But then I stopped to imagine what lockdown must be like if you live in a flatshare.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the London parks first to close, citing visitors’ disregard of social distancing, are in areas popular with young sharers: Victoria Park in Hackney, and Brockwell Park in South-East London. (Brockwell Park has since reopened.) After all, it’s one thing to obey social distancing rules if you have a house, a partner you get on with, even a garden. But what must it be like for those young aspiring members of the London ‘metropolitan elite’ jammed cheek by jowl into dingy flatshares most of which don’t even have a sitting room?

This demographic has grown steadily in recent decades. Half of Britain’s school-leavers today go to university. On campus, they absorb the liberal worldview of the urban knowledge-worker class, even as the salaries associated with a ‘metropolitan elite’ lifestyle ascend ever further out of reach. (Even before coronavirus, the median graduate starting salary had not increased in five years, and the average has fallen since 2011.)

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

The result, I argued last November, is a socially-liberal, economically aspirational graduate precariat, clinging to the big-city dream while scraping a hand-to-mouth existence in cramped, expensive shared housing. David, a youth campaigner in his twenties who moved to London after university to help found a new charity, describes life on the bottom rungs of the capital’s graduate rat-race as a split between a professional life full of excitement, and a domestic one where comfort, security and even intimacy were hard to come by:

“It was all flashy and big and exciting, and I felt like one of the destined few, right at the centre of things. I was meeting all these charity chief execs and building this amazing network. But at the same time I was sleeping on a friend’s sofa, and commuting an hour each way across London on crowded Tube carriages. It was this weird split between a slick professional outside appearance, then this miserable life at home.”

Millions of young graduates tolerate a similar state of affairs, in the expectation that in due course things will improve. There’ll be a flat they only share with a partner, a better salary, maybe even the distant dream of buying a home.

Now, these millions have had the exciting, slick, public-facing side of their lives abruptly cancelled by lockdown, and are stuck instead with the no-frills private one. Crowded, overpriced houseshares. Flatmates they may not especially like. Nothing much to do. No wonder the first warm weekend of spring tempted some to bend the lockdown rules with a spot of sunbathing in the park.

Though they may be on the bottom rung, these millions still identify culturally with the ‘Anywhere’ sociocultural group, as David Goodhart framed it — the ‘open’, highly educated, mobile and cosmopolitan group which contrasts so starkly with the more ‘closed’, place-bound, conservative and lower-class ‘Somewheres’ found in the provinces.

It’s a worldview with history. In 2006, Tony Blair framed the new politics as ‘Open’ versus ‘Closed’ — with openness, obviously, as the future. In his view, politicians should drive openness while reassuring the wary ‘closed’ plebs that this path as not just beneficial but historically inevitable. The moral weighting of the binary is clear. Who wants to be seen as closed, inflexible or narrow-minded?

Studies also suggest that ‘open’ personality types are more likely to gravitate to cities, as my colleague Ed West points out in his recent book. So London is bound to lean more liberal, more rule-bending – and, in a world that valorises ‘open’ traits, more sure of its own worth than the more culturally ‘closed’ provinces. More smug, in a word.

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Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By David Goodhart

Meanwhile, it has been argued that a ‘closed’ suspicion of strangers had evolutionary utility for much of human history, as it helped to limit the spread of pathogens to which a community might have no immunity. But now we’ve vanquished all the highly infectious diseases that might be spread by human hypermobility, haven’t we? So the shires’ worldview is vestigial, like the appendix, and we can and should all embrace a new, counter-evolutionary openness and enjoy the fruits of the resulting globalisation.

Except. A few weeks into the pandemic, it should be clear to even the most dedicated advocate of openness that there are some upsides to having a nation-state government with control of its currency and borders, and domestic capacity in key areas such as food production, medicine and precision engineering. (Ideally more than Britain has at present.) Even the Financial Times has suggested that some economic orthodoxies of recent decades might be due a rethink.

I would like to resist the temptation to be smug on behalf of the ‘closed’, rule-following provinces so long dismissed as obsolete. Rather, I want to invite today’s young urban flat-sharers to question the view I still secretly held as I loaded the removal van on my way to the shires, that leaving the capital is an admission of failure.

For as I watch my daughter run through the lawn sprinkler, and imagine lockdown in the poky London flat we left behind, I have no regrets at all. And I wonder if maybe, just maybe, we could help heal the sociocultural split in our country not by trying to persuade Somewheres to be more like Anywheres but by asking instead what more ‘open’ and ‘closed’ approaches to life could bring to one another.

“There are all these un-priced bits of working in London”, David told me. “The crowds, the smell, the pressure and lack of a personal life. I just decided that’s not what I want.” So he packed up his Anywhere skills and experience, and moved Somewhere. “I’ve been in Poole now for three years,” he says, “and my quality of life is so much better even though my salary has dropped by two-thirds.”

Along with having time for healthy eating, exercise and getting married, David told me how great it felt to bring valuable skills from the capital, with which he could make a real positive impact. In the last decade, I’ve seen something similar take place in my own small town, as other London escapees have settled here. Many have started businesses, formed clubs or otherwise thrown themselves into community life, bringing energy, skills and fresh insights to the community. “The biggest problem we have,” David says “isn’t the concentration of wealth but the concentration of talent.”

Before coronavirus blew everything up, public policy was just beginning to tackle the question of the gulf between dynamic cities and ‘left behind’ provinces. Boris Johnson’s December 2019 election campaign talked repeatedly of ‘levelling up’, a framing that suggests that with a bit of subsidy and jollying-along, the Somewheres can all be induced to be more Anywhere and then everything will be alright.

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Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

But that does nothing to challenge our centrifugal economy, in which urban hubs act as pyramid schemes, with a gravitational force both economic and cultural that pulls in everyone with an iota of energy and ambition. Once dragged to the hubs, people must then scramble over one another in a race for the top of the pile. Talking of ‘levelling up’ just creates more pyramids.

Instead, we need to give greater weight to the benefits of provincial life — fresh air, friendly relations with your neighbours, a slower pace of life, room to settle and raise a family — not just for retirees, but also the young. Even the ‘closed’ mindset, it turns out, has some benefits when you need longstanding neighbours willing to look out for you during a crisis. “Everyone knows that coastal towns are the most under-developed parts of the UK,” David says. “I see think tanks wondering about how to improve them. But the most obvious solution is: move there.”

In The Matrix, the hero Neo discovers that the life he thought he was living is an illusion created by intelligent machines, to pacify humans who are being farmed as living batteries. Today, with the illusion of a glittering urban future abruptly switched off by lockdown, millions of young graduates may feel rather like Neo: opening their eyes to discover themselves stacked in battery pods and not, in fact, about to take over the world after all.

These millions might consider whether it is time to vote with their feet. After all, theirs is the talent and energy. Theirs is the future. Lockdown will come to an end one day. When it does, we’ll have a chance to re-evaluate how we do pretty much everything. Perhaps it’s time for young graduates to bin the polluted, hypercompetitive metropolis, and the over-reliance on ‘open’ values, and make a difference instead in the clean air, affordable housing and friendly communities of Britain’s towns.

It proposes to withhold payments to the EU, slash overseas aid and scrap HS2 high-speed rail in order to deliver £200 billion of investment to regions outside London, improve transport links and broadband across the country and scrap business rates for new firms outside the capital. It is casting itself, as Freddie Sayers noted, “as the party of the regions, pitted against an over-dominant capital”.

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Farage has found Boris's weak spot

By Freddie Sayers

The Brexit Party’s tilt towards regional grievances is the latest example in Western democracies of how a sharpening divide between what the French geographer Christophe Guilluy calls the “metropole and the periphery” is rapidly being politicised.

It’s a familiar enough refrain now. On one side are those who can afford to live in the big cities; they are strongly liberal and have little interest in rebalancing the settlement. On the other, are those who are stuck in the periphery and outer regions – or who choose to live there – who have seen life sucked out of their once thriving communities. Left behind and left out, these voters know that our ‘open’ cities are actually among the most ‘closed’ places on earth.

The problem for the main parties is that this narrative resonates. Whisper it quietly: the Brexit Party’s offer is not a bad reply to the referendum result. The Leave vote was always anchored as much in regional inequalities as conservative Euroscepticism.

Such policies are also not a million miles away from proposals that have been put forward by think-tanks such as IPPR North, the Social Mobility Commission and former prime minister, Gordon Brown, who rightly suggested that we should have a royal commission to think more seriously about those regional divides. So why is it the populists and not the main parties who have translated this discussion into concrete proposals?

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

The pivot suggests that Farage and the Brexit Party have realised that their future lies not in affluent southern Tory seats but in blue-collar, left-behind Britain. “There are many seats in the country”, Farage told his supporters last week, “especially Labour-held seats, where we are the main challenger”. The Brexit Party will contest every seat at the next election and it looks like those Labour redoubts scattered along coastal England, in the Midlands, the struggling north and Wales will be key targets as a result.

The seats most conducive to the Brexit Party can be identified by using data that I compiled with Caitlin Milazzo for a book on UKIP, which turned out to be an extremely good predictor of how Farage’s party performed in 2015. We have subsequently demonstrated how there is a strong relationship between support for the two, and so the data paints a pretty reliable picture of where the Brexit Party will strike a chord.

The picture highlights peripheral, unheard Britain – towns, communities and neighbourhoods which have been neglected and ignored for decades. There are typically larger numbers of working-class residents, pensioners, white voters and people with few or no formal qualifications. Most have been sidelined by the economic transformation of Britain over the past 30 years and battered by the winds of globalisation. There has been very little inward investment.

They include coastal communities such as Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and Boston and Skegness, and then pass through struggling communities in Wales like Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil, up to Ashfield in Eastern England and into Blackpool and Sunderland in the North. Spend one-hour in these seats and the question of why so many people turned away from the main parties to vote for UKIP, and then Brexit, is not a hard one to answer. These are the areas that are suffering from a ‘double whammy’: few people with skills and qualifications but also few local opportunities.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Many of the Brexit Party’s most favourable seats are currently in Labour hands. Of the 20 most favourable, no fewer than 16 were won by Labour in 2017; of the 50 most favourable, 36 are held by Labour. They include seats such as Yvette Cooper’s seat of Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and other northern Labour seats such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Wentworth and Dearne, and Easington. In many of these places, Labour’s MPs have large majorities, which have been built up over many years. But this is not the case in all of them.

There are also seats where the margins are closer and where a strong Brexit Party vote could easily make life far more complicated for both Labour and the Conservatives. There are, for example, northern and more marginal seats that should normally be in Conservative sights, such as Ashfield, Great Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Dudley North. Even if the Brexit Party were to only poll around the 10% mark this would seriously complicate the Tory task of capturing these Labour seats.

Nor is Farage starting from scratch. He is already well-known in these areas. Only four years ago, at the 2015 general election, UKIP won only one seat (in Clacton) but finished second in 120 constituencies, 44 of which went to Labour. UKIP easily surpassed 20% of the vote in lots of Labour seats without really trying or targeting them, seats such Barnsley East, Don Valley, Doncaster Central, and Houghton and Sunderland South.

Farage’s relationship with these places was rekindled when, at the European elections this year, many of them put the Brexit Party well ahead of Labour. His party humiliated Labour in its oldest heartlands – Ashfield, Redcar, Merthyr Tydfil, Bolsover and Hartlepool. It won all but a few of the 39 districts in England’s northwest, every district in the northeast and more than doubled Labour’s share of the vote in Wales.

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How long will the Brexit Party last?

By Peter Franklin

This is not to say that the Brexit Party is about to capture dozens of Labour seats – but the challenge to Labour from Farage at the next election will be stronger than the challenge presented in 2015

The problem for the Tories is that they also need to make inroads into these Leave-voting areas if they are to offset their likely losses to Labour and the Liberal Democrats in Remainia. Yet Brexit Party insiders argue that this will simply never happen because of long established political traditions: voters in these areas will never turn out in large numbers for ‘the Tories’. “If you vote Tory,” Farage declared, “you will get Corbyn and you should stand aside for the Brexit Party who can beat them in those constituencies.”

The claim is not without evidence. In 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives appealed directly to Brexit voters, hoping to offset losses in Remainia by capturing pro-Brexit seats in Labour’s heartlands. In the end, however, the former happened while the latter never really materialised. The Tories captured just five seats from Labour in places where a majority of people had voted to Leave the EU.

While a handful of Conservative candidates suddenly found themselves representing the good people of Walsall North, Stoke South, Mansfield, Middlesbrough South and Copeland this was simply not enough when set alongside Conservative losses in Remain voting areas.

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The reason people peddle lies about Farage

By Douglas Murray

This time around, a Prime Minister Johnson or Hunt will need to find a far better way of appealing to these areas, otherwise they risk serious losses in both Remainia and Leave Land. This means grappling with the fact that many voters in these seats are ‘cross-pressured’. In their hearts, they agree with the Tories on the cultural issues of Brexit and immigration, and also crime. But in their heads, they agree with Corbyn’s economic radicalism and his promise to do more to redistribute an economy which many feel is rigged against them. Talking only about Brexit is not enough; voters also want to know how this moment will be used to make our society fairer.

Theresa May is familiar with this problem. Many voters liked her on culture but were deeply sceptical when it came to economics. So, while the Conservative vote increased a bit, so too did Labour’s, which was a disappointment to May and her advisors.

So, in short, the next Tory leader needs to go much further on economics than they are probably prepared to. In a world where the vast majority of Brexit Party voters earn less than £40,000 per year, tax cuts for people on £50-80k are not going to cut it.

Farage may have set out his stall, but there has been remarkably little during the Conservative leadership campaign to suggest that either candidate, or the Tory Party as a whole, truly grasps what is needed to appeal to Brexit Party Britain – that place where voters share a profound sense of economic insecurity and pessimism. These voters are looking for a far more radical domestic policy agenda and one that is chiefly focused on economic fairness, not on how to build a Singapore-on-Thames.

More from this author

The coming Conservative catastrophe

By Matthew Goodwin

With an election looming, the Tories need to come up with a counter offer for Brexit Britain and one that goes further than ‘we will deliver Brexit’. And do it fast. If they fail to do so, then even a mediocre Brexit Party vote could cause major problems for incumbent Conservative MPs who are sitting on small majorities – like Johnny Mercer in Plymouth Moor View, Lucy Allan in Telford, Amber Rudd in Hastings and Rye or Simon Clarke in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.

Other Tory seats that were gained in 2017, have wafer-thin majorities and are favourable to the Brexit Party like Thurrock, Southport, Aberconwy and Southampton Itchen could fall in the same way. The Tories will need to find a new way of appealing to these areas, not just by delivering Brexit but also going further on the economic axis.

Meanwhile, unless Labour retains its relationship with its traditional working-class voters then it could find that its majorities in pro-Leave seats are further whittled down as Opposition voters coalesce around the Brexit Party.

In short, as British politics continues to fragment, the future of the main parties depends on how they seek to renew their relationship with the Britain that they left behind.

We have noise cancelling headphones of course, but those have a very limited area of effect. Imagine, however, a device that could generate hush across a wider area – a train carriage, for instance. It would be wonderful: waves of quiet drowning out mobile phones, washing over leaky headphones, imposing silence on people accustomed to imposing their noise on others.

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The political significance of beards

By Peter Franklin

There’d be complaints, of course. Indeed, one can imagine laws might be passed to outlaw the silencing machines – ours is a society that typically places a higher value on ‘freedom to’ than ‘freedom from’.

In the public sphere the last havens of silence are disappearing, actively disapproved of by those who design our shared spaces. Even the libraries have lost their quiet faith – the stern shush of the librarian replaced by inane chat with colleagues and customers.

And then, of course, there’s there’s the definitive shared space of the age – the open plan office.

Amanda Mull of The Atlantic describes the irresistible rise of this abomination:

“If you’re under 40, you might have never experienced the joy of walls at work. In the late 1990s, open offices started to catch on among influential employers—especially those in the booming tech industry. The pitch from designers was twofold: Physically separating employees wasted space (and therefore money), and keeping workers apart was bad for collaboration. Other companies emulated the early adopters. In 2017, a survey estimated that 68 percent of American offices had low or no separation between workers.”

I suspect that most of the remaining 32% cater for enterprises that are too small to need a space big enough to be described as open plan. But even for them there may soon be no escape. ‘Coworking’ facilities in which multiple employers and self-employed people share the same space have become increasingly fashionable – and popular with landlords who can maximise rentable square footage in high demand locations.

In modern psychology, the so-called Big Five personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These are referred to by acronym OCEAN, or alternatively CANOE. OCEAN is the more appropriate, because what our culture considers to be the least desirable personality trait is placed last, while the most desirable, openness, is placed first. Open minds, open borders, open politics – what could be more in tune with the spirit of the age or the demands of the global economy?

Suggested reading

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

No wonder, then, that we’re designing our work places (and, increasingly, our homes), we follow suit. Walls, doors, partitions of any kind are regarded as barriers to communication, cooperation and all the other reasons why proximity still matters in the digital age.

However, as Mull points out, “now that open offices are the norm, their limitations have become clear. Research indicates that removing partitions is actually much worse for collaborative work and productivity than closed offices ever were… a 2018 study… found that open offices decrease face-to-face interaction among co-workers by as much as 70 percent.”

Even the slightest regard for tradition – i.e. the things that people organically work out for themselves through trial, error and the test of time – might have forewarned us. But having torn down the walls, we are where we are – i.e. in a big echoey room, full of annoying noisy people.

The twist is that the workers are fighting back – not through any collective action of course, but by the typically individualistic means of the earbud. While going around wearing earmuffs or earplugs would look weirdly passive-aggressive, the in-ear headphone (especially the wireless variety) has found widespread acceptance in the workplace. Perhaps that’s because it is seen as a smart connection to the digital world, not a barrier – and therefore conforms to our prejudice for the open over the closed.

And yet it is a barrier – one by which users isolate themselves from their colleagues. In addition to the inwardly-directed auditory function, the earbud also sends out an important visual signal:

“Since you don’t have to remove AirPods [Apple’s iconic wireless earbuds] to wander around the office, it can be hard for your co-workers to tell if you’re listening to music or on a conference call, or if you’ve simply forgotten to take them out.”

Amanda Mull explains that there’s also a gender angle to the phenomenon: “wireless earbuds are often so small that they’re entirely invisible under long hair.” One might theorise that this explains why the hair bun has come back into fashion. Of course, men can have long hair too, and so if you ever wondered who bears responsibility for the distressing existence of the ‘man bun‘, you can blame the open plan office. For men and women alike, our ears (and what we put in them) must be seen to be heard.

Suggested reading

How much do globalists really value diversity?

By Peter Franklin

The serious lesson here is that openness has its limits. Most of us are not hermits, we desire to connect with our fellow human beings; but on whatever scale – from the intimately personal to the dynamically global – we are happiest doing so from the security of borders under our control.

Tearing down these defences only creates other, less satisfactory, forms of isolation.

Suggested reading

Down and out in the Golden State

By Peter Franklin

In this decade, there’s been a modest but steady rise in German house prices. This might be a reaction to the Eurozone crisis, with investors looking for a safe haven for their money: it doesn’t get much safer than Germany’s unexciting property market.

In Berlin, however, things have been hotting up. By rights, the capital of Europe’s biggest economy ought to be a global metropolis like London or New York – with ridiculous rental values to match. However, Berlin’s history set it on a different path. Thankfully, the 21st century has been less traumatic than the 20th, and the city quietly gained a reputation for affordable urban cool.

Needless to say, it couldn’t last – not the affordability bit, anyway. According to an article by Joanna Kusiak for The Conversation, the housing market is up sharply – with a 20.5% increase in 2017 alone. Renters are paying the price:

“As demand for housing in Berlin has grown over the past 15 years, rents have been driven up to the point that – according to a recent study – 40% of Berliners aged between 45 and 55 are unlikely to be able to afford to stay in the city after they retire. Unless housing is socialised, that is.”

The city does have rent controls – a system known as the Mietspiegel or ‘rent mirror’. Basically, it’s an index of rent levels over recent years that serves as a guide to what a fair rent should be for properties, according to type and location. In other words, a very German system of consensus-building through established precedent.

But in Berlin the constraints are breaking down. Large-scale private landlords, owning tens of thousands of flats, have such an outsize influence that they can shift the Mietspiegel firmly in their favour.

This has provoked a campaign to use an obscure clause in the German constitution to renationalise the property through compulsory purchase:

“If successful, the move could provide a legal precedent for other cities to call for nationalisaton as a modern and legitimate solution to their housing crises. It could also prompt changes to international law, empowering legislation initiatives that see housing as a human right, as a strategic resource or as global commons.”

Suggested reading

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

This attempt to ‘take back control’ fits the great political pattern of our time – the struggle between global frameworks and local democracy (or ‘open versus closed’ to use the biased language of the globalisers):

“Berlin’s housing corporations are active on the international stock market, and taking their property would lead the city government into a confrontation with international law which, in general, strongly protects corporate private property.”

Therefore, I’d be very surprised if the local campaigners win a legal battle – especially if they want to use the compulsory purchase powers to pay less than the inflated market values of the properties concerned.

A better way forward would be to use the tax system. If property prices go up by a fifth in one year, it’s not because the buildings suddenly got 20% bigger – it’s because the land on which they’re built got more valuable. All the landlord has to do is sit on his land and count the profit. The answer is to tax this unearned wealth – at a significantly higher rate than taxes on earned income and returns from genuine entrepreneurship.

Of course, heavy taxation disincentivises work and investment. With a land value tax, though, it is speculation that is disincentivised. However, if private landlords can’t make a profit from rising land values, they may decide that managing the buildings isn’t worth the bother. So, what if they decide to sell up and walk away?

Well, in that case the housing reformers of Berlin will get what they want – they can buy the offloaded stock at a reasonable price and transfer it to social ownership. There are many different models – including council housing, housing associations, housing cooperatives and community land trusts. Try them all and see what works best where.

Suggested reading

How to introduce a Land Value Tax tactfully

By Peter Franklin

Nationalising – or, rather, socialising – housing stock would appear to be a defeat for the free market: the frontiers of the state rolling forwards instead of back. Certainly, such a move could be seen as ‘crowding out’ private investment and thus a vital source of the innovation and entrepreneurship on which wealth creation depends. Land, however, is not like other kinds of wealth. On any economically relevant timescale and in any normal circumstances, it can be neither created nor destroyed.

Rent, therefore, is not a reward for wealth creation, but rather an overhead that wealth creators have to pay. The lower the rent the more efficient the market.

No, I’m not talking about Paris and the Gilets Jaunes, but London and the Extinction Rebellion movement – which campaigns against climate change through acts of non-violent direct action.

According to the Guardian the occupation of the bridges was “one of the biggest acts of peaceful civil disobedience in the UK for decades”.

Most of the media, however, didn’t seem that interested. Green campaigner and journalist George Monbiot tweeted his dismay that BBC had given “far more coverage to French protests for cheaper fuel than to the massive and remarkable #ExtinctionRebellion protest in our own country”. He condemned the editorial decision as “shameful”.

Subsequent developments may appear to vindicate the BBC’s judgement call, but that, of course, depends on one’s perspective.

Suggested reading

Blazing Arizona: why adapting to climate change is deeply immoral

By Peter Franklin

If, by the end of the century, our children and grandchildren are living with three, four or more degrees of global warming then the only question they’ll be addressing to our gravestones is why we didn’t do more to avert disaster. The issues that made our headlines, excited our passions and swung our votes will seem irrelevant.

But that’s the future and this is now. Any path to climate stability has to be reconciled with the political realities of the present. Any failure to do so allows environmentalism to be painted as the exclusive concern of those with the luxury of looking beyond the immediate challenges of everyday life.

Consider the following from Jonathan Miller in the Spectator:

“As the yellow wave roils France, Macron is a diminished figure after a crunching fall to earth… Instead of the confident leader, lecturing and preening on the global stage, he is barricaded in his palace, a sort of latter-day Marie Antoinette. French people can’t afford diesel? Let them buy Teslas. Others might compare him to Nero, fiddling with emission targets while Paris burns…”

If the environmental cause becomes mired in this kind of narrative, then it will fail. Miller does acknowledge that the French uprising is about much more than diesel taxes – it is a rebellion against the elites not the environment. And yet Macron’s policy (on which he’s now u-turned) is an object lesson in how not to use taxation as a weapon against climate change.

Fuel duty is a blunt instrument whose blows fall heaviest on those who have no choice but to use their cars and vans to live their lives and make a living. Progressive taxation is all about the ability to pay, but upping duties on fuel is the precise opposite – a tax on the inability not to pay.

Suggested reading

Could the gilets jaunes topple Macron?

By John Lichfield

One can use the proceeds to subsidise public transport, but, inevitably, this is to the primary benefit of city centres, not the ‘peri-urban’ and rural strongholds of the gilets jaunes. Similarly, using the proceeds to help the poor, while a laudable objective in itself, excludes those who strive, without security, to subsist on their own efforts alone. Geographically and socially, there couldn’t be a better way of provoking France’s flyover country.

And it’s not just the financial pain, but the implication of guilt. Who’s to blame for climate change? You are, white van man! You and your filthy polluting diesel vehicle (that we recently encouraged you to buy as part of a Europe-wide industrial policy that the Germans wanted).

Is there a better way forward? Yes, says Leyland Cecco, also in the Guardian. He argues that the Canadian province of British Columbia provides us with a model of good green taxation – a revenue neutral carbon tax, introduced in 2008:

“By design, the British Columbia plan was simple: it slapped a tax on any fossil fuels used for heating, electricity and transportation. Each person and business was expected to shoulder the burden of pricing pollution; no loopholes, no exemptions.”

Though this did push up prices (“most noticeably at the gas pump”), there was an all-important sweetener :

“…the critical selling point of the plan – the tax’s revenue neutral design – was unprecedented. With a revenue-neutral tax, the government keeps none of the money collected from the levy. Instead, it redistributes all of it – close to $1.8bn in its first three years – back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts.”

And for people in rural areas there were “extra cash and tax benefits.”

These features help explain why after a decade the tax retains widespread support.

The EU could have had a revenue neutral carbon tax too – but, naturally, it went for the immensely more complicated option of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Thanks to design flaws such as distribution of free permits to favoured industries, the price of carbon produced by the scheme has a history of crashing – and thus undermining incentives for investment in clean technologies. Moreover, not being revenue neutral, there’s no direct dividend for citizens.

Still, what’s bad for ordinary people and the environment has been good for brokers and lobbyists – so there’s always that.

Suggested reading

What's driving this French revolution?

By John Lichfield

If the global elites really care as much about global warming as they say do then it is vital that measures to combat greenhouse gas emissions are not aligned with the interests of the knowledge worker class and against everyone else. This must not become an open-versus-closed, globalist-versus-nationalist, anywhere-versus-somewhere issue. Green taxation needs to be socially neutral as well as revenue neutral.

Let’s not forget that globalisation is product of hyper-mobility which in turn is a product of fossil fuel consumption.

Perhaps this is something the global elite could consider at the next World Economic Forum – or even as they travel to Davos in their private jets and limousines.

It’s even older now – closer in time to the end of the American Civil War than it is to the present day. However, its reputation has grown. If a nation as young as America can be said to have a mythos, then The Wizard of Oz is an integral part of it.

As with most cultural icons, the 1939 film (and the earlier novel it was adapted from) is open to political interpretations. Only this week, Bidisha offered a few of her own in the Guardian:

“The US of The Wizard of Oz is not so far from the US of today. The supposedly great man living in Trump Tower – I mean Emerald City – turns out to be a con artist, a bloviating coward who relies on self-aggrandisement and empty shows of power to cow the people.”

This provoked a bit of a backlash on Twitter. The gist of the rather patronising criticism aimed at her was that she’d read far too much into what was ‘only’ a story.

Further reading

Five reasons why populism isn't up to the job

By Peter Franklin

However, you don’t have to share Bidisha’s contemporary interpretations – “we can read the catastrophic effects of climate change into the tornado that sets the narrative off, see the opioid crisis in the characters’ drugged sleep in Oz’s Powell and Pressburger-esque poppy field…” – to see that the story is heaving with symbolic elements. It was surely written with some kind of allegorical purpose.

If so, what was Frank Baum, the author of the original novel (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) allegorising back in 1900?

The most compelling theory (as set out by Henry Littlefield in 1964) is that the story symbolises the American politics of in the late 19th century – a time when the Populist Party was challenging the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans.

The Populists aimed to forge an alliance between the poor farmers of the West and South and the industrial working class of the North East – as symbolised in the story by the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. The Cowardly Lion was said to represent William Jennings Bryan, an accomplished orator who would take up the populist cause, but also prove instrumental in merging most of the movement into the Democratic Party.

The great dividing issue of the era was over monetary policy. The Populists wanted the currency to be backed by gold and silver (the policy of free silver or bimetallism) not gold alone. The aim was to expand the money supply and lower interest rates – to the advantage of the debt-burdened farmers of the West and disadvantage of the financial establishment on the East Coast.

Further reading

Easy money: How have the central bankers got away with it?

By Peter Franklin

Therefore the Yellow Brick Road of the story symbolised the gold standard, while Dorothy’s slippers (originally silver, not ruby) symbolised the cause of monetary reform.

The Yellow Brick Road led to the centre of power – the Emerald City (green symbolising the Dollar). Of course, when Dorothy and her companions get to the city they discover that their supposed saviour, the titular wizard, is a powerless fraud.

With headlines about the failure of Donald Trump (and Justin Trudeau) to stop GM from shutting down five factories in North America, the symbolism of the story seems as relevant as ever. As Bidisha puts it, “the central reveal about the hollowness, cynicism, opportunism, egotism and fakery of our leaders is chillingly apt”.

As for monetary policy, the gold standard has long been abandoned, but other economic decisions, made behind the curtain in the Emerald Cities of our own world, have also produced undeserving winners and losers: those who benefit from artificially-inflated asset values versus the victims of debt-fuelled consumerism.

As in the Populist Era of the late 19th Century, the economic and social divisions of the New Populist Era are also geographical: flyover country versus the global cities – the places that the Yellow Brick Road leads away from versus the places it leads to.

In the film, Dorothy eventually escapes the Technicolor land of Oz to return to the monochrome realities of Kansas. Bidisha laments that our heroine “goes from wishing to explore all the shades of the rainbow to gratefully embracing black and white”. However, not everyone gets to have that choice.

Further reading

TV can't ignore flyover country – but nor can it look it in the eye

By Peter Franklin

Populists such as Donald Trump succeed by recognising that for millions of Americans there really is ‘no place like home’, indeed no place but home. Even if he fails to do anything to improve his supporters’ lives, at least he doesn’t disparage them (if only because he’s too busy insulting everyone else).

Populism will not be defeated until mainstream politics – and culture – finds a way of according dignity, granting agency and restoring hope to every part of society.

Then again, for every pub that closes down, a coffee shop seems to open. In the town where I live, we now have a ‘cat cafe’. This is a cafe with cats rather than for them – and yet it’s somehow symbolic of the direction our society is going in:

“If our era has a pre-eminent gathering space, in both its chain and independent forms, it is surely the modern cafe – where most people seem to be hunched over their laptops, transfixed by their phones, or huddled with friends and oblivious to everyone else. This is the opposite of the places where the best kind of chaotic, unexpected experiences can happen and you might end up falling into conversations with complete strangers.”

Further reading

Why are we calling time on working men's clubs?

By Ruth Cherrington

Harris fears that genuinely shared spaces are disappearing from our communities – as well as pubs, he mentions the demise of village shops, night clubs, music venues, public libraries and youth clubs.

Some of this he blames on “the effects of ten years of austerity” – but that’s not the only cause:

“On one hand cuts; on the other, deep cultural changes that are pushing us even further apart. Among some middle-class people there has long been a cringe about anything that smacks of cultural universalism, but this prejudice now seems to be defining an ever-greater swath of our culture… From Wetherspoons to McDonald’s, places that emphasise affordability and an appeal that runs across income groups and generations are viewed more snobbishly than ever. “

A few weeks back, I wrote about the ‘open versus closed‘ narrative in politics – and the way in which those who are loudest in their support for liberal policies on issues like trade and immigration just happen to be those most insulated from the downside.

Further reading

The deeper meaning of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

The cultural equivalent is to embrace an identity that is either so broad that it makes few demands on insiders (I’m a passionate European, don’t you know’), or else so narrowly defined as to exclude anyone who isn’t like you. In an era when identities are increasingly politicised, its purpose might even be to make demands on outsiders – but more likely it’s just a means of associating with people of much the same age group, social background, tastes and opinions.

To be carefully avoided, however, are identities firm enough to require at least some sacrifice on the part of the individual – and wide enough to embrace and link together different kinds of people, not just those who naturally flock together.

These are perhaps better described as loyalties than identities – and they can be both costly and uncomfortable. But then that’s the thing about sharing.

All of that said, in almost every village, town and city in the land, there is one place, and perhaps several, where you can be part of a genuine community – and furthermore one composed of people from different generations, classes and backgrounds. Whether or not you consider this to be good news rather depends on your attitude to the Good News. 

Further reading

Don't mock the parochial – it matters where we come from

By Giles Fraser

And yet there’s a big problem with the narrative surrounding the concept. If one looks at the numerous opinion pieces that have appeared on the subject since 2016, almost all of them are written from an ‘open’ perspective. And no wonder! Who would want to identify themselves as being ‘closed’? 

Read part two of this essay

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

The associations of the word are not encouraging: closed mind, closed session, closed membership, closed shop, closed doors, closed borders. Contrast that with the associations of ‘open’: open minded, open hearted, open handed, open to offers, open door, open house, the open road – the list goes on-and-on .

At least the terminology of left-and-right sounds neutral to modern ears.[1. Though, as discussed in part one, the deeper, older symbolism is anything but] The language of open-and-closed, by contrast, is one-sided in the impressions it conveys – and is intended to convey.

That’s something that any open-minded liberal ought to recognise. Some of them do. One such is Adrian Wooldridge – the current custodian of the Bagehot column in the Economist:[2. ‘The trouble with open v closed’, The Economist, 22 March 2018]

“Open v closed clearly matters… [but] the division is too self-serving for comfort. It looks more like ammunition for a political war than dispassionate analysis, and thereby contributes to the polarisation that it claims to diagnose.”

Wooldridge also questions the idea that open-versus-closed is just another way of saying liberal-versus-illiberal: 

“Consider Brexit. Remainers regard it as the quintessential revolt against the open society. Yet some of the most prominent Leavers, such as Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, are classical liberals who regard the European Union as a protectionist bloc that is bent on subsidising inefficient industries.”

That said, there are some populist leaders who are clearly illiberal – because they’ve said so themselves. For instance, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has declared his intention to build “an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.”[3. Viktor Orbán, speech at Băile Tuşnad, Romania, 26 July 2014; Budapest Beacon, 29 July 2014]

West of the old Iron Curtain, however, populist rhetoric tends to take a different tone. ‘Closed’ policies on immigration, trade and international obligations are often presented as a defence of liberal values – for instance, of secularism,[4. Andrew Callus, ‘Le Pen slams rival Fillon over use of religion in politics’, Reuters, 11 January 2017] women’s rights[5. Somini Sengupta, ‘On Europe’s far right, female leaders look to female voters’, New York Times, 2 March 2017] or a ‘level playing field’ in trade[6. John Ydstie, ‘What the Trump administration means when it says countries ‘cheat’ on trade’, National Public Radio, 6 March 2018] – against those who do not share western values or play by the same rules. 

The downfall of self-serving narratives is that they’re also self-deluding. If the advocates of open think that open-versus-closed is an argument for-and-against liberal democracy, then they will lose – because that is not the battle being fought. Rather, it’s a battle to define what liberal democracy actually is. 

From the open perspective, liberal democracy is a universal concept – one enhanced by the dismantling of barriers between different groups of people. From the closed perspective, liberal democracies, where they exist, are nurtured by, and particular to, specific national and cultural traditions – around which barriers are required so that freedoms can grow and develop in an otherwise hostile world.

There’s an already well-developed argument that the costs and benefits of dismantling barriers has had a hugely unequal impact on different parts of the population – and that the advocates of open are insensitive to this reality. But to the charge of insensitivity we must add hypocrisy – because for all the barriers that globalisation has brought crashing down, many of those that protect the interests of “open people” have remained mysteriously intact.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Adrian Wooldridge notes the inconsistency:[7. ‘The trouble with open v closed’, The Economist, 22 March 2018]     

“The post-1979 deregulation of the economy was one-sided. Working-class closed shops, such as that of the printworkers, were broken, while professional closed shops, notably for barristers, were left to thrive.

“Academics like to think of themselves as open to their core. But academia is rife with restrictive practices. The most highly prized commodity in academic life is tenure—that is, the right to an income for life whatever happens to the world.”

He concludes that “open people aren’t as open as they think.” I agree with that statement, but it hints at a more fundamental issue. The barriers that the advocates of open have built around themselves aren’t just economic, they’re also epistemic – there is something about their chosen narrative that prevents them from seeing its self-serving and hypocritical nature.

The biggest problem with the open perspective isn’t that it presupposes the other side is wrong, but that it is incapable of being right. If one automatically associates a ‘closed’ position on issues like immigration, globalisation and supra-nationalism with having a closed mind then there is no need to take it seriously. 

Further reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

You can build an awful lot of contempt and condescension on a platform like that. In taking the perpetrators to task, other UnHerd contributors like James Bloodworth, Paul Embery and Henry Olsen have done an excellent job; I, however, would like to go after a different target. 

The false equivalence of open-versus-closed with rational-versus-irrational isn’t based on shallow rhetoric alone, it has a deeper intellectual foundation that also needs digging up.

In the second part of this essay, I traced the political narrative back to the middle of the last decade and Tony Blair. However, for the philosophical inspiration we have to go back to the middle of the last century and Karl Popper.

Popper was a philosopher and scientist, one the greatest thinkers of the modern age. His best-known work, The Open Society and its Enemies was first published in 1945. Written while the world was in flames, it is a brilliant, and enduringly influential, defence of liberal democracy

It revolves around the distinction that Popper makes between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ societies: A closed society is one in which individual actions are “determined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can never become objects of critical consideration”; an “open society” is one in which some taboos remain, but where there is an “ever-widening field of personal decisions, with its problems and responsibilities” (and, moreover, problems and responsibilities upon which there is “the possibility of rational reflection”).[8. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, fifth edition, 1966, chapter 10]

Further reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

The “enemies” that Popper refers to are those who wish to recreate the closed society, albeit in contemporary, totalitarian form. In place of the tribe, the individual is subordinated to some other collective – whether based on class, race, nationality or religion; and in place of magic, there is ‘historicism‘ – Popper’s term for the idea that human affairs are determined by historical laws, just as the natural world is subject to physical laws. [9. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, fifth edition, 1966, chapter 1]

One can see how all this might inspire the open-and-closed narratives of the 21st century. By removing barriers to immigration, international trade and the ‘pooling’ of sovereignty we weaken ‘tribal’ identities and thus expand the space for rational decision-making. Or as Tony Blair approvingly puts it:[10. Tony Blair, ‘Tony Blair speech at Blenheim Palace’, Office of Tony Blair, 1 October 2007 accessed via Wayback Machine]

“…Globalisation trashes national boundaries, gives people a means of universal communication and spreads ideas and ideology as much as capital or technology.”

Popper’s work certainly inspired George Soros to found the Open Society Institute[11. Now the Open Society Institutes], arguably the foremost advocate of ‘openness’ in the world today.

Popper died in 1994 and we can’t be sure what he would have made of the way his arguments have been applied in the 21st century. But what if Popper himself was wrong? Not about whether the open society is a good thing, but about how it can be sustained?

An open society, he says, is one where “individuals are confronted with personal decisions” – which they can, and indeed must, think through for themselves. However, his emphasis on “rational reflection” suggests that we grapple with the “problems and responsibilities” of modern life in the manner of a philosophy professor.[11. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, fifth edition, 1966, chapter 10]

The fact that philosophy professors exist and can think aloud upon matters of importance without being burned at the stake is of course a mark of an open society. However, if such a mode of thought were the only, or main, alternative to the tribal taboos of the closed society then the open society wouldn’t exist. The only reason why a society composed of autonomous individuals doesn’t descend into chaos is because of the existence of a constantly reinforced system of social norms. 

None of us is perfect and neither is the world in which we live. Life is a daily struggle against our own worse instincts and those of other people. To live a good life (or, failing that, one that isn’t catastrophically dysfunctional) we need so much more than our own rational faculties. We also – indeed, mainly – depend on the incentives, expectations and encouragement we’re exposed to through our participation in collective human endeavour. 

Further reading

The unhappy homes that helped put Trump in the White House

By Peter Franklin

These relationships can be public or private, the requirements they place upon their participants can be formal or informal, and their influence on behaviour can be conscious or unconscious, but for want of a better description, there is a whole world of moral guidance beyond the Popperian extremes of “magical taboos” and “rational reflection.”

Popper places remarkably little emphasis on human connections. Indeed, he goes out of his way to distinguish the “organic character” of the closed society and the “abstract relationships” of the open society.

He even states that “most of the social groups of a modern open society… are poor substitutes [for the organic relationships of the closed society], since they do not provide for a common life.” Instead, he argues that “our modern open societies function largely by way of abstract relations” for instance those of the market place. He even appears to suggest that “real social groups” aren’t worth studying:[12. Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, fifth edition, 1966, chapter 10]

“It is the analysis of these abstract relations with which modern social theory, such as economic theory, is mainly concerned. This point has not been understood by many sociologists, such as Durkheim, who never gave up the dogmatic belief that society must be analysed in terms of real social groups.”

It’s not surprising that anyone who shares Popper’s analysis would have little regard for group identity. If abstract relations – and the rules and formalities that govern them – are all its takes to keep the show on the road, then “real social groups” are at best an irrelevance and at worst an impediment to progress. So let’s dispense with all that irrational nonsense about faith, flag and family, and keep on rolling-out those international trade agreements, supra-national bureaucracies and commercial digital platforms until they encircle the world.

Except that in fields as diverse as behavioural economics, international development and the study of social mobility we’re discovering that real social groups matter. Even in the case of an especially abstract system of relations like the global banking system, we found out the hard way that the attenuation of human connections between lender and borrower, owner and manager, regulator and practitioner can have devastating consequences.

Popper got it wrong. The social structures we’re part of do indeed “provide for a common life”. They are every bit as important to the functioning of an open society as tribal social structures are to a closed society.

Further reading

Is capitalism immoral?

By Victoria Bateman

This is something that Émile Durkheim, who Popper so scathingly referred to, understood very well.

A leading French intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th century, he was one of the founders of the modern social sciences. Arguably, his most important idea was that of anomie, which literally means lawlessness or normlessness. Durkheim used it to mean the condition that people find themselves in when they are denied the relationships they need to sustain their moral wellbeing. This might be due to the decay or absence of social structures; or it may be because those structures are too restrictive – trapping the individual in situations where they can’t thrive. 

Like Popper, Durkheim wrote about two kinds of society.[13. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, Macmillan, 1933, book 1, chapters 2 and 3] The first, less developed, kind he calls a “mechanical solidarity”, not because it is industrialised (in fact such societies are typically pre-industrial), but because its individual members are in a fixed, unchanging relationship to one another like the parts of a machine. Tribal in structure, such groups are the equivalent of Popper’s closed society.

However, with developments like urbanisation, a different kind of society emerges – one in which individuals have evermore opportunity to choose the roles they play by acquiring specialised skills. Durkheim calls this an “organic solidarity” because relationships are neither fixed nor chaotic but self-regulating. They hold themselves together through the evolution of community-based norms and institutions that help align autonomous individual actions to the common good.

Organic solidarity corresponds to Popper’s open society, but Durkheim’s theory provides a much richer, more human account of how such societies actually work.

Durkheim also shows how organic solidarities fall apart.

The self-regulation of a system of independent components requires close contact between those components – so that mutual needs can be communicated, relationships negotiated and ground rules propagated. If, however, that close contact is disrupted – “if some opaque environment is interposed”[14. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, Macmillan, 1933, book 3, chapter 1] – then self-regulation begins to break down.

Given the Modern Times he lived in, Durkheim was particularly concerned by the regimentation demanded of the industrial workforce:[15. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, Macmillan, 1933, book 3, chapter 1]

“Machines replace men; manufacturing replaces hand-work. The worker is regimented, separated from his family throughout the day. He always lives apart from his employer, etc. These ‘new conditions of industrial life naturally demand a new organization, but as these changes have been accomplished with extreme rapidity, the interests in conflict have not yet had the time to be equilibrated.”

The consequences of the resulting anomie would have consequences that should be familiar to any student of modern history. However, the 20th century was also a time in which the conditions of the industrial workforce improved, especially in the post-war period. Working life became less regimented, women entered the workplace and there were opportunities to develop new skills: mastery of, instead of servitude to, the machine. Furthermore, there were opportunities to form new connections beyond the workplace – for instance, through the spread of home ownership.

Further reading

Full employment, decent pay and affordable housing: choose two

By Peter Franklin

But then, starting in the latter part of the 20th century, came a new wave of disruption. Here is Durkheim’s prescient description of what we now call globalisation:[16. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, Macmillan, 1933, book 3, chapter 1]

“…as the organized type [of society] develops, the fusion of different segments draws the markets together into one which embraces almost all society… The result is that each industry produces for consumers spread over the whole surface of the country or even of the entire world.”

Access to – and, consequently, the benefit derived from – these global systems of self-regulation is not equally distributed. In the West, opportunity has increased for so-called knowledge workers (though in a way sharply skewed to the very wealthiest quantities of the income distribution). For the remainder of the workforce there has been a shrinking of horizons, a stalling of social mobility, the stagnation of incomes and the imposition of new forms of regimented employment (as exemplified by the Amazon warehouse). 

And right at the bottom of the pile, there is an underclass of the unemployed and under-employed. Writing at the end of the 19th century, Durkheim’s analysis is prophetic of the dependency cultures that would emerge in the latter part of the 20th century – in particular the inadequacy of the state as a substitute for strong family, community and workplace institutions.[17. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, The Free Press, 1951 (originally published in 1897), book 3, chapter 3]

We can see the worst effects of anomie in social pathologies like America’s opioid epidemic. These may not be typical of life in the 21st century, but they provide a warning of what happens when the real social groups that support, connect and guide individuals fall into disarray or disappear altogether. 

Further reading

Test article

By Charlotte Pickles

In the US, scholars from a wide range of viewpoints, including Charles Murray,[18. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Crown Forum, 2012] Robert Putnam[19. Robert Putnam, Our Kids: American Dream in Crisis, Simon & Schuster, 2015] and Jennifer Silva[20. Jennifer Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty, Oxford University Press, 2013] have amassed a mountain of evidence to show that the growing divide between the richer and poorer parts of society is as much about social capital as it is about the financial kind. 

On issues like family structure, parental time with children, engagement with civil society, membership of faith communities, health-promoting lifestyles, participation in education and stable, dignified employment, the “new upper class” (as Murray calls it) is maintaining or enhancing the self-regulatory structures essential to organic solidarity; while the “new lower class” is not.

For all that the cultural elites preach social liberalism, they are part of a class that, with modifications, practices social conservatism. Radically open ideas about breaking free of social conventions – for instance on marriage, family, education and work – are the subject of elite debate and experimentation, but it is those at other end of the social spectrum who are living the dream full-time. It is their lives, not those of the privileged, that have diverged furthest from the old order.

Further reading

Marriage is a uniquely stabilising force: are liberals finally getting the message?

By Peter Franklin

If those of an open viewpoint aren’t concerned about such matters, it’s because they don’t have to be. Having either escaped or benefited from the dislocations of industrialisation, deindustrialisation, globalisation, immigration and the dependency culture, they have remained secure within functioning organic solidarities – which they’ve been able to adapt, extend and refine on their own terms.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, uses moral foundations theory to analyse the gulf in understanding between liberals and conservatives in America (categories that correspond pretty well to open and closed, especially in the age of Trump). He found that of the five fundamental values that shape people’s political judgements, liberals are only sensitive to the two that are about how individuals within a group are treated (i.e. “Care” and “Fairness”); in this they differ from conservatives, who are also sensitive to the three values that are about group identity and cohesion (i.e. “Loyalty”, “Authority” and “Sanctity”).[21. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon, 2012]

This makes sense. It’s difficult to be sensitive to what you’ve always had. But what open voters can take for granted, closed voters are having to fight for – or have already lost. They haven’t turned against the open society, they are struggling to feel part of it.

Having suffered so much damage to their economic strength and social cohesion, what remains is cultural identity. But when even that comes under sustained attack from those ill-equipped to understand it’s value, it would be surprising if the dispossessed did not rebel.

I’ll leave the final word to Émile Durkheim:[22. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, The Free Press, 1951 (originally published in 1897), book 3, chapter 3]

“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.”

Read part one of this essay

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Ultimately, the closed shop was outlawed by the Conservative government in the early 1990s – a move designed not only to tame the unions, but also to bring the UK into line with European legislation. (I wonder how many among today’s fanatically pro-EU labour movement know or even care about this.)

But there is one closed shop that wasn’t outlawed. In fact, it’s the most powerful that ever existed, and it remains alive and well. It members are not those fighting against the system, but those running it.

After years of talk by politicians about the value of meritocracy and the need to smash glass ceilings, progress at tackling the culture of elitism that infects the upper echelons of our public life and institutions has been utterly lamentable. And this failure is resulting in a nation increasingly atomised, and in which large numbers simmer with resentment at those who exercise power over them while seemingly being devoid of any desire to understand their lives.

Politics, business, the media and public services remain resolutely in the grip of those who (let’s be clear, through no fault of their own) were born into wealth and privilege. Class, parental income and geography remain key determinants in how far one might rise. Advancement in today’s Britain is still as much about who you know, not what you know; about where you came from, not what ability you might have.

Introducing Open vs Closed

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

In its most recent State of the Nation report, the Social Mobility Commission found a labour market highly polarised, with five million workers caught in a low-pay trap from which there is little chance of escape. Predictably, London, the Home Counties and East of England dominate when it comes to high-skilled, high-paid and knowledge-based jobs. 58% of internships – often a pathway to a plum job and career – were located in the Capital, placing them out-of-bounds to millions. That many were unpaid rendered them further inaccessible to the less advantaged. And it’s not only workers in the old industrial heartlands who are locked out of good-quality employment. Those in rural areas and coastal towns suffer the worst outcomes.

Earlier research by the Commission exposed the staggering degree to which the commanding heights of our society remain stubbornly under the control of the privileged few. Its study of 4,000 leaders in politics, business, the media and other areas of public life revealed that 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior armed forces officers, 50% of members of the House of Lords, 45% of public body chairs, 44% of individuals on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists and 33% of MPs were educated at private schools – that compares to 7% of the population as a whole. Oxbridge, as you might expect, features heavily too.

The Commission also found that children’s future income was, in Britain more than in many other countries, determined by parental background.

More on Open vs Closed

Why the Open vs Closed debate is so deplorable

By Henry Olsen

”Twas ever thus,’ some might say. Indeed so. But today, those who run the establishment are united not merely by advantages of family affluence and education, but very often by opinion too. With many of them having been exposed to the radical nostrums of the cultural revolution that took hold in universities in the 1960s – and which were designed to supplant the traditional values held by millions of ordinary people – it is hardly a surprise that liberal tendencies tend to dominate among the modern elite.

This in turn has encouraged a rigid groupthink at the top, which can easily destroy the reputation and careers of those who violate it either innocently or through dissent. Witness, for example, the sacking of Nobel laureate Professor Tim Hunt for telling a silly joke about girls crying in the lab, or the forced resignation of Sarah Champion from the Labour front bench for offending the multiculturalists by drawing attention to the grooming exploits of British Pakistani men. Today’s establishment closed shop is filled with closed minds.

Almost comically, even our supposed anti-establishment protest groups – such as Momentum, whose co-founders Jon Lansman and James Schneider were educated at Highgate and Winchester respectively – are these days frequently led by the sons and daughters of the privileged.

All of this has led to a worsening social apartheid in the UK – an estrangement between the haves and have nots, the powerful and powerless, governors and governed. Across the piece, throughout politics, business and public institutions, our leaders have very little concept of (or affinity with) the lives of those over whom they rule, while those at the bottom look upwards and conclude that that way of life is ‘not for the likes of us’. The divide is profound, and widening.

And these working class communities feel abandoned by their own institutions of the Labour party and trade unions, which once fought their corner proudly but with their modern middle-class liberal inclinations now barely tolerate them. This divide has left the working classes unrepresented, and feeling there is no vehicle through which they might exercise any sort of political or economic clout in pursuance of their own interests.

We are expected to believe that Britain is more open, tolerant, meritocratic and inclusive than ever before. And for some, that is undoubtedly true. But for millions, the best opportunities in life remain beyond their reach, not through a lack of talent, but for reasons of wealth, privilege and geography. Britain is, for them, a closed shop – the shutters firmly down. And the privileged, ‘open’, few will not be extending an invitation to step inside any time soon.

Suggester reading

Why did union leaders abandon the workers?

By Paul Embery

But such liberal values and attitudes are rather lacking within the universities here, which seem to be rife with restrictive practices.

Only the other night, a conference I was presenting on one campus, which focused on sexual exploitation towards women and children, was stormed by a group of campaigners. They were shouting “Blow Jobs Are Real Jobs” in protest at the position taken by speakers such as myself that prostitution is harmful to all women. I didn’t mind that in the slightest. I am all for protest and free-speech. My problem was with the university’s response.

Rather than seeing such protests as an inevitable consequence of today’s combative style of healthy debate, the university decided that our next event would be moved off-campus in order to “protect the students”. Protecting students from what exactly? Learning that there is more than one opinion on matters such as prostitution, feminism, and the like?

Alas, this is far from an isolated incident. As Peter Franklin’s thoughtful series, Open vs Closed, has pointed out, there is a growing tendency in places of learning and academia, which you would expect to be open-minded, to be Closed to ideas to which they are opposed – and there is an increasing inclination to no-platform certain opinions.

Suggested reading

The rise and rise of Open and Closed

By Peter Franklin

This trend is not restricted to Australia. It’s one I am far too familiar with the world over. In 2013, to take only one example, I was disinvited from a debate in a UK University on pornography (the pornographer was not) when the elected transgender representative of its LGBTQ Society argued that it was wrong to give a platform to someone with “a track record of transphobia during Welcome Week, when making all students feel safe and included is particularly important”.

My crime? An article written in 2004 in which I argued that men who identify as women are not suitable to counsel rape victims. I wasn’t allowed to even state my case.

On countless other times I have been invited to address students – including post-graduates – at British universities only to be stood down when management decide that they cannot ‘guarantee’ the ‘safety’ of students. Heaven forbid any of the little darlings experience trauma as a result of my presence.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Lecturers at one American university even set up a ‘safe room’ for students when I took part in a debate with the alt-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos about feminism. This room, outside of the sight and hearing of students, was, so I heard, stocked with soft toys, ‘relaxation music’ and there were counsellors on hand ready to intervene if the upset of having our alien views on campus became too much to bear.

Who’s to blame for this “drawbridge up” attitude? On a book tour around Texas last year, fresh from my London launch at which the (non-academic) venue was filled to capacity with 400 attendees, an independent Catholic college that prides itself of being ‘open-minded and progressive’ cancelled my appearance with less than 24-hours notice. The academic in charge of the event told me, by email, that he had a “duty of care” to the students.

Not one student, the academic admitted, had read my 2004 article, but they had heard I was transphobic. If he had been honest, he would have admitted that he dares not risk any views perceived as controversial on campus.

It’s depressing enough to learn that the ‘snowflake’, cosmopolitan students aren’t as open-minded as they like to think they are – their tolerance extends only to view-points they agree with. But to know that the academics, the people who are supposed to charge these places with their intellectual energy, feel that it is legitimate to shut down certain points of view is worse. They are supposed to be Open to challenging ideas. But reluctant to venture beyond their own ideological comfort zone, they are, instead, closing young minds.

Bristol University student union recently proposed a policy to ban any feminist who refuses to accept that trans women are actual women. The policy was drawn up after a major kerfuffle was caused when a group of women organised an event to discuss controversial proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. They were met with blockades, pickets and major disruption by trans activists and allies, including local university students.

Later, when news that disciplinary procedures had been initiated against a PhD student involved who attempted to stop the group from meeting, an open letter to Bristol University Vice Chancellorwas signed by numerous senior academics protesting the assault on this particular student’s ‘freedom of speech’.

So there we have it – major support from spineless academics for a student who did their level best to prevent a women’s group from being able to speak out and address the 100-plus citizens who wished to hear both sides. It’s Orwellian, hypocritical, and Closed. It’s all part of a pattern which includes the pandering to the Rhodes Must Fall mob and the no-platforming of Theresa May’s portrait.

Once, universities were places where unpopular views – from either Left or Right – were welcomed and challenged. Today, the left-leaning ideologues steering these supposed bastions of learning aren’t just set against conservative soft–right views, but also those of radical feminists such as myself. Prejudices are reinforced by curricula and differing opinion silenced by the drawing up of the drawbridges.

It is to our great shame that universities are becoming such Closed, ideological echo chambers – places were students will tolerate you only if you think like them.

Where do we go from here? How do we break down the walls of their ‘safe spaces’? I would never advocate blanket freedom of speech, and I do recognise that some speech can be incitement to criminal activity. But I do believe we need to stop encouraging or accepting those Closed prejudices so prevalent on university campuses, which are inculcated and inflamed by the academics. This enforced ignorance is taking our kids in the wrong direction. It is anti-intellectual, anti-progress and anti-democratic. I despair.

Suggested reading

What's the point of the Intellectual Dark Web?

By Peter Franklin

In many areas in the United States, a cosmetology license is required to work with hair, but Clayton was told she wouldn’t need one for braiding. In 2009, however, an anonymous email appeared in her inbox: “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license. Please delete your ad, or you will be reported.” Returning to the state licensing board she was told that she would, in fact, need that license.

The requirement was ridiculous – the mandatory classes would not even teach the techniques used in her braiding, which were, after all, traditional techniques learned in Sierra Leone. And the required coursework was estimated to cost between $9,000 and $19,000. Even at the low end, that’s roughly twice as much as Clayton makes in a good business year.

Clayton turned to the courts, arguing that the occupational licensing requirements infringed on her right to work and earn a living. Finally, three years later, she won a reprieve and returned to braiding.

Luckily, hairdressers in the UK are subject to less regulation than their US counterparts. While they are often required to register with local governments, it is a far less stringent process than obtaining a license. But even having to ask the government for permission before beginning to serve customers is overly bureaucratic.

Overall in the UK, around one in five workers must be licensed for their work. A further fifth that must register before working.

The justification for such onerous requirements is consumer protection, but the academic research on occupational licensing shows that rather than benefiting consumers, licensing primarily helps protect those who are already licensed from competition. In other words, it closes off the industry to people who might struggle to obtain a license, possibly due to cost, while creating higher prices for consumers.

Suggested reading

The closed world of the 'enlightened' middle class

By James Bloodworth

Studies of occupational licensing in a variety of countries have generally shown that licensing creates a ‘wage premium’. A 2018 estimate published in the Eastern Economic Journal found, for example, a 16.9% premium for licensed opticians compared to unlicensed opticians. That means people paid more for glasses and other needs than they would have in an unlicensed state.

And in the European Union, researchers found that, averaging over both country and occupation, the average overall premium is around 4%, accounting for the country and occupation in question – but they also found that the premium varies considerably and may be as much as 19% for some workers.

It is often argued that the extra costs associated with licensed businesses are the price of higher quality services and goods – but there’s little evidence of that. The authors of the opticians paper conclude: “By and large, optician licensing appears to be reducing consumer welfare by raising the earnings of opticians without enhancing the quality of services delivered to consumers.”

The higher prices also mean that people visit licensed occupations less often. With less business activity, there are fewer jobs in the licensed sectors than there would otherwise be. This is not a small effect either. Again, it varies by occupation, but estimates by European labour scholars Maria Koumenta and Mario Pagliero suggest as many as 705,000 jobs may be lost because of occupational licensing. They write, “Depending on the occupation, there could be between 3% and 9% more people working in a given profession should access requirements be made less stringent.”

This tends to hit those most in need the hardest. Clayton, for example, had fled her home country because of a civil war. She had few other options available to her. Similarly, other research by Koumenta and Pagliero suggests that licensing an occupation deters foreign workers from entering the field – representing higher costs that the consumers are forced to bear.

Although minorities seem to suffer disproportionately from licensing requirements, it also depresses employment for the entire economy­ – potentially closing off opportunities for millions. In a 2006 book, University of Minnesota professor Morris Kleiner estimated that job growth in an occupation grew 20% slower in states that licensed compared to states that did not. And in 2011, Kleiner and two other economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research used back-of-the-envelope calculations to show that occupational licensing may result in 2.8 million fewer jobs in the US. That’s a huge, negative impact on employment opportunities for people living in states with licensing.

Suggested reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

Given these formidable costs, it’s clear that alternatives to licensing are at least worth exploring for certain occupations. The most obvious place to start would be removing the licensing requirements for occupations where there is no obvious need for it. In Scotland, for example, tattoo artists need a license, whereas only registration is needed in Northern Ireland – and Northern Ireland doesn’t appear to experience undue numbers of accidents or complaints compared to Scotland.

Or window cleaners, which in Scotland again requires a license – it’s far from clear what benefits a license is providing to customers when they are both uninterested in, and unaware of, the licensing process, as several reports note. Online review systems are just as effective, likely more so, in helping ensure consumers get a high-quality window wash.

In fact, consumers’ ability to use review sites to cut down on the information gap between consumer and provider makes the need for much of the ‘protection’ that occupational licensing is meant to provide obsolete.

Ultimately, consumers will be better off if unnecessarily burdensome licensing requirements for certain jobs are removed or relaxed. The problems that licensing sets out to solve are more likely to be prevented simply by the competitive process, as one business strives to serve its customers best. More than anything, occupational licensing protects industries from competition and erects high barriers to entry for new workers, closing doors to those most in need of a chance to work.

Read part one of this essay

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it has always had its limitations. Most obviously, it is one dimensional, making no allowance for the fact that the positions that people and parties hold on different policies don’t always align in a uniform way. For instance, one member of a political party may be middle-of-the-road on economic policy, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative on social issues and a resolute anti-interventionist in foreign affairs; meanwhile, another member of the same party could be a gung-ho free marketeer, a dripping-wet liberal in the social sphere and an enthusiast for military intervention on the world stage.

Clearly, the left-right spectrum can’t represent these multi-dimensional permutations. Then again, it doesn’t have to. Given that elections are about basic choices, mostly economic, a single dimension gets the job done.

However, what works for clarifying electoral politics doesn’t always work for classifying political ideology. For instance, where do we put the various kinds of populism currently disrupting conventional politics – especially those described as rightwing populism? Do we place them to the right of the mainstream conservative parties, as is physically the case in the European Parliament? The problem with that is that populist economic policies are usually to the left of what conservatives advocate and sometimes far to the left.

And where does libertarianism go? Should we tack that onto the right end of the spectrum too? Not if it means lumping it in with authoritarian ideologies to which it is diametrically opposed.

To try to resolve these contradictions, various attempts have been made to change the way that we classify politics.

Sorry libertarians, but it’s not all about you

One approach is to add a second axis to the conventional left-right spectrum – the two axes intersecting at right angles to create a two-dimensional continuum. Examples include the Nolan Chart and the Political Compass.

Typically, one axis is about how much or how little government should intervene in economic matters, while the other is about how much or how little regulation there should be of non-economic matters. Essentially, both axes are about (personal) liberty versus (collective) authority and therefore, unlike the conventional political spectrum, they do a good job of clearly separating libertarians from conservatives, the liberal left and various kinds of authoritarian.

Further reading

The idea that liberals aren't represented by the party system is the opposite of the truth

By Peter Franklin

However, this way of thinking about political differences does rather revolve around libertarian assumptions. The value of freedom is elevated above all others – and, furthermore, defined in direct opposition to the role of the state. The idea that government, or other sources of authority, might be an enabler of freedom is designed out from the start.

But perhaps the strongest argument against concepts such as the Nolan Chart is that real-life politics refuses to organise itself in any such fashion. Though libertarian parties exist in many western countries, very few have had a significant impact on mainstream politics. Indeed most are on the fringes, not even qualifying for minor party status. 

The populist surge currently disrupting conventional left-right politics is not a libertarian revolt. Admittedly, it is not a demand for less freedom either; but that only underlines the fact that the current realignment of politics is about something else completely.

Sorry centrists, but it’s not all about you either (whoever you are)

A different solution to the limitations of left-right spectrum is to stick to a single dimension, but to stop visualising it as a straight line. A straight line maximises the distance between extreme left and extreme right, but if you bend it into a horseshoe shape, then the extremes curve back round towards one another. Shaped in this way the greatest distance between any two points on the line is between the centre and either extreme.

The horseshoe model of politics has a lot going for it – not least in reflecting the commonalities between extreme left and extreme right. It seems especially applicable to French politics where a centrist candidate (Emmanuel Macron) defeated opponents on the hard left (Jean-Luc Melenchon) and the hard right (Marine Le Pen) to win the Presidency. It also help us visualise how a great deal of the National Front’s voter base defected directly from the left,[1. Andrew Knapp, Parties and the Party System in France: A Disconnected Democracy?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, page 118] without going on a political ‘journey’ via the centre.

However, like a real horseshoe, this model of politics is full of holes. It strongly implies the existence of a second and more important political axis running between centrism and extremism, but doesn’t say what it is. Who are the centrists, anyway? Metropolitan liberals? Localist communitarians? Technocratic pragmatists?

Further reading

A new party could save politics from the extremes

By Ian Birrell

The only firm definition of political centrism is that it lies between the extremes – and yet the whole purpose of the horseshoe is to bring those extremes closer together. As a model of political opinion it is incoherent and paradoxical.

We can’t even identify centrism with the strongest support for democracy. The weakening of such is a worrying long-term trend identified by Yascha Mounk and others.[2. Amanda Taub, ‘How Stable Are Democracies? Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’, New York Times, 29 November 2016] One might logically associate it with the growing polarisation of politics. And yet recent research suggests that the loss of faith in our democratic institutions has gone further among self-identified centrists than among those on the Left or the Right. The same research found that “support for a strong leader who ignores his legislature” is also strongest among self-declared centrists.[3. David Adler, ‘Centrists are the most hostile to democracy, not extremists’, New York Times, 23 May 2018]

The most plausible explanation for these perplexing results is that it isn’t just political moderates who claim the centre as their home, but also their temperamental opposites – people who are fed-up with the political establishment and everything about it – including conventional categories of Left and Right.

Leaving aside the special example of France, it seems clear that centrism is no more useful a reference point for the new politics than libertarianism is.

There is, however, a much much stronger candidate for a new political spectrum.

How open-and-closed got its start

Ruth Davidson is the young and charismatic leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. She is a confidante of the Prime Minister Theresa May and widely tipped as a future, if not immediate, successor. Interviewed in Vogue earlier this year, she was asked whether she worried about the “Tory brand becoming re-toxified.” Her answer was full of significance:[4. Decca Aitkenhead/Ruth Davidson, Vogue, 31 January 2018]

“My worry is actually much greater than that… My worry is that we’re about to head into a culture war around the world where it’s not a question of left versus right any more – it’s a question of open versus closed. We’ve spent a long time believing there was a consensus about the idea of freedom and interaction and breaking down borders, and then suddenly they’re all being built back up again. That’s what I think the fight is going to be about, and I’m damn sure going to take part in it.”

Further reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

Where does the concept of open-versus-closed come from and what exactly does it mean?

One of the earliest and best references comes from the opinion pollster Stephan Shakespeare. This is what he said in the Guardian at the time of the 2005 UK general election:[5. Stephan Shakespeare, ‘They seem to be campaigning for the sake of it’, Guardian, 17 April 2005]

“…there is a new line which separates one side of the electorate from another: recent YouGov research suggests that we no longer range along a left-right axis, but are divided by ‘drawbridge issues’.

“We are either ‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down’. Are you someone who feels your life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other? Depending on which side we take, we regard ‘drawbridge up’ people as unpleasant, or ‘drawbridge down’ people as foolish.”

He didn’t actually use the terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ – but they’re clearly equivalent to “drawbridge down” and “drawbridge up.”

A year later, Tony Blair, then British Prime minister, gave a speech to the TUC annual conference, in which open versus closed made its political debut:[6. Tony Blair, ‘Prime Minister’s address to Congress 2006’, TUC, 12 September 2006]

“There is a debate going on which, confusingly for the politicians, often crosses traditional left/right lines and the debate is: open v closed.

“Do we embrace the challenge of more open societies or build defences against it?”

The year after that, following his resignation as Prime Minister, Blair devoted a whole speech to this concept:[7. Tony Blair, ‘Tony Blair speech at Blenheim Palace’, Office of Tony Blair, 1 October 2007 accessed via Wayback Machine]

“the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left [and] more to do today with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed.”

Though thoroughly biased towards the open point-of-view, the speech had its prescient moments:

“….you’ll find the open and the closed on either of the traditional political categories of right and left. And it has got some fascinating implications, actually, for electoral calculations.”

Of course, by the time the speech, Blair was out-of-office and out-of-favour with fashionable opinion. His thoughts on open-versus-closed were largely ignored over most of the following decade.

Further reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

In that time, there were many indications that populism was growing in strength.  For instance, the arrival of Five Star as a major party in the 2013 Italian general election and the results of the 2014 European Parliamentary elections. However, these could be dismissed a protest vote against the financial crisis and its aftermath.

One of the few commentators to realise that something more important was going on on was an UnHerd contributor, James Kirkup. Writing for the Daily Telegraph in 2014, he argued that left-and-right were of diminishing relevance – especially in describing the distinctions between the parties of the political establishment and their populist challengers:[8. James Kirkup, ‘From immigration to trade and the NHS, politics is about open vs closed’, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2014]

“…the terms ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ are becoming meaningless.

“After all, if those labels were useful, they’d tell us how people who carry them would think about particular subjects. Left-wingers, for instance, would be hostile to free markets and big business, while Right-wingers would embrace them. It’s a nice, clean theory, but the reality is much messier.”

Referring to a proposed free trade agreement between The US and EU, he said that open-versus-closed would be a better to guide to the politics of the future:

“So keep watching TTIP. Dry and dusty it may be, but the way our politicians deal with it will tell you much more about them than any label putting them on some meaningless left-right spectrum.

“Forget Left and Right. The real political division of the 21st Century is the same as it was in the 19th. Should we be open or closed?”

Further reading

A plan to defeat Jeremy Corbyn: provide help to the poorer Britons he has deserted

By James Kirkup

From concept to reality

He didn’t have to wait long to be vindicated. 2016 was the year that the vote for Brexit redefined British politics and the election of Donald Trump redefined American politics. In 2017, Marine le Pen reached the final round of the French Presidential election, gaining a third of the vote.

Anti-populists took heart from the fact that her centrist opponent got twice as many votes. They were also encouraged by a disappointing result for Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Dutch general election (his party having lost a clear opinion poll lead to come in a poor second).

However, hopes that the surging populist tide of 2016 had been turned back in 2017 were soon to be dashed. In last year’s German general election, the AfD doubled its vote to become the biggest opposition party in the Bundestag – forcing a weakened CDU and SPD into yet another reluctant coalition. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, won the legislative election by taking his party to the right on immigration. He then turned right again – selecting the Freedom Party as his coalition partner. Over the border, Victor Orban won a crushing victory (the third in a row) in this year’s Hungarian general election.

Further reading

U OK Hun(gary)?

By Peter Franklin

In any case, the fact that ‘open’ sometimes wins doesn’t alter the reality that open-versus-closed is displacing left-versus-right as the most important political divide.

This year’s Italian general election was an especially symbolic moment. Italy has a large number of parties, but traditionally they organise themselves into two main blocs – one on the centre-right and one on the centre-left. The names of the two blocs and their precise membership changes from election to election, but each time it amounts to much the same thing. Or, at least, it did.

The first blow to the old order came from the emergence of the populist Five Star Movement as powerful force unaligned to either bloc. The second blow has come from the rise of the League – a populist party of the hard right. The League fought the 2018 election as part of the centre-right and was expected to follow the lead of what had been the biggest party in the bloc: Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. Except that, as UnHerd’s Henry Olsen predicted,[9. Henry Olsen, ‘Il nuovo, dolce vita per Italia?’, UnHerd, 6 March 2018] things turned out differently. Five Star won the election, but the League came second – and well ahead of Forza Italia. In the subsequent negotiations to form a government, the League dumped its centre-right partners to form a coalition with the other big populist party – Five Star.

Not for the first time, the organising logic of open-versus-closed is proving to be more powerful than that of left-versus-right.

After Brexit, after Trump, after Italy, there is no more ignoring the new reality. Left-and-right is not dead yet, but open-and-closed is nevertheless redefining politics. Therefore there’s a lot riding on what is actually meant by open and closed. 

The battle to define that is what we turn to next.

Further reading

Test article

By Henry Olsen

On both sides of the Atlantic, though, the argument is identical: the views of the educated, urban few represent “the future”, while the less-educated, rural or town-based many are pining for the past. It is standard political framing designed to marginalise one’s political adversaries.

Further reading

Test article

By UnHerd contributors

The positioning presumes the primacy of a certain set of values: those belonging to the Open. To be Open is to be ‘open-minded’. It is to be open towards new places, new cultures, and new experiences that are not part of the American tradition. It is to be open to ethnic cuisine, say, or valuing foreign travel over domestic tourism.

It is broadly accepting of free trade or large-scale immigration. And most contentiously – more so in America than in Britain – it refers to valuing non-traditional sexual partnerships, behaviours, or identities as highly as the marital, man-woman relationship. To be for these things is to be Open; to be suspicious or opposed to them is to be Closed.

But how do things look from the other side of the fence? How do things look to those deemed to have Closed minds (those thought to be on the wrong side of the argument)?

Well, the defenders of traditional sexual behaviour say that they, in fact, are the ones who are Open – Open to real human flourishing. They are Closed only to the social challenges of unwed motherhood, to the creation of broken families through divorce, and to the declining birthrates that social subsidy and the honouring of non-traditional norms often bring.

Similarly, those suspicious of mass migration could also say they are Open – Open to strong communities built on shared values; they are Closed only to the dissolution of such communities and Closed to the local authorities’ insistence they suppress their values or safety in order to make the newcomers feel more secure. To not treat their concerns as having equal weight is to be Closed to them. It’s hard to get more Closed than to call these people “deplorables” as Mrs Clinton did.

Where the hypocrisy of the Opens is particularly clear, is on the subject of religion. Traditional Christianity is one of the things most strongly disfavoured by the Open few in America. Non-belief is much higher among people who live in large metropolitan areas, especially in places like Seattle and San Franciscowhich are home to the industries touted as the archetypes of the “new economy”. This non-belief is not neutral in its politics: over two-thirdsof those who practice no religion voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

These voters hold a remarkably cold view of traditional Christians. The cross-partisan Voter Study Group’ Summer 2017 pollasked respondents to rate how they feel about selected groups on a 100-point scale, 0 being “very cold” and 100 being “very warm”. There were 42% of Clinton voters who rated “evangelical Christians” between 0 and 24; the total rose to 46% of  people who said they were “very liberal”.

This is 60% higher than the number of Trump voters who gave “immigrants” or “gays and lesbians” similar scores, and more than four times higher than the number of Trump voters who said they felt this coldly towards blacks or Hispanics.

Yet it is the Trump voters who are labelled as racist, homophobic, bigoted, and sexist, while the Clinton voters are Open to “moving forward”.

Tens of millions of Americans think going forward into Clinton’s future would push them backwards. Traditional Christians wonder whether they would be allowed to practice their faith, or even express their views on sexual morality in public. Factory workers wonder if there will be any good jobs left as manufacturing goes overseas or is made unprofitable by climate change-focused regulations and practices.

These people have heard nothing yet to suggest that those on the Open side of the debate are Open to their views of the good life. Inevitably, these voters are increasingly proving Closed to Clinton and her ilk and very Open to anyone who vocally takes their side – hence, Trump.

That’s the trouble with such binary political classifications and rhetoric. They can exaggerate and intensify honest disagreements.

Winston Churchill famously over-reached with incendiary words in 1945, when he said Labour would have to set up “some form of Gestapo”, if it won the election. Politicians ratchet up the rhetoric and leave no room for nuance. Anything to win the argument. But it’s precisely that refusal to understand human motivation that has brought us to this political precipice.

Open vs Closed, Forward vs Backward – both are merely one side’s partisan characterisation of our current political debate. What is really at stake, though, is the type of society we will built together, and what place (if any) traditional values, social roles, and jobs will have in it.

Those who genuinely desire an “open” system should think deeply about these questions, rather than presuming that theirs are the values, jobs, and preferences which are the only ones worth empowering and honoring. For it is by being closed to other possibilities that they are opening the door to something else that could be much worse.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

Conveniently, this alternative to the traditional Left-Right spectrum has been adopted almost exclusively by those who purport to sit on the Open side of the fence. It is, in other words, a label that is at once flattering to half of the equation and damning to the other. Thus when the former Prime Minister Tony Blair (an early adopter of the term) declared in 2007 that the “real dividing line to think of in modern politics has… more to do today with… open versus closed”, it was clear which side he viewed himself and New Labour as being on.

In fairness, Closed is not a bad appellation when applied to anti-immigrant movements of the far Right. In defining themselves through virulent hostility toward both globalisation and immigration, much of the far Right wishes to retreat behind the comfort blanket of an idealised nation state, self-reliant and closed off to the outside world.

During her 2017 election campaign France’s far Right leader Marine Le Pen echoed those who say the old divisions have melted away and been replaced by something new. “There is no rightwing and no leftwing anymore,” she said, “there is only those who support globalisation and patriots.”

A division that may be useful in describing the extremes is, however, unhelpful when applied to the swathes of people who fall somewhere in between, particularly in Britain.

In this country it is more accurate to look at contemporary politics through the prism of social mobility. The extent to which a person is socially mobile even appears to dictate whether that person is likely to adopt some of the attitudes superficially associated with being Open or Closed – more on that later.

The prevailing view of social mobility in Britain is that there is less of it than, say, half a century ago. Everyone from the former Prime Minister John Major to the General Secretary of the TUC, Frances O’Grady have talked, respectively, of a “collapse” and a “reverse” in social mobility. This slots comfortably within the general mood of nostalgia that is engulfing politics – be it in the revived enthusiasm for grammar schools or nationalisation.

More on Open vs Closed

Open vs Closed: The rise and fall of Left and Right

By Peter Franklin

Yet the notion of a golden era of social mobility is in some respects a myth built on the post-war expansion of the professions. The growth in white-collar occupations after the Second World War created more room at the top, and so a larger number of working class children were drawn into the middle classes. In other words, social mobility was predominantly driven by structural change, rather than any particular policy.

The big change today is the gulf between those who go to university and those who do not. As Professor Mike Savage of the London School of Economics notes in his exceptionally detailed book Social Class in the 21st Century: “there is a tightening association between graduate status and membership of the most advantaged groups in British society”.

Half a century ago it was the exception to go to university. Today, due to the professionalisation of many jobs and the expansion of higher education, it is unusual to encounter a young professional who has not gone to university. According to Savage, while just over half of what he defines as the “elite” have a degree, this figure increases to two-thirds for those aged between twenty-five and fifty.

Suggested reading

Slaying Dragons: Global Elite Condescension

By Henry Olsen

In one sense there really is a good deal of social mobility – it’s just contained within the middle and upper echelons of British society. As Savage puts it, a meritocratic “elite class has often achieved its advantaged economic position through performing well in the education system and then succeeding in the cut-throat world of high-level professional and managerial employment”.

Graduates, in contrast, are largely absent from the ‘precariat’ – typically unstable labour without pensions, holiday or sick pay – where the majority have no qualifications.

Moreover, the new meritocratic elite clusters around urban centres, particularly London, which “operates as the unquestioned centre of elite geography,” according to Savage.

The contemporary debate around Open versus Closed is focused almost entirely on those deemed Closed. Blame for the fact that many formerly industrial towns voted for Brexit is laid at the door of a sort of cultural malaise, where material explanations give way to a blame-game grounded in the allegedly ‘backward’, ‘regressive’ and ‘closed’ nature of certain communities and the people who live there. Our current political predicaments are thus attributed to a set of attitudes rather than any economic system or policy.

In this sense, Open versus Closed offers a convenient ideological model of the world for those who refuse to believe in any alternative to the status quo. After all, if Britain’s problems can be solved simply through a change of heart – an ‘opening’ of the mind to a different way of life – then little really needs to change at all, and certainly not for those who have done well out of the existing order.

Correspondingly, those who find themselves cut adrift in contemporary Britain – marooned in small towns where industry has been replaced by call centres, distribution sheds and supermarket checkouts – are effectively told that there is little to be in revolt about.

Suggested reading

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

Yet these types of job – documented in more detail in my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low Wage Britain – are increasingly part of the life that awaits those without qualifications when they leave school. The fact that a growing number of young people also go to university – on the surface a good thing – compounds the sense of failure for those left behind, who no longer have many of the routes into skilled work that existed in the past.

To try and erect a dichotomy based solely on a supposed cultural chasm – the enlightened versus those who wish to stop the world and get off – misses something far more significant. If Open versus Closed has any value at all, it is in the fact that we have created a meritocratic order that is open to some while being firmly closed to others. Indeed, Open versus Closed is less useful as a marker of a person’s perceived enlightenment, than as a description of the barriers imposed on non-graduates by the professionalisation of our economy.

They simplify and summarise, stripping out the detail – but that’s what makes them so valuable. They provide us with a common frame of reference, a way of gauging where we stand in relation to one another. 

Democracy, too, needs directions. For all the details of policy making, all the nuances of ideology, we, as voters, need a straightforward way of lining up the options and making our choices. By reducing the complexities to a single dimension, that’s exactly what the Left-Right spectrum does for us.

It may be crude, it may be simplistic – but in the democratic era, it has untangled the mess, sorting politicians into parties, and parties into coalitions. 

It also puts the focus on the issues that matter most. The central proposition of modern politics is the state. How big should it be? How much should it spend, tax, redistribute, regulate? The details are complex, but the fundamental choice is not: do you want a bigger state or a smaller one? Go left for the former; right for the latter. 

But what if that’s not how it works anymore? What if politics has become about something else? 

Further reading

How the populists have united Italy

By Beatrice Faleri

From Brexit to Trump to the populist triumph in Italy, the established order is under attack. There is talk of political realignment. But realignment along what axis? If it’s no longer Left-versus-Right, then what are the defining directions of the new spectrum?

This deep dive is an attempt to find answers. It comes in three parts:

• First, where did Left and Right come from? How did they end up defining our politics? And why are they now losing their grip?
• Second, what are the alternatives to Left-versus-Right? Why has ‘open-versus-closed’ emerged as the front runner? And who’s pushing the idea?
• Third, what is the true meaning of Open and Closed? What is it doing to democracy? And are the advocates of ‘Open’ really as open as they think they are?

For more on these new directions, read on. 

The origin of left and right

Let’s begin at the beginning. Or what is supposed to be the beginning.

In the English language, the first reference to Left and Right as political categories is in Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history of the French Revolution. It comes from his description of the National Constituent Assembly – the first ‘parliament’ of revolutionary France, where supporters of the king and supporters of the revolution sat on opposite sides of the chamber:[1. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 1837, Book VI, Chapter 2]

“…if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, ‘most irregular.’ As many as ‘a hundred members are on their feet at once;’ no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss… Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin arranging itself to like… Rudiments of Methods disclose themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (Cote Droit), a Left Side (Cote Gauche); sitting on M. le President’s right hand, or on his left: the Cote Droit conservative; the Cote Gauche destructive.”

The Assembly, formed in 1789, was soon for the chop (as indeed were many of its members). However, the symbolism of its seating arrangement would persist in the various bodies that succeeded it – those most attached to the established order on the right, those keenest on radical change on the left, and those between the extremes in the centre. 

Further reading

Ever since medieval times, angry men have been inciting mobs

By Michael Burleigh

Over the next two hundred years, these labels would attach themselves to the politics of other nations – whether or not their legislative bodies followed the same physical layout.

So, is that all there is to it – just an accident of history? The legacy of a seating arrangement that might just as easily have gone the other way? Absolutely not. The symbolic meaning of left and right is much older the French Revolution. In fact, it pre-dates history itself.

Most human beings are right-handed. Our right hands are typically stronger and more dextrous than the left. It is a physical bias strong enough to shape language. For instance, the English word ‘dexterity’ is derived from the Latin for right-handed; whereas the word ‘left‘ has Germanic origins meaning weak or foolish.

The word ‘right‘ goes all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European root word *reg from which we also get words like ‘regular’, ‘straight’, ‘correct’, ‘adroit’, ‘royal’ and ‘rule’.

Both literally and symbolically, ‘right’ embodies normality, ability and thus the natural order of things. The left embodies the opposite.

In fact, from a leftie perspective it gets worse. Because most people use their right hand to eat with, many cultures have made a point of using the left hand to perform tasks that include contact with dirt and excrement.[2. For instance, the Chinese character for right-handed is composed of the symbols for hand and mouth, while the character for left-handed is features symbols for hand and work] Across the Middle East, and many other parts of the world, touching food with the left hand is a cultural taboo.

The unsavoury associations of the left hand are perhaps compounded by an element of fear. In contests of physical prowess, whether on the battlefield or the sporting arena, the left-hander presents the right-hander with an unfamiliar opponent – one capable of delivering blows from an unaccustomed direction.

This left-handedness isn’t just unusual, it’s also subversive – if not downright sinister.

We see the symbolism of left and right in religion too. In the New Testament, Christ, as the Good Shepherd, separates the sheep (i.e. the righteous) from the goats (i.e. the fallen), placing the former on his right side and the latter on his left.[3. Matthew 25: 31-46] Comparable metaphors can be found in non-Abrahamic faiths too. For intance, Hindu traditions distinguish between the concepts of daksinachara (the ‘right-hand path’ of orthodox, virtuous spiritual practice) and vamacara (the ‘left-hand path’ of heterodox, transgressive spiritual practice).

Left and right in politics

The political association of the right with the established order and the left with challenges to that order is therefore no accident. It is deeply encoded within culture, language and religion – and thus applying the same symbols to politics came naturally. But why did it take so long for politics to acquire its ‘wings’?

It wasn’t until the Enlightenment period that internal division along ideological lines came to be seen as anything other than a mortal threat to the integrity of the realm. Before that the only alternative to a unified, if hierarchical, society was assumed to be bloody chaos – which is why the established order (and the shared religious assumptions that underpinned it) was ferociously defended.

The Reformation would, of course, shatter the religious unity of western Christendom, but within each state it was generally expected that the people would follow the same religion as their rulers: the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion).

Further reading

Is Europe on the brink of a new Thirty Years' War?

By Peter Franklin

In the Enlightenment period, the old certainties and structures would be loosened. In some states, such as England, the process was evolutionary; in others, like France, it was revolutionary. The English approach allowed for the gradual accommodation of a widening range of religious and economic interests within a continuing, though not immutable, constitutional framework. However, in France, where the ancien régime was unaccommodating, change could only come about through the repudiation of established sources of authority. What was once regarded as right was right no longer.

In one form or another, the struggle to break with the pre-modern past would go on to define the politics of the West in the 19th century. However, the bourgeois revolt against the aristocratic order was just the beginning.

As a different kind of revolution – the Industrial Revolution – gathered pace, it created the conditions for the rise (and, in many places, the revolt) of an urban working class. Moreover, the Industrial Age was also a ‘Bureaucratic Age‘, with transport and communication technologies enabling the centralisation of political and economic power. For the first time, state ownership of the means of production, the wholesale redistribution of wealth and the creation of a modern welfare state – i.e. socialism – became a viable proposition with a powerful political constituency.

As a result, the bourgeois revolutionaries found themselves outflanked on the left by socialist revolutionaries. Indeed, left and right were redefined. Instead of corresponding to the enemies and the defenders of the aristocratic order, the labels became attached to the enemies and defenders of the capitalist order. [4. In Russia, where a bourgeois revolution (or evolution) hadn’t happened, revolution, when it did occur, brought down the aristocracy and capitalism at the same time]

Further reading

Why we should listen to the Luddites

By Nigel Cameron

Parties that had been thought of as being on the left, but opposed socialism, found themselves moving to the right. One of the best examples of this realignment comes from Denmark, where the main party of the centre-right is called Venstre. This confuses outsiders because venstre is the Danish word for ‘left’. There is, however, a logical explanation: In the 19th century, Venstre really was a party of the left – as the term was then understood; but when socialism emerged as an electoral force, the political spectrum was redefined and Venstre along with it.

We can therefore think in terms of a ’19th-century Left’ and a ’20th-century Left’. To this day, support for, or opposition to, the ideas of the latter defines the Left-Right political spectrum.

That said, it’s worth noting that while the ’19th-century Left’ triumphed over the aristocratic order; there was, in the West, no clear victory for the ’20th-century Left’ over its enemy – the capitalist order. At best, it forced a compromise: the so-called ‘mixed economy’ of publicly and privately-owned industries. By the final decades of the 20th century not even that could be maintained. The mixed economy gave way to the weaker compromise of ‘neoliberalism‘ – i.e. in which the welfare state continued, but nationalised industry was privatised. Furthermore, the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the transmutation of communism in China cleared the way for the globalisation of the capitalist order.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08, followed by the Great Recession, could have marked another turning point – this time in favour of the Left. But while the flaws of neoliberalism were painfully exposed, and are yet to be adequately reformed, the contemporary Left has failed to provide a coherent economic alternative. And that’s not even the Left’s biggest problem.

Though the dominance of neoliberalism can be seen as a success for the Right, the Left still had a powerful role to play as the most enthusiastic redistributor of the proceeds of growth. [5. The era of ‘high neoliberalism’ – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of Lehman Brothers – was defined by centre-left leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder.] But in the decade of austerity since the crash, neoliberalism has not provided much in the way of proceeds for the Left to redistribute from; and, as mentioned, the Left has not provided a replacement for neoliberalism. This leaves the Left without a purpose and, increasingly, without power.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

Across Europe, social democrats are in crisis. Once dominant parties of government are haemorrhaging votes and in many cases (e.g. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Greece) dwindling away to minor party status. In part, this is due to the electoral rise of the radical and alternative Left. However, parties of protest are a poor substitute for parties of government. To date, the only one of the left-wing populist parties to gain power is SYRIZA in Greece – and its fate has been to implement a savage programme of cuts on behalf of the Eurozone authorities.

An end to Left and Right?

The decline of the mainstream Left isn’t just an issue for one side of the political divide. A Left incapable of making a difference to economic policy calls into question the relevance of the entire Left-Right spectrum.

A clear sign that old distinctions are collapsing is the growing ease with which parties of the mainstream Left and Right now find themselves in government together. For instance, three of the last four German governments have been ‘grand coalitions’ between the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats. Since 2010, Left-Right coalitions have been formed in a number of other European countries including Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. One could argue that Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement is also a Left-Right coalition – albeit in the form of a new party designed for the purpose.

The old model of centre-left and centre-right alternating in government and opposition can no longer be taken for granted. Parties and politicians that were once rivals for power are increasingly likely to find themselves as partners.

There is a parallel here with the political realignment that took place at the beginning of the 20th century. A clear sign that the liberal parties of the ’19th-century Left’ had ceased to be the actual left was when they joined forces with their old enemies on the Right – against the rising influence of socialism.

But how exact is the parallel between what happened to ’19th-century Left’ and what might be happening now to the ‘20th-century Left’?  

Is there, for instance, an emerging ‘21st-century Left’, capable of (a) redefining Left and Right as completely as the socialists did a hundred years ago; and (b) displacing the previous incarnation of the Left at the ballot box ?

Further reading

How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

There is, but only up to a point.

Ideologically, left-wing populist movements are good at saying what they are against (neoliberalism, etc), but not so good at articulating what they are for. There is no new ‘big idea’ whose impact is even remotely comparable to that of socialism in the 20th century. 

The closest it gets are the ‘post-work’ ideas[6. See, for instance, Andy Beckett, ‘Post-work: the radical idea of a world without jobs’, Guardian, 19 January 2018] of the accelerationists and others. However, ‘post-workism’ is a response to economic conditions that don’t exist yet i.e. a super-productive economy in which human workers are largely replaced by robots. The socialism of the late 19th was able to flourish in the 20th because it was a response to economic conditions that most people experienced in their daily lives. Furthermore, the socialist parties of the era – whether communist, democratic socialist or social democrat – offered not just a protest against those conditions, but also a means of changing them.

Further reading

Accelerationism, Blue Labour and the future of work

By Peter Franklin

Protest can still make an impact at the ballot box, of course. In countries across Europe, there’s no doubt that the populist Left has taken votes away from the mainstream left.

And yet the radical Left is not the only, or even the biggest, threat to the mainstream Left. In many countries, the most shattering blow to the latter’s voter base has come from populists who don’t belong to any kind of Left: a far from exhaustive list includes UKIP in the UK, the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, the Five Star Movement and the League in Italy, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party in Austria and, of course, the ‘alt-right’ and the wider Trump phenomenon in America.

With the exception of Five Star, these movements are usually classified as ‘right-wing populists’. 

They are certainly populist in the sense of being anti-establishment, but in what what sense are they right-wing? In terms of the economic issues that are most definitive of the conventional left-right political spectrum, parties of the ‘populist Right’ are generally to the Left of the mainstream Right and often to the left of the mainstream Left too.

Most of these movements don’t define themselves by conventional categories of Left and Right anyway. The degree of state involvement in the economy is, for them, a secondary issue. Indeed, their mission is to polarise politics along an entirely different axis. As their support increases, they are succeeding – sometimes pushing the mainstream left and right into unholy alliance, sometimes pushing one or both out of power altogether.

The Left-Right spectrum is falling to bits; what might replace it is the subject of part two of this series.