson will be viewed by history as a stoic Churchillian bulldog who pulled the nation back from the brink of catastrophe – although our unpreparedness to deal with Covid-19 does bring to mind the title of Churchill’s book on the complacency that led up to war: ‘While England Slept’.

However, I think key echoes may actually be found in Covid-19’s aftermath. Britain discovered during World War Two that economic planning could work. And so, once Britain had seen off Hitler and the Nazis, it was no longer inconceivable that the Government could take a larger role in the economy. The old world of laissez faire economics was buried under ten square miles of rubble along with Berlin.

As unemployment soars, the political horizons of the British people may very well expand. Recent months have demonstrated to even the most sceptical, that it is possible to house rough sleepers. What it requires is political will — and for the Chancellor to turn the funding taps on. The homeless charity Crisis has estimated that it would cost £282m to permanently rehouse those currently staying in hotels and B&Bs. This is chicken feed in the context of the vast sums that have already been spent.

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The Covid-19 class war

By James Bloodworth

The next decade is going to be an exceedingly difficult one. Unemployment will reach levels not seen since the 1980s. The warm bubble we are suspended in at present — held afloat by furlough money  — will pop come October, and many will fall suddenly to the ground with a painful crash. Amid the growing government debt, we can expect a rehash of the pro-austerity arguments of a decade ago; there will be calls for the Government to retreat yet further from the social life of the nation.

But I suspect the post-Covid landscape will resemble the post-war era more than the world born of the 2008 recession, at least in terms of its political potential. The greatest feats of the immediate post-war government — the NHS, the welfare state, a major programme of house building — were achieved in a country that was so bankrupt it had to ration bread. Yet within a few years, those radical institutions seemed entirely normal.  The political horizons of ordinary people had slowly expanded as the bombs fell on British cities, to the point where an impossible dream — of a land ‘fit for heroes’, as Lloyd George defined it at the close of the First World War —  had become a reality.

Perhaps Covid-19 will lead to a similar expansion in the realm of the possible. Amid the ever-present threat of disease, the comfortably off may begin to notice — really notice —the people who sit mournfully in the shop doorways. The sight of thousands of men and women bedding down out of doors each night might suddenly seem intolerable in a modern and civilised country. We may collectively look upon the Garys — as well as the thousands of other men and women like him — and put aside the miserly economic calculations and simply say, “That is a human being”.

And then, just as they did for a few years after 1945, the poor will have begun to make history again.

Many people of goodwill, including many white people, have joined marches in the UK. Young friends of mine who have been on the marches tell me I should tread carefully writing about the issue because I cannot know what it feels like to be black in Britain.

That is true. Yet if we are going to have an honest conversation about the condition of the black minority, then we should consider facts as well as feelings.

The most important fact is that there is no single black minority. Over recent decades some ethnic minority groups have been climbing the ladder faster than others. That divergence story can now be told about Britain’s black minority itself, which in recent decades has generally experienced less good outcomes than most other big UK minorities.

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Black America can't take it any more

By Christopher Rhodes

The UK doesn’t yet have a US-style black middle class, but we are getting there. More than 35% of British-Caribbean men are now in the top two social classes (out of seven) up from just 11% in the 1990s, British-African men lag behind at 28%. On average poverty is higher and accumulated wealth a lot lower for black people, but pay is now only a bit below average.

Black children now slightly outperform whites in the Government’s Progress 8 school measures. Young black people are more likely to go to university than whites, 41% to 31%, albeit only 9% go to elite Russell Group universities compared to 12% of whites. Black people are well represented at the top in sport, music the arts, and the public sector, while under-represented in business and academia.

So far, so relatively good, especially given that most (not all) of Britain’s 1.8m black people trace their roots back a few generations to mainly poor, and poorly educated, immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

There is, however, a substantial minority of the black population stuck to the bottom of British society, (14% of black people live in households with persistent low income compared with 8% of whites). They are likely to live in public housing in inner city London or other big cities. Their lives are shorter, more violent, poorer and less healthy than other black people and almost all other groups in Britain. It is their pain, and anger, that is easily connected to a narrative of slavery and humiliation, to historic white stereotypes of inferiority, as well as to more recent stories of police brutality.

Racial disadvantage is a reality but a complex one. It affects some groups more than others, and often overlaps with social class disadvantage. And the extent to which it is caused by white people is moot, given the apparent decline in racial prejudice of recent decades. It is possible to have racial inequality without a society full of racists. Less than 1% of the population admit to hard racist attitudes, though around a quarter admit to some prejudice, and back in 2006 only 1.3% of 35-54 year old whites objected strongly to having a black boss. The British Social Attitudes survey has not asked the question since but if previous trends had continued, and even allowing for some flattening out of the decline, that figure would now be close to zero.

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How racist is Britain?

By Tom Chivers

There is no widely agreed definition of racism but prejudice clearly operates on a wide spectrum and manifests itself in many different ways. Even allowing for the fact that racism is a central taboo of British society, and that people therefore may not give honest answers in surveys, the evidence says it has been declining in recent decades. Yet many people on the anti-racist Left maintain that it has merely become less visible, a view with considerable support in parts of the establishment.

I have taken an interest in race issues for 15 years (seven years ago I published a book partly on the subject, The British Dream) and I know that the data, with one or two important caveats, tells a generally positive story of minority, including black, advance. (An enduring image for me of the Covid-19 crisis and British openness is Chancellor Rishi Sunak talking to BBC economics editor Faisal Islam about an NHS in which 35% of consultants are British Asians.) I also listen to a range of black and Asian voices, not just those BLM sympathisers who have dominated the airwaves in the past fortnight.

Everybody selects facts to suit — and make — their case, but we are currently seeing an epidemic of politicised selection (including in a Times editorial on Saturday on black advancement that uncritically recycled activist claims about disparities).

There is also the context of historical disadvantage versus current disadvantage. Black Caribbean households have on average just one third the assets of white households, and only one third of all black people own their own home compared to two-thirds of whites. But you would expect some disparity, given a general starting point a few generations back of a poor newcomer without assets or much education, and it is noticeable that 40% of Caribbeans now own their own home compared with just 20% of Africans who have been here a shorter time.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

When BLM supporters use evidence to support their arguments for systemic racism it usually runs like this: take the black population in the UK of 3% and then point to big over-representation in bad things (prison population, stop and search, deaths in custody, being sectioned, unemployment) and under-representation in good things (top professions, Oxbridge, football management, Parliament, corporate boardrooms).

This is statistically naive. The over-representation of black people in prison, at 12% of the total, should not be looked at in relation to the total black population but rather to those involved in serious crime: in recent years black people accounted for around 20% of robbery convictions and 15% of murder convictions. Apparent disproportionality also falls away for stop and search (when you focus on who is on the streets in the places it happens), deaths in custody and being sectioned, but not for higher rates of unemployment (which was at least moving in the right direction prior to the crisis).

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What Antifa and the alt-Right have in common

By Mary Harrington

Under-representation in good things is a more mixed picture. There are some real issues here and Britain needs to do better, especially in business (just 0.9% of the top 20 executives in FTSE 100 companies are black). Indeed, one source of the alienation of some black BLM protesters may be frustration that after getting decent degrees they are not achieving the high-status employment they expected. The same is true of a lot of young whites too, sometimes seen as the driver behind Corbynism.

Looked at in this light, the anger of the black BLM activists might be seen, in part, as the growing pains of the expanding black middle class. And both anecdotal and labour market evidence does suggest that recruitment and promotion is harder for young professional black people than white ones.

Stereotypes and unconscious biases do linger on, possibly reinforced by AI. They persist even in the mainly progressive world of education. A friend of mine who teaches at an inner-city school in London, with mainly minority pupils, says he notices that white teachers get promoted faster than black ones. In some cases, he says, that is clearly because the whites deserve it, in other cases he is not so sure. But it is also worth remembering that stereotypes change when the social reality changes; in my lifetime, the dominant stereotype for both Irish and Indian people has been completely transformed.

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Should we trust AI to hire and fire?

By Tom Chivers

Nearly 40 years ago in Brixton mainly working class British Caribbean young men rioted over openly racist policing, today we have black graduates (a mix of British Caribbean and British African) angry over unconscious bias and slower promotion. That surely represents some kind of progress.

And happily the black elite is now large enough to accommodate real intellectual variety. In the recent row over the review of ethnic minority Covid-19 deaths the mainstream black view, that they must be caused by poverty and racism, was challenged by leading black figures like Trevor Phillips and Tony Sewell who argued that we should consider all evidence, including the role of conditions that especially afflict minorities such as diabetes, and follow where it leads.

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Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Sewell featured in an issue of Prospect magazine I edited in 2010 called Rethinking Race. As did Munira Mirza, now head of the No10 policy unit, who summed up part of the rethink, saying: “Of course, racism still exists, but things have improved to a point where many ethnic minority Britons do not experience it as a regular feature in their lives.”

To repeat, none of these people say there is no black racism here. But they would, I think, challenge the BLM story in three main ways. First, if you want to help disadvantaged black people focus on practical solutions to inner city problems: more investment in anti-knife crime units; more black police officers (just 1% at present); greater efforts to deal with obesity levels and chronic bad health; a national volunteering scheme for inner-city school mentors. Second, do not ignore the self-inflicted wounds of violent crime, fatherless families, anti-educational “acting white” culture. Third, reject victim culture which can discourage young blacks from aiming higher, using racism as an excuse for any setback.

Shaun Bailey, the black Tory London mayoral candidate, likes to talk about tackling black disadvantage and widening access to the elite as a means of strengthening the national team. This is the kind of language that people of all races can happily support. But a worrying aspect of recent events is the gulf between white elite reaction to BLM and the white majority who are likely to be looking on with some bemusement.

Consider this routine statement of anti-racist political activism: “We must be clear in the workplace that racism and inequality are enemies we must keep fighting; that racism takes many forms; that privilege takes many forms. It’s why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important. And that it’s not enough to be passively anti-racist; we must take a stand, and we must take action.” And then consider the fact that it was written a week ago by Richard Heaton, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Justice. A more establishment position is hard to imagine. BLM is a broad movement without much by way of programme or hierarchy but to the extent that it has a manifesto it calls for the de-funding of the police and its retreat from black communities (the opposite of what most of those communities want).

Elite reaction in the media was also captured by Andrew Marr on his Sunday programme asking black British historian David Olusoga to tell him: “What should white people be doing to change our lives… to make this a better country for black people.” Olusoga didn’t really have an answer but talked about the subtle ways that black people are psychologically damaged by systemic racism, in language for example.

Marr’s instinct is, of course, a perfectly proper one but it reinforces the general assumption that whites are the central problem — which ends up placing too much focus on the white conscience, with even some suggestion of white people asking for absolution from black people.

I worry that these debates are being heard very differently in white middle England. White privilege tends to be a concern of privileged whites. As Barack Obama put it: “Most working-class and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.”

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The Democrats' patchy record on race

By Justin Webb

And in the UK, BLM’s attempt to unilaterally rearrange the national heritage is a potential recruiting sergeant to the normally minuscule far-right. More worrying is the danger that it will drive an even bigger wedge between a progressive establishment, happy to embrace much of the BLM perspective, and the bulk of non-privileged, non-guilty, whites, who are not taking the hiring or promotion decisions that might disadvantage black people, and resent being labelled as racists. At a time when we should be trying to make it more, not less, comfortable to talk about race, they are likely to be more on their guard on this issue, and in the presence of black individuals they do not know.

Olusoga says we should listen to young black British BLM marchers when they say they see echoes of George Floyd’s experience in their own lives. But, to put it politely, there is an intense subjectivism here. About 1,000 people are killed every year by the US police, one quarter black. Three people in the UK were killed by the police in 2018 and none of them were black. Over the last 10 years 163 people have died in or following police custody, 13 were black. But taking the category of all those who have been arrested a white person is more likely to die in custody.

Black people in the US are closer in time to a truly brutal official racism and remain far more segregated. In the UK, nearly half of Caribbean men partner with white women and the mixed-race ethnic group is the fastest growing, a living symbol of integration.

False or exaggerated claims of victimhood are all too easy to make in the current environment but they are damaging to the cause of both equality and rational argument. And the whole debate is disfigured by disproportionality. The gravitational force of ideology focuses the attention of young radicals on a small problem, at least in the UK, of police harassment, while ignoring some far larger problems in the black community.

How does attacking white people for unintended micro-aggressions help a middle-aged black woman living in the inner city? She belongs to probably the unhappiest group in Britain. The father of her children is statistically likely to be absent, she lives in fear that violence will devour her son, she commutes a long distance to a low-paid job, she has more than a 50% chance of suffering from high blood pressure and obesity. When BLM comes up with some solutions to her problems the country should listen carefully.

Peoples’ feelings and perceptions are important, but they are just one piece of evidence in this jigsaw. And if we accept that the perceptions of young black BLM supporters is the only truth that matters then it just becomes my tribe versus your tribe and we are truly lost.

Until now. While the tearing down of the Colston statue may have superficially burnished the city’s hip, progressive credentials, it also illuminated the city’s dark side: a history of brutal imperial exploitation, worker rebellion and rampant inequality that never went away.

The city, in 1889, just before the statue was erected, had been described as “a seething centre of revolt”. Britain was in its imperial pomp, but the servants’ quarters were in revolt. The subversive creed of socialism was gaining ground among the West Country’s working class. Respectable Victorian society sought to counter that spirit of rebellion by promoting philanthropists and the paternalistic values of ‘great men’ – men like Edward Colston, who now finds himself sitting in the bottom of the marina while a new generation of rebels cheer.

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Did Colston deserve his watery grave?

By Matthew Sweet

Today, Bristol is a ‘cultural hub’ in that rather hackneyed term. The artist Banksy, another Bristolian, is a representative figure when it comes to the pseudo-revolutionary aesthetic that seems to emanate from the city’s pores. It is beloved by a stratum of the upper middle class – which is smug, complacent, and not quite as revolutionary as it would like to think.

Because the poor are still very often airbrushed from the city’s public image. Behind the street art, cobbled lanes, ludicrously expensive housing and overpriced drinking dens is a city where many residents struggle to make ends meet.

This is an image carefully curated by the city’s last mayor, George Ferguson. Known for his bright red trousers, Ferguson’s agenda was notoriously light on substance. He created a buzz around the city, while increasing inequality and gentrification — as well as the hole in the city’s finances. Pedestrianisation, tree-planting and the promotion of high-profile festivals were all celebrated achievements – and largely preoccupations of an outer-suburban middle class who made up Ferguson’s voter base.

But five years ago, he was ousted by Marvin Rees, the son of a Jamaican father and British mother. He couldn’t have been more different from Ferguson; Rees was brought up by a single mother in the deprived areas of St Pauls, Lawrence Weston and Easton.

Rees won by focusing on two policy areas which had been neglected for decades: housing and transport. Back in 2016, when he was elected, house prices were increasing by 17%  a year. Great news for existing homeowners but less so for the city’s low income residents — and nearly a quarter of Bristol children (21%) live in low-income families. Rees has, since his election, overseen the building of 200 council homes with a further 900 currently being built. But it’s still not enough. There are 13,000 families currently on the council’s housing waiting list in Bristol.

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How the poor are kept in their place

By James Kirkup

And yet the image the middle classes cling to is of high levels of life satisfaction. In fact, Bristol was recently voted the happiest city in the country to live by its residents; but, tellingly, it has also been voted the worst city in which to use public transport. And public transport is vital for those commuting from the deprived outer boroughs into the city centre. But services designed for the poor, are generally poor services. Buses are late or don’t turn up. And for those travelling to work, a frequently late bus can be the difference between a warning and a sacking.

Bristol is certainly a diverse city — 16% of the local population belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. Yet the fact that a statue of Edward Colston stood for 125 years ought to temper the idea that the city is some exceptional progressive ‘hub’.

Indeed, much has been made, since the toppling, of the importance of removing offensive monuments consensually. But that approach had already been tried in Bristol — over and again. The most recent stalemate was over a contextual plaque intended for Colston’s plinth. The Merchant Venturers — the organisation to which Colston belonged — engaged in filibustering pedantry in an attempt to water down the wording. Meanwhile,Tory councillor Richard Eddy, who said on Sunday that he was “horrified and appalled by the rank lawlessness” of those who threw Colston’s statue in the river, had encouraged pro-Colston vigilantism, saying in 2018 that vandalism of the new plaque “might be justified”. In other words, the status quo in Bristol has its own militant wing.

There was, of course, an element of revolution as play at work among those who romped around central Bristol at the weekend. A few of the white arms pulling down Colston’s statue were doubtless attached to hemp-shirted, dreadlocked out-of-towners who came to Bristol for the ‘vibe’.

To focus on them, however, and to obsess about “process”, is to ignore the fact that Bristol’s social problems run a lot deeper than statues, concert halls and road signs. Yes, black locals hated that statue — and for good reason. But they have other pressing concerns, too. A 2017 report by the Runnymede Trust ranked Bristol as the seventh worst local authority for racial inequality out of the 348 in the UK – and the worst ‘core’ city (self-selected core cities are: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield).

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Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Growing up poor in Bristol is hard. And growing up poor and BAME is a constant battle, despite the popular image of the city as ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’ and [insert woke corporate buzzword]. Bristol has 41 areas in the most deprived 10% in England. Despite graduates of Bristol’s prestigious university earning above the national average three years after graduation, Bristol was ranked in the bottom third of all local authorities in England by the Social Mobility Commission.

Because political activism is dominated by university students, more deep-rooted inequalities are sometimes passed over by campaigners in favour of headline-grabbing stunts. Spectacular public actions can galvanise opinion. But race equality campaigners will want to ensure that superficial change is not a substitute for what has been correctly identified as structural and institutional racism. Too often mere cosmetic change is a feature of liberal identity politics: the diverse boardroom but the overwhelmingly black, poorly paid shop floor. That isn’t equality; nor is the act of pulling down an objectionable statue in a city where residents from Black African and Black Caribbean families have persistently high levels of unemployment.

Another bleak irony about last weekend’s protests, was that so many protesters seemed complacent about the spread of a virus which, while perhaps not affecting them, has been disproportionately killing the old, the infirm, and, yes, black people. To point this out while protests were taking place was frowned upon as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘insensitive’ — further proof perhaps that we live in a shallow and unserious culture where raw feelings are given much too much credence.

Bristol at times encapsulates our culture’s contemporary shallowness. The city has a propensity to sate itself on its own progressive reputation – while simultaneously ignoring glaring inequalities that exist just beneath the surface. We must hope that the carnivalesque removal of Edward Colston from his plinth at the weekend will not adhere to this familiar Bristolian type: a self-satisfied pat on the back that quickly slips into complacency about the city’s more deep-rooted inequalities.

In 2014, he made waves with a pointed warning to his “fellow zillionaires”:

“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”

Given recent events, one could be forgiven for thinking that “when” is now. Six years ago Hanuaer wrote:

“Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning.”

America is burning. The spark wasn’t somebody setting themselves on fire (a reference to the start of the Arab Spring), but the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police.

The anger unleashed last week was, first and foremost, directed at racism. But as important as the foreground issues are, we can’t ignore the economic issues in the background. Looking back at all the political upheavals of the last decade or more, I doubt that either the radical Left or the populist Right would have attracted as much support if opportunity were more widespread.

Money isn’t everything, of course, but if you have (or reasonably expect to have) a decently-paid job, a home to call your own and savings in the bank, you’re less inclined to burn it all down, whether literally or metaphorically.

If one image from last week captured the interplay of these foreground and background issues, it was a photograph of Jamie Dimon kneeling with staff in a branch of Chase Bank. There he was, the notoriously well-paid CEO of JPMorgan Chase, apparently ‘taking a knee’ in front of a bank vault.

It’s all very well for woke corporations to express their solidarity with oppressed minorities, but what we really want to hear from Dimon and the rest of the business elite is why they’ve been doing so well when so many of their countrymen haven’t. Why have wages stagnated? Why is home ownership in decline? Why is the rent too damn high? Why are we individually, and collectively, so deep in debt? Why have so many families and communities been left behind ?

*

For Hanauer the answer is that prosperity is being hoarded at the top :

“The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.”

In the UK, we’ve also seen the top 1% racing ahead, if not to the same extent as in America.

And, yet, the most remarkable thing is just how little political pressure there is for change. Yes, we’ve seen a surge of radicalism and populism — but most of that energy has gone into fighting culture wars. Attempts by centre-left governments to raise taxes on the rich have been reversed — for instance, the wealth tax in France under François Hollande or the 50% top rate of income tax in the UK under Gordon Brown. Further to the Left, insurgents such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have been neutralised. As for Right-wing populists, they’ve been kept out of power too. Trump, of course, is the big exception, but he’s no direct threat to the super-wealthy — indeed, he gave them a tax cut. He may go down to defeat this November, but if so, he’ll be replaced by Joe Biden, the ultimate establishment timeserver.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

Just about everywhere, governments are plugging their deficits with borrowing, not higher taxation. To keep debt cheap, they resort to quantitative easing (QE) which artificially inflates the value of assets held by the rich.

The position of the wealthy has, therefore, held firm. It survived the banking crisis, the Great Recession and austerity. Whether or not it survives the Covid-crisis remains to be seen. Thus far, in most countries, support has rallied to the governing establishment and populists have struggled to stay relevant. We can be sure there’ll be more public borrowing and more QE. Stock markets are already anticipating the financial sugar-rush and are roaring back after the the Covid-crash in March.

It’s not that the rich won’t make losses. There will be individual bankruptcies. Some corporations will go under, others will be bailed-out. But as a class, their privilege look secure. Riots and culture wars, far from being an existential threat, are more likely to serve as diversions.

*

Contrast the situation today with that of a hundred years ago. In the early and mid 20th century, there was an almighty push-back against the inequalities of the Gilded Age. In some countries, we saw the revolutions and police states that Hanauer talks about. Elsewhere, democracy prevailed, but with a shift to progressive taxation, the welfare state and reforms to curb corporate power.

So why hasn’t there been anything on the same scale in the 21st century? After decades of neoliberalism, this should have been the Left’s great opportunity to regain the initiative. They failed — and whenever they fail, they cry foul. As they can’t possibly have lost fair-and-square, there must be some kind of cheating going on. It could be Russian interference, the influence of social media algorithms or the eldritch power of a slogan painted on a bus. You see, it’s not enough for the other side to be simply mistaken, they must be conspiratorially deceitful. If the people are voting the wrong way, it’s because they’ve been lied to — indeed caught in a carefully spun web of lies. And this isn’t just about the fake news and propaganda, there are intellectual strands to this web too — bad ideas that lend a veneer of respectability to the low politics.

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The terrible threat of Wokenomics

By Peter Franklin

In respect to the distribution of income and wealth, there’s one such bad idea that comes in for more criticism than any other: ‘trickle-down economics’ — also referred to as ‘trickle-down theory’ or just ‘trickle-down’. Basically, it’s a supposed justification for inequality. The state should help the rich to get richer, because some of the benefit will diffuse to the rest of society. The wealthy trickle-down on us from a great height — and we should be grateful for it.

Except that that, on this definition, almost everyone is a trickle-down theorist. If you see any common good at all in allowing some people to be richer than others, then you’re in the club. From Adam Smith’s invisible hand to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice to Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy — it’s all trickle-down theory.

Clearly, we need a tighter, more technical definition — one that can be ascribed to those who defend the neoliberal status quo. But that’s when you discover that trickle-down theory doesn’t exist.

Do a search on “trickle-down” and you’ll get a long list of speeches, articles, tweets and other arguments against the idea. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, economists like Paul Krugman, business people like Nick Hanauer (see above) — are all vociferous in their condemnation. What you’ll be hard-pressed to find, however, are arguments in favour of it.

That’s odd because there are all sorts of ideas the Left doesn’t like — for instance, monetarism or libertarianism — that free marketeers are happy to defend. But with trickle-down economics there’s nothing there to argue for. It’s a phantom — the cause of much fear and alarm, but lacking substance.

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

This is what Thomas Sowell, the economist and social theorist, had to say about trickle-down:

“No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter’s monumental 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Yet this non-existent theory has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena… It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made.”

But might there be a real idea advanced by the Right for which trickle-down is simply the Left’s insult of choice? The most obvious candidate is the proposition that cutting taxes (especially on the rich) can increase tax revenues. That might seem counter-intuitive, but it makes sense. There has to be a point at which a tax rate is so high that it disincentivises whatever activity is being taxed, while incentivising avoidance and evasion. From a revenue raising perspective, the optimum tax rate will therefore be somewhere between 0% and a 100%. If the current tax rate is above the optimum, then cutting it will raise more revenue. This is the principle behind the famous Laffer Curve.

It’s a perfectly reasonable theory — most economists accept it to some extent. To use it to argue for tax cuts isn’t trickle-down economics, it’s just an argument over where the optimum tax rate is (albeit one influenced by ideological biases).

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The big problem with the Left’s trickle-down rhetoric is that it misdiagnoses what the Right gets wrong — and it fails to understand what motivates free market ideology.

Trickle-down suggests that the only benefit that most of us get from capitalism are the crumbs falling from the rich man’s table. But why would free marketeers subscribe to such a limited view of what their beloved marketplace can achieve?

With some justification, what they actual believe is that economic liberalism benefits just about everyone directly: both as producers, by setting people free to achieve their full economic potential; and as consumers, by providing the widest possible choice of good and services at competitive prices.

That’s not to say they don’t also celebrate the special contribution made by the most talented individuals — the entrepreneurs, inventors and other pioneers of material progress. But in doing so, and in asserting the right of such individuals to get filthy rich, they argue that the rest of us get much more than crumbs. In fact, thanks to those pioneers, we enjoy lives of plenty beyond the dreams of our pre-industrial ancestors.

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Are you ready for 'fully automated luxury communism'?

By Peter Franklin

So no trickle-down here, but a gushing torrent of wealth flowing in all directions. That’s the real narrative of economic liberalism — and as a summary of the last 200 years of economic history it’s at least partly true.

However, it’s not the last 200 years that most people care about. The politically relevant timeframe stretches back, say, two or three generations. Basically, we’re talking about the neoliberal era — a period in which taxes have been reduced, industry privatised, regulations relaxed and markets globalised.

And yet, over these same decades, growth and productivity have slowed, wages have stagnated and innovation has faltered. Tax revenues have not kept up with spending and public and private sector debt has grown. Oh, and the global financial system would have collapsed without taxpayer bailouts.

Just as the statist Left struggles to explain the last 20 years of political failure, the freemarket Right struggles to explain the last 20 years of economic failure. The best they can do is point to global progress against poverty, sickness, illiteracy etc. These things are to be welcomed, of course, but ‘the world is getting better’ is not the slam-dunk argument that the neoliberals think it is. Not when most of the progress is being made by implementing the breakthroughs of an earlier era (vaccines, running water, electricity etc) — and not when the countries making the progress (especially China) are openly authoritarian.

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And yet as the liberal West loses ground, the rich are getting richer — taking the lion’s share of our reduced rates of economic growth. The problem with free marketeers is not that they defend this state of affairs, but that they have no convincing explanation for it. Some of them might argue that we need even more tax cuts, deregulation, free trade etc — but who wants to listen that broken record?

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The cost of liberal economics

By Mary Harrington

Nick Hanuaer argues that economic inequality is itself the cause of slower growth. That’s because the rich spend a smaller proportion of their money than do people on ordinary incomes. Therefore if the rich take a greater slice of the pie, the economy is deprived of consumer demand and slows down.

That is why he wants to replace “idiotic trickle-down policies” with what he calls “middle-out” economics — i.e. measures taken by both government and business to boost ordinary incomes:

“If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.”

But if that’s the whole story then how have the rich got richer at a time when the middle has evidently not prospered?

The answer is that they have found other ways of enriching themselves. Instead of competing to provide better jobs, goods and services to the rest of us, they game the system to their advantage alone. Property speculation, asset stripping, tax avoidance, share buy-backs, taxpayer-subsidised low wage business models — there are many ways in which the rich can financially engineer and lobby their way to further riches without creating value. Indeed, they’re all about extracting value from what remains of the productive economy.

What’s killing capitalism isn’t trickle-down theory, but the trickle-up practices of the rentier class.

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Why low interest rates poison the economy

By Peter Franklin

One never imagined that local authorities in major resorts such as Blackpool, Scarborough and Skegness would beg visitors to stay away; people whose careers have been dedicated to urging the English to discover the delights of the homegrown seaside on their doorstep, have been forced into a volte face. Coastal resorts are likely to lose £7.9bn in revenue, according to evidence presented to the parliamentary select committee of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in mid-May. That represents both revenue already lost because of the lockdown, and projected losses as businesses implement social distancing measures. The capacity of hotels and restaurants will have to be slashed; and the numbers of visitors to beaches, piers, promenades will have to be controlled.

For many coastal towns who welcome millions of visitors every year, this will be a summer like no other; the usual crowds in need of ice creams, fish and chips and fun will have to be marshalled in an unprecedented public order operation.

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Sun, sea, sand – and shooting up

By James Bloodworth

With the chances of a foreign holiday this summer slim, seaside resorts could face the tricky dilemma of unprecedented demand overwhelming reduced capacity. Already councils have had a taste of this. After the Prime Minister slightly eased lockdown in mid-May, telling people they could drive as far as they liked and even visit beaches, councils had to scramble to put in place social distancing measures. Headlines a couple of days later reported packed beaches in Southend and Bournemouth basking in the unusual May heat.

In Southend, councillor Kevin Robinson admitted that the minute Boris Johnson said the word ‘beaches’, every councillor’s heart sank; they had 48 hours to widen the promenade and hire marshals to ensure they could cope safely. Despite the volume of visitors, Robinson maintains that people kept to the rules; the photos of crowded beaches depended on the angle of the camera, and pictures from drones showed that people were spread out. Southend has a seven-mile long seafront, so they can cope better than some resorts, even if they attract thousands of London day trippers keen to escape the capital.

But that doesn’t reassure many local residents, anxious about higher infection rates in London and elsewhere; they lobbied councillors to keep the visitors out by shutting the sea front and beaches — which was physically as well as legally impossible. Southend was not the only place facing this balancing act; many coastal towns have an aged demographic, higher than average levels of chronic ill health and a large care home sector, placing them at increased risk from Covid-19.

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The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Few people can be watching the R value more closely than the council leaders of England’s coastal towns. If reopening of socially distanced hospitality and hotels doesn’t go ahead on 4 July as currently suggested, some coastal resorts will be economically crippled with lasting impacts. The normal pattern is that July and August are the key months, clocking up a sizeable proportion of the towns’ annual turnover, with a third of the year’s visitors. While some coastal resorts have made strenuous efforts in the past couple of decades to diversify, others are effectively one-industry towns with over half of all employment tied up in tourism. The millions of pounds of visitor revenue that arrive every summer are the lifeblood of places like Skegness, Blackpool and Whitby.

In mid-March, just days before lockdown, I visited Skegness, and the town was gearing itself up for the season; decorators and maintenance workers were hard at work. The headlines were already alarming — on the seafront I took a panicked call from my daughter who feared she was infected with Covid — and it felt particularly ominous in a town obviously struggling already and which was utterly dependent on those visitors from Midland cities.

Already the early indicators are that coastal towns are likely to be the hardest hit economically of anywhere in the country. As unemployment soared across the country in March and early April, analysis by the Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion found that of the ten areas with the largest increases in unemployment benefit claims, nine were coastal: Blackpool, Torbay, Thanet, Scarborough, Cornwall, North Devon, Tendring and Torridge. There have been predictions that 20-25% of hotels and bed and breakfasts will be forced to close. A quarter of businesses fear they won’t survive even if the season does go ahead in July.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Covid-19 is sharply exposing the deep seated economic precariousness of seaside resorts. Their plight represents a major failure of the political system. By a wide range of measures, they are among some of the most challenged communities in the country; pockets of deep deprivation have been overlooked for decades, argues Gordon Marsden who lost his Blackpool South seat in 2019 to the Tories. Since he became a parliamentary candidate in 1990, he has lobbied for seaside resorts to win in Whitehall the cross-departmental attention needed.

Studies in August 2019 found that five of the ten areas in the UK with the lowest average pay are coastal, and they also clock up the highest levels of personal debt. Jobs are poor quality, and often seasonal, with little opportunities for career development, and many seaside towns wrestle with above-average unemployment rates. Transient populations living crammed into houses which have been subdivided lead to high levels of problems such as crime, drug addiction and domestic violence. They have a disproportionate number of people on benefits, as well as with mental health issues, drug addiction and chronic ill health, according to the last census in 2011.

Two of the three local authorities with the highest prescription rates for antidepressants last year were seaside resorts: East Lindsey (which includes Skegness) and Blackpool. With this profile, comes some of the lowest levels of educational achievement; a report in 2016 argued that the distribution had shifted from inner cities to coastal and rural areas. Local authorities, particularly in south coast resorts and Blackpool have long argued that social services departments in big cities such as London and Manchester have used the cheap housing in coastal areas to relocate their cases. Torbay for example had one of the highest number of looked after children in the country in 2019; Weston Super Mare has the largest number of drug rehabilitation centres.

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Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

In the Eighties, concern was mobilised around the plight of inner cities, and deindustrialised regions; what got left out was the longer term, gradual decline of coastal resorts. When attention finally arrived 20 or so years later, many projects focused on culture — such as Margate’s Turner centre and Folkestone’s creative quarter — but gentrification could only ever be a part of the solution, and the investment was never comparable to inner-city regeneration projects; the results were fragile. Gentrification could work in places within easy reach of major cities but not in Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Minehead or Scarborough. In such places, peripherality proved a steep cost, with poor railway and road links. The success stories of Brighton and Bournemouth, which used higher education as a part of their regeneration strategy, dominated the narrative.

Seaside resorts, always as much rivals as allies, were keen to celebrate their successes; they wanted badly to change the public perception of rundown neglect, but perhaps that has contributed to how their plight has not attracted sufficient public attention and thus effective political engagement. A generation of marginalisation paid bitter results at the ballot box last December as many Labour coastal strongholds fell to the Conservatives.

Covid-19 is exposing all the fault-lines of British society. Rightly, much concern has been raised by the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on the BAME population, and alongside that, I would argue that there should be a comparable attention on coastal communities. Beyond this year’s immediate crisis, the question is whether with the right support they could finally look to a more secure future; could anxiety about foreign travel bring a rise in holidays at home? After millions have experienced homeworking in lockdown, could it prompt a change in lifestyle, moving away from expensive cities to the coast in search of homeworking beside golden sands and fresh sea air? The paradox is that these resorts are much loved; Blackpool has a staggering 19 million visits annually. The challenge is to translate that popularity and affection into flourishing local economies.

Last week, the quietness of Margate was all the more poignant because in recent years it seemed that the pretty historic town with its Turner Gallery had finally turned the corner and had launched in a new chapter of its long history: now its hard won recovery is thrown once more into question.

I was reminded of this very human weakness as I listened to Dominic Cummings exhaustively describe the “complicated, tricky situation” that had led him to drive his family to Durham at the end of March. He seemed to think that “complicated” and “tricky” were evidence that his circumstances were exceptional. Because, like my school friends, he was blind to the complexity of others’ lives — the thousands upon thousands of other parents who also had little children, sick spouses and important jobs.

The government wrote a lockdown policy that was radically different to the norm in our common law system. Under common law, everything is legal unless prohibited by law. During the lockdown the default was the opposite: it was illegal to leave your home unless you had a good excuse. That shift puts an impossible burden on those who draft the law, to think of every single good reason that could arise, in the infinite variety of human experience.

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There is no mental illness epidemic

By Polly Mackenzie

They missed a few. Of course they did. They deluded themselves that a short list of legal exemptions would be enough. They deluded themselves that tricky and complicated were rare.

This is an affliction that runs right through the heart of policymaking. We build models and spreadsheets to establish what the impact of a policy might be. To fit into those spreadsheets, the people have to be grouped into categories of similar people, and then all the inconvenient and incompatible details of their lives have to be stripped away. And that’s when we’re doing things properly. Half the time, we simply make an assumption that everyone in the population is very much like us.

In the 2005 General Election, my job was to research and advocate for the Liberal Democrat plan to replace Council Tax with a local income tax. I spent weeks poring over data about household composition: who lives in what family groups. I remember being astonished by how few families met the model I had in my head for normal — in other words the model I had grown up with — two full-time working parents with children. At the time, less than one in 10 households had two parents working full time, and children at home.

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Do we really have that much in common?

By Trevor Phillips

It didn’t stop the media writing up reports about the terrible impact of the Lib Dems’ proposals that were almost always based on the calculation of two full time workers on the average income. I counted it a victory for common sense on the rare occasions they bothered to put the mother on the average female income, as it brought the total down by several thousand pounds. But even then single parents, retired people, disabled people, students, working people who lived on their own: the impact on them was obliterated by the urgent yearning for simplicity among the people who designed infographics.

That yearning for simplicity is at the root of countless policy failures. Take Universal Credit. It was designed to radically simplify the welfare system, which everyone agreed was far too complicated. Wouldn’t it be easier, we asked ourselves, if people got a single, simple payment to meet all of their needs? If all the benefits were rolled into one, and you could apply via a single online portal?

I fell for this delusion myself. I watched experts draw graphs on whiteboards in meetings, and say things like “smooth taper” and I found myself seduced. This would be so much better than what I’d described in speeches as the “rollercoaster of tax credit overpayments”. I failed to fully understand that tax credits had become chaotic for claimants primarily because their lives were chaotic. Their incomes were unstable. They could get more hours one week, and lose them the next. Their childcare could fall through. They could be booted out of their home. They could be victims of fraud.

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How the poor are kept in their place

By James Kirkup

Of course, I knew these things were possible. But I didn’t recognise that they were normal — more likely to happen than not, for the people who would use UC. The welfare system shouldn’t be built for the average person. It has to be built for the extreme cases — or at least for the average claimant. And the average claimant is more likely to have a mental health problem than not, so making the system accessible for people with mental illness isn’t a luxury. It has to be your starting point.

The sad truth is that not even treatment pathways for people with mental health problems have been designed to suit the needs of the people they serve. They send appointment letters to people’s homes, not recognising that half of people with a mental health problem report they struggle with opening the post. I’ve heard stories of people blacklisted from treatment because they didn’t turn up for appointments they didn’t know they had.

Take sentencing policy. It is almost always written by people who’ve never committed a crime, and assume they understand the way to deter people who have from doing it again. They imagine that a long sentence will be a better deterrent, because they themselves would hate to go to prison. They rarely stop to think about the complex interplay of forces that drives kids to carry knives or join a gang: fear, status, opportunity.

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Eight ways to unite the nation

By Polly Mackenzie

A benefits adviser I met a couple of years ago told me about a single mum who’d got into debt to buy a 52-inch flat screen TV. No matter how bad things got, she wouldn’t get rid of the TV. It was the biggest on the estate. Plenty of people would be quick to judge her. But she kept the TV because it was status for her teenage son: he and his friends would stay indoors and play video games. It kept him out of a gang.

No one is going to suggest a national programme to buy large TVs for teenagers at risk, and I wouldn’t want them to. Only a parent could possibly know that this was the one thing that would make a difference for their child.

But we have to stop with the cookie cutter policies, imposed on everyone as if we were all identical. This is about so much more than lockdown. Complicated and tricky is everywhere you look. One-size fits all policies designed in Whitehall can’t possibly accommodate the infinite diversity of human experience. Central policy makers need to develop the humility to understand that other people’s lives are just as multi-coloured as their own. We must stop blurring out the background, and give people who can see the problem for what it is, the power to fix it. That means more flexibility — whether for benefits advisers, youth workers, therapists, community groups or local councils. One size fits no one.