Authorities issue orders to drink water, stay in the shade, stay at home, use a fan and so on. One scientist even suggested coating windows with yogurt. It’s easily spreadable, he argued, dries quickly, and can be removed with water and cloth. In straitened circumstances, the idea might make some sense.

But it seems anachronistic that we must rely on fans, yogurt and wheelie bins when, as much of the world has understood for many decades, the best defense against a heatwave is air conditioning.

This relatively simple physical mechanism has become the locus of rather more complex social conflicts. In the more innocent time that was the year 2015, AC became a battleground of the gender wars. “Air conditioning in your office is sexist,” read one headline, beneath which a writer argued that her workplace, that of the Telegraph newspaper, was kept at a temperature suitable for men (strolling around in their shirtsleeves) rather than women (huddled under communal jumpers).

The problem of sexist air conditioning remains unresolved, but the culture wars have metastasized. Already accused of being unfeminist, AC is now viewed in some quarters as being an example of “climate colonialism”, where Western standards of comfort, and the energy-hungry practices and buildings needed to maintain them, supersede non-Western architectural styles that might result in lower emissions. Perhaps, these critics suggest, it is time to use courtyards and organic materials rather than glass-and-steel monoliths.

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Sometimes this line of thinking veers into patronizing deference to anything non-Western and pre-industrial. “How can we learn from indigenous technologies,” asked a Guardian contributor during the 40°C heatwave of 2022, “that better incorporate collective management of resources and collaborate with natural systems?” He suggested we consider an irrigation system native to the steep terraces of rice paddies in Bali. Granted, there is a prelapsarian charm to the idea of water gushing down the great residential ziggurats of central London, slaking the endless thirst of a Babylonian hanging garden of shade-bestowing greenery. But to re-engineer the West’s housing stock into irrigated rice paddy terraces would be the work not only of decades, but also gigatons of carbon emissions.

A more practical solution, from this anti-colonial, pro-environment perspective, is simply not to use air conditioning at all. By now, of course, AC is used on a vast scale outside the West; even Chinese pigs, which are generally treated notoriously poorly, sometimes enjoy cooler air than European commuters. Nevertheless, the view on the European Left is that most Europeans should endure heatwaves without AC, that the hottest summers on record should simply be rawdogged. France’s Right-wing National Rally wants to install AC across the country; the Left is scandalized. “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, in June. “That would only make things worse.” The Left minds its own business, of course, when it comes to the soaring third-world use of AC. The Global South does what it will; Europe’s aged Boomers, conscripted into a continental display of self-flagellation, suffer what they must.

A softer form of this strain of thinking, but one that is nonetheless real, has made AC practically impossible to put into British newbuilds. To qualify for AC, a building must first satisfy the demanding requirements of the “cooling hierarchy”. Is the design of your house energy-efficient? Are the windows thick cuboids of plastic? Are there plants on the roof? Are the ceilings high? Are there solar panels on the roof as well as plants? Fail to comply and your council will order you to tear out the AC and open your windows instead.

With air conditioning now demarcated as a Right-wing technology, Americans mock overheated Europeans and joke about turning down their own ACs so low that they wake up cold. The war over air-conditioning is therefore a mirror to the faults of its antagonists: the know-nothing Right revels in its own selfishness, while the anti-Western Left finds ever-more inventive outlets for its narcissistic illiberalism.

How do we find our way out of this morass? Heat pumps, a favorite of the British establishment, are not the answer. In winter, Britons like warmth to come from plumbing rather than from vents. This means that our heat pumps are built into that plumbing, which makes them incapable of cooling. The only answer is air conditioning.

Fortunately for overheated Britons, the harms of AC are rapidly diminishing. Earlier types of AC unit used refrigerants that were potent greenhouse gases, but newer models use less damaging alternatives and are less liable to leak. As for the power consumed by the AC unit, there is no reason that it need be derived from fossil fuels. By definition, AC is required when the sun is at its hottest — which is, of course, when solar power is at its most useful. Without fossil fuels, our dysfunctionally decarbonized grid would find it impossible to warm our homes over winter; but in summer, cooling the same homes should be less of a challenge.

For that reason, the war over air conditioning has a good claim to being the culture wars’ stupidest excrescence yet. America aside, the Western public is broadly sympathetic to policy measures designed to curb global warming, but that sympathy is not inscribed in stone. If it becomes clear that ideology rather than righteous parsimony is responsible for our sweaty offices, restless bedrooms, and menaced grandparents, then the ideology itself will be threatened. Buoyed by the support of a well-intentioned public, the Left has dangerously overreached in its hostility to air conditioning, just as it has dangerously overreached with regard to multiculturalism and Net Zero.

Europe and Britain still hope, perhaps, to set a virtuous example to the rest of the world, to atone for the original sin of industrialization and to demonstrate our moral superiority. But nobody will follow us into a sweltering cul-de-sac; air conditioning is a technology of tremendous importance to a country’s prosperity and wellbeing. In one of his first acts as Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew had AC installed in buildings where his civil service worked, hailing it as “key to public efficiency”. China, thanks in part to government subsidies, has more home AC units than it has homes. Even today, the US Government conducts, via its National Labs, its own work on AC, attempting to make it cheaper and more effective.

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The Big Air Con

By Mary Harrington

If a continent decides, instead, to become a 4,000-square mile armpit, it should not be surprised if it inspires few imitators. In the 21st century, we find it unconscionable that the Aztecs cut out prisoners’ hearts to feed the sun god; but we ourselves are sacrificing our elderly to that same god’s heat.

If Europe and Britain were to play to their strengths, they would be optimizing air-conditioning technology. And rather than settle for the ugly units that blemish the exteriors of American homes, the Old World could find more tasteful ways of retrofitting the technology — even combining it, as per the progressive academics, with what we might call indigenous European building styles.

And if the anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly in favor of heatwaves au naturel, then it should bear in mind an additional expression of thermodynamics. No matter how much of it is produced, hot air will always dissipate.

A report published last weekend sheds light: the female drift away from conservatism is  structural and is a worldwide trend. The authors offer some speculation as to why, such as the need for state-subsidised childcare since we entered the workplace. But this is to see things backwards. It’s not so much that women are becoming more progressive, as that progress is leaving men behind.

If the Unabomber declared in the manifesto he sent to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”, we’re now some decades out of the industrial era and into the “information age” — a much more asymmetrical disaster, whose principal weight has been borne by working-class men. Meanwhile, the Left that once stood up for those men has been colonised by a female-heavy new class of knowledge worker, that wields progressivism as a means of legitimating its interests. And the implications of this change reach well beyond the Tories’ electoral prospects with female voters.

In the smoking rubble of the Second World War’s aftermath, a new dream took hold: cleaner, safer and more modern than the industrial one. Post-industrial “knowledge societies” would be governed by rules-based internationalism; manufacturing could happen anywhere, and what mattered was ideas and innovation. In 1963, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the country that a new Britain was rising, and would prosper in the “white heat” of scientific revolution. Wilson wrote later that his speech’s aim had been to “replace the cloth cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour”.

This post-war push from an industrial to a knowledge base created new opportunities for women. For while men are, on average, considerably physically stronger than women, and as such more likely to be able to perform heavy industrial work, an economy that’s more geared toward desk-based work places no such constraints on the sex of employees.

And this, in turn, reshaped the Left. As a movement born out of 19th-century trade unionism, and premised on the power of working-class people to exact better pay and conditions from their bosses through collective action, the industrial Left’s relation to women was historically ambivalent. Speaking in 1875, for example, TUC secretary Henry Broadhurst declared that the aim of trade unionism was a situation “where wives and daughters would be in their proper sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against the great and strong men of the world”. Even in 1906, many within the Labour Party argued that including women in the demand for universal suffrage would weaken their cause.

But de-industrialisation levelled the employment playing-field between men and women. From the mid-century onward, these changes combined with a flood of new consumer technologies that eased the previously arduous work of housekeeping, and medical ones that meant women could enjoy an active sex life with minimal risk of pregnancy. Thus liberated by technology, women demanded the right to seize those opportunities on the same terms as men — and second-wave feminism was born.

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Between 1964 and 1970 women accounted for 70% of new trade union members; today, women make up a majority of trade unionists. This then accelerated with deliberate de-industrialisation under Thatcher, aimed at breaking the power of the unions. Wakefield, site of one of tomorrow’s by-elections, illustrates this shift: once the home of the physically arduous and thus male-dominated mining industry, the city’s biggest single field of employment is now health, which makes no such physical demands.

Women also flocked to the universities: the proportion of female undergraduates increased sharply over the same decade, and by 1979 women outstripped men in the US as a proportion of undergraduates. It took until 2010 for women to outnumber men at university in the UK, but similar trends hold in most developed-world economies.

And with women making up a growing proportion of academia, it’s hardly surprising that the political interests of an increasingly female-heavy class of knowledge worker should begin to make their presence felt there too. It was in the Sixties that the New Left began to shift the focus of progressive politics away from labour issues in the industrial sense, toward civil rights, environmentalism, feminism and gay rights. This, too, represented a turn away from the “cloth cap” as an emblem of the industrial worker. But the New Left’s direction of travel was less toward lab coats than mortarboards and black polo-necks: a colonisation of the academy and commanding heights of culture, characterised in the Sixties by the German activist Rudi Dutschke as “the long march through the institutions”.

So it’s not so much that women became more Left-wing. Rather, material conditions made sex less salient for participation in public life, and women responded accordingly — all the while framing these changes as “progress” in an absolute sense.

But so what? Why shouldn’t women participate in public life when technology opens those opportunities? Here I am, after all. Well, the other side of this picture is the concurrent relative decline in prospects for men. ONS data shows that the past 40 years have seen rising employment for women and falling employment for men: in 1971, 53% of women were in work, compared with 72% today, while the percentage for men has fallen from 92% to 76%.

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And these downsides have not been evenly distributed. Men still dominate the highest-paid professions, giving elite knowledge-class women plenty to grumble about. It’s easy to get fixated on “gender pay gaps” and the paucity of female CEOs (just 8% in the FTSE100). But if we’re only looking at the top of the food chain, it’s easy to forget that the picture is more complicated further down.

House of Commons research shows that manufacturing’s share of the UK economy declined from 27% in 1970 to around 10% by 2018, and that the value of this share has stayed the same over that period. But the number of employees in the sector has fallen dramatically, thanks to greater automation and other increases in productivity. That is: in absolute terms the number of (physically arduous, traditionally male) manufacturing jobs has declined dramatically.

The same picture is replicated across UK employment: sectors such as agriculture, forestry, construction and logistics have declined or grown only slowly in the past 25 years. Meanwhile, other less physically demanding working-class employment sectors such as public administration, education and health grew significantly. The three biggest UK employers are now supermarkets (where some 800,000 women work as sales assistants, compared with 500,000 men), hospitals (where 77% of NHS staff are women), and charities (where 70% of employees are women). In other words, the high-tech dwindling of brute strength as a desirable characteristic in employees maps onto a concurrent rise in female economic and political power.

The impact of this shift in the balance of power is not evenly distributed — and where it lands, it can be severe. Working-class men are at 44% higher risk of suicide than other demographics, and talk of the “crisis in masculinity” is everywhere in journalism and academia.

So is this all women’s fault? No: the decline in opportunities for working-class men isn’t a malign feminist conspiracy, but rather an effect of technological developments. It makes little sense to blame women as a sex for structural material changes that have disadvantaged working-class men. But it makes a great deal of sense to point the finger at knowledge-workers as a class for their efforts to wave away externalities, via a self-righteous ideology that often flies under the banner of feminism.

In the UK, only seven current Labour Party MPs of either sex have working-class backgrounds. And despite its historic origins in the labour movement, there seem to be no overt Labour Party measures, such as candidate shortlists, seeking to address this — for example by prioritising working-class people, let alone working-class men. Labour does, however, have all-women shortlists.

And where there’s a conflict of interest between the two groups, progressive arguments often seem to end up legitimating the interests of women. Think about the progressive argument for remaining in the EU (heavily endorsed by almost all in the Labour Party). Then think about who benefited materially from EU free movement, and who lost out: knowledge-class women could employ au pairs, while skilled tradesmen (a sector that’s over 90% male) got cut-throat competition.

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We may already be seeing a male-inflected backlash to this unhappy dynamic in the USA. In 2016, sex politics and class politics seemed to converge: men, people without degrees, and those for whom the modern economy wasn’t delivering skewed sharply for Trump. It’s possible that these demographics also skewed sharply against that quintessence of knowledge-class progressivism, Hillary Clinton.

A long way from its roots in the labour movement, progressivism has become a story knowledge-class women tell about why their material interests are good in an absolute moral sense. And once you believe that, you can say with perfect conviction that anyone opposing my class interests is an enemy of progress, and thus is by definition a fascist. And faced with this accusation, we may have difficulty persuading working-class men not to turn their ire, frustration and resentment on women — especially while economic shifts that feel like disastrous decline continue to be narrated by the progressive Left as feminist progress.

And having been so resoundingly abandoned by Labour, working-class men are sorely in need of political representation. So, too, are those women who don’t see their interests reflected in elite progressivism. It’s difficult to imagine the Tories filling this gap — but a party (any party) that worried less about how to court elite knowledge workers and set out to defend the interests of labourers, tradesmen and other dealers in matter rather than knowledge would be welcome news to many voters. This is the tack now being adopted by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley in the US, a vision of “levelling up” explicitly directed at defending working-class men against those who would class their priorities and perspectives as “deplorable”.

Hawley’s suggestions include re-shoring industries, financial support for marriage and families and cracking down on university-driven talk of “toxic masculinity”. Whether that would make enough (or any) meaningful difference is moot; I can only imagine the outrage it would occasion (as it did in America), particularly from progressive women. But I doubt I’m the only woman who would rather this than an escalating militant, macho, jack-booted backlash, powered by working-class rage and served with a side-order of embittered misogyny.

On paper, his piece had all the hallmarks of an inspiring call to arms: it was illustrated with a photo gallery of smiling workers; it took a swipe at Amazon and Starbucks; it celebrated how the “movement retains pockets of strength”. It was inspiring, that is, until we remind ourselves that the NYT is one of the most aggressively anti-union newspapers in the media — an attitude that trickles all the way down from the dynasty that still controls the paper to this day.

Just this month, it emerged that senior NYT executives are heavily leaning on 600 tech staffers hoping to unionise. In response, Times management has implemented a full-court-press campaign to defeat the effort. “This is an unproven experiment with permanent consequences,” New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levin wrote to staff in a leaked memo. “We encourage you to vote no,” the NYT informed staff in leaflets it distributed. Indeed, the NYT has been so strident in its approach to the tech union that a group of investors wrote a letter to the company’s management, urging them to “cease and refrain from actions that may violate federal labor law”.

Yet such behaviour is nothing new. Only weeks before, the paper had extinguished the flames of another labour confrontation, this time with the union of the paper’s product review site, the Wirecutter, which culminated in a walk-out by Wirecutter staff. In response to the union’s demands for better pay and terms, the NYT slow-walked negotiations for two years in an apparent effort to derail the negotiations — despite retaining strong revenue and cash reserves. “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me! What’s appalling? Bosses stalling!” members of the three Times unions chanted in a rally outside the NYT building.

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By Alwyn Turner

In his essay, Applebaum singled out Amazon, Walmart and Google as hotbeds for union strife — but the battle for workers’ rights at the NYT is of a very different magnitude: it has been raging for almost a century. Almost immediately after the country’s premier news union, American Newspaper Guild (now the NewsGuild), was founded in 1933, the NYT took a harsh anti-union stance, not only refusing to allow its employees to organise but going so far as to deploy a network of spies to track employees engaging in union activities. When a pro-union communist flier was found in the newsroom amid early efforts to unionise, NYT Managing Editor Edwin James wrote to publisher Arthurs Hays Sulzberger: “The spies report that some of the auditing people are back of this. Maybe it will amuse [NYT corporate auditor] Mr. Weinstock to try to find out who.”

The revelation about a spy network at the NYT followed an investigation into the paper by the National Labor Relations Board, brought by the American Newspaper Guild. The Guild had charged that the NYT violated the Wagner Act by intimidating and discriminating against pro-union employees. Though James retorted that the term “spies” was used jokingly and that “voluntary informant” was a more accurate term, the paper’s general manager, Julius Ochs Adler, testified that the paper indeed had run an “espionage system” (though Adler claimed it had been mothballed). Sulzberger, however, defended the paper’s espionage against its employees, testifying that it used the tactic “to avoid raising issues with the Guild”.

The National Labor Relations Board trial erupted after a group of NYT reporters agitating for unionisation were either transferred to different departments or summarily fired. One of the most important cases involved the paper’s informal spy-catcher, Harry Weinstock, who had repeatedly questioned a newly hired assistant named Grace Porter about her communist sympathies and affiliations (she denied being a communist) after Weinstock discovered she was involved in meetings to unionise. After Weinstock reassured her that the NYT, as a liberal paper, had no issue employing communists, Porter was transferred, put on half time (slashing her salary by 40%) and, shortly thereafter, fired. (Note that the NYT was using insinuations about communism to silence union-related dissent a decade before Joseph McCarthy began his communist witch hunts.)

At least two other similar cases were examined by the National Labor Relations Board, including that of Fred Jaegar, a reporter and one of the organisers of a smaller guild at the paper, who was accused by the NYT of not working hard enough and showing up late multiple times a month, despite his frequently staying late at the office. Jaegar was subject to extreme scrutiny before being transferred to “a job at which he could not possibly succeed”, according to the National Labor Relations Board investigation. He was then fired.

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While we might look to figures like Weinstock as lone crusaders, the reality is the most pernicious argument against unionising the newsroom came from Arthur Hays Sulzberger himself. On this question, Sulzberger took a position that made organised labour and good journalism completely incompatible, arguing that a Guild shop (one that would require all employees to be members of the union) covering editorial roles would cause bias in the NYT news reporting as, in Sulzberger’s view, allowing unions in news organisations risked “polluting the well-spring of editorial objectivity”. This was quite a claim: not merely that unionising was bad for business, but that it was antithetical to journalism itself.

Sulzberger would pass this sentiment onto his son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (grandfather to today’s publisher) whose attitude towards unions, the NYT noted in Sulzberger’s obituary, “ranged from annoyance to hostility”. This attitude would have significant consequences for the company, in particular on one occasion that inadvertently shifted the balance of power towards disempowered workers.

In 1972, Betsy Wade, the first female news editor at the NYT, began working with arts columnist Grace Glueck to force the NYT to change its practices towards female employees. Despite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex, the NYT had no women on its masthead or among its ten business-side vice presidents. Women were also paid on average $59 a week (about $400 in today’s money) less than the paper’s male employees.

Glueck and Wade formed the Women’s Caucus at the NYT, seeking to use the influence of the Times Guild to drive change. Perhaps not to their surprise, the NYT refused to engage. After two years of NYT stalling, the Women’s Caucus filed a lawsuit, which the paper quickly settled, setting a major precedent for women’s rights at news organisations.

How does the NYT reconcile such chequered past — and present — on organised labour with its own editorial positions? The answer is simple. Although we refer to the New York Times as if it’s a single thing, in fact there are two entities that get conflated: the New York Times newsroom and the New York Times Company. As a Times software engineer elegantly put it in last year: “The newsroom is responsible for the primary product of the Times, but there’s an entirely separate business side to the organisation. That’s the side making these decisions. It’s not the newsroom calling the shots. When we think of the NYT’s leadership, it’s not a writer or editor making that decision — it’s the chief executive officer.”

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In the case of the NYT’s most recent labour flap, the current publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, along with the company’s CEO, decided that the NYT would not voluntarily recognise the Tech Guild and called for union elections to be conducted by the National Labor Relations Board — the same body Sulzberger’s ancestor testified before nearly a century ago. As the NewsGuild has pointed out, the Times had previously thrown its editorial weight behind laws designed to allow majority sign-up to a union as legally binding, writing in a 2007 editorial that employers who reject the majority’s signatures often leverage “the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionise”.

Yet this is exactly what the NYT is accused of doing with the Tech Guild. In one of the more hardline tactics, the NYT has since pressed employees into captive audience meetings, where management representatives spend an hour or more explaining to staff why unionising will be bad for them.

But as efforts to unionise heat up, the question now is how long the NYT can play this double role. It’s been doing for almost a century. But at some point soon, the practice of preaching labour virtue while practising capitalist vice will no longer be tenable.

Within a few hours, Roussel found himself under heavy bombardment, as other factions of the French Left lined up to pelt him with insults and insinuations. Why was a Left-wing politician promoting hard-Right, identitarian notions such as “French gastronomy”? What did he mean by excluding couscous? What about the ecological implications of beef-rearing? And the health risks of cheese? And wine?

Despite all the excitement, the incident will have zero impact on the outcome of the French election in April. Communist Party support in France topped 20% a half century ago; it now hovers at around 2%.

All the same, such attacks on a pleasant, rather old-fashioned “lefty” like Roussel tell a revealing story of the self-destructive tribalism of the French Left. France is now a “socialist” country which no longer votes Left in national elections: for the second presidential election in succession, no Left-wing candidate will reach the second round.

And yet, until five years ago, France had a Socialist president and a Socialist majority in parliament. Even today, most of its big, thriving cities — Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Lilles, Nantes, Rennes, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Strasbourg — still have Socialist or Green mayors. Over 61% of French GDP is spent by the state, compared to 45% in the US, 49% in the UK and 51% in Germany. Support for what would be considered Left-wing ideas in other countries — state intervention, abortion, gay rights — is strong.

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Three ways Macron could lose France

By John Lichfield

There are at least eight Left-wing candidates for April’s presidential election. By some calculations, there are as many as 12 of them — including two flavours of Trotskyist, two socialists and several greens. None has more than 10% of the vote; none has much chance of being in the top four when France votes in the first round on 10 April. Between them they have around 26% of first round support, compared to the 43% of voters who backed a Left or green candidate in 2012.

The Left in Britain and Germany also fell to a low ebb recently, but managed to resurrect themselves — seizing the Chancellorship in Germany and topping the opinion polls in Britain. Yet no such Lazarus-like revival is likely in France for many years, if ever. Why?

The most obvious explanation is the implosion, as a national force, of Le Parti Socialiste, which was created by François Mitterrand in the Seventies to herd the scattered Left and put the shepherd (himself) into the Elysée Palace.

Ten years ago, the PS candidate, François Hollande, took 28.6% of the vote in the first round of a presidential election. Its current standard-bearer, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is running at around 3%.

There are three reasons for the PS’s rapid decline: two circumstantial and one fundamental. The first is the emergence of a powerful centrist force in French politics: President Macron has hijacked between 8 to 10 points of the old “moderate Left” which used to vote Socialist.

The second concerns the weaknesses and personal antagonisms of a new generation of Left-wing leaders. Their jealousies and limitations will be illustrated in the next few days by the psychodrama of a People’s Primary — a well-meaning attempt by leftist academics and activists to unite the French Left behind one presidential candidate. But like all such attempts, it will only divide the Left further.

To understand why Le Primaire Populaire is doomed to fail, you have to look at the third and most important reason for the decline of the Left: the changing social and political geology of France.

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By Abdul Saboor

As in other countries, mass, blue-collar support for Left-wing parties evaporated long ago. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, two in five blue-collar workers voted for Marine Le Pen and other far-Right candidates. In their place, the broad Left (including the Greens) is now mostly populated by an educated, middle-class and urban grouping — hence its success in big cities, like Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. Such a Left — more intellectual than emotional; more interested in ideology than in solidarity — finds it irksome to have a dominant, pragmatic worldview or a single, respected leader.

In the absence of any unifying identity, a new French polling organisation, Cluster-17, believes that talk of Left and Right no longer makes sense in France. Rather, it divides France into 16 “clusters” or tribes of voters, seven of which include or overlap with chunks of the old “Left”.

Often, these groups are contradictory. There is, for example, a fiercely secular French Left, which is as anxious about radical Islam, as well as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist French Left, which resists attempts to curb Islamist influence. There is a pro-European Left and an anti-European Left. There is a pro-nuclear power Left and an anti-nuclear Left.

“Political allegiances in France have become much more complex and individual,” Professor Jean-Yves Dormagen of Montpellier University, the founder of Cluster-17, tells me. “Instead of large voting blocs there is an archipelago of voting clusters. Social class, education, wealth, all remain factors but so are cultural attitudes.”

The key word there is individual. In France belief in action for the common good (fraternité/egalité) is carved on every town hall and imprinted on the national DNA. But the French are also a nation of fiercely individual individuals (liberté). And the collapse of Left-wing solidarity means that those who value “common action” do so in an increasingly “individual” way. This was displayed, ad absurdum at times, by the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which instantly detested anyone who emerged as its leader. Politics should be abolished, the Gilets Jaunes believed; everyone should run the country from laptops on their kitchen tables.

This new belief in citizen power is more pronounced on the French Left than on the French Right, where the belief in a Providential Man (or Woman) remains strong. To misquote Charles de Gaulle, how can you hope to govern a French Left which has 265 different interpretations of “solidarity”?

Enter the independent “Popular Primary”: a hopeless attempt by Left-wing academics and activists to unite the Left before April. Although called a “primary”, it is more like a giant, online opinion poll to be held on 27 to 30 January. Up to 250,000 self-selected participants will be asked to give a score between 1 and 5 to the seven candidates chosen by the organisers.

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Three of the “leading”, publicly-declared Left-wing contenders — Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise, Yannick Jadot, the official candidate of the Green party and Anne Hidalgo — have been included without their consent. All have said they will ignore the result.

There are also three obscure candidates chosen by the organisers, including a socialist-ecologist who campaigned by going on a 10-day hunger strike. Finally, there is the woman who will probably win the primary, because she is the only well-known personality actively taking part: Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister, a great orator and a heroine for those on the Left pushing through a law legalising gay marriage in 2013.

Taubira said originally that she would only run if she was widely recognised as the candidate who could unite the Left. She now says that she will definitely run in April if she “wins” the primary; she may even run if she loses it. In other words, she will probably end up splitting the Left even more.

In sum, the French Left — dedicated to common action on behalf of the masses — is dominated by obsessive individuals who refuse to work together. If a great new leader of the Left were to emerge — another François Mitterrand or another Léon Blum, the Prime Minister of the Popular Front in the Thirties — it is doubtful whether he or she could impose his or her personality or programme.

And so an obvious question arises: how long can France remain a “socialist” country if the country has no Left capable of governing? The small, mostly sensible changes made by Macron since 2017 have been denounced by “the Left” as catastrophic. The French state remains — for good or ill — the biggest in Europe outside Scandinavia.

Yet three of the top four candidates in the polls talk of shrinking government; only Marine Le Pen would expand it.

Here lies the great paradox of the French Left: voters who support a babel of leftist candidates in Round One on 10 April could decide the outcome in Round Two on 24 April. The two-round French election system used to give a casting vote to centrists. It will go once again this year to voters of the Left, who face a choice between President Macron and whichever candidate of the Right or Far Right reaches the run-off with him: Valérie Pécresse, Marine le Pen or (less likely) Éric Zemmour.

Five years after the country’s last socialist President, the French Left finds itself with three options: staying at home; voting for a candidate that they abhor; or voting for a candidate that they merely hate.

Far from the economic uplands promised by those who campaigned to remain, British industry was “bruised, lacerated, and bleeding to death because of the Common Market”. EEC membership meant British taxpayers were subsidising “fat cows” in Germany. “In future, all harvest festivals will be held in hangers at Heathrow”, he joked to thunderous applause. In even more vivid language, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Peter Shore, told delegates that EEC membership constituted “a rape of the British people and British power and the constitution”.

When the time came to vote on whether to leave or remain in the EEC, 71% of Labour delegates voted to leave. Brexit, as we now call it, was Labour Party policy.

The 1980 conference vote would have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with British Labour history. Two special party conferences on Europe had already voted against membership: one in 1971 against joining and one in 1975 against remaining. Indeed, Euroscepticism had been the mainstream view of the British Labour movement ever since Clement Attlee rejected French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s plan for European unity in 1950.

The Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC), with Attlee’s full support, declared: “No Socialist Party with the prospect of forming a government could accept a system by which important fields of national policy were surrendered to a supranational European representative authority.” It was intuitively understood by a vast majority in the Labour Party that entanglement in the European Economic Community ran contrary to three of the party’s core principles: democracy, socialism and internationalism.

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The Brexiteer who could have saved Labour

By Paul Embery

Following the 1980 conference vote, the Labour NEC began serious discussions to flesh out Labour’s Brexit policy. Labour’s MEPs were invited to London to help; it may seem rather unlikely now, but in the Eighties they were overwhelmingly Eurosceptic.

Then, at the 1981 Labour Party conference in Brighton, the NEC endorsed “withdrawal” as official Labour Party policy. By an even larger margin than the year before, 84% of delegates voted in favour of leaving the EEC. Hardly any activists could be described as “Remainers”.

In the following months, the NEC set about drawing up a “blueprint” for withdrawal. Unlike David Cameron, who blocked efforts to prepare for Brexit before the 2016 EU referendum, the Labour Party considered it vitally important to assess the future relationship between the UK and EEC before the withdrawal process began.

So in December, a delegation of Labour MPs went to Brussels to discuss Labour’s plan for withdrawal with the European Commission. A confidential memorandum of the meeting, prepared for the NEC and held in the Labour History Archive at the People’s History Museum, details how the Labour delegation was led by Judith Hart, a Left-wing Labour MP who had served in the Wilson government as Overseas Development Minister.

Hart and fellow Eurosceptic Barbara Castle, the leader of Labour’s MEPs, were the only two women in Wilson’s first cabinet. Undeterred by the sexism of the age — one Cabinet colleague dismissed her as “a prattling woman” — Hart was a passionate advocate for anti-colonial causes. She regarded the EEC as a “neo-colonial” project where the “white tribes of Europe” were teaming up together to create a circle of privilege. In Brussels, Hart was joined by three other Eurosceptic Labour MPs: Gwyneth Dunwoody, Denzil Davies and Doug Hoyle, father of the current Speaker of the House of Commons.

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Their initial reception from the EEC Commissioners was not encouraging. The notes record: “the original shape of the programme gave the impression that the delegation was to be taken on a ‘Cook’s tour’ of the Commission with much time to be spent on officials expounding the virtues of the EEC”. However, after a few phone calls and the intervention of British Labour MEPs, led by Barbara Castle, “the nature of the meetings changed completely and we were able to fulfil our original intentions” — namely, the technicalities of a Labour Brexit.

The Labour negotiators met with a dozen members of the Commission, including British Commissioner Christopher Tugendhat, a former Conservative MP and uncle of the current Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat. Curiously, the meetings went smoothly, with the exception of those with the British officials. “On the whole the discussions were both serious and fruitful and conducted in an atmosphere of considerable friendliness,” the Labour internal report reflected. “It was quite noticeable”, however, that the only “hostility that was shown came from the British officials”.

Predictably, many of Labour’s discussions with the EEC Commission — whether on trade, agriculture, Ireland or employment — presaged the kinds of wrangling which occurred after the 2016 referendum.

The Commission, for example, told the Labour negotiators that there were only two options available for a post-Brexit trade deal. The UK would either need to join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), or it would have to trade with the EEC on GATT (WTO) rules – a “no deal” Brexit in post-2016 parlance. The Commissioners stated: “it would not be possible for the Community, if only for political reasons, to negotiate a better deal with the UK”.

Already, the EEC was playing hardball. A bespoke trade deal between the EEC and UK was ruled out before the starting gun had even fired. “The officials were keen to point out that we could expect no special considerations from the Community once we had withdrawn.” the Labour report reflected.

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The Labour team’s response equally mirrored the concerns of many Brexiteers in recent years. They ruled out joining EFTA because it would continue to subject the UK to EEC rules without having political influence to shape them. It meant that the only option before Labour was no deal. “The effect on the UK would,” said Labour’s negotiators, “be at worst highly marginal”; it would spur British manufacturing, while freeing the UK to form trade agreements with non-EEC countries on more favourable terms.

Ireland also proved a thorny topic. The Labour negotiators were comfortable with having an open border, but “Commission officials saw the problems in terms of the UK having to stop the ‘leakage’”. The Commission argued “certain controls on cross border commercial activity” would be necessary. A briefing note sent back to the Labour leader Michael Foot about the visit concluded: “It was agreed that the border with Ireland might create some problems and need further investigation.”

Finally, the two sides discussed the timeline for withdrawal. At that time, there was no provision similar to Article 50 that spelt out the specific way a member state could leave the EEC. It was agreed that 18 months to two years would be sufficient to draw up a withdrawal agreement initiating the formal process of leaving.

But there was a catch. The EEC negotiators said the agreement of all member states would be required for Britain to leave the organisation; the UK Labour representatives were not convinced. What would happen if a Labour government just unilaterally left the EEC without an agreement, they asked?

Thirty years on, the EEC’s response sounds eerily familiar. According to Labour’s internal report: “The officials stated at this point that ‘there had to be an agreement otherwise it would be terrible!’. They declined to speculate further.”

My thoughts were with those former employees this week when I read that Rusbridger has another act left in him, this time as the editor of Prospect magazine. His appointment to the helm of the centre-left magazine did not cause many ripples beyond the confines of Twitter. But it was a reminder of an iron rule of British life, which is that prizes will always remain available for a certain sort of person on the Left. For them, no setback is ever forever. Often, it is hardly a setback at all.

One of the most perplexing aspects of every Conservative government is the continued reluctance of people on the Right to put themselves forward for public appointments. One reason for this, sometimes put forward by ministers themselves, is that people on the Right are often too busy pursuing private careers to spend their energies in the public sector. The argument goes that if they do move to the public sector, they only do it towards the end of their careers once they have made money.

There may be some truth to this, but it is at best a partial explanation. In recent years, the more likely reason is the tendency of the Left to hound anyone who dares encroach on what they regard as their territory. So a few years ago, when Toby Young was put forward as a non-executive member of the Office for Students, he was not merely deemed unsuitable for the job, but had almost every other part of his career torn from him.

It was the same with Sir Roger Scruton when he was appointed to an unpaid position on an advisory committee on house building. The activist Left used the opportunity to attempt to end in his career — even if it meant making up lies. In this climate of censoriousness, is it so surprising that Right-wingers and even centrists remain loath to put themselves forward for prominent appointments? Who would want every aspect of their personal life upturned for the sake of a job?

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But as Rusbridger’s latest appointment demonstrates, such concerns are not shared by the Left. For by any reasonable standards, Rusbridger is a surprising person to appoint to any editorial position — and not only for his budgetary shortcomings.

The recent public admission by Roy Greenslade that he had been an active supporter of the IRA throughout his period of employment at The Guardian might normally have been dismissed as simply a matter of a foul personal conscience, had Greenslade not used his position at the paper to repeatedly push it in a pro-IRA direction. Greenslade’s pro-IRA opinions were well-known at the time — but when  Rusbridger was repeatedly warned about this, he decided that those telling the truth were liars.

You might say that this was a different era and different standards applied. But Rusbridger failed one of the most notable standards of our own era as well. During his time as editor, he allowed Greenslade to downplay the rape of a woman, Máiría Cahill, and its subsequent cover-up by members of the IRA. By then Rusbridger must have been well-aware that his employee was a supporter of the IRA.

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Why was that contributor allowed to smear a woman blowing the whistle on one of the IRA’s many disturbing practices? It is worth considering the outrage that would have erupted if, say, an editor of a Right-wing tabloid had allowed a female rape victim to be smeared in his pages. Their career would be finished. For Rusbridger, however, all he had to do was step down from an Irish media commission he was on.

Elsewhere, his career has continued to flourish. After leaving The Guardian he sailed into the comfortable position of Principal of Lady Margaret Hall — a position that it is impossible to conceive would ever have been offered to Paul Dacre. But last year, he announced his plans to leave his Oxford perch to spend more time addressing “the question of trust in media and society”.

No doubt he was confident that the revolving door would continue to work for him. Even if the old media wouldn’t give him another job, I suspect he felt safe in the knowledge there were plenty of other opportunities out there. Indeed, it is noticeable that in the wake of the Máiría Cahill scandal in March, Rusbridger did not resign his membership of other boards he was on.

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He did not, for instance, resign from the deeply sinister Facebook Oversight Board, which decided that former US President Donald Trump should be barred from the platform. Perhaps he neglected to take that particular hit because the Board reportedly pays its members six-figure salaries for not much more than a dozen hours of work a week.

Yet in many ways, Rusbridger’s long tale of success is to be expected. After all, the Conservative Party may be the dominant political force in Britain. But there remains an unassailable culture that will always favour relatively unimpressive figures on the Left who preach about the importance of diversity but always take the jobs that they could so easily offer up to others.

If they have no business acumen, it doesn’t matter. If they have broken the standards of their trade, it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to be part of a small circle on the establishment Left, the world is your oyster. That is what keeps conservatives out of so many corners of public life. Britain still belongs to the Left – the Right just pretends to govern it.

People might not understand why Israelis and Palestinians are firing rockets at each other, but that doesn’t stop them choosing a team. “Mark likes Israel, I’m Palestine” — as Jeremy in Peep Show pointed out, it’s much more interesting if you pick sides, and the western world is not short of People With Opinions About The Middle East.

The modern stereotype of western partisanship is, on the one hand, someone with a US flag and/or a crucifix in their Twitter avatar protesting that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where gay pride is allowed. And on the other, you’d have someone like gender studies professor Judith Butler, who once described Hamas and Hezbollah as being “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left”.

Yet it wasn’t always like this. As Jeet Heer wrote a while back, American conservatives were once sympathetic to the Palestinians. Right-wing publisher Regnery, for instance, “published a steady stream of books championing Arab culture and sympathetically describing the plight of the Palestinians”. In 1956 the National Review called Israel “the first racist state in modern history” while “James Burnham, the most important and influential foreign policy analyst at National Review, was very critical of Israel, constantly berating the state for inflaming Arab passions by mistreating Palestinian refugees and its internal Arab population.” The conservative science fiction writer Poul Anderson mocked the Left for ignoring the Palestinians — something you couldn’t accuse them of now.

Among certain English conservatives was a strong affinity and natural sympathy with the aristocratic Arab world, while most of the Zionists were radicals, socialists and feminists of various kinds.

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So why did Left and Right swap places? After 1967, the two sides did become more aligned along Cold War lines and so to be pro-Israeli was to be pro-American, and vice versa. But Heer argued that conservatives like power, and that their perception of a weak Jewish state changed following their heroic, spectacular victory in 1967: “After that, conservatives, like nerds attracted to a strongman, decided to sidle up to Israel.” That generalisation of conservatives is not entirely untrue, of course; Right-wing views in men tend to correlate with higher upper-body-mass and after the Six Day War Israel became a gym-bro’s dreams. Its military victories, as well as its famous special forces and intelligence agencies, are genuinely impressive in a Boy’s Own sort of way. That Israel operates as a sort of modern-day Sparta while also being ultra-libertarian does push all the right buttons for conservatives.

Then there is religion. In the Seventies, Israeli politicians built relationships with Evangelical leaders, who increasingly referred to “Judeo-Christian” values and gave Israel a solid support base in the US far larger than its Jewish minority; the one tiny downside was that Israel’s victory would ultimately bring about the end of the world, but this was a mere detail.

Israel, most recently, has also become much more religious, and therefore conservative, due to its Orthodox population having higher birth rates; indeed, it has become more religious at a time when religion is in freefall not just in the United States, but in the Arab world too.

The western Left, in contrast, carries with it an overriding interest in the power of victimhood, a legacy of some obscure sect that flourished in that part of the world 2,000 years ago. They also strongly identify with what Jonathan Haidt called the Care/Harm Foundation — the desire to protect the weak — but this is often only really triggered when they can in some way identify with the person doing the harming; that is why Syrian atrocities against Palestinians get as much attention as police shootings in Jamaica or Brazil.

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But another, better suggestion for the Right’s identification with Israel might simply be anti-liberalism, so that when the Left adopted the Palestinian cause after 1967, conservatives supported Israel just to oppose them. Much of the modern Right is really only defined in opposition to the Left; if progressives went back to supporting Israel tomorrow, the Right would probably all add little Palestinian flags to their Twitter profiles. As the Balfour Declaration famously put it: “a home for the Jewish people, to own the libs”.

That won’t happen, but there are lots of instances where partisan groups switch sides en masse for purely tribal reasons. Before 2016, Republicans tended to be much more free trade than Democrats, and more hostile to Russia. Post-2016 that has reversed, to such an extent you might assume it was just the natural state of things.

The Left’s fondness for the underdog has often led intellectuals to side with “social movements that are progressive” who were also bloodthirsty maniacs. During the Cold War, many went off to support Leftist guerrillas in Cuba, Vietnam and various parts of Africa, but as Communism faded they found other underdog-murderers to support, and stumbled on Islamic radicals and revolutionaries. Michel Foucault famously had a weird infatuation with the Ayatollah Khomeini, calling him an “old saint” and referring to the Iranian revolution as “the most modern and the most insane” event. He meant “insane” in a good sense because Khomeinism transgressed western notions of rationality, which indeed hanging gay people from cranes certainly does.

Islamic fundamentalists, unlike communists, have little in common with western progressives, but that didn’t necessarily matter. While there are lots of different factors that determine a person’s political stance — personality type, moral flavour, our view of gender roles — the real primary motive is: who hates whom. Who is on your side?

Butler’s argument was that, since the likes of Hamas define themselves as anti-imperialist, and are opposed to US dominance, then they are on the Left. Of course, many on the Left get furious at this argument, since if Hamas were white, they would be defined as so right-wing as to be off the spectrum. Indeed the Right-Wing Authoritarian test has been done on Palestinian subjects and, unsurprisingly, Hamas supporters turned out to be pretty Right-wing and authoritarian.

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And yet if they were white reactionaries, they would not be anti-western, nor therefore “anti-imperialistic”, so it is not an illogical rationale. If the Left defines itself as being against the United States’ global hegemony, then Hamas are indeed on the Left.

This is also the logic of the Right on Israel — that not only is it a liberal democracy, but it is somehow on their side in a civilisational sense. In some ways that’s true; visiting Israel, it does feel western in many respects. But neither is that wholly true, and it is certainly not helpful for a country which needs the acceptance of its neighbours for long-term survival. Indeed, it only vouches for the narrative that Israel is a colonial state.

In From Fatwa to Jihad, Kenan Malik interviewed some British-born Muslims fuming at the Zionist entity, and observed that none of them could point to Palestine on a map or mention a single fact about it. But the same is true of most culture warriors on the issue, who all see it as a proxy for a debate closer to home.

The Right is just as bad: during the 2016 presidential race, Ted Cruz was addressing a group of Arab Christians when he proceeded to tell them that they have no greater ally than Israel. Perhaps as a great surprise to him, they didn’t agree and he was booed off stage. But then Arab Christians don’t tend to be especially Zionist, funnily enough. And why should they be? It’s not a civilisational battle between West and East.

A century ago, up to a third of Palestinians were Christian, a group whose existence was famously summed up by the story of an Anglican visitor who asked a local which missionary had converted his family: “Paul”. Many of the leading PLO activists in the 1970s were Christians, as were the founders of Ba’athism. Indeed, rather than Israel being part of the West, the majority of Israelis don’t come from a European Ashkenazi background; over three million are Mizrahim and have always lived in the Middle East; to Europeans many if not most Israelis appear indistinguishable from other Middle Easterners.

But then many people who take an interest in the conflict see it as representative of something bigger. For conservatives, Zionism long ago became a way of signalling civilisational patriotism, opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration in the West, as well as a way of isolating the anti-Semites who have often dogged the Right and toxified the brand. On the other side, Palestinianism is part of a broader struggle; today America’s young progressives are as pro-Palestinian as their European equivalents, conflating it with America’s racial dynamic in a way that displays almost world-beating levels of solipsism.

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Yet I wonder how this will last. The region will always have explosive potential, but it might not hold the same symbolic importance it once did. The Religious Right is in serious decline in the US, and the conservatism replacing it is more secular and more nationalist; it is less keen on foreign adventures and less invested in Israel or the Middle East. Americans as a whole have largely given up on the idea that they are in some existential, civilisational clash with radical Islam because they’ve realised that, whatever their issues with the Muslim world, they hate each other more.

Most of all, the whole narrative around the Holy Land was in many ways a proxy for our view on the United States in a brief unipolar moment — and the rise of China will once again flip political alliances in ways we can’t entirely predict. The one thing we can be sure of is that, whatever horrors the Beijing regime inflicts on the world, some western intellectuals will be on hand to justify it as part of the global struggle against western oppression and colonialism. Some things are even more timeless and unending than war in the Middle East.

British politics is turning upside down. Conservative support is growing in the North and among working class voters, while Labour has made progress in parts of the South and among the middle class voters.

Unluckily for Sir Keir, the Labour gains aren’t enough to offset the Tory advance. The electoral map isn’t inverting completely. It’s getting bluer at the top, but, like a disappointed baboon, it’s not much redder at the bottom.

Except that from a ministerial desk in Whitehall, things might not seem that way. With younger, London-based graduates leaning evermore to the Left, then, for Tory ministers, enemy-held territory starts right outside the office door.

The Conservatives maybe the “natural party of government”, but things have been tense with the civil service ever since Margaret Thatcher proclaimed her intention to “roll back the frontiers of the state”.

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Though the Tories have been busy of late rolling those frontiers forward again, this hasn’t made the relationship with civil servants any easier. In fact, the relationship is acquiring paranoid undertones. Only last weekend, a story appeared in the Mail on Sunday alleging the existence of a Labour spy ring somewhere in Whitehall. That’s almost certainly nonsense, but one can see why ministers might be feeling a little jumpy.

In any workplace, it helps if you feel that you and your colleagues are on the same side. But in Whitehall, that’s rather in doubt. Certainly, the politicians are outnumbered. There are about a hundred ministers, but hundreds of thousands of civil servants.

Of course, the civil servants that matter most to ministerial life are only a small fraction of the overall number. Most immediately there are those who sit in the minister’s Private Office. This is a misleading name, because there’s nothing private about it. Apart from the occasional special advisor or speechwriter, a minister has very little control over the staff who literally surround him, or her. As soon as he walks out of his physical office, there they are waiting for him — people appointed by someone else to provide an all-enveloping interface with the outside world.

That “someone else”, by the way, is the department’s Permanent Secretary — whose own office and staff are never very far away.

These are the most politically-sensitive parts of the civil service and they take extreme care to be politically neutral — and to be seen as such. Nevertheless, civil servants are people too and people have opinions. So how many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing?

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Well, judging from my own experience of working in two government departments, I would say approximately all of them. Not that you need any special insight here. You only have to walk around a ministerial Private Office to get the picture. The staff are young — most of them in their twenties and thirties. They’re all university educated — largely in the humanities and social sciences — and thus have been wokishly catechised. To purchase this dubious privilege, they’ve had to take out hefty student loans, which they’re now paying back out of their modest salaries. Of their remaining money, most of it is paid to some landlord to rent a room in an overpriced London suburb. So, yes, of course they’re Lefties.

If the hyperactive fools who run Downing Street weren’t so concerned with backroom politics and conspiracy theories, then they might want do something about a system that churns out a hostile graduate workforce from which the civil service is recruited. But why engage in serious systemic reform when you can be briefing out cock-and-bull stories to the tabloid press?

Going to war with the civil service as it is now would be a terrible mistake for the Government. Whether or not Whitehall harbours hardcore Lefties leaking secrets to Labour is unimportant, because they’re not representative of the civil service as whole. Even among London-based public sector professionals there is more than one kind of Left-winger — and it’s important to distinguish between them.

It has become fashionable for pollsters to divide the country not just by party preference (which can change), but also by ‘political tribe’ which reflects underlying values. For instance, research conducted for More in Common identifies seven political tribes — from “Progressive Activists” to “Backbone Conservatives”.

It’s tempting to place our younger civil servants in the “Progressive Activist” category — which is the most Leftwing of the seven tribes. This grouping is notorious for its disproportionately gobby presence on social media. However, our civil servants — especially those working in Private Offices — are anything but outspoken in their opinions. If activism is your thing, then the civil service, (which is more into passivism) couldn’t be a worse career choice.

If there is a political tribe that our civil servants naturally belong to, it’s a group called the “Civic Pragmatists”. This tribe is also Left-leaning, but unlike the “Progressive Activists” they’re far from confrontational. More in Common describes them as “a group that cares about others, at home or abroad, and who are turned off by the divisiveness of politics… they are charitable, concerned, exhausted, community-minded, open to compromise, and socially liberal.”

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The civil service might not always attract the most adventurous of souls, but many of its recruits are looking for more than a regular pay check — they also want to do something meaningful and public spirited with their lives.

From a Conservative viewpoint, the real danger is not that these people are subversives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Far from wanting to smash the system, they’re all too inclined to perpetuate well-meaning, but stagnant, public sector orthodoxies. As such, they become absorbed into the Whitehall ‘blobs’ that stand in the way of meaningful reform.

Is there anything that a reforming Conservative government can do about this? One way is for ministers and their special advisors to challenge the system, Cummings-style. But while I’m all for a spot of creative confrontation, true change comes from persistence of effort. And as long as ministers and their advisors are moved every few years (or months) that will be cut short. And don’t forget that any civil servants that fully get behind a particular reform effort will get moved too — and thus reabsorbed into the blob.

There is a way forward, however, which is to restructure bits of government around the delivery of strategic missions. This would allow the most entrepreneurial and idealistic civil servants to be recruited with the promise that their dedication to a reforming project will be properly recognised and rewarded over the long-term. Given the shining example of the vaccine development and procurement programme, there’s never been a better to promote a mission-led government.

Of course, that approach would require Conservative politicians to accept that the state can be a solution as well as a problem. Hopefully, that’s not too Leftwing an idea for them to swallow.

That is certainly plausible. In which case, it would presumably be important to document how ordinary Americans, especially those most directly affected, perceive the “movement” in question.

Scan almost any of the popular media coverage over the past six weeks and you’ll find that journalists have been steadfast in their depiction of “protesters” as unassailably “peaceful.” While the vast majority of those who attended a state-backed demonstration or some other event spurred by the ‘movement’ are unlikely to have committed any acts of physical destruction, the term “peaceful protest” doesn’t seem to quite capture the impact of a society-wide upheaval that included, as a key component, mass riots — the magnitude of which have not been seen in the U.S. since at least the 1960s.

From large metro areas like Chicago and Minneapolis/St. Paul, to small and mid-sized cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana and Green Bay, Wisconsin, the number of boarded up, damaged or destroyed buildings I have personally observed — commercial, civic, and residential — is staggering. Keeping exact count is impossible. One might think that a major media organisation such as the New York Times would use some of their galactic journalistic resources to tally up the wreckage for posterity. But roughly six weeks later, and such a tally is still nowhere to be found.

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A standard retort one often hears is that “the riots” must not be conflated with “the protests,” which is technically accurate in certain contexts. But the distinction is not as obvious as the media like to make out. In many locations, police and fire services were diverted to accommodate these massive protests, which in turn created a vacuum that enabled the outbreak of riotous activity. As one resident of Minneapolis explained to me, emergency services told him that they would simply be unavailable during the weekend of 29-31 May, while other locals recounted with amazement that police were totally absent as their neighbourhoods burned.

In Milwaukee, a man described being chased down by rioters after getting off the bus on his way home from work. He saw no difference between protesters and rioters; the flippant idea that these groups can be so neatly disentangled is wrong.

This view is just as likely to be espoused by black people and other minorities as anyone else (the Milwaukee man was black), which renders the media’s strident insistence to depict the ‘movement’ as entirely peaceful incongruous with the perceptions of working-class Americans (of all races). So many of them experienced what transpired more as a painful tragedy than any kind of wondrous harmony.

Indeed, the resulting destruction may have set their majority-minority neighbourhoods back economically for months or years, if not longer. Most had already been struggling due to the pandemic, with the riots interrupting fragile reopening plans. To exclude the perspectives of these people from popular media narratives amounts to a kind of purposefully obfuscatory, moralising snobbery. Talk about ‘erasure’.

So why, exactly, has the scope of these riots been so assiduously downplayed, and the opinions of those who experienced them first-hand been largely ignored? A number of potential explanations ring true. For one, media elites desperately do not want to undermine the moral legitimacy of a ‘movement’ that they have cast as presumptively righteous. And highlighting that urban minority populations are generally less enthusiastic about a movement whose mantra is “Black Lives Matter” would be embarrassing for obvious reasons.

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The white liberals and Leftists who claim to be so sensitively attuned to the feelings of minorities clearly spend very little time actually talking to working class non-white people — or at least those who happen to fall outside their activist cohort. If they did, they would be saddened to discover that, unlike them, working class non-whites frequently express “small-c” conservative cultural attitudes.

For instance, black Americans whom I’ve spoken to on the street across America in randomly-selected encounters were almost unanimous in their approval of the National Guard deployments to their neighborhood during the riots. If anything, their main criticism was that these deployments came too late to prevent the destruction.

This certainly makes the emotional meltdown of coddled 20 and 30-something journalists, who seriously claimed that they were “endangered” by a U.S. Senator’s NYT column advocating for a military presence to maintain order in cities, look especially disconnected and bizarre. So one could understand why the media would be reluctant to feature the “voices” of minorities who take an alternate view.

There’s also the barely-hidden fear that properly depicting the after-effects of these riots would somehow “help Trump” during an election year. Even if it could be established as true that reporting on a historically significant event would “help” the incumbent president, refraining from such reportage on that ground would obviously be wildly improper from a journalistic perspective.

But even from a raw political standpoint, it’s almost certainly not even true. Trump’s inability to convert this post-riot political environment into some kind of electoral advantage is an irony unto itself, given the theme of his inaugural address — which ominously (but not entirely unjustifiably) invoked the specter of “American carnage”. For all the non-stop hysteria painting Trump as some kind of maniacal fascist, it truly is a lousy fascist who fails to leverage widespread social unrest and instability to consolidate power.

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By Michael Tracey

Needless to say, Trump is also currently presiding over a disastrous federal pandemic response, and rapidly shedding support among elderly voters. So if one insists on behaving purely as a partisan actor — which many contemporary journalists certainly are — any fatuous “would it help Trump?” calculation ought to be irrelevant.

Trump or no Trump, the lack of adequate coverage is the true affront. It should be more widely known that large swathes of a major American metropolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, still lies in rubble over a month after the riots. And the main perpetrators of this destruction — namely those who committed the most incendiary arson attacks — were, by many accounts relayed to me directly, white Left-wing activists. Refusing to seek out and accurately present this information reflects the mainstream media’s propensity to operate under predetermined, politicised assumptions that are antithetical to any rightly-understood conception of journalism.

Travelling around Minneapolis, one frequently sees the anarchist “A” symbol scrawled on charred and/or boarded-up buildings, as well as catchphrases like “Viva La Revolucion” — expressions typical of Left-wing activists. Indeed, it’s abundantly clear that there was a strong ideological component to these riots, one that’s also been under-emphasised by the media, again likely because of the belief that it could in some vague sense “help Trump.” I spoke to numerous residents who are convinced that white out-of-towners were the ones who instigated the most severe chaos, after which locals latched on opportunistically. Marianne Robinson, a black woman who has resided in Chicago’s South Side for decades, asked me if I was familiar with “antifa” and blamed them for the riots.

Flora Westbrooks of Minneapolis, whose hair salon was burned down, was likewise convinced that the perpetrators could not have possibly been familiar with the neighbourhood given her longstanding community ties there. The theory might be a tad over-simplistic, but it does seem at least partially accurate. A (white) rioter I interviewed, who was present when the Third Police Precinct building in Minneapolis burned, remarked to me that he found himself in jail alongside people who came from as far as Missouri, Florida, Colorado, California and other distant states. He said they ventured to Minnesota out of a mixture of thrill-seeking and inchoate political grievance.

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A police officer on foot patrol in Chicago’s heavily-black West Side remarked to me how perplexed she was by the lack of coverage of the damage in these neighbourhoods. Indeed, a simple drive around such parts of Chicago reveals a stunning number of boarded-up establishments, many of which appear like they will never return. The officer mused that she enjoyed the social-work aspects of the job — I watched her greeting various street-dwellers by name — and so, far from seeing the “Defund the Police” slogan and other expressions of animosity as an existential threat to the Chicago Police Department, regarded it as so detached from her everyday experience that she wasn’t even bothered. Over the course of my ten days in Minneapolis, I didn’t see a single officer on foot patrol, which is highly unusual for a major American city.

In Chicago, at the peak of the riots during the last weekend in May, there were a record-breaking 18 homicides in a single 24-hour period — the most since such data started being collected in 1961. I mention this not to make a knee-jerk “what about black-on-black crime” point, but simply to ask in general terms: why wasn’t this historic occurrence featured more prominently in the coverage of these protests?

Something extreme just happened in America. I could give dozens of additional examples of reportorial tidbits which don’t align with the prevailing media narrative that has flourished in the wake of this “movement”. And if you hadn’t seen it directly, would you ever know?