In a bid to wean his nation off its oil addiction, de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has approved the building of numerous such resorts to lure high-end tourists to the kingdom. The most egregious, and least plausible, is a ski resort planned for the arid mountain town of Trojena, which plans to pump out snow for three months a year for the merriment of international ski bums. This energy-guzzling resort forms part of Neom, MBS’s futuristic giga-project in north-west Saudi Arabia. If you look it up online, you will find a fantasy world of yachting marinas, soaring buildings, and elegant people in European attire exploring the rugged beauty of Arabia and its dazzling Red Sea coast.

For many Western architects hedged by planning laws at home, the lure of building in Saudi Arabia’s wild west is irresistible — despite the nation’s abysmal record on human rights and the environment. Even after the murder and dismemberment of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, at the hands of a team sent specially from Riyadh, the architectural bonanza continues apace. According to Architects’ Journal, dozens of UK architecture firms are understood to be involved in Vision 2030, the array of projects overseen by MBS, of which Neom forms a part.

One of these firms is Foster + Partners. Although English architect Norman Foster stepped back from the board overseeing Neom after Khashoggi’s murder, his practice has only deepened its engagement. It is currently designing a two-kilometer-high tower near Riyadh, set to be the world’s tallest; a six-runway “aerotropolis”; and what is described as “the world’s first fully immersive experiential marine life center” at the Amaala Red Sea resort on the Gulf. For his role in building Neom’s airport, Foster has been strongly reprimanded by the Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), which stated that “based on Saudi Arabia’s reputation for human rights abuse, slavery, and deaths in construction, working on projects there which are not critical would be unethical” — and contrary to the Royal Institute of British Architects’ professional code of practice.

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Meanwhile, more than a dozen beautiful football stadiums are also being designed by global architects including Populous and Foster + Partners. These are under construction or renovation ahead of the 2034 World Cup, which was awarded by FIFA to Saudi Arabia last December amid controversies about changed voting procedures and the concerns of human rights organizations.

In accepting such fantastical commissions, Western architects are choosing to overlook not only the murder of Khashoggi, but also the fallout from MBS’s massive construction projects. The region where Neom is located is the heartland of the Huwaitat tribe — rivals to the Al Saudi. According to human rights group ALQST, Saudi authorities have illegally displaced local tribes to make way for Neom, and cracked down violently on tribe members who resisted eviction. Several have been sentenced to execution. Today, the Huwaitats’ goat-hair tents have been replaced by temporary trailer-parks, housing more than 100,000 bureaucrats and construction workers.

Since then, The Wall Street Journal has exposed malpractice and corruption at the highest level of Neom, with senior executives who were banned for corruption in Europe still practicing freely in Arabia. As the newspaper put it, MBS “allows what many consider bad behavior as long as an executive delivers on his vision”. Meanwhile, on the ground, workers on The Line are reportedly subjected to 16-hour days and poor working conditions. An ITV documentary aired last October, Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia, estimated that 21,000 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh have died since 2016 while working on Saudi’s giga-projects.

If bad behavior won’t give MBS pause, perhaps the project’s finances will, as hoped-for foreign investors are deterred less by human rights abuses than Neom’s dubious economic prospects. According to the WSJ, a draft board audit last summer estimated the amount required to complete Neom by 2080 at $8.8 trillion — that’s 25 times more than the annual Saudi budget. The audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” of finances by “certain members of management”, aided by McKinsey & Co.

Yet it seems little will tear MBS from his futuristic vision. And so it is worth asking what Neom’s design reveals about its autocratic patron. The jewel in Neom’s crown is The Line, a steel and glass structure some 170 kilometers long with mirrors for walls and cascading terraces with plants and ponds. Nothing about its design seems “Islamic”. The original model was devised by veteran American architect Thom Mayne, who, unlike the late Tom Payette, designer of the impressive Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, has no experience of working in Muslim environments. Before designing the hospital, Payette, at his client’s request, visited numerous sites from Spain to Pakistan to study different styles of Islamic architecture. The idea was to learn how qualities of Muslim living as well as architecture could be incorporated into the hospital’s design. So far Mayne has made no such efforts.

It might not be too outlandish to describe Mayne’s linear vision as “Islamically illiterate” in terms of both its aesthetic as well as its social vision. While there may not be a consensus about what constitutes “Islamic architecture” globally, the rhythmic opposition of earth-bound domes and soaring minarets that characterize iconic masterpieces like the Taj Mahal in India or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, are conspicuously absent. As Mayne himself explained to the Saudis, The Line’s rectilinear structure was inspired by deconstructing a map of New York.

In awarding the contract to Western designers oblivious of Muslim contexts, MBS and his apparatchiks demonstrated either an ignorance of the aesthetic and cultural traditions prevailing in the Muslim world, or, more probably, a disdain for them. Such contempt was on full display when the Al Saud clan destroyed the Ottoman fabric of Mecca, turning the holy city of Islam into a replica of Las Vegas.

In a recent plea to UK architects, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan, told the Architects’ Journal: “I’m proud that you are helping Saudi Arabia to develop, and this is what Jamal wanted, but please speak to them [Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family] and remind them there is unfinished business here, which is Jamal.” It seems unlikely that in Saudi Arabia, a Disneyland for ambitious British architects, that Hanan’s plea will make the slightest headway. As J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, supposedly said when asked to explain the appeal of working on atomic weapons: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

Debanking is when a bank closes an account in order to censor or punish the customer for political or religious views. The banks, in these cases, are typically responding to ideological pressure or to perceived reputational risk. As you might imagine, anger over debanking rapidly merged with concerns shared by crypto companies, which have also contended with access issues to traditional banking. One CEO shared a letter in which the bank Chase said it was closing his company’s account.

The complaints about debanking were echoed and amplified by Donald Trump. His wife, Melania, claims that she herself was debanked. More broadly, the MAGA movement has ample experience of being booted off social media platforms. The matter of tech debanking, therefore, has been rolled into existing MAGA complaints. By this account, the US government has restricted freedom of expression via several coercive means.

In keeping with this view, Trump’s allies have called for a dismantling of financial watchdogs such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). “Delete CFPB”, wrote Musk, echoing Andreessen, who blamed debanking woes on the agency. Examine the policy upheavals of the past two months, though, and you will note that such measures will not have the intended effect.

Far from protecting freedom of speech, the new administration has made it easier for financial platforms to kick users off for political expression. Among the red tape it has slashed were some CFPB rules that were designed to protect, of all things, free speech. This should all work out well for Andreessen, who is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors in crypto — the sector that, more than almost any other, yearns for looser regulation.

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Just as the casual observer loses sight of the magician’s card, many observers missed Andreessen’s sleight of hand. His remarks on the Rogan show convinced those enraged about censorship to support a niche campaign to unwind protections against crypto fraud.

In this way, Andreessen conflated two unrelated issues for his own financial benefit. In a worrying global trend, a wide array of people — Canadian truckers, Brexit supporters and Palestinian activists — have been removed from financial platforms without due process. Unrelatedly, regulators concerned with keeping crypto startups in compliance with banking rules have taken steps to crack down. Some executives involved in the crypto trade have said they have had difficulty using traditional bank accounts simply because they were flagged by the system. The truckers were debanked; the crypto executives were not.

Consider the viewpoint of regulators. On several occasions in recent years, crypto brokerages and emerging cryptocurrencies have imploded overnight and left ordinary customers with nothing. Regulators have also repeatedly accused crypto startups — including those backed by Andreessen — of a variety of alleged financial crimes. These offenses have included the undermining of rules on money laundering, and the violation of sanctions on terrorist groups. It’s not entirely surprising that those entrusted with safeguarding the financial system view these schemes with extreme suspicion.

As free speech has become a battleground for everyday Americans — waged on college campuses, over political correctness in the workplace, and on social media platforms — a simultaneous legal revolution has taken shape. Corporate actors seeking to eviscerate rules and restrictions on business conduct have attempted to conflate commercial action with free expression. In other words, the business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.

“The business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.”

This piggybacking has been taking place for decades. Lawyers have poked and prodded, attempting to find new legal maneuvers to classify business behavior as protected speech. In this vein, Southwest and Spirit Airlines have repeatedly litigated to block a regulation that required airlines to display the full price of tickets. Another example comes via the private rating agencies that were responsible for falsely certifying the safety of risky mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis. In court, the agencies argued that they were simply expressing First Amendment-protected speech, and were thus exempt from fraud lawsuits.

These efforts largely failed in court, but other, similar arguments have begun to prevail increasingly often. In the Supreme Court ruling Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., Justice Anthony Kennedy struck down laws against health care firms mining and selling patient data to pharmaceutical companies. The patient data laws, Kennedy wrote, violated commercial speech laws and “burdened a form of protected expression.” In similar fashion, Kennedy and his Supreme Court colleagues cited the First Amendment when ruling in 2018 that the imposition of union fees on non-union public sector employees was unconstitutional. The imposition of fees, they said, amounted to coerced financial speech.

Most famously, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and independent spending in elections. The court ruling ushered in our current era of engorged Super PACs and dark money spending, all in the name of the First Amendment. The rules that had governed the financing of political campaigns, Kennedy wrote, had unduly restricted “corporate political speech”.

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Everyone loses in America's misinformation war

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The flood of challenges continues. The First Amendment is being used to attack corporate regulations, ethics laws and consumer safety rules. Corporate attorneys are attempting to overturn the few existing laws restricting robo-calls and automated texts; interest groups funded by Google and Facebook have claimed that antitrust enforcement would increase censorship and stifle free speech; and state bans on lobbyist gifts to legislators are continually under threat. Lawyers have argued that such gifts are not bribery, but an example of free expression.

The new administration might find that this legal trend threatens some of its most consumer-friendly reforms. Processed food industry lobbyists have threatened to use First Amendment lawsuits to strike down the Food and Drug Administration’s new updated guidelines on what foods can be labeled as “healthy” — a cause that has been championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s new health secretary. Trump has also promised to minimize pharmaceutical advertisements on television, but this endeavor, too, is likely to face challenge in the courts on the grounds of freedom of expression.

All of this is taking place without society having made much progress on what we should consider genuine freedom of expression. Banks are still free to arbitrarily remove customers, college students continue to face coercion over free speech, and social media platforms retain near-untrammeled power to censor their users.

Corporations, then, have taken an expansive view of the First Amendment in order to remove constraints on their power. But ordinary Americans have been left on the sidelines, as vulnerable as they ever were to government and corporate censorship.

Montaigne left such pursuits behind in the 1560s, at age 38, when he retired from public office to embark on a life of contemplation, thanks to which we have his published work. In solitude, he gave himself over to the world and his own mind — his “back shop”. He was there for the weeds.

A similar gardening metaphor appears in the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s recent book, Vita Contemplativa. Like Montaigne, Han, the author previously of the bestselling The Burnout Society, has left behind an active life of status and striving to dwell in the inner sanctum of his mind. According to a profile in El Pais, he writes “just three sentences a day”, devoting most of his time to his plants and classical music. His latest book is a paean to contemplative inactivity, which he correctly sees as “not just the absence of activity but a capacity in itself”.

Think of the difference between paddling upriver and floating downstream. Tranquillity — what Han calls the “freedom from purpose and usefulness” — is the end toward which activity ought to be directed. That is the “basic formula for happiness”. Aristotle, Epicurus and others arrived at similar conclusions over 2,000 years ago, but the insight bears repeating in a culture that has grown ever more obsessed with “purpose”, particularly of the professional variety. This has happened not despite the escape from poverty and material constraints, but because of it. The cliche now runs that many workers no longer want to just do work — they want to make the world a better place. Judging by a recent Time magazine profile of young, purpose-oriented professionals, this can mean working as a branding manager at a yoghurt company that is taking pains to decarbonise its supply chain (while also still upholding its fiduciary duty to maximise value for shareholders, of course). Set against such a culture — it is basically Calvinism without the theology — the Hans of the world seem destined to constitute a small minority.

I do not mean to belittle those who demand that their job be more than just a job. It is a reasonable request, given the circumstances of contemporary economic and cultural life. But put aside the fact that “meaningful” jobs allow those employers to get away with paying less. The more fundamental question is how we arrived at such an impoverished search for meaning. Now that we are in another wave of hype about technology and its potential to cause widespread job displacement (AI-powered “brand management” is already here), age-old arguments for the vita contemplativa — an obvious substitute for delusional workaholism — take on a new urgency.

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Enlightenment, Kant proclaimed early in the Industrial Revolution, is the “courage to use your own understanding”, not only to think for yourself, but to do so publicly with neither fear nor favour. For too long, the bulk of humanity had outsourced this quintessential human capacity, deferring to clergy on matters of religion, to physicians on matters of health, to princes on matters of state, and so on. But even a pastor must mind his church’s teachings in his ministrations, and members of any profession must conform to certain expectations. A priest qua priest “is not free and cannot be such because he is acting under instructions from someone else”, Kant writes. But who, then, is free? Even the most senior priest is ultimately subject to “someone else”. The same goes for any professional, any employee, and any boss.

No; for Kant, only someone fulfilling the role of a scholar (even if merely temporarily) is completely free to “use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind”. The vast majority of us must fill prefabricated roles that then become our identities, dictating what we ought to say, do, and think (a predicament that of course afflicts scholars, too, nowadays).

The result is a society of dissemblers, the denizens of LinkedIn who doth insist too much that they are “passionate” about digital marketing, sales portfolio management, or “leveraging data to help clients achieve their goals”. These are the lies we live by, and one is reminded of the Athenian Apollonius: “To speak falsely is the mark of a slave.” Enlightenment is available only to select members of those societies that satisfy certain basic conditions of freedom. But satisfying such conditions requires no shortage of unfreedom. The beating heart of it all, Kant believed, is mankind’s “heartless competitive vanity” and “insatiable desire to possess and to rule.” Without such appetites, humanity might have remained no different from its beasts of burden. It would have fallen short of its true and natural purpose, which is to develop its capacities, ad infinitum.

Kant’s understanding of progress as capability-building has obviously prevailed, culminating in the present age of endless hype about world-changing technologies, Mars missions and digital platforms to connect all of humanity. Yet one can still question his conclusions about human nature and the purpose of society. Though developing our capabilities does allow us to develop ever more capabilities, surely it also could allow more of us, someday, to get off the train. The fact that we dare not, Han believes, is a product of our economic system: a “hell of unbridled competition”, performance, and achievement, where the only constants are “hyperactivity and hyper-communication… Capitalism is nurtured by the illusion that more capital creates more life, increases the capacity to live.”

This God-is-dead explanation rings true, but it is incomplete. The problem cannot be only “capitalism”. Socialist regimes, too, fetishise action and champion their respective Stakhanovites. No, the historical transformation of waged labour from an indignity into a higher calling required more than just coercion. Beyond the rise of a particular economic system, we are also suffering the loss of an older sensibility. Those with the privilege to “do good” by “changing the world” simply assume that that is indeed what they are doing. Such conceits used to go by the name of presumption. In the cult of purposiveness, the old wisdom that recommends against hubris is not only ignored but inverted. Nowadays, Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, boasts that: “We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it. Let’s go work even harder.”

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Coming from industry leaders, such proclamations will always fit Montaigne’s description of a “fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover”. But they have also come to reflect genuinely held, quasi-religious convictions. Like traditional religious faith, faith in one’s own purpose serves a consolatory function (especially for the secularly minded), warding off all those usual irksome existential questions about the meaning of finite lives in an apparently arbitrary cosmos. The cult of purposiveness crowds out those concerns by requiring an always-on, all-consuming asceticism, especially among its lower-ranking members.

Yet as Nietzsche — another contemplatavista who disembarked the train early on — understood, an ascetic is a paradox. By taking what looks like the difficult path, he makes “life easier for himself” through a “complete subordination to the will of another or to a comprehensive law and ritual”. By fully embracing purposiveness, and a career through which to realise it, you need not worry about what to do with yourself, or even about taking responsibility for your actions. Even supposing your (or your company’s) plans to change the world backfire and produce malign unintended consequences, at least you tried. Rarely does it occur to anyone to ask whether the world would have been better had more doers with grand designs simply abstained. In the Nineties, charities started paying ransoms to free enslaved people in Sudan; in response, the enslavers rounded up even more victims for a bigger payoff. Such examples are legion. At least they tried.

If one truly wants to make the world a better place, perhaps one ought to give more attention to how things could go wrong than to how they might go right. The problem, as contemplavistas have long known, is that our intentions are rarely as pure as we think. The ostensibly selfless act always offers its own hit of personal pleasure. Pity, as Nietzsche saw, confers a sense of superiority, just as public philanthropy brings recognition, even glory — one of the most dangerous inducements of all. Righteous indignation can veer all too easily into self-indulgence. It is an open secret that some professions and activist groups owe their existence to the perpetuation of the problem they purport to solve. But the dilemma doesn’t stop there. The economists Ruben Andersson and David Keen have documented similar dynamics in the US “wars” on illegal immigration, drugs, and terror. Each has generated its own private industry of contractors and other stakeholders (an overused term that actually fits in this case) who would be out of the job if their “purpose” was ever actually achieved.

That the purpose-driven individual’s motives include not-so-noble elements seems indisputable. That is just who we are. The sheer potency of glory and prestige is what led classical Epicureans to counsel not only retirement from public life but anonymity (though this precept proved too much for either Lucretius or Epicurus or Montaigne, for that matter). They saw the pleasures offered by a hectic, active existence as too fleeting and contingent to be worth the trouble. With wealth, public achievement, or approbation comes the fear of losing what you have won, and fear of any kind is antithetical to the tranquillity that happiness requires. Better to do away with all sources of anxiety — insofar as you can — and embrace the life of the mind (or of therapeutic tinkering, hobbies, exploration, and the like) and the pleasure of good friends. The fruits of the vita activa are perishable, Epicureans observe, whereas those of the vita contemplativa grow only sweeter with time.

Could any ethical tradition be more out of favour today? As ancient philosophies go, Stoicism is the reigning champion, not least among trade publishers and influencers. While sharing some of Epicureanism’s common-sense insights about what really matters, it is easily cherry-picked, and boasts the advantage of being practical for modern career-oriented and entrepreneurial strivers. For those selling Stoicism (a lucrative gig, to be sure), the original school’s rejection of status and other such pleasures tends to be overshadowed by its principles for maximising performance in a workaholic culture. Hence, in its offerings of “ancient wisdom for everyday life,” The Daily Stoic gives us “7 Essential Stoic Productivity Tips (from Top Performers)”. Marketed predominantly to younger male careerists, there is no better pablum to keep noses to the grindstone.

It is not surprising that Han is better known in continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon world — especially the United States. There has always been a strain of European radical thought that sees through the cult of purposiveness in affluent, “post-scarcity” societies. In Vita Contemplativa, he echoes (largely without attribution) post-war European Situationism, whose exponents argued that the neuroses of affluent societies lay in their ideological underpinnings, implying that no amount of policy tweaking would get to the root of the problem. Instead, more people first would have to abandon the presumption of purposiveness in roles where it holds no purchase. That may seem unlikely — not everyone wants to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace — but contemplation need not be as narrow as it sounds. Freedom from tormenting demands — not least those we place on ourselves — is what matters.

The irony is that these “inactivities”, too, would be productive in their own way, creating the conditions for the art, fellowship, and social cohesion that make human lives human. We should not wish for everyone to give up on purposiveness, of course. Large efforts are underway to commercialise solar energy and battery storage, even as others are making progress against hitherto incurable diseases. But millions of others are just fooling themselves. Another piece of “ancient wisdom for everyday life” warns that you can always have too much of a good thing. Purpose may now be one of them.

The Establishment loathed it on sight. To broadsheet and tabloid journalists alike, the importation of the long-running US format — refined by game show kingpin Mark Goodson in 1972 from a show he’d first produced from 1956 — was nothing less than a deplorable new low in British culture. “Unashamedly designed to bring out the avaricious worst in both contestants and audiences” was the Daily Telegraph’s damning verdict. Over at The Guardian, critic Hugh Hebert called it “the noisiest, most mob-hysterical, money-grubbing game show to be slavishly copied from America so far”.

Evidently viewers were less judgmental. By the end of its initial three-week run, cut short by an electricians’ strike at Central Television in Nottingham, The Price is Right was a sensation, scoring ratings of 16 million. Under second-term Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the masses weren’t just buying their council houses and voting for privatisation, a policy that would sell them bargain-price British Telecom shares in late 1984. They were drooling over consumer durables, to the disgust of their supposed social betters. This was a new Britain, which coveted such items — and knew how much they were worth.

One can, if one wishes, detect both oikophobia and anti-American snobbery in the horror that greeted The Price is Right. Watching that debut show today on YouTube, it’s clear that the working-class coach parties in the audience have left their British reserve on the bus, relishing the possibility of short-lived fame and a nice little windfall. When contestants look uncertain, the 291 onlookers yell good-natured advice in the manner of Shakespearean theatregoers or Victorian music hall patrons. It’s worth remembering as well that, in the Eighties, American traits such as appreciating money and showing enthusiasm were frowned upon by the more supercilious Britons among us. The stupid, vulgar, materialistic Yank was the stereotype du jour, not least because a former Hollywood B-lister, Ronald Reagan, was heading a Right-wing resurgence in tandem with the much-vilified Thatcher.

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The staunchest defender of ITV’s newest hit was its producer, William G. Stewart, a former Butlins redcoat who’d cut his teeth in the BBC’s light entertainment department. Before his TV career, he’d been a private secretary to the Labour MP Tom Driberg in the early Sixties. “English people can be just as lively as anyone else,” Stewart assured a reporter in the days leading up to 24 March. “Look at the way people behave at football matches and boxing matches.” The snootier criticisms seemed to grate on Leslie Crowther, however, who accused the show’s detractors of trying “to read all manner of sociological data into something intended to be nothing more than fun. And no, we don’t feed the audience gin crisps to get them into the right psyched-up frame of mind — they work the spell on themselves as they travel here.”

Crowther, who’d present the show until 1988, was in a happy position. Before then, he’d been best known as the presenter of Crackerjack, the BBC’s variety show for children, and as the face of Stork SB margarine commercials. Now, all of a sudden, he was raking in the cash as a rictus-grinned, flamboyant showman in his early 50s. But it’s the lively, garrulous contestants who are the stars of that first show — notably Norma, who wears comically large, distorting Coke-bottle glasses and can barely contain her excitement when she wins a tumble dryer. To Hebert in The Guardian, she resembled “a pogo stick with spectacles”.

Norma eventually triumphs in the showcase final, winning two nights at London’s Ritz Hotel, tickets to a West End show, a luggage set, a 35mm camera and a slide projector. She narrowly misses out on a trip to New York and back on the QE2 cruise liner and Concorde, but in the landscape of Winner Takes All and Sale of the Century, her haul is staggering. As a rule, the average weekly winnings on ITV shows like these were capped at £1,750 — that’s why Bullseye’s speedboat was offset by pen sets and teddy bears. When The Price is Right returned in May for six more shows, watchdog the Independent Broadcasting Authority warned it be less generous, or else.

On the strength of the first series, 25,000 people applied for studio tickets to the second, which ran to 25 shows. “The fact is that the audiences are willing the contestants to win,” Crowther stressed. “That’s not greed, that’s generosity.” In the autumn, the ongoing culture clash reached the Edinburgh Television Festival, where BBC variety chief James Moir accused ITV in a formal debate of consciously lowering standards. “The game show represents the pursuit of ratings, not the pursuit of excellence,” he declared, adding pointedly that ITV had made 300 shows like these in a year.

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John Birt, a current affairs man who’d risen to the role of London Weekend Television’s director of programmes, begged to differ. Alarming his intellectual peers, the future director-general of the BBC took the side of the ex-redcoat. Yes, The Price is Right had topped the ratings, he said. Crucially, though, it had also scored highly in the viewer appreciation index. The core of the BBC’s appeal was to a “suburban middle-class England that uses words like ‘standards’”, Birt argued. By contrast, the great strength of Stewart’s show was that it attracted a neglected constituency — the older, working-class audience.

But, from the Eighties onwards, that was the constituency that picked the winner in Britain. They voted for Thatcher’s Conservative Party, which ultimately won two landslide election victories in the Eighties by appealing to Britons’ aspirational needs. As highbrow commentators looked on aghast, ordinary people didn’t especially seem to mind if their “barrow-boy” sons became City traders, or if getting rich quick was not just socially acceptable but desirable. Boastful plasterer “Loadsamoney”, a satirical creation of the privately educated comic Harry Enfield, became a beloved icon of the decade. And as pop stars and “alternative” comedians complained that by reversing nationalisation, the Tories were “selling you things you already own”, the advertising slogan “Tell Sid” heralded a headlong rush for newly listed British Gas shares.

An ancient culture of deference genuinely seemed to be dying. And with it was fading the bourgeois cultural gatekeeping of a British media still governed by the principles of Lord Reith.  Beyond terrestrial gameshow fun, this period saw the explosion of home video and the massive popularity of American director Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. The “video nasties” panic, in which commentators reached for their fainting couches on hearing that the hoi polloi and their children might be watching gory horror films, culminated in the Video Recordings Act 1984, which insisted that videos be rated in the same way as cinema films. This being the UK, class assumptions were lurking just under the surface.

As the year drew to a close, the BBC passive-aggressively responded to ITV’s The Price is Right with a laconically amused documentary, written and presented by film critic Barry Norman, about over-the-top game shows in California (predictably, its title was Come On Down!). Norman’s hour-long treatise is a thoughtful addition to the “aren’t Americans weird?” genre, a staple of British television for decades. Norman concludes that shows like these are harmless, but worries aloud that they reflect a markedly American brand of cynicism — “that true happiness is only possible though the acquisition of more and more material possessions”. This might be good for bodily comfort, he suggests, “but I really don’t think it does much for the soul”.

Calmly and eloquently, Norman had alluded to the real problem with The Price is Right. It wasn’t that the show was poorly made. It wasn’t that audiences in Nottingham were idiots or somehow unworthy. It was that without a sense of restraint, of social responsibility, TV executives would keep pushing at the boundaries of good taste indefinitely. And push they would. Crowther’s campy game show was enriching as far as it went, but it didn’t upend contestants’ lives. William G Stewart said as much in 1984, when he remarked that giving away, say, £1 million “would end up doing more harm than good”. When the Independent Television Commission abolished prize limits in 1993, the writing was on the wall. Four years after that, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? became a homegrown, worldwide smash hit.

Since then, what began as a force for social levelling has become a race to the bottom. Having uncorked Britain’s new-found materialism, producers moved on to coarser passions. Channel 5’s one-off Naked Jungle, presented by a desperate (and naked) Keith Chegwin in 2000, along with the arrival of Big Brother, launched a reality TV genre that wallows among the atavisms of sex and conflict. Watching from the sidelines, commentators continue to sneer at “low-information voters” and “gammons”. But while rewatching The Price is Right evokes a sense of genuine liberation, of a class of people free to aspire to a different sort of lifestyle for the first time, our current landscape is flatter, and staler. Instead of sneering at such television, the new Establishment are the ones crafting and purveying it, serving up not thrills and escapism, but a form of reality TV which can addict but never satisfy. In culture as in politics, the line between democracy and demagogy is always unstable.

Critics, not unreasonably, said crypto had failed to offer compelling use-cases, beyond speculation. They said it was a cesspit of money laundering and terrorism (its involvement in the latter tends to be vastly overstated). They said it was dangerous for the environment. They said it could never become part of the financial system, because key financial players on Wall Street would never accept it. Some even dared to bid a valedictory “Sayonara”, as they have hundreds of times before now.

Yet today, Bitcoin is trading at around $70,000, above its previous all-time-high of about $69,000. The world’s premier cryptocurrency now has a market cap greater than silver, and many expect it to reach parity with gold within a few months. Meanwhile, the rest of the crypto market, which slumped along lifelessly for much of 2023, isn’t far behind.

So, what’s going on here? What sparked Bitcoin’s resurrection? The truth is there are five principal reasons behind its revival, the first of which may seem rather obvious…

1. You can’t kill Bitcoin

It’s awfully difficult to eradicate something like Bitcoin. Its network is peer-to-peer and decentralised, with roughly 18,000 public nodes working to validate and maintain the network daily, and they work independently. There isn’t a central point of failure or vulnerability for someone or something to stop. It’s a self-perpetuating system. And, more importantly, Bitcoin has tremendous latent support in the world: there are more than 100 million Bitcoin holders globally and, characteristically, they do not respond to political pressure. Since its emergence 13 years ago, Bitcoin has purred along efficiently, steadily growing, even in the face of massive competition and numerous hacks (particularly to exchanges and individual wallets).

This resilience isn’t directly connected to price; Bitcoin can be resistant without the price going up. But the price is based on this sense of permanence. It’s a function of everyone knowing with certainty that the Bitcoin code can’t be changed and that the issuance of new Bitcoin isn’t a political matter. Unlike fiat currencies, which are subject to central bank issuing more or less of a currency depending on the economic circumstances, the issuance of Bitcoin is predictable. That’s a unique selling point in a world where everything, even money, is increasingly politicised.

2. The arrival of ETFs

Though the Bitcoin industry takes pride in its outsider status, it has long sought mainstream support, whether from regulators or blue-blood institutions. This January, after 10 years of trying, it hit the mother lode, winning SEC approval for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. These vehicles, which helped to popularise gold in the 2000s, allow everyday investors to buy into Bitcoin as if they were purchasing a conventional stock. There’s no need to own the underlying asset or to store it oneself.

This convenience is propelling a whole new generation of customers to buy into digital markets via trusted names such as BlackRock and Fidelity. Recently, daily inflows to 10 approved ETFs averaged more than $1 billion, and analysts expect more than $200 billion in trade for Bitcoin in the next couple of years. If so, crypto will have a strong underpinning, helping it to weather regulatory storms and inevitable crises. And the Bitcoin ETFs are just the start. Many expect regulators to approve Ethereum ETFs in a few months and that, eventually, wealth managers will allocate up to 5% global savings to digital assets. Bitcoin is the gateway drug: once people hold Bitcoin in an ETF, the thinking goes, they’ll move on to more exotic digital asset investments later.

3. Regulation works

People in crypto tend to hate regulators and regulation, believing that people and institutions should be able to transact freely. They complain about regulatory interference in general and particularly about the type of intervention we’ve seen over the past year from the SEC. The lack of new legislation governing crypto in the US has led to a series of arbitrary enforcement actions by that agency, leading to a deep sense of mistrust across the Bitcoin ecosystem.

However, regulation can also be a useful tool for industries seeking acceptance. The trial and prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried last November created a sense of clearing-house, of past failures being put to bed. Finally, many Bitcoiners believe, we can all move on. Meanwhile, the EU passed its comprehensive MiCA legislation regarding crypto, creating greater regulatory certainty within the bloc and showing other jurisdictions the way forward.

4. Elite approval

If you want a cast-iron indication of the new mood around Bitcoin, look no further than Donald J. Trump. Back in 2021, Trump said that Bitcoin was “a scam” that undermines the dollar’s place as the world’s reserve currency. But now he says, if he’s re-elected, he wouldn’t seek to ban it. “I have seen there has been a lot of use of that,” Trump said recently. “I’m not sure that I’d want to take it away at this point.”

Nor is Trump the only high-profile convert. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also U-turned, recently backing an Ethereum ETF to go with his company’s Bitcoin ETF. Even, the Financial Times and the New York Times, liberal institutions that have routinely amplified the routine criticisms of Bitcoin, are noticeably more accommodating these days, running approving articles to go along with all the jeremiads. (That said, central bankers, who have the most to lose from Bitcoin becoming serious money, are still lockstep against Bitcoin, even in the face of ETF mania.)

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5. The world is going to end

The less palatable reason for Bitcoin’s rise is that it’s a hedge against very bad things happening. Bitcoin is “disaster insurance” in a world where traditional monetary mechanisms break down. People buy it because they don’t trust central banks. That’s why more than half the adults of Turkey, to take one example, own Bitcoin: because they think it will hold its value better than the Lira.

In this way, Bitcoin is the strangest of exotic assets: its price is both an indication of financial health in capital markets, but also an indicator of deep unease with the current social settlement. On the one hand, the mainstream approval of Bitcoin arguably makes us safer because capital markets are broader-based and people are diversifying into new categories. On the other, its resurgence shows that many people are concerned that the conventional financial system — and, by extension, the broad social system it is based on — is going to fail. They want to “exit” and find something that isn’t controlled by a few dozen middle-aged white men in suits. They want decentralisation away from narrow elites controlling our lives, whether it’s Wall Street, the Federal Reserve or Big Tech.

Having said that, the demise of today’s financial system, long foretold following the 2008-9 financial crisis, hasn’t happened yet. For now, we have the curious situation of mainstream financial institutions marketing the hell out of an asset that was once created to outrun and destroy them. The question is whether this uneasy situation continues indefinitely. Will the mainstreaming of crypto mean it’s sanitised of political and social meaning; that it becomes just another financial asset? Or will Bitcoin’s success lead where hardcore Bitcoiners have always wanted to go? For now, we don’t know whether the promises of global financial revolution made by some of Bitcoin’s more Jacobinical founders will materialise. But, even as it takes another tumble, with some of the new investor funds from early this year going into reverse, we can be sure of one thing: reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Among the many myths woven around the miners’ strike is the claim that it represented the end of industrial working-class militancy — indeed, of the industrial working class as such. From then on, so the story goes, coal mines gave way to call centres and manufacture to finance and the service sector. Greasy overalls were replaced by the dressed-down mateyness of the modern office. The class which Karl Marx had dreamt might take over material production was depleted and scattered to the winds.

This isn’t quite what happened, not least if one takes a rather more global view of the matter. For one thing, work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. It includes not only Harley Street receptionists and celebrity chefs but refuse, postal, hospital, cleaning and catering workers. For another thing, while today’s chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over a billion people on the planet go hungry every day. Slum dwellers, the fastest growing social group on earth, represent one third of the world’s city dwellers, while the urban poor more generally constitute at least half of the world’s population. Most of the mega-cities of the Global South are rife with poverty, disease and overcrowding. Capital is concentrated in fewer hands than ever, while the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour. The transition from industrial to post-industrial capitalism has expanded and consolidated the system, not modified it.

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Like Mark Twain’s death notice, the obituaries issued for the working class have been much exaggerated. If you take the category to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers, it constitutes a massive proportion of the world’s population, perhaps around two to three billion. If you add to that the vast army of unskilled casual labour, along with the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, the number soars even higher. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce. There has also been an increasing proletarianisation of the professionals (teachers, social workers, technicians, journalists, middling clerical and administrative workers) as the modern middle classes are hit by the kind of economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th-century working class. Labels like “service” and “white collar” obscure the immense differences between airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids. It’s true that there has been a huge expansion in technical, administrative and managerial jobs, yet this increase was also taking place in Marx’s day, who noted what he called the “constantly growing number of the middle classes” and rebuked orthodox political economists for overlooking it.

If by “the working class” you mean blue-collar factory workers, then this group has indeed diminished sharply in advanced capitalist nations — though this is partly because a large slice of it has been exported to poorer regions of the planet. It is true, even so, that industrial employment on a global scale has declined. Yet the working class is by no means confined to factory workers. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. Marx is generally considered to be a champion of blue-collar industrial workers, yet he was well aware that they didn’t form the majority of working people of his own time. For that, one must look to the vast army of Victorian domestic servants, most of whom were women. In fact, the original proletariat wasn’t the male working class but lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes from the Latin word for “offspring”, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies, producing labour-power in the form of children. And the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. Today, in the farms and sweatshops of the Global South, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

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By Terry Eagleton

Marx didn’t champion the proletariat because he thought there was some resplendent virtue in labour. On the contrary, he wanted to abolish it as far as possible. In any case, some stockbrokers no doubt work as hard as some garbage collectors. Marx didn’t even consider the proletariat to be necessarily the most downtrodden of social groups. There are many more likely candidates for this role: vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the chronically unemployed and so on. What interested him was its place in the system of production. These men and women were familiar with its workings, organised by it into a collective force, indispensable to its successful running, yet with the capacity to take it over. It was in this sense that industrial capitalism created its own gravedigger. It couldn’t achieve its ends without massing people together, and by massing them together it created the conditions in which they could seize the means of production and run them for their own benefit rather than for the profit of their masters.

It’s in this sense that for Marx history moves under the sign of irony. Marx’s championing of the proletariat, in other words, is inseparable from his belief in democracy. People needed to throw off their chains by their own collective efforts on the spot where they found themselves, not handed their emancipation from elsewhere. What’s changed since the miners’ strike, then, isn’t that the working class has vanished, but that its material conditions have changed. A more flexible, smaller-scale form of capitalist manufacture, with its average unit employing  only a few hundred people, means that the workplace is no longer the main or sole focus of political militancy, as pits and power stations were for the miners. In our own time, the theatre of political conflict is increasingly the street. The mass protests which matter, from Americans marching for George Floyd to Israelis against Netanyahu, take place in public squares rather than factory yards, and the participants are a far more socially mixed bunch than a phalanx of Yorkshire coal miners.

A coal miners’ strike isn’t like a strike by, say, firefighters. There are no communities which consist almost entirely of firefighters and their families, but there used to be towns and villages which drew almost the whole of their identity from the local pit. It is this intimate interweaving of life and labour which Margaret Thatcher and her gang failed to grasp. For them, you would drive to the office and then return to your suburban home, with little connection between the two. In a mining town, the domestic and public realms are closely related, and one of the vital links between them is women. One function of the domestic arena is to breed a new generation of colliers, as well as to care for the current one. The solidarity among miners underground that may be essential for their survival can be translated into collective action in the political sphere.

Not much of this was understood by those bureaucrats and politicians for whom a mining community is just a convenient means of grabbing energy out of the ground, and can be allowed to collapse when the last chunk of the stuff has been excavated. What matters for them are the two grand abstractions of state and economy. The state was unleashed against the miners with such alarming force that any fiction of its impartiality was discredited. For their part, the police seemed to disown any semblance of disinterestedness and treated the strikers as deadly antagonists. My injured leg healed pretty quickly, but there are a number of wounds and traumas from that time which continue to fester.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, its last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed on to do an advert for Pizza Hut, in which a family gathering of Russians debate whether the introduction of fast-food chains like Pizza Hut was truly worth the fall of the USSR. Unsurprisingly, the pro-Pizza Hut faction win. And though that particular advert is somewhat on the nose, it wasn’t a great leap from the post-Soviet reality. When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990, hundreds queued to get a chance to taste American fast food.

Today, however, the “McDonald’s era” in Russia has come to a close, as all of the franchise’s restaurants have been sold off. Most of them are still being operated, but they carry new names. The elusive “magic” that those Big Macs held in the Nineties in the eyes of Russians as harbingers of modernity, symbols of a new, global market society, is now well and truly gone.

But American fast food was never only important for the ways it could dazzle the Russian proletariat, or anyone else in what is now called the Global South. It has become part of the American self-conception, at the lowest and uppermost reaches of society. Pictures of Burger King lorries being unloaded from US military cargo planes in bases across Afghanistan and Iraq were a powerful symbol of American power; the now-abandoned US military base at Kandahar, for example, once boasted a Burger King, a Pizza Hut and a TGI Fridays serving alcohol-free margaritas. Like the Roman legionaries before them, wherever American soldiers and marines deployed in force, they brought their own culture and preferences with them. Far from being a white elephant and a pointless waste of resources, that McDonald’s or Burger King inside the Green Zone was a little piece of America, one that soldiers — often worn down from their long deployments into the sandbox — genuinely appreciative. For them, it really was a little slice of home.

The Kandahar Burger King closed down a long time ago; ordering Pizza Hut at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is likewise a distant memory, as the US military slowly cuts back and retreats from the world. But even on the home front, inside the continental United States, fast food isn’t what it used to be. The industry is now locked in a genuine affordability crisis, and it is unclear when — or even if — things will ever improve. The famous McDonald’s dollar menu has been renamed to the “$1, $2, $3 Dollar Menu”, and an increasing amount of items on it — even the chicken nuggets — now cost upwards of $4.

In the early years of the post-Cold War era, the ridiculous affordability of American fast food was a point of pride, waved in the faces of the snobs of Europe. Michelin chefs be damned: in the US, mass prosperity and mass culture were the order of the day. The average American could be proud of the fact that he could eat more calories and afford more stuff than the average citizen of any other country in the world (even if nothing else).

But this is no longer the case, as massive cost increases, coupled with shrinkflation, have eaten away at this central aspect of American living standards. Those same supermarkets that Boris Yeltsin salivated over are putting locks on the displays. Once, Russians queued up in droves to get a taste of Pizza Hut or Burger King; now, Americans marvel on social media at just how cheap the hamburgers in Moscow seem to be compared to their own. But though many things are becoming increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Westerners these days, the rising price of hamburgers comes with its own poignant cultural significance. And this new reality is the source of a new type of dissatisfaction on social media.

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One of the internet’s most popular content creators, John Jurasek — commonly nicknamed “Reviewbrah” — posted a cri de coeur on the topic several months ago, in which he described how the fast food he reviewed had skyrocketed in price and nosedived in quality over the last few years. After listing his own experiences and complaints, Jurasek opened up the floor to people to report their own experiences in the comments section. More than 10,000 comments later, the picture painted was overwhelmingly clear: the fast-food industry inside America seemed to be in a state of near-collapse.

In response, some might be tempted to ask: so what? Fast food is bad for your health; why would the unaffordability of a greasy pizza or a cardboard box of processed chicken nuggets even be a problem? These complaints are reasonable on one level, but they ignore the broader social, economic and political reality that this affordability crisis speaks to. The United States is possibly the only country in the world where the term “food desert” is in semi-regular use, denoting areas within the country where there is little or no access to supermarkets selling fresh vegetables and the like. In this nutritional frontier country, fast food is the only game in town. Though the extent and severity of this problem shouldn’t be overstated, it is an issue, and some Americans are, for various reasons, at least partly dependent on cheap fast food in the way that the citizens of ancient Rome were dependent on cura annonae: the provision of state-subsidised bread and grain.

On another level, however, tutting at Americans who resent that their burgers are now twice as expensive and increasingly filled with sawdust is just the Western equivalent of tutting at Soviet citizens for coveting American blue jeans. The USSR collapsed in part due to its citizens being disillusioned with the promises of socialist prosperity that had been made to them. Looking at their own shabby reality, blue jeans and hamburgers became symbols of something greater. America, by contrast, is now a consumerist society where the ability to actually be a happy consumer is rapidly collapsing. Just like the Soviet Union before it, the once-alluring story of American society is now being seen as an increasingly shabby fraud by a growing segment of its own citizenry. The same feelings of anomie and cynicism that once animated Soviet political jokes are now spreading to more and more Americans, forced to contrast the newspaper headline stories of economic growth and prosperity for all with their experiences of food inflation and wage stagnation.

A very stark illustration of this fact came recently, as the American journalist and cable TV profile, Tucker Carlson, travelled to Russia. The official goal was to interview Vladimir Putin, but there’s a fair chance their meeting was the least culturally impactful moment of the trip. It’s what Tucker decided to do afterwards that has now really stirred up consternation and controversy on social media: in an ironic repeat of Yeltsin’s visit to that American grocery store, Tucker decided to visit a Russian grocery store in Moscow, ride the Moscow subway, and then visit a Vkushno i tochka — Russian for “Tasty, that’s it”, the new hamburger chain that has taken over where McDonald’s left off.

In Tucker’s own words, his visits to Moscow “radicalised” him, in a sort of mirror image of how citizens of the USSR were once equally radicalised by seeing how the other side lived. Moscow simply wasn’t that bad: the groceries were cheap, the store selection was wide, nothing was locked down to prevent theft — which is becoming extremely common in many parts of the West — and the streets were free of drug addicts and homeless people. The burgers were far cheaper than in the United States, and they were indeed tasty.

Given that Russia is, according to the official narrative in the West, a backwards tyranny, run by an incompetent, brutal kleptocracy, ridden with crime and lacking in basic services, things in Moscow reasonably shouldn’t be quite so, well, normal. Why can’t we in the West, with all the natural, inherent superiority our societies supposedly possess, manage to have clean public transit, cheap fast food, or stores where you don’t have to ask an employee to unlock the deodorant shelf?

History might not repeat, but it sure does rhyme: after Tucker posted these videos from Moscow to social media, a massive firestorm broke out, as people tried their best to debunk the very idea of Russians enjoying anything close to a decent living standard or a functional society. Statistics, often decades old, pointing to Americans spending only some 8-10% of their total income on groceries (compared to Russians who supposedly spent almost 50%) made the rounds, but it is hard not to get the sense that it is all, in a very real way, a futile effort at this point.

The problem isn’t that people suddenly love Russia — it’s that they remember when the West had affordable fast food, and when stores didn’t put half their wares under lock and key. They remember living in functioning societies, and now they increasingly feel that they don’t, anymore. What Tucker — like Boris Yeltsin before him — inadvertently did is simple: he revealed that the belief in the grand narrative of his own society has withered away and died. It doesn’t matter how many statistics and graphs are posted about PPP and GDP growth and how America is richer today than it has ever been before: people don’t feel richer. They see the decay around them and they now feel they are being lied to, and that the system is broken. And not least when it comes to their hamburgers.

Almost a freak accident of history, the hamburger has been pressed into service as a grand symbol for the past half century. In 1990, it was a symbol of American cultural and economic dominance, as Muscovites waited in line for their taste of the future. In 2004, as airlifted Burger King trucks rolled off the tarmac at Bagram air base, it became a symbol not just of cultural and economic dominance but of military power too. A mere 20 years later, the hamburger is now coming to symbolise very real feelings of political and economic decline, as people take to social media to bicker over whose fault it is that they’re no longer affordable.

Anger over expensive burgers won’t bring down America, just as the lack of blue jeans didn’t cause the collapse of the USSR. But they point to exactly the same thing: a shared vision of the future, once commonly held, is now in the process of dying. And nobody knows how to repair that vision, or what to replace it with when it’s gone.

Also in Ed Davey’s amorous sights, according to the same Telegraph report, are “M&S Movers”: youngish couples who have upped sticks from London to the Home Counties after the pandemic in the hope of starting families there. They worry about climate change and mortgage hikes, and “care deeply” about “Gary Lineker and his causes”. Normally this fantasy pair would vote Labour, but the Lib Dem leader apparently thinks he can lure them into a socially responsible throuple.

Whenever I read about fictitious voting personas — see also Waterstones Dad, Deano, Millennial Milly, and Workington Man — it is striking how they seem more like characters in a terrible play than resembling real people. On a stage set for a dinner party, Waterstones Dad is boring on about Simon Schama’s latest tome as Waitrose Woman politely nods and pretends to listen. Workington Man is surreptitiously checking his betting app while, outside, Millennial Milly is flirtily cadging fags off Deano. Indeed, the people who came up with Waitrose Woman and M&S Movers can’t even seem to make the supermarkets in question believable. For surely Waitrose is more often a place full of recycling obsessives wearing wacky spectacles and stripey jumpers; while M&S tends to attract the more sedate dowager-types.

Even so, political strategists still love the device of a fictitious persona: partly, I assume, because they wrongly think of themselves as too individual to ever be described generically. See: “Daniel is a pale-faced 30-something dressed in white shirt and Portcullis House lanyard, stalking about Westminster coffee cup in hand, worrying about his rent and listening to The Rest is Politics on his AirPods.”

Originally, personas were conceived by marketers as a means of designing more desirable products — first identifying a specific type of person, and then working out what sort of thing, exactly, that type of person might want. Soon the practice migrated to politics and characters such as “Dougie” were born: “a stereotypically hard-working, blue-collar white guy who loved hockey, beer, Tim Hortons coffee, and hanging out at the hardware store”.

Dougie was aimed at attracting like-minded souls to vote Conservative in the 2006 Canadian federal election. Single and in his 20s, he worked for Canadian Tire, and later went on to get a girlfriend called Denise. And as his creator put it: “He agreed with us on issues such as crime and welfare abuse, but he was more interested in hunting and fishing than politics and often didn’t bother to vote.”

These days, presumably Dougie is languishing in a Canadian jail for his role in the trucker convoy protests; but back in 2006 he was the Conservative’s main man. Over the course of that campaign, he appeared on PowerPoints and briefing sheets, posters and hockey cards. Policymakers were encouraged to look at an image of Dougie and ask themselves how he would feel about a particular idea; those in charge of communications would anticipate which messages he would most like to hear. When the Conservatives eventually got into minority government, they put “Team Dougie” on a T-shirt.

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Yet despite its apparent success in this case, the practice of persona-construction still seems distinctly odd. On the face of it, even the use of them in product design seems counterintuitive: for why would you deliberately make the things that you want to sell appeal only to a very specific type of consumer? The standard answer here is that the use of the technique works best for what are assumed to be relatively niche markets in the first place; and, after all, most markets are like this. It’s theoretically true that catering for the whims of a very particular sort of person might dissuade lots of others from buying your wares, who don’t share those precise whims; but since in most cases your product was unlikely to appeal to the masses anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

With the political use of fictitious personas, however, the initial puzzlement becomes more insistent. For you would think that, by definition, there should be no particularly niche markets for the biggest political parties. Their aim should always be to give as many people as possible what they want, whether that’s because they want to attract the largest number of voters to their cause or because, more nobly but perhaps less plausibly, they think that this is how democracy ought to work. For the biggest parties, then, there seems to be a risk that, in putting time and energy into producing policies that specifically appeal to some particular caricature of a swing voter, they might accidentally ignore or even alienate lots of other potentials.

Or to put it another way: in going for Waitrose Woman, you are in danger of deterring Morrisons Man or Asda Aunty. Dougie seems to have worked well for a Canadian Conservative party that had arguably lost touch with a relatively large natural voter base at the time; but in the case of more marginal voting types, the value of using such devices is not so clear.

This scepticism would not seem to apply to parties like the Reform Party or George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, though. Each of these is currently touting for voters in Rochdale with renewed urgency, now that the Labour by-election candidate has lost the future whip thanks to his endorsement of an antisemitic October 7 conspiracy theory. For these smaller outfits, mostly unheard-of on the doorstep, their aim is presumably to become much better known and liked among a relatively narrow band of rather similar voters, rather than to widen their appeal more broadly. Here, it would seem strategically reasonable — if not particularly palatable in terms of optics — to specifically target policies at, say, John the 70-year-old Northern homeowner furious about immigration; or careworker Malika, who has three kids and likes going to pro-Palestinian marches in her spare time.

The counterargument to scepticism about the use of personas for the larger parties is that nowadays each of us has increasingly less in common with others, so that there are relatively few general voter characteristics for a would-be unifying political party to draw upon. Multiple social cleavages — financial, educational, cultural, moral — are separating us into smaller and smaller voting blocs. In other words, though relatively many of us will end up voting for the same party, it will be for very different background reasons. As a result, Conservatives now include those advocating for state interference in family life and those allergic to it; those who support gender ideology in schools and those who want it banned; those who would rejoin the EU and those who would prefer to see it destroyed. Labour voters are no less stratified; and arguably Lib Dem supporters have always been a basket case — as also seems evident from some current members’ wildly illiberal approaches to free speech.

Still, noticing the existence of increased voter stratification is one thing; deliberately drawing the electorate’s attention to it, quite another. As well as potentially alienating others and intensifying social divisions, singling out one or two groups for special attention by coarsely personifying them into a clichéd caricature inevitably comes across to some as deeply patronising. And then there’s just the sheer desperate transactionality of the practice. Politicians being explicit about fashioning niche policies and messages simply in order to bribe small numbers of voters over to their side, with increased or maintained power as their ultimate object, is hardly the noble democratic ideal. In fact — given they sound like highly principled sorts — it’s exactly the sort of thing Waitrose Woman and M&S Movers might rightly despise.

Last week, to no fanfare whatsoever, the Treasury Committee released an extensive report on a set of policies the Bank of England has undertaken over the past few years. The report’s immediate focus was on the Bank’s recent Quantitative Tightening (QT) programme, which promotes higher interest rates. But read properly, it was an attempt to assess Britain’s central bank policy since 2008. QT, after all, was a direct attempt to unwind the Quantitative Easing (QE) programmes that were put in place in response to the financial crisis. To judge its effectiveness, the report had to look at the Bank’s monetary policies over the past 15 years. Suffice it to say it made for damning reading.

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In a capitalist economy, financial markets should have one job and one job only: the allocation of capital. They should look at various businesses and assess their viability. Those they assess as being viable should then access funding on good terms; those that are not viable should not.

But since the onset of QE, the City has largely become an arm of the Bank, constantly watching its every move for signals about what to do next. The reason for this is straightforward: the QE programmes have given the central bank almost total control over the government bond market, partial control over the corporate bond market, and a large degree of influence over stock prices. If you are an investor and you want to make money, the easiest way to do so is to guess what the Bank is going to do next.

There are, as a result, plenty of investment professionals consulted in the report, all of whom have firmly bought into the QE/QT framework. Each provides their own minor assessments: one will say QT is being undertaken too fast, another will say that it is being undertaken too slowly — and, at the end of the day, the Bank will fall somewhere in the middle. All very sensible, all very orderly. Until it isn’t.

In fact, what is so striking about these assessments is their lack of clarity. Beyond the fundamental virtue of the QE/QT framework, the only point that everyone agrees on is that they really have no way to know what is going on. The Bank, as the report makes clear, “is uncertain about the macroeconomic and money supply effects of QT”. Elsewhere, it notes that “the Bank is taking a ‘leap in the dark’ by embarking upon a major monetary operation without specifically and separately tracking its effects”. Indeed, at one point, the Governor himself admits this, explaining that such uncertainty is “why we keep QT under constant review”.

Of course, no policy undertaken by any government institution produces certain outcomes. But this, it’s worth spelling out, is the Bank of England, the very institution tasked with keeping the financial peace; indeed, its own independence rests on the pretence that they set monetary policy in line with scientific criteria. Instead, it’s been treating our economy like a roulette wheel — and one that will soon be stacked against us. As interest rates have risen, the value of gilts — government-issued bonds that are supposed to be low-risk — has fallen fast. You don’t need to be a finance whizz to understand what this gap represents: losses.

Indeed, these losses are shown clearly in the Committee’s report: “Annual losses in each of 2023 and 2024 will amount to £40 billion, eroding the cumulative £124 billion positive cashflow that was generated up until September 2022,” it states. Crucially, this doesn’t even take into account that these significant and rapid declines are dependent on optimistic forecasts of future inflation. If inflation remains stubbornly high or even rises again — say, on the back of ever-increasing geopolitical tensions — then the downturn will be even more significant. And who will pick up the bill? The Treasury and, via the Treasury, the taxpayer.

The Committee, understandably, were less than pleased with this: “Notwithstanding the operational independence of the monetary policy… it strikes us as highly anomalous that decisions have been and are being taken concerning huge sums of public money without any regard to the usual value-for-money requirements”. On the face of it, such an indictment surely calls for root and branch reform of the Bank of England. Its QE programmes of the past 15 years have been a disaster, turning would-be investors into dreary inflation-watchers. But beyond this, it has also wasted money — public money — and left the country effectively broke. The Bank of England knows this; it is, after all, what they told Liz Truss when she tried to force through tax cuts.

Yet while the Bank is more than happy to aim their budgetary fire at a sitting Prime Minister, they seem a lot more reluctant to address how much their own monetary policy experiments have cost the country. Amid today’s inflation news, politicians will gloat, the bankers will chatter, and the national press will lap it up. And missing from all this will be any mention of main driver of Britain’s economic woes: the Bank of England itself.

I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the British research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have produced reports that cautiously advocate the very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.

The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, the concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely thanks to the growing panic over climate change. And much of the interest in solar engineering stems from the fact that, unlike other climate mitigation policies, which require decades to yield any significant results, “SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years”, as the White House report claims, even to “the preindustrial level” according to “highly idealised modeling studies”.

That report followed on from a 2021 study by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), “Reflecting Sunlight”, which suggested that “the US should cautiously pursue solar geoengineering research to better understand options for responding to climate change risks”. Mark Symes, director of the UK’s research agency ARIA, agrees: “Through carefully-considered engineering solutions it may eventually be possible to actively and responsibly control the climate and weather at regional and global scale.” Earlier this year, more than 100 scientists signed an open letter calling on governments to increase research into solar geoengineering.

Scientists point to large historical volcanic eruptions — which result in massive quantities of sulfur dioxide and dust particles being spewed into the atmosphere — as examples of the effectiveness of “stratospheric aerosol injection”. They’re not wrong: the 1815 Tambora eruption cooled the Earth by 0.7°C and led to a “year without summer”; more recently, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in 1991, cooled the planet by about half a degree Celsius on average for many months. So, the idea goes, by spraying a certain amount of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, we could replicate the effects of a major eruption and cool the Earth. Problem solved?

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Not quite. All the reports acknowledge that there are serious risks associated with solar radiation modification, which could affect human health, biodiversity and geopolitics. That’s because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies and in fact lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. But despite such caveats, the very existence of these reports represents a huge opening of the Overton window when it comes to the issue of geoengineering. Indeed: “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component”, Shuchi Talati of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering crowed after the White House’s report.

In other words, what matters here isn’t so much the content of these reports — which rightly highlight the risks of such interventions, and the need to proceed with caution — but the mere fact that the issue is treated as a topic of legitimate debate, thus slowly getting the public accustomed to the concept. But even more worryingly, perhaps, now that the geoengineering genie is out of the bottle, can we really expect governments and institutions to keep it under control?

After all, we live in an era in which private and corporate power has largely unshackled itself from any forms of meaningful public control, when it hasn’t outright merged with the institutions of the state, subordinating the latter to its own logic. As a result, billionaires, philanthrocapitalists and investment funds arguably exercise a greater influence over society than most governments. And, of course, they love playing God — especially when it offers massive opportunities for profit. So perhaps it is no surprise that much of the pressure for solar engineering also comes from this rarefied community.

In a speech to the Munich Security Conference last year, George Soros endorsed using solar geoengineering to combat climate change. Jeff Bezos has partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the geoengineering non-profit SilverLining, closely tied to Silicon Valley venture capital, to help create models that show what would happen if we blocked out some of the sun’s rays. Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, is another major funder of SRM projects. And then there is, of course, the ever-lurking Bill Gates: in 2021, he backed a sun-dimming project by the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which aimed to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over Sweden to test its effects on sunlight scattering.

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The project, however, was strongly criticised by environmentalists and indigenous groups, with 30 groups of indigenous peoples from around the world calling upon Harvard University to abandon the Gates-backed plans to test its solar geoengineering tech. “We do not approve legitimising development towards solar geoengineering technology, nor for it to be conducted in or above our lands, territories and skies, nor in any ecosystems anywhere,” stated a letter from the Saami Council, which represents Saami people across Scandinavia and in Russia. In the end, the test was called off. But this didn’t stop the ominously named American start-up Make Sunsets, which focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection — “Cooling the planet one reflective cloud at the time”  — from carrying out several tests in the United States.

This means that sun-dimming experiments are already being conducted by private companies, with little or no oversight or regulation. And the edging of this technology into reality is part of a more general phenomenon in climate action: the emergence of a “climate power bloc” encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, certain climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists”. At this intersection of ideology, class and economic interests, extreme and ambitious ideas such as solar engineering find fertile ground. And they are primed to grow further into the popular consciousness — which has already been conditioned to think of climate change as an apocalyptic threat, and to therefore accept “do or die” solutions.

Activists and scientists have started to push back. We’ve already seen the successful prevention of the SCoPEx test. Then, last year, more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world published an open letter, since supported by more than 450 academics, calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering”. They emphasise the very serious risks: to human health, but also to the ecosystem itself, with precipitation patterns, vegetation and crop production all disrupted.

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The problem, as is often the case, is mission creep — the gradual broadening of the original objectives of a certain programme, often under the influence of technological path dependency. Once a technology comes into existence it tends to be used for the simple fact that it exists, especially if it has been normalised for the public. Hence the call for “research into solar engineering” is, wittingly or not, paving the ground for its future adoption. And its advocates have an existential climate discourse on their side. SRM lobbyists can always claim that the alternative is worse — if that alternative is planetary extinction. As Anote Tong, a former president of Kiribati, a low-lying Pacific island state menaced by rising sea levels, told the New Yorker last year: “It has to be either geoengineering or total destruction”.

In this sense, the debate over solar engineering is symptomatic of how we are interpreting climate change: as a utopian speculation created in response to the dystopia we increasingly see as our future. This logic is designed to spur humanity into action, to find answers to the climate crisis that avoid vicious socioeconomic costs — which is why some sceptics of radical decarbonisation are sympathetic to solar geoengineering. It’s also why climate change activists such as Greta Thunberg oppose it — because it would threaten commitments to decarbonisation. We should oppose this binary logic. We shouldn’t have to choose between radical decarbonisation and geoengineering: fuelled by an impetus towards climate doomerism, they are both dangerous in their own way.

Wholly absent from the narrative, one assumes, would be allegations of data harvesting, electoral manipulation, politicised shadow-banning, hosting of terrorist footage, the exacerbation of ethnic and religious conflicts, and the significant worsening of mental health in adolescent girls. Nor, I suspect, would any celebratory montage feature this week’s congressional hearing on online child exploitation, during which a senator dramatically told founder Mark Zuckerberg “you have blood on your hands”. Last year, a Guardian investigation revealed that, despite historic efforts to stop it, Facebook is still a major site of child sex trafficking. Meanwhile Wall Street Journal investigators have separately revealed that the platform is building “communities devoted to child sexualisation” (surely the final nail in the coffin for misty-eyed uses of the word “community”). Attention-hungry algorithms are apparently identifying users interested in paedophilic content and pointing them towards more of the same; connecting those with an initial interest in pictures of young cheerleaders and gymnasts, and then making suggestions for more hardcore image sites and private groups.

Such an inglorious future could not have been foretold during Facebook’s birth on the Harvard campus in 2004 — and nor even was it evident in 2008, when the platform really started to take off. Controversial algorithmic changes were still in the company’s future, and had yet to unleash their epistemic and moral carnage. But it was at least clear from an early stage that something momentously compulsive was now upon us, and that there would be no going back. Henceforth, the population would be divided into two groups: those of us wandering around the world with immediate access to a real-time digital soap opera, in which we too could perform as characters if we liked; and those few souls who remained blissfully unaware and unaffected.

It was also clear from the start that the structure of the platform was making some users behave in ways unlike their ordinary public selves. Early on in my own social-media journey, I still remember the feeling of horror-struck bafflement at seeing a husband and wife I knew, clearly located in the same house at the time, performatively writing to each other with high affection via a public Facebook wall rather than texting or even calling out the words to one other across their shared physical space. “What are they doing?” I thought to myself, squirming with mortification on their behalf. Later on, I felt a similar sense of second-hand embarrassment when I saw a woman taking a selfie in a train station. For a few seconds, my brain could not comprehend the action at all: the awkwardly tilted head, the rigid arm, the weird rictus smile. I thought she might be having a stroke. Looking back now, my innocence seems quite touching.

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Via the most famous line from his play Huis Clos, Jean-Paul Sartre characterised hell as the chronic unease of being watched and judged by other people — real or intimated — and of projecting onto yourself the characteristics you imagine they see there. Effectively, Zuckerberg and colleagues built the Sartrean version of hell into Facebook’s business model, making every declaration or gesture there a form of public speaking. Whenever you write a post or comment, you do so with the knowledge that someone else, whom you are not directly addressing and perhaps do not even know, might be looking on. And even where, in actuality, nobody at all is paying you any attention, this sense of being overlooked never really goes away. This fact alone has profoundly changed the nature of much modern communication and yet is scarcely ever remarked upon.

Of course, it’s quite enjoyable when you are the one doing the eavesdropping. Though Facebook has always acted as if it is simply a positive tool for facilitating social harmony in pleasingly photogenic ways, part of its success undoubtedly lies in the stoking of darker emotions such as envy, spite and schadenfreude. Indeed, this layer has generated tonnes of extra business, as a whole raft of group chats have sprung into existence on associated messaging apps, created simply in order to criticise or mock outrageous behaviour occurring on the main stage. For every conversation or discussion playing out on social media in front of others, it is possible to generate another separate discussion, also on social media, which dissects the first (repeat ad infinitum). Not for nothing is Facebook’s parent company now called Meta.

Another presumably unplanned consequence of Facebook’s basic design is that it has always been a place where what you are not saying, but only implying, is often far more important than what you are actually saying. With the platform’s rise to cultural prominence in the 2000s came a whole new vocabulary, coined in order to pinpoint indirect speech acts online more precisely: virtue-signalling, vaguebooking, humblebragging and dogwhistling being good examples.

Sometimes it can be fun to try and work out what a particular poster is really trying to communicate, and to whom. Perhaps I’m cynical, but whenever I see an apparently casual and spontaneous “I’m feeling fabulous and my life is great now!” post, I assume it must be addressed to an ex. And in my experience, academics on Facebook are particularly good at not-so-subtly humblebragging for the benefit of their rivals, always finding themselves “honoured” to have received some bit of amazing student feedback which they then feel duty-bound to type out for readers word for word.

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As Carl Jung told us: “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.” Some people communicate into the online void picturing admiring and benevolent listeners; but others imagine precisely the opposite. The darker side of the Facebook structure arrives when you also imagine that your unseen observers are your harshest critics. Sometimes, of course, they are. In a relatively childish environment dominated by a few bullying types — say, in an adolescent girls’ school, or in a university — every photo, post or ”like” bestowed can come up for disapproving scrutiny. But even where your onlookers are imagined, deep anxiety can still bite. Most of us who use social media regularly have felt the pang of fear as a post remains unliked or relatively unacknowledged, with your sense of humiliation compounded by the idea that others must see this too. Given that most adults can barely handle the resulting feelings, it seems quite incredible that Zuckerberg’s company ever knowingly exposed children to the same thing.

Just as a year in a dog’s life counts for seven, 20 years in the life of a social media platform makes it positively antediluvian. These days, Facebook is the shambolic old aunty of the social media field, her feed a whiplash-inducing, visually unappealing mess of personal posts from friends, adverts and celebrity clickbait. Apparently having mentally discarded his embarrassing first child long ago, Zuckerberg himself is busy these days enthusing about the use of “Codec avatars” in future online communication. Roughly, once Meta can work out how to do it more cheaply and time-efficiently, you will be able to have your face and body minutely scanned to produce a photorealistic avatar in 3-D, that then makes it appear exactly as if you are in the room with the person you are speaking to. In an interview with Lex Fridman in which the prototype was demonstrated, Zuckerberg indicated that, once the technology is established, you should also be able to enhance the face of your avatar to make “you” more expressive or better-looking.

Though I’m doubtless out-of-touch, it seems to me that we don’t really want a future in which generations of yet more anxious people find further excuses to hide indoors, preferring to put on a fake mask to talk to someone in the next town or even the next room rather than to face them directly. And of course, any resulting communication via this method will still be potentially surveilled by third parties — be they tech firms or fellow users.

But whatever the true psychological risks eventually posed by this and other new communication technologies, you can guarantee that those in charge of the profits will downplay them until it’s already too late. According to Zuckerberg in the same interview, “you know the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is a combination of a physical world and the digital world”. What he didn’t say is that, as Sartre knew, the “real world” for human beings is partly constituted by our social relationships with one another. And so far, he has made a right old mess of those.

The chances are that Rishi Sunak won’t end up trading punches in the toilets with hostile MPs, but the atmosphere in the Conservative Party is taking on a familiar hue. Where once Labour was a byword for factionalism — with a dizzying array of Bennites, Tribunites and other “tendencies” — so the Tories today present a kaleidoscope of “New Conservatives”, “National Conservatives”, “Common Sense” Conservatives and self-styled “research groups”, all battling for control of the leadership. And where once a Social Democratic Party fought to “break the mould” of British politics, today the Right-wing Reform party proclaims a “realignment” intended to sweep the Conservatives from the electoral landscape. Over all this hangs the stench of electoral death, as the party contemplates defeat on the scale of 1983 or 1997.

But the Conservatives can still learn from Labour’s agonies in the Eighties. Then, Labour faced three interlocking crises. The first was electoral: from 1979 to 1992, Labour lost four general elections in a row — something that had never happened before in the democratic era. The fear was not simply that Labour was losing, but that its traditional electorate was disappearing. Deindustrialisation was shrinking the manual working class, trade-union membership was in freefall, while non-unionised workers seemed increasingly drawn to Thatcherism. The challenge for Labour was both to reclaim its old electorate and to build a new one, at a time of disruptive sociological change.

The second crisis was political, with the formation of a breakaway party by former Labour grandees. In David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins, the SDP could boast the youngest foreign secretary in history, one of the most popular female politicians in the country, a skilled party organiser, and a former Chancellor, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission. Even under the pressures of First Past the Post, the SDP-Liberal Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote in 1983, coming only 2% behind Labour. In his first term, at least, the challenge for Kinnock was not to defeat the Conservatives. It was to stave off the threat from the Alliance.

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The third problem was intellectual. Parties do not often rethink their core principles, but the questions being asked of Labour during this period were genuinely existential. Was socialism still relevant, in a world where workers were buying their own homes and filling them with consumer goods? Could one talk meaningfully about “working-class solidarity” when the long-term unemployed were so distanced from those in work? Was parliamentary socialism still possible, given the cultural and media power of the Right, or did industrial action pose a surer route to victory? From the hard-Left to the old-Right, there was universal agreement that Labour must change. What was so disruptive was the direction of change, and the principles on which it should be based.

For the Conservative Party today, the challenges are slightly different. Unlike Labour, modern Conservatives are accustomed to winning elections, but that makes the prospect of defeat all the more terrifying. Three-quarters of the parliamentary party, including all but six of the Cabinet, have no experience of opposition, yet the party has now trailed in the polls for more than two years. Those voters who remain loyal are heavily concentrated among the elderly. Labour leads in every cohort below the age of 65; and even the next oldest cohort, from 55-64, has the Conservatives at just 20%.

As for party competition, Reform cannot match the polling figures of the early Alliance, which peaked at more than 40%. Nor has it drawn heavyweight defections of the stature of Jenkins, Owen or Williams. But if Nigel Farage were to return to the leadership, it would boast a consummate campaigner with strong support among Conservative voters: Farage now polls more strongly among 2019 Conservatives than the current prime minister.

Underpinning both these problems is an intellectual dilemma. What is the Conservative Party for? And what, if anything, does it seek to conserve? Under First Past the Post, parties have to construct broad coalitions to be electorally competitive. At its best, that is a source of strength, expanding the range of ideas on which a party can draw and bringing different interests into partnership. At its worst, it generates unstable compounds that can explode at any moment. While Labour struggles to hold together Fabians, Left liberals, ethical socialists, trade unionists and social democrats, those jostling within the Conservative coalition have ranged from free traders to protectionists, libertarians to moral conservatives, Atlanticists to Empire loyalists, and institutionalists to radical populists. The surprise, perhaps, is not that such fissile materials sometimes combust, but that they do not do so more often.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives could rely on two gravitational forces to keep their centrifugal tendencies in check. The first was a shared hostility to socialism. At a time when the Cold War dominated political alignment, fear of a common enemy was a potent unifying force. The party was also anchored in a set of common institutions: the Church of England, the professions and the institutions of the party itself, which boasted more than two million members at its peak. It was no accident that the party lost coherence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as its own institutions shrivelled, and as it became either detached from or hostile to the institutions of state and civil society. The effect was to leave the party both socially and intellectually unmoored.

More recently, in 2019, the party could deploy two unifying forces: the desire to “Get Brexit Done”; and a determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office. Neither exerts much power today. Britain has left the EU, and Labour is almost neurotically averse to reopening the question. Those Brexit questions which remain live are as likely to divide Conservatives as to unite them: notably, the status of retained EU law; the future of immigration policy; and the Northern Ireland border. As for Corbyn, he is no longer even a Labour MP. The current Labour leadership defines itself as much against Corbyn as against the Conservatives, and attempts to present Keir Starmer as a secret revolutionary have gained little traction with the public.

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As its unifying elements weaken, other forces are driving the party apart. A tradition that once prided itself on its suspicion of “ideology” increasingly demands “true Conservatism” from its leaders, while disagreeing furiously on what that might be. Loyal newspapers that once catered to millions have become more sectarian as their readerships have shrunk, while new TV stations offer rich rewards for rebels and mavericks. The moderate, pragmatic MP who votes loyally with her party is unlikely to follow Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey into the presenter’s chair at GB News or Talk TV.

All this puts a premium on skilled party management, yet there is little in Sunak’s past that has prepared him for this task. Jim Callaghan, who led a government with no majority at all for two years, had spent 30 years in Parliament, including 20 years on Labour’s national executive and a period as party chair. He had held four great offices of state and began his career as a trade-union official. By contrast, Sunak only entered Parliament in 2015, spent his short ministerial career at the Treasury and previously worked at a hedge fund. In a party that has disposed of four prime ministers in six years, even a majority of 60 has strained his powers of party management. Nor have the party’s strategists served him well, for the fashion for seeking “wedge issues” and “dividing lines” has inflamed divisions within the party, rather than establishing clear blue water with the opposition.

Yet as Labour’s experience demonstrates, division need not be terminal; and the Conservatives enjoy a number of structural advantages that were denied to Labour in the Eighties. That includes a largely sympathetic press and a donor base that can outspend their opponents even at the nadir of the party’s fortunes. The Right is in the ascendant across much of the West, and may soon take back the presidency of the United States. And in an age of short political careers, the Tory factions have no equivalent to Benn, Jenkins or Healey — household names with careers stretching back decades. The heavens do not tremble at the thunder of Sir Simon Clarke; nor do the mountains smoke at the voice of Robert Jenrick. That makes the party’s factions more volatile, but also less deeply entrenched.

Moreover, for a party accustomed to government, opposition may also have a galvanising effect. A Labour government would confront a grim inheritance: a public sector on fire, a financial crisis in local government, a stagnant economy and a perilous international situation — perhaps made more difficult by the return of Donald Trump. If there are good elections for the Conservatives to lose, 2024 may be one of them.

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But if the party wishes to restore its intellectual vitality, it will need to face some uncomfortable truths. If the tax bill has risen under five Conservative leaders drawn from across the party spectrum, that is not because they lacked conviction or were secret socialists. A party that wishes to cut taxation must wrestle honestly with the dilemmas of an ageing population, a stagnant economy, a surging bill for social care and pensions, and growing pressure on the defence budget. If younger voters are abandoning the Conservative Party, that is not because they have been brainwashed by their teachers or indoctrinated on TikTok. It is because Conservatism has offered them little but mockery at a time of decaying wages and an impossible housing market.

As the once-great Liberal Party could affirm, parties do not have a divine right to survive. Those that cannot contain their divisions, that look inwards rather than out, and that blame the electorate for their own misfortunes are rarely rewarded at the polls. Like Labour in 1979, the Conservatives may soon be out of office. Unless they learn the lessons of the Eighties, it could be some time before they return.

Lifelong sufferers report dysphoric levels of internal torment. Christopher, now 62, started shedding when he was 28. “I was so proud of my thick hair, but it just got thinner and thinner,” he says. “It changes your image of yourself fundamentally, at least it did for me. Because my hair was so thick I never thought it would, and then I just thought, ‘Oh fucking hell. I’m going to be one of those bald guys.’ I’m not exaggerating — it robbed life of any pleasure. Just looking in the mirror became a torture. And I already drank a lot, and I started drinking really heavily after that. My drinking took on a really dark turn after the hair loss — it just poisoned everything.”

Christopher had five hair transplants over a couple of decades, and the final one “took” completely, leaving him with a full head of hair. But he tells me about a friend who started losing his as a teenager. “I know that it destroyed his self-confidence,” Christopher says. The friend, now 70, neither treated nor shaved it, persisting with “combovers and things like that”. “He would say, ‘Once you go bald, your looks are gone and you’re always going to have to accept second-best in terms of a wife’… I know it ruined his life.”

In an age of technologically compelled self-obsession, a version of this fear is already filtering down to my own age group. Having barely achieved the quarter-century, friends are inspecting their family trees for evolutionary disadvantage, peeling back fringes to reveal widow’s peaks and Eiger foreheads. It is now more than common for my social reunions to begin with an update on the loosened thatch — stories of smoothing back your rug only to find yourself with furry fingers, and of showers that seem uncomfortably akin to shaves. These anecdotes find plenty of statistical company. A quarter of men who develop hereditary male baldness (“androgenic alopecia”) see symptoms before the age of 21; by 35, two-thirds of men have lost at least some of their hair. 

Such is the potency of this fear that young men try to palliatively anticipate what’s to come. Ben is 29, and has been using medicinal treatments for hair loss for two years. “It was like a preventative thing,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as someone who is vain. But I don’t really exercise, and if I were to lose my hair, I’d basically just become my dad… It’s almost like a psychological thing where, if I take this pill, I’ll keep my hair. It’s like an anxiety deferred.” But he’s sure this is more prevalent among young men than it used to be. “If I was a 30-year-old man in the Seventies, and I was going bald, no one would care. Something has happened in the last 40 years.” And he’s right. For most of human history, however miserable it made them, men could do nothing about their condition. But now an entire male baldness industry has arisen to simultaneously nurture and service their fears. 

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The gold standard is, of course, the transplant, a treatment which sprouted onto the British male psyche in 2011 when Wayne Rooney explained: “I was going bald at 25 — why not?” In response, millions of men must have thought: if a guy who’s been turned into a Shrek doll by his own fans can have a decent head of hair, why not me? Other celebrities followed suit (“Rio Ferdinand shows off his new hair and beard transplant,” as the sidebar of shame had it last month) and now a £1.5 billion transplant economy has now opened up, headquartered in Istanbul. Nor is the trip necessarily a fool’s errand. For the scale of change possible, observe the stunning transformation of Arsenal defender Rob Holding from tonsured no-hoper to barbershop pin-up.

Though increasingly popular, this is still the expensive option, costing thousands in Turkey, and tens thereof in England. For those of leaner means, or whose condition is not yet so severe, there are alternatives. An entire fleet of companies has surfaced: Keeps, Rogaine, Happy Head, Scandinavian Biolabs, Sons UK, Numan, Unthin, Manual and Hims. If you haven’t heard of them, check the social media feed of any man you know. You’ll find their before-and-after adverts squatting there, admonishing and inviting. 

For around £20 a month, you’ll receive a mixture of topical and oral treatments (pills, shampoos, serums and sprays) which make use of two main chemicals, minoxidil and finasteride. The first came about by happy accident. Minoxidil is a vasodilator (a drug used to treat high blood pressure) originally developed in the Seventies. But when it was tested, doctors noticed that it also stimulated hair growth (exactly why is still somewhat unclear) and it was directed towards hair-loss treatment in 1986. Finasteride, meanwhile, is a “preventer”. The drug stops testosterone from turning into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a male development hormone, and was first developed to treat enlarged prostates in 1992. But, since DHT also stops hair growing, reducing its presence in the body can slow hair loss, including after it has already begun. The product joined minoxidil in a different section of the pharmacy in 1997. As cosmetic treatments, neither is available on the NHS for hair loss, though they have been available from private pharmacies for years. 

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In this way, these companies are effectively pulling off a marketing trick more than a medical miracle: they offer the slickness of a “telehealth” service, employing online physicians to validate prescription-subscriptions which are then sent out in the mail. And in this digital setting, a distinctive, millennial tech start-up aesthetic emerges: gorgeous websites, pastel colours, and stylish, sans-serif fonts. Hims is most typical, and like any modern company worth its screentime, offers a philosophy as well as a product. “Hims is about personal wellness,” its website boasts. “You should look and feel your best all the time. Our job is to make that easy and affordable… We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted. Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves [we’re too often told]. What a load of bollocks.”

This is the language of wellness, of looksmaxxing and personal optimisation, turned into breathy corporate advertising copy. The packaging of Hims’s bottles and pouches is of a piece — beige, clean and minimalist. Manual, which Ben uses, does the same: “You get a little box, and it’s very cute, and it’s like you’re opening a present… It’s almost like they’ve managed to remove all stigma around what is essentially a pharmaceutical product, and it just becomes another thing that you take alongside your vitamin D and vitamin C tablets.” Much like the supplement industry, they are marketing hair regrowth as a route to the giddy state of “self-care”. And not just hair regrowth — several (but not all) of these companies offer other optimising pathways to spot-free skin and top-notch sexual performance. In this context, hair regrowth becomes just one waypoint of many along the road to total masculine performance. 

But obviously there is a catch. For a start, none of these treatments is guaranteed to work — and certainly not to levels of reforestation depicted in the adverts — while the hair that grows can be thin, and disappointingly downy (“peach fuzz”, Christopher calls it). The drugs can also take months to have any effect, which, for all the many happy customers, will see many men paying for weeks’ worth of ultimately useless brew, while (unlike transplants) any improvements will disappear the moment you stop taking them. And, frequently noted in manosphere-adjacent corners of the internet, finasteride especially can have some worrisome side-effects: depression, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. Which makes you wonder if Hims were onto something with the specific combination of treatments they offer.

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Nevertheless, men are flocking to these companies. While there’s little evidence that hair loss is statistically more prevalent today, the psychologists’ verdict is that social media has made millennials and Gen Z more “hair aware”. Popular Reddit threads such as r/tressless and r/HaircareScience provide a platform for tens of thousands of young men to trade tips on courses of “min” and “fin”, and share their own progress, uploading dozens images of their gradually thickening scalps. Even those who suffer the side-effects shrug them off: “Had a couple of days of ball ache and I don’t get morning wood anymore,” one user told me. “But fine. Satisfied with the results.”

Another man in his 40s making use of finasteride explained it “has had some psychological effects such as moderate depression that I have recently mitigated via antidepressants”. But, not to be deterred, he’s just starting using minoxidil too. Ben, meanwhile, used finasteride before minoxidil, and reported a plunging period of depression. “I was taking actually a very small dose, like half the dose I was recommended, and I just felt dead inside… It’s actually really disturbing that you can send off for something on the internet which can put you in such a dark place.” (Manual lists “low mood, depression or thoughts of self-harm” as very rare side-effects on its website.)

This is not exactly the relationship one might expect between a health supplement and its consumer, and it’s quite self-evident what all this really adds up to. In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to clarify the phase of late capitalism that had established itself in the post-war United States, based around the marketing of luxury and consumer goods. Many had been retailed through what he called “the dependence effect”, by which consumers’ “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”. Frequently, producers may go as far as to “actively create wants through advertising and salesmanship”. In the Fifties, this meant white goods and General Motors. But now individual happiness is found in the mirror, much as it was once found in things. 

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Since then, with nowhere else left to colonise, capitalism has begun to cultivate the interior self, as it once did the fields and forests. And, it should be noted, this follows a strategy that has already been tried and tested to tremendous effect on at least 50% of the population. Women, for whom the scale of personal refurbishment demanded by society was always greater, have long been sold the language of optimisation and tweakments. It is part-and-parcel of existence as a female citizen-consumer, but also of a feminist discourse that has been critiquing the relationship of the cosmetic to the political for decades. 

The old stereotype of male insouciance when it comes to appearance is equally now long dead. A brave new world has crept up to replace it: of hair regrowth, breaking your femurs to gain a few inches in height, chin implants to achieve a squarer bone structure, and penis-enlargement surgery. But this is all about as liberating as the first appearance of Botox, another very 21st-century promise of cash-for-youth, cash-for-looks. It is another patch of the private realm swept into the orbit of commerce and checkout, a demand that may be exploited, but is ultimately unsatisfied.

Her portrayal of the district, which overlaps with much of the East Bay, a region connected by bridge to San Francisco, is a throwback to an idealised past. In many respects, it is the cradle of Californian radicalism and those New Left identity politics that have come to define modern progressivism. But it is also home to extreme inequality and sprawling homeless encampments, with carjackings, shootings, and rampant theft part of daily life. The “most dangerous square mile” in America lies right at the heart of this district.

The revolutionary symbolism of Simon’s campaign also betrays a murkier reality: one that has both reshaped the East Bay and reflects the future of the Democratic Party. For all her trumpeting of social mobility, Simon, who previously worked as an aide to Kamala Harris, is a party operative on the payroll of the wealthiest donors in the state — a self-appointed clique of philanthropist benefactors who have ripped apart the social threads of the region with their extreme policies designed to remake policing and criminal justice. In Oakland, for instance, burglaries are so common that the police department encourages homeowners to warn one another of break-ins with airhorns. Inevitably, the wealthy live cloistered behind gates with their own private security.

Faced with such disorder, one might expect Simon to view fixing crime as a priority. And yet, there are no crime policy positions or any policy platform listed on her campaign website. The local media, parts of which have received funding from her work in philanthropy, haven’t done any significant reporting into Simon’s background or her tenure managing BART, the local train network that has fallen into severe fiscal decline and where violent incidents for passengers have become routine. And in a year since announcing, she has refused to debate any challengers.

This isn’t to say that Simon has shied away from discussing the issue on the mind of every East Bay resident. Following the death of George Floyd, Simon said she would focus on a “complete shift” in policing — an institution “riddled with anti-blackness”. As a BART director, she led the push to shift funds to new programmes that use social workers to respond to the problem of widespread mental illness, homelessness and drug abuse on trains, rather than police. She hired a DEI firm, Be the Change Consulting, to institute her “de-emphasising police” reforms.

“If there is a man who is houseless, and he has no clothes and he has no shoes, we are in conversations and in some agreement that his first interaction may need to be with an outreach worker,” Simon told reporters. “Not a man or a woman trained to take down a soldier.”

The results, it’s safe to say, have been disastrous. It’s common to see passengers smoking fentanyl and meth openly on trains, and violent incidents occur nearly every week. Last year, there were more than a dozen overdose deaths on BART, as well as a dramatic drop in ridership: one survey found that only 17% of riders feel safe on BART. And this is as much an economic as a security problem. After federal relief funding dries up, the train system, which connects the entire San Francisco region, is on track to run operating deficits of more than $300 million next year.

Simon, however, has stepped down from the BART board to focus on her congressional campaign — though with her backers encompassing the moneyed Silicon Valley elite and political establishment, it’s starting to feel more like a coronation.Nearly every local Democratic leader and interest group endorsed her; Gov. Gavin Newsom, the attorney general, local mayors of the major cities, the abortion rights and environmental nonprofits, and California’s largest unions have all blessed her campaign. When I spoke to her after a recent event, she noted that she was on her way to move into a campaign office with Rep. Barbara Lee, the retiring lawmaker who previously held this seat for more than a quarter century.

Simon has easily outraised the combined fundraising of the other Democratic candidates by a factor of eight and her donor list is a who’s who of liberal nobility, featuring Jurvetson, Haas, and Pritzker. Michel Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, Rebecca Prozan, Google’s chief lobbyist in California, and Tony West, who oversees Uber’s global lobbying operations, are also contributors.

Even though, in many respects, Simon embodies this East Bay radical chic, she takes care to conceal it. Her stump speech focuses on humble beginnings, her struggle as a young single mother and in the juvenile justice system after an arrest for shoplifting. She sought elected office, she says, as just another citizen without a voice.

That story contrasts dramatically with Simon’s more recent history. She currently advises the charity endeavours of Patricia Quillin, the wife of billionaire Netflix founder Reed Hastings, receiving a $557,700 salary in just one year. She also earned roughly $2 million between 2016 and 2022 as the president of the Akonadi Foundation, a liberal group backed by real estate investor Wayne Jordan. From that perch, she doled out dozens of grants to “abolish the police” activists and decriminalisation initiatives in the region.

Under Simon, for instance, Akonadi gave routine grants of $40,000 and $50,000 to the Anti-Police Terror Project, an Oakland-based group seeking to “radically transform — and eventually abolish — police and policing”. They led the initiative to cut $18 million from the Oakland Police Department, a force that faces persistent shortfalls in the face of escalating violence.

Simon is also largely responsible for the push to remove police officers from guarding public schools. Tax records show that the campaign was powered by more than $300,000 of Akonadi grants to multiple overlapping organisations that successfully lobbied Oakland for the change in 2020. Black Organizing Project, one major recipient of donor money under Simon, claimed that police officers do nothing to improve safety and instead place minority students in danger.

Since the removal of officers, however, Oakland students have contended with multiple school shootings. In 2022, a mass shooter at King Estates School killed one student and left five wounded, and the previous month, gang violence at Oakland Technical High School injured three students. Last year, the violence continued with multiple school shootings.

Under Simon’s leadership, Akonadi also gave funding to media outlets now covering her campaign, including KQED and Oaklandside. Shortly after announcing her congressional bid, KQED, the local PBS affiliate, produced a hagiographic 30-minute programme introducing Simon as a “nationally recognised” civil rights leader with an impressive list of accomplishments.

What little national media attention Simon has received has been overwhelmingly supportive, describing her as the “West Coast answer to AOC”. That may well be the case: Simon has signed onto a pledge to enact reparations, including the “distribution of funds to Black-led organisations serving Black populations”.

Finding an opportunity to talk to Simon has proved difficult. At a routine campaign stop earlier this month in San Leandro, a working-class suburb in the district, I tried to speak with her. Only minutes into our conversation, her staffer, Han Zou, interrupted and promised an interview later. That staffer, it turned out, was on loan from Gov. Newsom’s consulting firm, Bearstar Strategies, which manages the campaigns of much of the California Democratic establishment.

Before Simon was whisked away, I asked if she would agree to a single debate before voters are mailed a primary ballot in a few weeks. “Absolutely,” she responded. As for Zou, he never returned my emails for a promised interview. And Glenn Kaplan and Jennifer Tran, two of the other candidates in the race, say Simons snubbed their plans for a debate. For a district known for its Leftist radicalism, and its Sixties-era mantra “democracy in the streets”, a competitive election is conspicuous by its absence.

As a writer of two best-selling books, people assume I’m well-off. Hailing from background which could comfortably be described as “deprived”, I came to enjoy the feeling of being regarded as successful and prosperous. But behind the scenes, I’ve struggled to keep my head above water. The truth is, over the last few years, like millions of others on this God forsaken little island, I’ve been caught in a web of financial adversity.

I am well aware that my relative privilege as an author and broadcaster may render my difficulties laughable in some people’s eyes. How could someone off the telly have the gall to complain about financial adversity, during a cost-of-living clusterfuck like the one we are living through in the UK. Of course, the key word here is “relative”. Ten years ago, my main problem was being unable to make a carry-out last until the off-licence opened at 10am. Today, keeping up with the taxman is the central dilemma of my existence.

I was caught out by a particular form of tax. The one self-employed people pay. Many years ago, Gordon Brown, in his wisdom, changed the rules around when and how this tax should be paid. When you work for yourself, your tax is not deducted at source, so you are responsible for setting aside the funds throughout the course of the year, and paying what you owe in January. Brown decided self-employed people should not only pay what they owe, but also an additional half of what they were projected to earn the following year — this is Payment on Account. It means that if your tax bill is £15,000, then you have to pay £22,500 by January’s end and then another £7,500 the following July. And if your tax bill is £30,000, you’re up for 45k, then 15k six months later.

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But what if, like me, you weren’t aware of this? What if nobody told you that this is how it works? Well, then, you’re fucked. Here’s how it goes: the tax bill comes in, plus the additional “payment on account”, and you realise you haven’t got enough to cover it. And suddenly, the first genuinely great year of your entire life morphs into a terrifying nightmare.

Now, add a random calamity such as Covid, lockdown and an economy in absolute freefall. You emerge from the first high-earning year of your life, only to discover you have the tax liability of a well-paid person, with no capacity to actually earn the money required to settle your bill. And what’s worse, every pound you do claw in is itself taxable. So basically, the money you are making to try to pay the tax becomes your next tax bill. And the more you try and earn to offset this, the harder it all gets. Yes, it’s a first-world problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.

According to Money and Mental Health, over 1.5 million people experienced both difficult debt and mental health issues in 2023. Money and Pensions Service found that as many as 24 million people don’t feel confident managing their money. And according to the Financial Capability Survey, only a third of those people in debt receive help. One of the hardest things is not being able to talk about it. I couldn’t talk to my working-class friends or family because I feared they would resent me, given the sums I was dealing with. Plus, it seemed arrogant to complain given many of them are still living in genuine poverty. And I didn’t know anyone with money well enough to get into any real depth with them about something so personal either.

But I did consistently face the problem. This is the first difficult aspect of confronting a debt. You have to behave like a person who is in debt. You have to open the letters — they won’t go away. You have to make the calls — they’ll always track you down if you don’t. There is something about accepting the reality of the debt and not resisting nor hiding from it which makes the situation slightly more tolerable.

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The outstanding amount was, for me, a large sum, made all the greater by the punishing fines and penalties incurred. And dealing with HMRC is torture. It’s shaming, confusing and utterly humiliating. It reminded me of dealing with the DWP when I was living in supported accommodation on benefits in my early twenties.

I did eventually come to realise, though, that my pain was not caused solely by the debt but by resentment. I was suffering from the sense of injustice that after a life of having so little, I was now being punished for doing better. My stubborn refusal to fully accept that the debt was my responsibility, was making everything worse.

There was some stubborn pride rolling around in there, too. I enjoyed that people believed I was doing well. It was a tremendous buzz to be regarded as prosperous, given how much shame I had felt as a kid wearing cheap, unfashionable brands, and for how long I’d languished in my alcoholic years, letting everybody down. The pain I was experiencing was not simply the pain of being in debt, but the pain of being humbled. Not humbled the way people claim to be when they win a BAFTA. I mean truly, excruciatingly humbled. I’d fucked up big time, got ahead of myself, and paid little attention to the detail. All my life I had advocated that those with more should pay more. Well, now was time to put my money where my big socialist mouth was.

But while the situation was far from ideal, it was hardly an existential crisis. My family was well looked after. I could work every day if I chose to. HMRC weren’t coming through my door waving clawhammers. Of all the debts you could get yourself into, a debt with a dysfunctional government department is probably one of the cheapest and least stressful, truth be told.

I realised that, if I wanted to pay it off, I had to reframe my experience. In my early days, as a struggling writer and artist, I was extremely industrious. As a teenager, I’d record my own music, buy the blank cassette tapes, hand-draw all the covers and give them out at school. I pressed up my own CDs, handed them in to local record stores and collected the sales the next month. Indeed, my debut book was itself a by-product of my can-do attitude; being crowdfunded, the buzz I managed to generate before it was even finished led to first week sales in Scotland so strong that it wasn’t long until London publishers began sniffing around to see what all the fuss was about.

“So what happened to that guy?” I began asking myself. The success had blunted my wits. Dulled my appetite. Why was I sitting around waiting for something to happen when the situation clearly demanded two qualities I have in spades: creativity and courage? There are many difficult problems most of us will face at some stage of our lives — spiralling debt is just one of them. Once it dawned on me that I’d choose my large debt burden over a chronic health problem, a divorce, or a sudden bereavement, it freed up a little energy to do more than simply tread financial water — I began setting about the debt the way a lumberjack does the trunk of a very large tree.

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Nothing changes if nothing changes. I decided to take some risks. I announced a UK tour and invited my followers to approach me directly if they wanted to book my show. The response was overwhelming. Within a few days I had one or two shows a week scheduled from March to August. No venue too small. No location too remote. No community priced-out. If they wanted me, I would go. I then partnered with local booksellers in every town and city and shifted a fair amount of stock while on the road. This put a spring in my step. I learned that by sitting down and coming up with a plan, and staying the course as best I could, the mountain of debt needn’t be insufferable.

For years, every morning I woke up and this was on my mind. Every time I thought I was making progress, they would hammer me again with another couple thousand in charges, inflating the figure, leading to more charges and more interest. I took it all on the chin. It was demoralising, yes. But I stuck to the plan and can honestly say I did the best I could. And, a few weeks ago, with tears in my eyes, I called HMRC up to settle the outstanding amount, finally.

This morning, I’ve just spent a few hours signing and inscribing copies of my second book, writing out the corresponding envelopes, and prepping them for delivery. This is how I used to do it in the old days, before anyone knew or cared about my work. I’m not doing this out of the kindness of my heart but out of necessity. And you know what, I couldn’t be happier.

I’m not skint in the way someone who works in a low-paid job is skint. I’m not skint because I haven’t been working. I’m skint because I’ve used pretty much every penny I could get my hands on to get this monkey off my back. My sole motivation, after years of cowering beneath its awesome weight, was to finally settle this fucking debt. A debt which I accrued through a lack of financial education, and I have a feeling this story is more common than people realise.

I say this for the benefit of anyone climbing a steep financial mountain. While every circumstance is different, there are principles I think apply to most people and most problems. The first, acknowledge there is a problem and that it’s yours to solve. Second, identify and eliminate any unhelpful stories you are telling yourself about the problem. Focus on what you can do about it. And finally, come up with a plan to tackle it and stick to the plan as best you can. Don’t hide from it. Even though it often feels impossible, I promise one day, if you hang in there, you’ll wake up and that problem won’t be looming over your head anymore.

Citizens Advice can help advise if you are struggling with debt

For electricity has arrived in Bondo. Three turbines were installed in a micro-hydro scheme exploiting the fertile region’s rainfall. And the impact has been life-changing for the 1,800 homes so far connected to a mini-grid. Children can study after dark, so now have a better chance of passing the exams for secondary school rather than having to leave aged 11. Drugs and food can be stored in fridges, so villagers do not have to make the 12-mile trek to the hospital and can produce batches of food or drinks to sell at market. Cooking the evening meal is three times quicker — and far less destructive to the environment — without the need to collect firewood.

One group of women giggled when I asked if they had televisions and watched football in their homes. “Before, our husbands would say they were going off to watch football when they were really walking out with other women. Now they can no long claim they are going off for football,” Bertha told me. The senior chief told me they had never dreamed of having energy supplied to the villages, with a dozen maize mills, many small enterprises, schools, shops and churches also connected to the grid. “When you move around Bondo you see happy people — and that’s because of electricity.”

Yet the big surprise in Bondo is not simply the supply of energy to such an isolated community, in a country where only one in eight citizens has access to grid electricity and on a continent where almost half the 1.2 billion population still lack this life-changing supply. The real eye-opener is the stack of 32 computers inside the concrete pump shed. This innovative mini-grid — located more than two hours from Malawi’s second city of Blantyre along bumpy roads and tracks that can become impassable in a torrential downpour — is mining Bitcoin to fund its operation.

It is a smart idea. The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this cryptocurrency wastes the planet’s precious resources. This initiative flips that narrative by using Bitcoin mining to fund energy in parts of Africa that are too poor or remote to merit connection to grids, but which do have plentiful supplies of potential power sources. Mining soaks up the excess energy of these renewable plants. And this delivers not just electricity but a powerful jolt to to drive development in the local economy.

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The concept comes from a Kenyan firm, Gridless, set up in 2022, whose backers include Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. There are four other sites in Kenya and Zambia and plans for scores more across the continent. Its aim is to demonstrate how Africa could play a central role in countering the conventional belief that Bitcoin, now 15 years old, is used simply for risky speculation and dodgy transactions. Instead, it backs those who claim it will lead to more inclusive financial systems as it usurps the control of dysfunctional governments and manipulative central banks.

It will also release the community from reliance on foreign handouts to survive. The Bondo power plants were built by Mount Mulanje Conservation Trust, a local group trying to protect the mountain region’s unique bio-diversity, and were initially supported by finance from aid and development agencies — but now Bitcoin covers the running costs. This offers a commercial incentive that does not rely on altruism or subsidies to deliver power to remote regions, while exploiting energy waste at times of low use such as overnight.

Malawi, one of the world’s poorest nations, provides a powerful case study in the failures of aid. As former development minister Rory Stewart said in a lecture at Yale, Britain gave £4.5billion over half a century to this southern African country corroded by corruption and bad governance, yet it ended up “if anything, poorer than it was when we started”.

“Bitcoin can prevent Bondo becoming the sort of white elephant that you see across Africa, built by aid groups and then abandoned,” said Erik Hersman, chief executive of Gridless. He admits that he is “not a big fan” of the sector. “They come in with low-cost loans and grants to finance all these schemes that they say will pay their way in 30 years but the sums never add up. This is a new way to finance development.”

Malawi also demonstrates another reason why there is rising interest in Bitcoin in Africa: people are seeking a safer home for their cash than local currencies. Prices rose sharply after its currency was devalued two months ago by 44% against the US dollar — the second decrease in value of the kwacha in 18 months. Many African countries on the continent have suffered also from catastrophic inflation, while official currency conversion rates can be significantly lower than street rates.

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One Kenyan entrepreneur told me she turned to the cryptocurrency after seeing her savings constantly eroded even in a country with lower than average inflation for the continent. “I was trying to save to buy a house but kept finding my sums declining. I wanted more stability so tried Bitcoin, and then found it had other uses,” said Marcel Lorraine, founder of Bitcoin DADA. Her clients include a trader of alternative health products in a Nairobi street market, who found it much cheaper to use than changing currencies after being introduced to it by a Nigerian customer and is now hoping it will provide a stable platform for building her business to obtain a shop.

While Warren Buffet dismissed Bitcoin as “probably rat poison squared” and the economist Paul Krugman has compared it to a Ponzi scam fuelled by libertarian fantasies and “technobabble”, devotees see it as a liberating force due to the decentralised design created by its mysterious and pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has even applied to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that may open up the market to the US wealth management industry.

Certainly Bitcoin, for all its fluctuations, can seem comparatively reliable if you live in Africa — or indeed many other parts of the planet, from Argentina to Lebanon. “This is what I have seen everywhere,” said Peter McCormack, who travels the world for a Bitcoin podcast. “Here is an alternative to gold and property for a middle class that has some money and patience, but is seeing expenses and costs rise while savings decline in value. And a strong middle class helps build a strong economy by driving consumer spending, reducing reliance on the state and driving innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Bitcoin has also become a helpful tool for activists and journalists in dictatorships, since it makes it far harder to track funds. In Togo, a West African state run by one despotic family since 1967, it is used to channel cash to opposition and civil society leaders despite the freezing of bank accounts. Bitcoin has been instrumental in delivering donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in Russia and the pro-democracy movements in Belarus and Myanmar.

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Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation and author of a book arguing that Bitcoin offers freedom from archaic monetary systems and political strife, believes the cryptocurrency is especially exciting for Africans, since they suffer “all kinds of financial repression”. He points out there are 45 currencies on the continent — with 15 still controlled by France — with high transaction fees on conversion deals that are largely processed by Western firms with heavily-fluctuating rates. “Bitcoin provides an escape and an alternative for Africans while its use is less limited than some people think,” he says. “Entrepreneurs there have figured out how people without the internet can use Bitcoin, which is frankly remarkable.”

This agility is typical of the technological innovation exploding across Africa, driven by a young, rapidly growing and increasingly well-educated population. “The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it is a bottom-up technology and its adoption has been genuine at all levels,” said one key figure at the second African Bitcoin Conference in Ghana at the end of last year.

Only time will tell if Satoshi’s invention will turn out to be a bubble with bad consequences or, as optimists believe, a driver of profound change in the world. The fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, and admission of money-laundering by the boss of another major exchange has hurt the reputation of cryptocurrencies for many in the West. But Bitcoin certainly seems to offer something positive in societies scarred by autocracy, colonialism, military coups and woeful governance — as seen with those computers in a concrete shed in rural Malawi turning water into streams of cash to fund electricity.

The source of this conflict isn’t so much that the Glazers borrowed the money to buy the club and secured the debt against United. Nor is it that they’re foreign: there have been plenty of football bosses who were born overseas. No, it is that they rarely go to Old Trafford and sit with the Red faithful. Add to that the club’s sustained failure to recapture the glory days under Sir Alex Ferguson, when it won every major honour and did so repeatedly, and the stage was set for a prolonged outpouring of bile and violence.

When the Glazers bought the club in 2005, many were concerned about their use of high-interest loans, secured against the club’s assets, to complete the £800-million purchase. The supporters felt their club was being stolen. Such was their anger that, after their first game, the Glazer brothers, Joel, Avie and Bryan, left the ground in the back of a police van. Since then, they have had every opportunity to explain themselves, to show that the deal, while clever, did not affect the playing side; that under them, United would remain top of the tree. But they didn’t, and the opprobrium stuck.

Such is the opaque nature of United’s finances that it has been impossible to say how much, exactly, the owners have taken out of the club in personal loans, consultancy payments and dividends. But now we have a rough idea, after Sir Jim Ratcliffe paid £1.25 billion for 25% of the club. A Manc and lifelong United fan, he’s viewed by some as a returning saviour.

For the rest of the business world, though, the deal represented an important signal as to where the Glazers think sport is heading. After all, they had the chance to sell the entire club, and end the personal onslaught, but they preferred to retain 75%. In other words, after 19 years, it seems the insults and brickbats were a price worth paying.

Why might this be? Well, despite the lack of public warmth, the Glazers adore owning United. It’s their calling card, affording them a cachet they would not otherwise possess. They attend Formula One and the cricket in the Indian Premier League. United has a pavilion at Davos, the only football club to do so, while Avie is a regular at the World Economic Forum, mixing with the world’s business and political leaders.

Then there’s the belief that United could be worth significantly more than Ratcliffe’s valuation — £10 billion rather than £5 billion. If Chelsea, not even among the top two teams in London based on commercial firepower, could be sold for £4 billion in 2022, then United must be worth at least twice that.

So goes the theory — and it’s not hard to see why. While the players have underwhelmed on the pitch in the Glazer years, United’s marketeers and salespeople have excelled. As the media spent years focussing on the players attending Carrington, United’s training facility, the Glazers were busy assembling a 100-strong sales and advertising workforce 200 miles to the south, in London. The supporters complained, rightly, that the roof at Old Trafford was leaking. Carrington, too, has seen better days. Meanwhile, The Cliff — the training ground that produced the legendary “Busby Babes”, that enabled the Phoenix-like resurrection of the team after the Munich air disaster, then saw the likes of George Best, Bobby Charlton, Dennis Law and the “Class of ‘92” — fell into disrepair. Not, however, the sumptuous premises in Pall Mall and, after they proved too small, in Mayfair.

When making their decision, the Glazers will also have considered how football as a sport is set to change. Already, players are testing micro-cameras on their shirts. The idea is that, thanks to Augmented Reality (AR) technology, we will be able to see the action unfold as if we are a particular player, or even the referee.

Similarly, avatars are in their infancy. As one City executive said to me recently: “Just think, if people are prepared to pay to watch Abba perform, knowing it’s not really Abba, how could that work for football? They could be at a stadium in Asia watching avatars of the United players playing in a match.” Online betting is also a consideration. For United, which has a massive following in Asia, where gambling is huge, the prospects are enticing.

In the US, meanwhile, which is due to host the next World Cup, the influence on English football is already sizeable. It’s no coincidence that two US-owned British clubs, United and Liverpool, were among the main drivers of an enormously lucrative new European Super League. Of course, the initial proposals were howled down by fans, the media and politicians, but they are now being floated again. United has said it is opposed, but it’s hard to imagine that, if the league did get the go-ahead, the biggest club would not take part.

All of which points to United still representing a valuable investment. And yet, it seems the Glazers still struggled to make a decision. Most obviously, they don’t like partnerships; their father Malcolm, who created the family’s wealth, preferred operating alone and so do they. They’re suspicious, keen to remain in the shadows. Hence a 241-page “pre-nup” with the British tycoon. It is revealing that, among its myriad clauses filed at the New York Stock Exchange, is an agreement between both parties to not criticise the other in public. Glazer-Ratcliffe is not a marriage galvanised by natural attraction and desire; it’s a business arrangement that errs heavily on the side of caution.

For his part, Ratcliffe receives a great dollop of kudos and positive PR. He’s a local lad, and the first in the queue for when the Glazers do decide to depart. Until then, his holding is going to deter any other potential suitors. It’s as much an investment for the future as victory now.

In a smart first move, money has been put aside to repair the roof which will earn him instant acclaim. But it remains to be seen whether he can go on and earn the fans’ affection. As with the Glazers, he is not the sort to deal with partners; he likes to be in sole control. Who decides if a transfer should go ahead, and who decides to raise the offer and blow the opposition away? It stands to reason that it will be those who speak for three-quarters of the amount being paid.

As for the United fans, at least they now have a reason to hope. Yes, it will still be money that talks at the top. But when, on match-day, they look up at the Director’s Box, it’s unlikely there will be empty seats.

A righteous scourge where progress is concerned. He fell foul of feminists in the Eighties on account of a book about gender that championed the old-fashioned way of doing sex. Traditional sex roles as a bulwark against undiluted consumer culture or some such gender complementarian red-herring. He was greeted at the college campus in Marburg where he was teaching at the time by a mob brandishing a giant papier-mâché phallus. His reputation never recovered. Up until then, he’d been something of a fixture in academic circles. A Roman Catholic priest-cum-anarchic theorist. A bit of a celebrity, even. An ascetic who never really called anywhere home. His final years of transitory earthly existence he spent refusing to treat a large, painful growth emanating from his neck. Reputedly self-medicated by puffing on opium instead.

The corruption of the best is the worst, a Latin Maxim he frequently cited. Illich was at war with the systematisation of charity. The systematisation of everything, in fact. His most famous book — Deschooling Society — is a denunciation of compulsory education, of the “specialised torpor” it can’t help but induce. “Giving” in the Christian sense should not always have to be broken down into rules. This was the essential message embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan. You answered the call of a specific suffering. As in antiquity, you should not be bound by place or people, but free to love at will. With the institutionalisation of the Christian message, with its ascension to power, the inclination to force the hand of kindness took hold. The mystery was sucked right out of it, and with it went so much of the power and the glory. The church became the forerunner of the law-abiding modern state, the modern state whose incessant social engineering Illich heaps scorn upon from behind a wall of medieval scholarship.

However, it is a later Illich book, in which he turned the same line of attack onto modern medicine, that I find most provocatively stimulating in a 21st-century context. Written in the Seventies, Limits to Medicine — Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (catchy title) constitutes one of several blistering critiques of modernity and post-industrial alienation Illich produced in his heyday. The gist of it is that the more we lather ourselves in technology, the more of our autonomy we inevitably sacrifice, and the more technology we need just to get by in turn. Instead of enhancing nature, we attempt to step beyond it. A self-replenishing negative feedback loop ensues. The result: Nemesis, the envy of the gods. “Unbounded material progress has become everyman’s goal. Industrial hubris has destroyed the mythical framework of limits to irrational fantasies, has made technical answers to mad dreams seem rational…” I wonder what he might have made of Dignitas?

For Illich, anguish is a part of health, and the inner resources we acquire putting up with it are more precious than decent blood pressure, than the odd bit of surgery. They are fundamental to the building of community. What he calls the “art of suffering” is paramount. In all pain there is a question mark, he claims. To smother it out entirely is to prioritise one aspect of healing — treatment — at the cost of atrophying all of our cultural and spiritual strengths when dealing with agony. Pain-killing gone too far renders us little more than spectators of our own decay. If we don’t bother trying to turn suffering into meaning, we are left ever more dependent on “the machine”.

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The book is broken up into three sections. Beginning with clinical iatrogenesis, when pain and death are a direct result of medical procedure — most obviously, when myopic surgeons do things like amputate the wrong limb, and more obliquely through drug side-effects or antibiotic resistance. Here you’ll lumber into a swamp of footnotes, and far too many Seventies-born statistics, some of which have aged badly. For a start, treatment for cardiovascular disease has come a long way in the last 50 years. You can argue that medical practice sponsors a morbid society by inculcating slovenly lifestyles, but credit where it’s due, I’d far rather suffer this illness today than in 1973.

The sections covering social and cultural iatrogenesis in turn tackle what becomes of society when health policies reinforce an industrial organisation that encourages ill-health. He’s not wrong when he declares that the more energy invested in medicine as a commodity, the greater the delusion that society has a supply of health locked away somewhere. I’ve lived my entire life under this delusion, and will no doubt continue to do so. In fact I’m a prime candidate for an Illichian makeover. I’m depressive, over-ambitious, obsessive-compulsive, an addict and a complete neurotic. I’ve leapt under the knife at every available opportunity. Five times in all. As an adult I’ve had the tonsils out, despite being told it was non-essential. I’ve had two painless, totally benign lumps removed from my neck. Most recently I had a node sliced off of my right vocal cord. I’m the kind of person that starts hammering Solpadine Max the moment I get a sniffle. I expect industrial medicine to sort it, whatever it is, and in no time at all. No self-healing capacity whatsoever.

Illich claims that the negative function of money is the devaluation of that which cannot be bought and sold. The more we dismantle any natural ability to cope, the more we shroud ourselves in pseudo-divine scientist mystification. Obvious enough statements. What’s more interesting is Illich’s attempts to reach behind this dilemma. In his opinion, blaming Big Pharma for the abuse of proscribed chemicals is tantamount to blaming the mafia for the abuse of street drugs. Short-sighted and pointless. When the market for consumer goods reaches a critical level, civilisation convinces itself that the human condition can be remodelled without limit: this is his real gripe, what he considers the root of the problem. When we hit a brick wall, the same thing that birthed the problem is reached for. This cycle of over-consumption he sums up as a kind of compulsive nostalgia, a desperate hankering for yesterday’s progress. In a world unfit for human habitation, Illich’s notion of the “patient” becomes an accomplice to the lie that his failings are biological, as opposed to systemic.

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The lofty Catholic material really starts to sing once you get into old age and death in part three: cultural iatrogenesis. “From Stockholm to Wichita the towers of the medical centre impress upon the landscape the promise of a conspicuous final embrace…” Illich is very much in favour of old people being given a corner to die in at the family gaff as opposed to subjecting them to invasive and repeated medical procedures, and instead of outsourcing terminal decline to the old folks’ homes and the hospice. A cruel inversion here he points out: to die at home now is the preserve of the rich. Yet, the more wealth the country from which you hail globally has, the more likely the man in the street is to wind up surrounded by strangers in the closing chapter of his life.

From what I’ve seen, death in the mountains of Kabyle, where half of my family live, looks like more fun than death in working-class England. The intergenerational support network provided by the more “primitive” society is something most of us no doubt miss, subconsciously but bitterly. Have we shunned death? Illich certainly believes so. For us, death is crisis, instead of something to which we relate every step of the way, instead of that which informs and enriches our ability to fully live. Keep it out of sight. It spoils the utopian fantasy that everything is manageable, if we just hurl enough cold rationality at it. Shrouding it in an air of “crisis” justifies near limitless ineffectiveness where science is concerned, our replacement for religion. An excess of futile treatments in the dying embers being symbolic of this. As far as Illich is concerned, at the moment of demise, the insured are paying for participation in their own funeral rites and little more: “in an insidious way the doctor provides each citizen at the last hour with an encounter with society’s deadening dream of infinite power”.

In his antipathy for the industrial world, a lot of the time he goes way too far. He appears drunk on his own ideological fervour. On a botched suicide he writes: “I know of a woman who tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. She was brought to the hospital in a coma, with a bullet lodged in her spine. Using heroic measures the surgeon kept her alive, and he considers her case a success; he no longer has to worry about her ever attempting suicide again.” I like a bit of hardcore cynicism, it’s refreshing in a world which seems sworn to naïveté, but isn’t this beyond harsh where the medical practice in question is concerned? He’s not into birth control — I don’t agree but I can look past that, he’s a man of the cloth after all, it’s kind of to be expected — but what good does this statement do anybody? At one point he even appears to call for the scapegoating of doctors as a plausible solution to the overextension of medicine into human civilisation. That to me just sounds like sour grapes.

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You’ll often run into this problem reading Illich. Any remedy shy of some kind of Marxism-tinged, back-to-basics, Catholic revolution-cum-devolution is only furthering the grief, only enabling the torment of the species further. He attacks welfare as only deepening the problem, for instance. Unless people are downing tools entirely, they’re not doing enough. They’re complicit in their own damnation. I like the fiery tone, the austere biblical voice, but come on, let’s be pragmatic about this. At the end of the day, who’s going to remove your appendix, your uncle Abdul? Your gran?

That being said, prescribed medication is still the third highest cause of death globally. Some of this stuff has aged badly, but aspects of the underlying philosophical argument he hammers home are perhaps even more valuable today than at the time of writing. Overly radical yes, but Illich is also something of a seer. He’s maybe not your man for a solution, but through the prism of his very specific and expansive learning we can look at the mess of our current state of affairs with fresh clarity.

This is despite the fact that the Bank is at risk of going broke because of the very Quantitative Easing (QE) programme it pursued over the past decade. In other words, we are about to enable, with no public debate, the largest self-licking ice cream cone the country has ever seen.

In the event of the Bank going broke, a bailout would be underwritten by a letter sent by the then-Chancellor Alistair Darling to then-Bank of England governor Mervyn King in the heady days of 2009. This document enabled a so-called Asset Purchase Facility to help the Bank clean up the mess left over from the 2008 financial crisis. Yet since the letter can be read as open-ended, the current governor Andrew Bailey has said that it can be used again if the Bank goes broke.

Indeed, to some extent this technique is already being used: public borrowing figures suggest that £9.7 billion have been sent from the Treasury to the Bank. And the Bank is already short on funds to shore up its internal operations. While its current stance is that it will not ask the Treasury to backstop these losses, given recent history of mission creep in a crisis situation, this could change in a pinch.

This follows on from changes made by the Financial Services and Markets Act this year, which allow the Bank of England to raise a levy on private banks in Britain to fund its operations. In the cold light of day, however, the levy looks suspiciously like a tax and raises the question of whether the Bank of England is taking on quasi-governmental powers.

To better understand these developments, we must return to the chaos of March 2009. The global economy was reeling from the effects of the financial crisis and the recession that followed. Economists were terrified that we might be headed for a replay of the Great Depression, and so took on an attitude of “whatever it takes”. The Bank of England, like other central banks in the developed world, committed to a policy of Quantitative Easing (QE). This entailed creating enormous amounts of (electronic) money and flooding the banking system with it. Technically speaking, it meant buying eye-watering amounts of government debt from the private banks. Since the size of government debt and its interest rate are inversely related, interest rates went to the floor. The hope was that this would spur private-sector lending.

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Did it work? Well, the old joke — that if you ask a roomful of economists a question, you’ll end up with a roomful of different answers — certainly applies here. There are still some defenders of QE who claim that it saved the economy. A more cynical reading would be that it simply juiced asset markets and generated enormous financial bubbles in everything from stocks to bonds to classic cars and Rolex watches. It is the unwinding of these bubbles that is making the Bank of England’s own financial situation precarious.

After all, having bought this debt, the Bank was saddled with it. So, when we saw an outburst of inflation in the past few months and the Bank moved to raise interest rates, it had to start flooding the market with this debt. The price of the debt duly fell, and the Bank realised that it was haemorrhaging losses on its debt portfolio.

The obvious question is: did the Bank not factor in this possibility when it engaged in the QE programme in the first place? My guess is that they did not. The rush to enact it was driven by fear and more than a touch of hysteria. Economists at the time really had convinced themselves that the developed economies would never see inflation again.

Of course, those in charge at the Bank would no doubt prefer that this is not discussed. They will claim that they did their best in bad circumstances. And this is no doubt true. But it does raise questions about the growing closeness between central banks and financial markets. When I worked in private asset management, a friend at one of the big investment banks joked with me that we were simply overpaid civil servants. He was alluding to the fact that capital allocation by private markets, which should be seeking out the most profitable ventures in the real economy, was increasingly becoming a Punch and Judy show — with investment managers playing the role of puppets and the central bankers pulling the strings.

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The result of this dubious use of monetary policy is now bearing fruit: paradoxically handing the Bank of England more, not less power, further entwining the Bank with the markets. None of this will stuff the pockets of those in charge of the Bank, of course — but it will certainly be ploughed into hiring more economists and financial experts to come up with more “innovative ideas”, such as the QE programme that got us here in the first place.

All of which raises an obvious question: what is the Bank getting out of this? Now that it has quasi-taxation powers and the Government is filling the gap in its funding, what exactly is the money being spent on?

Back in 1998, when the Bank of England was made independent, there was broad consensus among economists on what central banks should do. By the Nineties, the basics of monetary policy management had been gleaned. This, the politicians and the public were assured, was a matter of science. The central bankers were simply carrying out objective exercises in economic modelling and using its interest rate setting policy to align the economy with its findings.

It makes for a nice story, but is it true? Probably not. The effects of monetary policy changes are far less predictable than central bankers make out, and the margin for error in economic forecasts is nothing short of legendary.

Even taking the story at face value is no longer plausible. This is because the Bank’s agenda has begun to creep. Consider its commitment to “net zero” in its corporate bond purchasing scheme, which includes updating the Bank’s “remit to confirm… the economic strategy of the Government”. What does this have to do with the monetary policy debates that led to the Bank’s independence in 1998? Absolutely nothing. It’s just economists playing politics.

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Or take the Bank’s research into a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) — the so-called “Britcoin”. Some view its proposal as a totalitarian imposition. Others see it as the future of finance. It doesn’t matter which side is correct; the very fact that people disagree is the key point. Britcoin does not even carry the pretence of being based on “scientific” or “objective” macroeconomic models. Rather, it is a case of a bunch of economists, hired by a central bank which is independent of the government yet receiving bailouts, getting enthusiastic about investigating an idea and funding themselves to do so.

Here we can see the perverse nature of its incentives. The Bank of England has spent years engaged in experimental monetary policies that have blown a hole in its finances — and now the Bank is asking the Government for a blank cheque to help it find a way to move beyond the monetary policy objectives that were the excuse for its independence in the first place. You need not be a hardcore libertarian to see these developments as dubious.

What is the solution? A debate, perhaps. Let’s have the leaders of the Bank drop the often-haughty pretence of gnostic knowledge and have a real discussion. Let them justify — in clear constitutional English, not the financial jargon they so enjoy — the policies that have led to their own bankruptcies. And let them also justify both the powers they are requesting and what they intend to do with them.

The men and women who are working at the Bank are no doubt well-meaning, diligent civil servants. But perhaps, being economists, it might be time to calculate whether the incentive structure at the Bank itself has become corrupted.

Gwen is a self-proclaimed “trad-wife”, one of a number of women across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit forums extolling a return to ultra-traditional gender roles and financial dependence on a male partner. Like the swinging dicks of WallStreetBets and crypto bros, the online trad-wife is an expression of 21st-century financial nihilism. Disillusioned by the girl-boss feminist fantasy, these young women are turning to men to pay off their loans and fund their lifestyles. And, why not? The good life isn’t coming any other way.

Growing up, Millennials and Gen Zs were sold a false promise of economic security and self-entrepreneurship. They were raised to believe that if they only worked and studied hard enough, success was in their futures; failure was a personal blight. Born between the mid-Eighties and early 2000s, their identities were shaped by the vacuum of post-Communist politics (I was sent, aged five, to a fancy-dress party styled, not as a Disney princess, but as the Berlin Wall). There was no sense that the future would be anything but Game Boys and capitalism.

It turned out not to be so easy. The speculation and excess of the Dot-com era, followed by the 2008 financial crash, undermined faith in the economic system, while the public investments in health, education and housing that Boomers enjoyed have been switched out for volatility and risk. Somewhere along the way, the dream of the good job and the good house was replaced by an acceptance that the good life could not worked for, or bought, or built. What began in general rumblings about why we can’t have it all progressed to a sense that maybe nothing matters anymore.

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If some men respond to this creeping nihilism by staying in with the curtains drawn, YOLOing their rent money on Tupperware stock, some women are choosing to retreat to a time when things felt more secure: the Fifties. Today, women are not only expected to parent like they don’t have jobs, but to work like they don’t have children. Often, they are expected to do both of these things without the public resources (affordable childcare, healthcare, and education) or social supports (neighbours, family) that previous generations enjoyed. So really, is it any wonder that we just want to watch a woman bake sourdough? Trad-wife influencers embrace the lives second-wave feminists fought to leave behind — the role of the housewife, her routine, her wardrobe, but also, if the bimbo ethos of “no thoughts, just vibes” is to be believed, her lobotomised outlook on current events. Betty Friedan’s sedated housewife in the suburbs is no longer a cautionary tale; suddenly she’s a manual for survival.

Of course, it’s no longer necessary to be an actual wife or mother to retreat to the home: nowadays, you can be stay-at-home girlfriend. While the trad-wife’s job, steeped in post-war nostalgia, is to keep her home and family, the girlfriend’s main project is to keep herself: thin, young, and desirable. She is her main project and her job is, as Jia Tolentino has written, to “always be optimising”.

Take Kendel Kay for example, whose boyfriend Luke Lintz is the CEO of Highkey Enterprises LLC. “This is my typical day as a stay-at-home girlfriend,” Kay intones in her flat little voice to her more than 500,000 followers on TikTok, sounding more like an Alexa than a real woman. Every day is more or less the same: beginning with a sun salutation in athleisure followed by various forms of superior hydration, iced waters, green smoothies, and matcha teas. There are small household tasks sprinkled throughout the routine, inconsequential things such as refilling ice trays, lighting candles, and watering the couples’ two lotus flowers. The work of content creation aside, Kay’s job is her own self-care, from workouts to complicated probiotics meals and 12-step skincare regimens.

Kay is one of a number of stay-at-home girlfriends now active on TikTok. There is also the content creator Aliyah Wears, whose videos are filled with sample sales and fat-melting treatments. In one video, she asks her boyfriend “how much do I owe you?” at the end of dinner, while showing the camera her empty purse. “It’s ok, it’s on the house,” her boyfriend says, sliding out his card to pay. Then there’s Shera Seven, who dispenses caustic dating advice such as “make sure the second date is a money date, which means shopping, some kind of gift or spending a lot of money. The faster you get him to spend money, the faster you get him to attach to you. Sprinkle Sprinkle.”

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There are tangible differences between the stay-at-home girlfriend and her older sister, the trad wife. While the trad-wife’s invisible breadwinner tends to have an honest profession that would be at home in a country music song — farmer, electrician, carpenter — the girlfriend’s partner usually has a lucrative career in tech or finance. And where the OG housewife, like her carpenter husband, can be seen to do real labour, such as laundry, childcare and vacuuming, the stay-at-home-girlfriend’s work is mostly vapor. Contrary to the Victorian mother and Fifties housewife who was “the angel in the house”, devoting herself to the needs of others, baking cakes that were perfect every time, and raising tomorrow’s workforce, Tolentino’s optimised woman is a trickier breed: she’s #thatgirl on TikTok whipping up kale smoothies, she’s the girl-online, the influencer.

While some women find Kay’s existence perplexing, many do not. Watching these videos in between school drop offs, work meetings, and cleaning up Lego is strangely soothing. I understand that I am being sold a lie, but I don’t want to think. I want to vibe. When having it all means doing it all, there’s an allure to doing almost nothing. “People used to ask me what’s your dream job,” Kay writes in one video caption. “I don’t dream of labour. I dream of living a soft, feminine life as a hot housewife. It’s as simple as that.”

Many people criticise trad-wives and stay-at-home girlfriends for setting feminism back decades. Despite what Gwen the Milkmaid would suggest, the Fifties wasn’t a golden age for women — if Betty Friedan (who actually lived through it) is to be believed, many real housewives got by on silent desperation and a permissive approach to benzodiazepines. For decades, women had to make do with care work, staying home, and a weekly allowance. And women the world over still do, not by choice, but by necessity. For this reason, many feel trad-wives are romanticising financial dependence, and maybe even financial abuse.

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Of course, there’s nothing new about the hustle of a woman getting a man to spend money on her. The economic anthropologist Viviana Zelizer devoted whole books to the complicated  economy of “treating” between working-class women and their dates, where drinks, gifts, rent and down payments on goods functioned as de facto payments for sexual favours. So why does it feel like an old trope has been given an overhaul? Maybe it’s that, unlike their grandmothers, women today can choose to stay at home because they feel it’s better than any “real” job. Or perhaps it’s that #Askingmyboyfriendformoney and #Girlmath trends are part of a broader response to deteriorating economic conditions: rather than working harder to climb the career ladder, young people all over the world are simply giving up, lying flat, manifesting wealth.

As much as these women preach an easier, calmer life away from the grind, the #Tradwife or #SAHG is just the latest niche in the long trail of “girl online” content. This work is its own hustle and produces its own income. Gwen the Milkmaid, for example, has recently cast off an online presence as an adult content creator on Only Fans. And surely few people could be fooled by Kendel Kay’s half-hearted TikTok screed against girl-bossing as she shills for a green juice brand? It’s as if the response to financial nihilism is yet more nihilism.

It might seem as though in staying at home, young women are refusing to work, retreating into something calmer in the face of economic uncertainty. But the home and the family and the body of the woman herself has never really been a place to escape to. We might be drawn to these women and their lives and their bodies because we hate what late capitalism has done to our own — but the solution we’re being sold is simply more meaningless self-care, in a retinoid or a sourdough starter. No thoughts, just vibes.

Strangely, 2 November was the exact day, a year earlier, that CoinDesk — the news organisation where I work — had broken the story that precipitated the fall. Ian Allison’s scoop showed that much of the balance sheet propelling FTX (through its hedge fund, Alameda Trading) was composed of a stablecoin token (FTT) that FTX itself had created. In effect, our reporting showed, FTX had been swapping real people’s real money for a coin with little liquidity and no intrinsic value. And, as the trial would reveal, even this balance sheet was a fiction created by Alameda’s chief, Caroline Ellison, to make FTX look healthier than it actually was.

This was fraud, pure and simple. And over the month of the trial, SBF has been turned into the white-collar criminal par excellence, all by the same media that once fêted and foregrounded him as a charming eccentric. But, though his personal foibles have come to dominate coverage, SBF’s downfall has also been seen as a parable for the entire crypto industry. Our original story set off a tailspin of valuations and crypto prices that is only today righting itself, and the fall of FTX hurt crypto’s reputation among the public and regulators — particularly in Washington D.C., which has turned viciously on the industry and its apologists. The jury on Pearl took just three hours to reach its unanimous verdict, and to many the conclusion was peremptorily clear: crypto was and is a scam, just as SBF and FTX were. For the faithful within the crypto industry, this is a terrifying conclusion. Was FTX really representative of the fundamental wrongness of crypto, an industry that literally creates money out of thin air, as SBF had done with FTT? Or, was FTX, in fact, just a story of immature corporate governance, of structural forces that keep allowing boy-wonders like SBF to do terrible things?

I’ve covered the crypto/blockchain/web3 space as a journalist since 2014, and this is far from the first scandal it’s seen. In fact, long before SBF, I thought I’d seen every flavour of exotic financial scam going. The stories behind “BitConnect”, “Onecoin”, “QuadrigaCX”, and “Mt. Gox” are notorious, and the losses staggering. The Onecoin Ponzi scheme, for instance, started in Bulgaria and fleeced victims of $4 billion. The main perpetrator was one Ruja Ignatova — aka the CryptoQueen — who went missing for years after the scam was first discovered in 2017. She is now thought to have been murdered on a yacht by a drug lord, her remains scattered into the Ionian Sea. QuadrigaCX was a mid-size crypto exchange operating in Canada in the mid-2010s, until its founder, Gerald Cotten, died in mysterious circumstances while on a trip to India in 2019. With his death, $145 million in tokens stored on the exchange inexplicably went offline, apparently missing forever.

Covering these and many such stories was fun. The characters were outsized (BitConnect’s Carlos Matos’s speech to an investor crowd in Thailand became an era-defining meme). And the claims they made for themselves were always outlandish, from “you’re going to get rich!” to “we’re going to save the world”. A lot of the journalists covering crypto at the time believed in the underlying technology and the message of decentralisation (that banks, governments and Silicon Valley fundamentally do have too much control over our lives). But we didn’t take the industry overly seriously, because the actors involved were often not serious about following through on their promises. Crypto was an entertaining sideshow to the mainstream events happening in finance and business.

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By the time SBF came along, emerging as a boy-genius during Covid, it seemed like much of the fun-and-games was over. Crypto had grown up. Its leading companies, like Coinbase, had gone public, sanitised of their earlier ideological commitments of banking-the-unbanked and usurping central banks in controlling the money supply. The industry had disciplined advocates in Washington. Its leaders were part of the financial establishment, still on the margins to be sure, but not in the way the cypherpunks — the community of Nineties-era digital anarchists who gave rise to Bitcoin — were outside society. They had believed in utterly breaking the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, not in getting Wall Street’s assent to reshape finance for the digital age.

Then, in November 2022, salacious details about SBF/FTX began to emerge on the back of our story. SBF had been running a “cabal” of former roommates (several of whom, it was speculated, had been involved in a polyamorous tryst) out of a lavish compound in the Bahamas. It had no accounting department or risk manager, despite being a $32 billion company in an infamously risky industry. Still, many aspects of FTX made it a different type of scandal to BitConnect and the rest. SBF’s organisation had been taken seriously by serious people, including the regulators and many high-profile politicians. It had investors from blue-blooded Silicon Valley firms and it presented itself as part of the next wave of crypto development: sober, measured, media-savvy, and politically connected.

BitConnect, Onecoin, QuadrigaCX et al. had never made it onto the front cover of Forbes or Fortune. The founders of these enterprises didn’t appear before Congressional committees, as SBF was wont to do, to argue for the industry’s interests. They never had private meetings with the chairman of the SEC to argue for favourable treatment. They never paid off one third of Congress — almost 200 representatives and senators. They never appeared in primetime ads, and on-stage, with A-listers like seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady, Larry David or President Bill Clinton. And they certainly never paid to rename football and baseball stadiums with their brand. This was a different crowd to the old bad boys of crypto.

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SBF’s need for attention from the media and the political class is one reason why he’s now taking such a rap for the industry’s failings. He brought it on himself. SBF, who dressed and acted in a casual way that reporters tended to like, was a media addict who revelled in his “king of crypto” status. He gave out his cell number to anyone who would listen to him, making himself available for comment at odd times, day and night. He never missed an opportunity to make a potentially viral TikTok video or eke out a little more airtime. Even after FTX’s collapse, he was still calling up every reporter he knew to try and press his innocence, even as every defence lawyer told him to stay quiet.

So, when the New York Times said that crypto was on trial in the SBF case, it was not entirely unreasonable (though definitely misleading). He was the face of crypto for a couple of years. But, to many in the industry, SBF’s incarceration proves little, because he was never a true believer. SBF never advocated for true decentralisation, as hardened Bitcoiners do. And, when he was palling around D.C. salons in 2021 and 2022, he was largely speaking for his own company, rather than for the industry as a whole. These people point out that the fraud was committed largely in dollars, rather than crypto, and it could have happened in any industry that’s lightly regulated and supervised. Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 managed fine without any Bitcoin or stablecoins changing hands.

But SBF really was supposed to be the chosen one who could make crypto safe for everyday users. As new laws and regulators come down in the wake of FTX, SBF may have achieved that goal, but not in the way he intended. Today, the words “crypto” and “Web3” are losing their currency, replaced by a legalistic vocabulary of “digital assets” and “tokenisation”. Intermediaries that hold crypto assets, like exchanges, now have to attest to their reserves, so it’s clear that people like SBF are not making off with people’s money for their own enjoyment. Crypto is less about financial freedom and wild speculation around funny sounding meme-coins (like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu) and more about “real-world assets”, such as treasury bonds and stocks.

Wall Street is gradually incorporating crypto into the wide financial nexus in subtle ways, exerting control over future regulation and controls. The T-shirt wearing Bitcoiners, who gave rise to the industry and made it culturally interesting, are being sidelined in favour of suits and compliance officers. This all makes the industry less fun to cover and less scandalous. But it also probably means that crypto is on safer ground: more trustworthy and predictable, and less volatile. SBF was part of a wave of crypto-sanitisers who aim was to move crypto from the anarchic fringe to the mainstream. His accidental legacy may be to make it more like the rest of finance — safe for grandma and relatively boring.

In fact, the economy has not looked truly healthy for years and forward-looking indicators imply that a recession is almost certainly in the pipeline in the next six to 18 months. And one of the key reasons that the Tory Party has already haemorrhaged support is due to the poor condition of the post-Covid economy, specifically with respect to the high rate of inflation. This has gradually made itself manifest in poll numbers. According to YouGov, at the beginning of 2021, still in the midst of the Covid pandemic, the most pressing issue in the country was “Health”. And at this time, and for months after, the Tories were still ahead in the general election polls (though Labour were biting at their heels).

As 2021 progressed, the initial burst of inflation caused by the lockdown’s impact on supply chains rippled through the economy. By the start of last year, with inflation running at about 6%, economic matters had overtaken health in YouGov’s polling. Then on 24 February 2022, another inflationary shock hit the world economy: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was not primarily the invasion itself that caused the shock, but rather the counter-sanctions undertaken in response, with the European energy supply in particular drying up. In October 2022, with inflation in Britain peaking at around 11% and a population-wide cost-of-living crisis broadly diagnosed by commentators, economic matters dwarfed any other issue. Labour stood at over 50% in some polls.

Which is another way of saying that over the last two years, the Tory Party have lost their credibility on the economy. They have ruled over an inflationary mess. But after years of shedding their veneer of competence, it actually looks as though the worst is still to come. Even though Britain has a serious cost-of-living crisis, most people who want work can find it. Until recently, the unemployment rate has been historically low — in 2022 it touched 3.5%, a record that had not been seen in over 40 years. But this is beginning to change. Unemployment has been ticking up since April of this year, with recent reports suggesting that it is set to increase even further. The media has been largely silent about this issue, but economists have been paying attention. After all, the Bank of England has been aggressively increasing interest rates since the beginning of 2022, raising them from almost 0% to 5.25%. Few economists would think that these sorts of hikes can be achieved without generating a recession.

The British economy is particularly prone to higher interest rates, most glaringly through its overinflated and economically axial housing market. At its previous peak in 2007, before housing crashed worldwide, the average house in England was worth around 7.15x the average salary. Fifteen years later, this has risen to 8.28x — a record high. And though our housing debate is dominated by questions of supply — the intractable Yimby v Nimby contestation — there is every reason to think that the current inflation in house prices is another speculative mania of the sort we saw collapse in 2008.

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By Tom McTague

It is already telling that the housing market has proven completely unable to stomach higher interest rates. House prices have been falling every month since January of this year and in the third quarter of 2023 the average house price was down nearly 5% from its peak. While this may not seem like much, declines in house prices of this nature this rarely bottom out quickly and usually signal further falls. The pressure in this regard can be seen in the falling number of mortgage approvals in Britain, a contraction which dates back to 2020. Mortgage approvals went into steep decline after August 2022 as the Bank of England interest rate rose to just under 2%; it was shortly after this that house prices themselves began to decline.

And this is leading to a consequent decline in construction as firms pull out of new projects, no longer confident of a return on their investments. Private housing construction output in August was down 7.1% since the start of the year, and 15.9% from its peak in May 2022. The labour market is already beginning to mirror this trend. Between July and September, vacancies in the real estate sector fell 29.6% from the previous quarter. It is very likely that — for the second time this century — the Great British housing bubble has burst. And, just as in 2008, it is taking the rest of the economy with it. A deep recession is now very probable.

How this recession interacts with politics is another question. As we have seen, the Conservative Party have already lost their credibility on the economy. If they go into an election with the economy in recession and the unemployment rate rising, they will get eviscerated. A few months ago, there was chatter within the party that maybe they should hold out, see if the Bank of England could get inflation under control, and hope that the economy improves. That position is no longer tenable. Inflation may be coming down, but the economic situation is spiralling beyond the control of central banks, and if the Tory strategists think that the public dislike inflation, just wait until they find out how much they abominate a recession and rising unemployment.

Political strategists are rightly sceptical of those wielding crystal balls. For every accurate forecast, there are a handful of inaccurate ones. Yet all the statistics currently show that the British economy is in a rapid state of decline. For this reason, the Tories might think of what they are facing as what investors refer to as an “asymmetric bet”. This is a gamble in which the loss incurred from losing is far greater than the gain incurred from winning. It is as if two people gamble on a coin toss, but while one gets £1 if he wins the other gets £100 if he wins.

The asymmetric bet the Tories are currently facing is roughly as follows. If they continue sitting on their hands, hoping that the electoral gods will smile favourably on them, the economy may fall into recession. If this happens, the party will lose vastly more seats than they would lose if an election were called today. On the other hand, if the economy stabilises or even improves slightly, people will barely notice. Skyrocketing growth and a booming housing market is simply not on the cards and anyone who tells you otherwise is trading in snake oil.

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On the other side of the bet is Labour. The polling seems to suggest that most people are willing to give Labour a punt in the hope that they can improve the economic situation. The policies that Labour are putting forward that are popular, especially with their base, all involve spending lots of money. This means that if Labour are handed the reins and soon thereafter the economy falls into recession, support for the party will dry up. As the recession hits government tax revenues, Labour will find themselves encircled by the same furious markets that brought down the Truss government. They will be forced impose austerity, and support for the party will likely collapse within 12-18 months.

The statistics do not lie. Recession in the coming months seems very likely, if not almost certain. And its arrival will provide a reminder of how economics undergirds the daily rigamarole of politics. The most important political event of the 21st century so far remains the Great Recession, triggering the populist uprisings and neoliberal collapse that has defined our recent history. The Conservatives and Labour can attempt to read the runes of the British financial system, trying to divine economic growth and surf its waves. But the economy does not serve to buttress political dignity — and whichever party winds up in power will soon have to reckon with the consequences.

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Altman has promised that his Worldcoin project, which he eventually hopes to roll out around the globe, will bring millions of “unbanked people” — that is, people without bank accounts — into the economic and biometric fold. But his Orwellian scheme will likely do more harm than good to the most financially vulnerable people on the planet. Despite the word “coin” in the title, it’s unclear whether Worldcoin is trying to create digital money — or to colonise global identity. Or perhaps it is angling to do both.

This lack of transparency may explain why the Kenyan government pulled the plug on Worldcoin’s operations less than a month after the coin launched. On 2 August, it called a halt to the great data onboarding, questioning the legality of Worldcoin’s biometric and data collection practices. But this was only after 635,000 Kenyans had signed up: surrendering their data to the unknowable intentions of a Silicon Valley tech bro.

While it may have provoked the most media controversy, Worldcoin isn’t the first project of its kind: nearly every major digital platform will now trade your digital identity for “tokens”.  And by tokens, I mean money-like things ranging from airtime credit and loyalty points to game tokens, customer data and gift balances. Tokens have always ghosted the economy of publicly mandated currency, but now they are coming to the fore, threatening to replace money itself. It raises the question: was money only ever a blip?

Tokens are different from “real” money in a number of ways. If money is at least in theory fungible — one dollar is supposedly the same as any other — tokens have limited fungibility: they come with strings attached, rules about who can spend them, where, and when. Many tokens, like Worldcoin, make identity a prerequisite for a transaction. In 2016, when The Orb was just a twinkle in Altman’s verifiably unique iris, the World Food Programme trialled a system that issued relief payments through the use of biometrics. The system allowed refugees to buy items from participating stores using their biometric data as a credential: all they needed to do was scan their iris to pay for an item. The idea was to prevent fraud — and to ensure that those availing themselves of the programme were “worthy” of relief in the first place.

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Amazon uses a similar strategy, paying its Mechanical Turk workers outside of the US and India in gift balances. This balance is non-transferable: it is tied to the workers’ identity and can only be redeemed through the Amazon store. The token thus keeps the flow of value in a closed loop.

The token system restricts people’s freedom of choice — the ultimate weapon for the nanny state and Big Tech corporations alike. In the United States, for instance, food stamps (now called SNAP benefits) come pre-loaded onto an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card. These tokens can be used for fresh food and produce, but not for alcohol, tobacco, or hygiene products such as tampons, vitamins or medicines. They can be used for cold deli food, but not for hot meals. Why cold pre-cooked meat but not half a rotisserie chicken? It seems there is something too “easy” — too idle, maybe — about buying a hot meal for your family using benefits.

Another way in which tokens are different to money is that they are able to communicate not just the terms of an exchange but additional values and criteria alongside a transaction. Sometimes these other things are a bit of fun — game tokens and NFTs are used to flex and brag, emotes are used to joke and troll, and even Dogecoin was used to tip other users for being funny on the internet before Elon Musk bought some for his children and catapulted the token into speculative stardom. Funny, that. But sometimes it’s not so fun: while money codifies exchange value, tokens are also used to survey, to remember, to calculate and to programme values into our exchange media.

As more and more of our money shifts from the coins, notes and bankcards we carry around in our pockets to tokens that ride the rails of information and communications technologies, our exchange media is becoming programmable. This means that — unlike cash, which is an anonymous bearer instrument — every digital transaction carries a range of transactional data about where it is spent, and by whom. Tokens can also be programmed to specify not only an exchange value, but a whole range of other terms and conditions that must be met before an exchange will take place: relief payments that can only be spent on so-called healthy food, cash transfers that are contingent on vaccine uptake or school enrolment. Whose values are these? We’re not at liberty to know.

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Programming is what digital platforms do so well. In China, the so-called “super-apps” are WeChat Pay and Alipay, where users can do everything from online shopping and ordering taxis to dating and applying for a loan. Alipay is owned by the Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba (second only to Amazon), which, after launching its integrated payments app in 2004, realised that its data about online purchasing could be used not only for logistics and advertising on the website, but also to underwrite China’s social credit system. In fact, that system actually began with Alipay’s Zhima or Sesame Credit system, in which what video games a user bought on the Alibaba platform influenced loan inquiries, access to dating sites, and even Schengen visa applications.

Of course, China is not alone in amassing personal data. In 2019, Facebook announced that it was launching a digital token, Libra, and wallet, Calibra, which many thought would turn into a Western super-app similar to Alipay. While Facebook publicly claimed to be providing financial inclusion for millions of unbanked Facebook users, buried in the Libra whitepaper was a statement that, alongside a coin, Facebook would also provide a portable global digital identity. “I call it KYZ or ‘Known by Zuck’”, David Birch, a financial identity expert, told me at the time. “And really, why wouldn’t your Facebook identity be more reliable? I can buy a fake passport on the dark web, but building a fake profile with a real social graph and real history takes a lot of grunt work.”

Tokens such as these are not a new or internet-native phenomenon. We have always had tokens or “special monies” that circulated alongside public money — alms, charitable tokens, food stamps and relief vouchers for the poor, allowances and pin money for women, scrip for workers. These tokens were privately issued; they came with strings attached. Not just value but values written in their metal. What is different today, however, is that tokens are bound to a specific digital platform. Where once a merchant could engage in a bit of creative accounting to turn a food stamp for butter into cigarettes, or accept a token intended for Alice as payment from Bob, today these sleights of hand are often impossible. Our tokens are hard-coded by the platform — and increasingly, by the state.

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Terrified of Big Tech platforms monopolising the token economy, governments have been playing catch up. Following Facebook’s Libra proposal, many governments pushed back with regulation and fast-tracked the development of what are now known as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) — in essence a digital version of publicly mandated currencies. Tokens, issued by the state. In China, where the digital Yuan is already in pilot form, these tokens are programmed at issuance. In Europe, members of parliament are experimenting with tokens that will monitor tax evasion and be programmed with a degree of identity. In the UK, the digital pound also contains proposals for sterling “with memory” — that is, for tokens that keep account of citizen spending to monitor suspicious transactional activity. Whether tokens are controlled by nation states or Big Tech companies still remains to be seen, but both outcomes look equally grim.

Digital tokens are often framed as a panacea for the financially vulnerable, providing ready access to safe, affordable remittances and credit. And yet, many of these programmable tokens have already inversely harmed the most vulnerable in our society, producing one kind of money for the affluent, the middle classes, and the banked West — and another for the poor, the underbanked, and the undocumented. A token with values, a token with strings attached.

Sam Altman predicts that, in the future, AI will displace so many waged jobs that citizens will require a Universal Basic Income to survive. This payment will be issued — how else? — through the Worldcoin app. Altman imagines a post-AGI future without work, without money — and maybe even without humans. The economy, at least as humans understand it, will be a thing of the past, a blip in the broader history of the world.

But the token dystopia is already here. In 2014, former Maine Republican governor Paul LePage lambasted families receiving a small relief cash benefit called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), accusing them of defrauding taxpayers by misspending their benefits. The allegation drew on 36,000 recorded cash withdrawals from a number of EBT cards to show 3,650 transactions in which recipients had made a withdrawal in off-licences or smoke shops. Despite the fact that the data did not show how or where the money was spent, it spurred a bill requiring TANF families to submit 12 months of receipts for auditing. The poor are the test subjects for future surveillance: “You should pay attention to what happens to us,” a mother on welfare payments warned. “You’re next.”

If there is one city which embodies this national decline, it is surely Liverpool, where I spent much of this week, at the Labour Party conference. During the Thirties, this was the great imperial port: a place of extraordinary wealth and grandeur, though of course no paradise lost. While Liverpool was a heaving metropolis by the sea, it was also a place of appalling squalor and exploitation; an English Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants crammed into teeming tenements sealed off from each other. Today, life is immeasurably better: the slums cleared, the sectarian divide all but gone. 

But what has been built in place of its lost industry? What does Liverpool do? These are difficult questions to answer, but they are no easier for almost every other city in Britain today apart from London. What does Birmingham do? Leeds? Newcastle?

Walk from Liverpool Lime Street down to the conference centre where Keir Starmer promised a decade of national rejuvenation, and you are presented with a scene of civic failure: not only low-level littering and dirtiness, but startling homelessness — beggars either slumped outside the latest fashionable shop to have sprung up, or lying in tents, pizza boxes slung from their roofs, with pleas for help sprawled over them. You don’t need to study the latest GDP figures to know something is wrong; that there’s a sickness in our society, a failure in our way of doing things. You need only open your eyes to see that much of the nation is quite obviously less pleasant than similarly sized places across Europe or North America. Why is this so? And why aren’t we more angry?

How you choose to answer these questions is, I think, the real political divide in Britain. For many Tories, it is a question of waste, inefficiency and spending priorities. Our local councils just need to stop frittering away money on diversity training and the like — and the Government in Westminster on things like HS2 and international development Sunak’s speech in Manchester gave a clear sense of this. After casting his expert eye over the national books, he informed us that we’re wasting too much money on infrastructure projects. For Labour, meanwhile, it is the opposite. The reason the public realm is crumbling is principally because of austerity — we are not spending enough. Liverpool would be clean and pleasant and thriving, if only we would put our hand in our pocket to maintain it properly. 

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Both of these responses contain important truths, and yet they are both still wrong. To the Conservative charge, the response is simple: getting stuff done is now structurally expensive in Britain, a reality which is making us poorer and which the Government has done almost nothing to change. Cancelling HS2 doesn’t alter this. It accepts it. It is principally an admission of gross government failure. To Labour’s austerity charge, the answer is that Liverpool is now structurally poor, not just politically starved of cash. Central government spending can alleviate some of the worst symptoms — and should — but it cannot change the fact that it depends on money being transferred from other parts of the UK.

Like many other cities, the source of Liverpool’s structural woes is complex and contested, wrapped up in the decline of empire, geography, technological change and political mismanagement. Containerisation changed the docks forever before Britain made its choice to prioritise European trade. Together, this meant Liverpool not only had permanently fewer jobs but it was simply on the wrong side of the country. Dover and Felixstowe, facing Europe, are Britain’s premier ports now. But what is true for Liverpool is also true in similar ways for Belfast, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle — all the great cities of the union outside London’s orbit. 

Back in Liverpool, the main industry is now tourism: the cruise-goers stopping off at the city to spend their cash, the stag and hen parties staying in Airbnbs, the football fans going to Anfield, the weekend shoppers visiting LiverpoolOne. But while tourism into Liverpool and our other great cities should be celebrated, it is hardly the route to prosperity. The kind of jobs linked to this industry are not those of an advanced, highly paid economy such as, say, the Netherlands or California. They are often low-paid, insecure and seasonal.

The truth is, you don’t have to venture far from the centre of Liverpool to see the limits of this approach. On Monday, I met the former Liverpool FC footballer Jamie Carragher in his home suburb of Bootle, just north of the city. It is a land of obvious, endemic poverty. Outside the Brunswick Club where we met, there was a giant mural to Carragher on the gable end of a terraced house. Perhaps it was this that made me immediately think of Belfast, as well as the general sense of economic decay only partially masked by the “redevelopment” cash ploughed into the centre. 

“Poverty”, however, is not the whole point here. Liverpool is not Bootle, just as it is not its city centre. Liverpool is also the middle-class suburbia of its south. If you are a teacher, a doctor, or a nurse, you have a better standard of living in Liverpool than in London. And yet, this does not mean all is fine. Such an economy ultimately depends on money generated elsewhere. And the fact is, too much of the country is in this same boat — reliant on too little of the country.

In Starmer’s speech to conference, he seemed to understand the scale of the challenge facing him, should he win the next election. “If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm,” he said, warming to his task, “that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology; in 1945 to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice. Then in 2024 it will have to be all three.” For Starmer, such aspirations are surely right. Few can plausibly deny that our public services are in a bad way; that the economy is in desperate need of reform; or that the pandemic has left behind a complicated legacy of mixed emotions about our response.

When it comes to a remedy, though, Starmer’s solutions are inadequate. On public services, he offered what Duncan Robinson has rightly identified as the “Reform Fairy” — the idea that, simply by reforming our public services, we can avoid the more difficult redistributive choices forced upon us by our ageing society. On the pandemic, Starmer’s solution to that collective trauma seems to amount to restoring the good chaps to government and replacing a few bad eggs. This, again, will certainly help, but it also avoids the more difficult questions that our politicians need to address, from the vulnerability of our care homes to our dependence on China, not to mention the extraordinary extent to which we shut down our society based on little evidence and middling results. Are we willing to confront these issues? It seems not.

At one point in his speech, Starmer spoke of the need to modernise the economy by invoking Harold Wilson in 1964. Of course, he did not acknowledge that Wilson’s grand plan utterly failed, forcing him to devalue the pound, withdraw from the East of Suez and eventually apply to join the European Community (and be rejected) before losing power in 1970. Today, Starmer’s main economic offering is to double down on Net Zero as a way to re-industrialise the economy and shore up the union with Scotland, while also loosening planning laws to accelerate house-building and construction. One problem with these policy proscriptions is that, as Helen Thompson has pointed out, there is little evidence that Net Zero will bring back significant numbers of heavy manufacturing jobs to Britain. Another is that the main beneficiary of reformed planning laws will be the South-East, where houses are needed most.

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As any housing expert will tell you, Britain does not have the same housing crisis across the whole country but acute housing crises in particular areas — principally in and around London or Cambridge. In Bootle, for instance, you can find an end-of-terrace three-bedroom family home for around £150,000. In Cambridge, a similar property will set you back at least three times that. 

Ultimately, then, Net Zero and planning reform will not make Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow or Birmingham rich again. For that, far more difficult decisions will need to be taken that will almost certainly involve trade-offs with the South-East: decisions about infrastructure and education, taxation and general British competitiveness, some of which might even come into conflict with the aspiration to hit Net Zero by 2050. As one senior figure in Downing Street told me this week: “Everyone knows what’s needed. Everyone knows we need a far more active industrial policy paid for with higher taxes. But this government cannot do it for ideological reasons and Starmer’s Labour can’t do it for political reasons. And so we’re stuck.” And this is before we consider our future relationship with Europe: whether to diverge and compete or align and even potentially rejoin.

When I put this to a leading figure on the centre-right of British politics, he told me that the only game-changing option for the British economy involved a form of targeted, state-directed investment to create a new mega-city of 15 million people in the arc between Oxford and Cambridge. Will a future Conservative opposition grasp this nettle? Or finally back an alternative version of this in the North? It seems unlikely. Right now, we seem to have reached the stage where we are quietly acknowledging the scale of our problems, but are only prepared to offer the most timid of solutions. If there’s a gaping hollowness in the British economy, it is matched by the emptiness of our political rhetoric as well.

Nothing could bring our waning love for the automobile more forcefully home than reports that the BBC may be axing its internationally bestselling motoring show, Top Gear. First broadcast in 1977, fronted by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, Top Gear began as a straight-faced motoring magazine show. It became the best-selling juggernaut production of its peak period after a 2002 reboot, fronted by the laddish trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond.

At its peak, Top Gear encapsulated an entire relationship between engineering and the pursuit of excellence: one inextricably bound up in material and cultural conditions that were already wavering when Clarkson was fired. And it’s this complex relationship, equal parts technical and emotional, which is in flux today: not just within the show itself, but out in the car-driving world itself.

The joy of Top Gear, in its Clarkson/Hammond/May salad days, was the way it captured the two dominant forms of motoring enthusiast: the tinkerer, and the petrolhead. Top Gear tinkerer features would depict these three middle-aged men making daft modifications to second-hand cars, for example turning a Porsche 944 into an “ambulance”, or a Ford Transit into a “hovervan”,  then try to complete ever sillier challenges. Petrolhead segments would feature the same three middle-aged men, driving beautiful, fast, staggeringly expensive miracles of engineering perfection through stunning landscapes.

Of course, petrolheads and tinkerers are often one and the same, though in my observation car-lovers tend to incline one way or the other. My late dad, for example, was a tinkerer: an engineer by training, he spent as much time as he could get away with in a workshop overflowing with hand and power tools, plus shelf after shelf of labelled tobacco tins brimming with nuts, bolts and other small objects that might come in handy one day.

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Tinkerers, of course, don’t confine their tinkering to cars. But cars have, historically, been a central object of tinkering attention. Whether mending, restoring, customising, or otherwise fiddling about with engines, the tinkerer is happiest absorbed in the material business of making the damn thing work. This both affords distinctive pleasures, and calls for a particular mindset: one eloquently defended by the mechanic and philosopher Matthew Crawford.

Working with your hands, Crawford argues, requires distinctive modes of knowing based in practice, imitation, and tradition as much as in abstract principles. Importantly, too, such work requires a pragmatic acceptance and understanding of what your chosen material will and won’t accommodate, such as flexibility, flammability, melting-point and so on. The resulting aggregate skill set is both physical and aesthetic: Crawford speaks of “pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation”, a sentiment my dad would indisputably have recognised.

For the petrolhead, meanwhile, the main attraction is how fun it is to make machines go ridiculously fast. Crawford analyses the emotional side of driving as a distinct aspect of his philosophy of engines, arguing that self-directed driving at speed expresses an attitude to risk-taking and personal agency that delivers immense social benefits.

For Crawford, giving up that sense of agency to an infrastructure of automated vehicles, speed cameras, and safety-minded restrictions may deliver some social utility, narrowly understood. But, driving is emotional as well as functional, expressing that aspect of our spirit that takes risks, and aspires to mastery of our tools. At its best, he characterises skilled driving as a “state of grace”.

In peak Top Gear, the avatar of tinkering was James May: an amiable nerd emanating pure essence of garden-shed. Clarkson, on the other hand, embodied the petrolhead delight at what these engines can do. (Hammond was the designated straight man and token biker.) Clarkson obviously knew about as much about engineering as I do, but his transparent delight at howling V8s, smoking brakes, and machines that let you corner at speeds that would kill you in a lesser vehicle, was genuinely infectious to watch even for a motoring agnostic like me.

But in different ways, both the tinkerer and the petrolhead have been losing cultural cachet for some time. Indeed, Top Gear itself captured this decline, mostly depicting tinkering in comic terms, and motoring excellence as the out-of-reach preserve of far-away experts. The supercar segments lionised these sleek, roaring vehicles as things of magic and wonder a long way from the reach of someone in a shed. And while my dad took his own tinkering seriously enough, car modifications for Top Gear challenges are usually comically shonky workmanship done not for the admiration and emulation of tinkering peers, but for banter. In amidst all the motoring was a pessimistic message radically at odds with Britain’s history as a nation of engineers: that fiddling under the bonnet is off-limits to amateurs, except as a joke.

As for the emotional side of driving, petrolhead joy in the high-velocity “state of grace” has also grown problematic. This is partly thanks to mounting anxieties over the financial and environmental price of fossil fuels — and, more broadly, a growing sense of scarcity. But it’s not just climate change. It speaks, too, to a growing discomfort with the pursuit of excellence as such — especially such resoundingly impractical forms of excellence as a car that will do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds but doesn’t have a boot.

Engineering miracles such as the Bugatti Veyron express a culture that will stop at nothing in pursuit of the “state of grace”, attainable in transcendent moments of harmony between driver and machine. And the cultural cachet accorded to this pursuit is, far more broadly, on the wane. It’s hard to point at a single cause, though it’s possible that at least some of those who once pursued mastery of tools and machines now devote the same attention to video gaming. In any case, the tinkering culture that once underpinned such joyfully pointless quests for excellence is also waning. Here, de-industrialisation no doubt plays a part, and it probably doesn’t help that modern gadgets are deliberately built to thwart tinkerers. So, too, are modern cars: there is much less point in buying a Haynes manual for a vehicle whose innards are largely powered by computer software.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the kind of inventive “shopcraft” that once characterised Britain’s tinkerers is today found more in culture where scarcity is part of life, and hence where tinkerers are still valued. Nor should it surprise us if the aspiration to build supercars has migrated with the tinkerers. Earlier this year, Entop unveiled the first Afghan supercar: the Simurgh, which looks like a Batmobile and runs on a modified 2000 Toyota Corolla engine.

The internal combustion engine was, once upon a time, accessible both mechanically and financially. Such machines afforded a democratic and emotionally potent playground for the symbiotic 20th-century emergence of the tinkerer and the petrolhead: the twin mastery of the engine’s innards, and of its capacity for excellence. But with its comical tinkerers and inaccessibly magical supercars, even peak Top Gear tacitly acknowledged that this age was on its way out.

Post-Clarkson the show has limped on for several fairly forgettable series, until presenter Freddie Flintoff’s horrific track accident last year took it off the air – possibly forever. And this may be wise: for even by 2015, the writing was on the wall.

Regulatory changes and rising fuel costs were already combining into the now acutely palpable pressure on Western consumers, to shift from internal combustion toward batteries. Some years on, there are no car manufacturers anywhere (except perhaps in Afghanistan) working on new internal-combustion models, while the cars we already have are at the heart of many energy-related culture wars. Whether it’s the cost of EVs, the politics of “Net Zero”, “15-minute cities”, or the geopolitics of petrol prices, much of our most contested political fractures concern personal transport. Against that backdrop, Top Gear’s fun, relatively apolitical magazine format feels at best out of step, if not outright disingenuous.

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And the energy transition has a bearing on the car as symbol of agency, too. This is partly practical: compared with internal combustion engines, the technical complexity of EVs poses tremendous barriers to entry for car-tinkerers. And there’s a class element, too: hybrids and EVs are prohibitively expensive compared with a battered-but-serviceable petrol runabout.

No wonder, then, that many young people are deciding not to bother, or to treat cars as mere appliances, with as little emotional weight as a dishwasher. To the extent that cars speak of agency or excellence today, they do so in ways that are ever more problematic – or simply inaccessible, whether through complexity or cost.

Cheap, abundant fossil fuels may have placed machine-enhanced grace temporarily in the hands of Everyman; but today, we are witnessing the end of that era. I have too much faith in the world’s nerds to imagine that tinkerers will ever die out completely; but the meaning of cars has already changed forever. And outside the dwindling community of tinkerers, a culture that has largely abandoned the search for mechanical mastery may not even feel this as much of a loss.

But even if the Tories possessed a record of passing legislation in, rather than directly against their own interests, the party has a vanishingly small prospect of winning the next election. The Conservatives turned a blitzkrieg electoral victory into a grinding war of attrition through their own incompetence, so that the enemy, whose capture of vast swathes of the country now looks fated, has already won the war by default. There are no electoral wunderwaffen on the horizon, as the leadership moves phantom armies across the map: but we must all endure a final grim winter of this ill-fated campaign before Labour’s red flag is planted on our ruinous parliament building.

Wartime analogies are not inapt: it is an odd characteristic of the national temperament that the best British novels of Second World War, and the immediate postwar period looking back to it, concern unsatisfying jobs in Whitehall, and frustrated engagement with the dysfunctional engine of the British state. Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the wartime sections of Powell’s Dance To the Music of Time sequence, the despondently cuckolded civil servants of both Greene’s End of the Affair and Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls From the Air, even the disenchanted civil servant of Nineteen-Eighty-Four: all convey a certain repulsion at British governance borne of sudden experience of how the sausage is actually made. For those outside the Westminster bubble, but away from the front, Europe’s great and bloody convulsion was experienced primarily as something akin to Houellebecq’s accurate prediction of the world after Covid: “the same, just a bit worse.”

There is something of our moment, also, in the writer Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, set in the grim midwar winter of 1943. For its spinster protagonist Miss Roach, the war is encountered “in its character of petty pilferer” first of all, making long accustomed goods increasingly unobtainable “while at the same time… gradually removing means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.” For Miss Roach, “it was, actually, the gradualness and unobtrusiveness of this process which served to make it so hateful. The war, which had begun by making dramatic and drastic demands, which had held up the public in style like a highwayman, had now developed into a petty pilferer, incessantly pilfering. You never knew where you were with it, and you could not look round without finding something else gone or going.”

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Miss Roach is condemned to live in the shabby-genteel oppressiveness of a provincial boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms, “this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town.” As the biographer Michael Holroyd observes, Hamilton’s “macabre imagination” and bitter lived experience converts the boarding house  “into something between an asylum and a torture chamber”. Beset by petty rules, the arbitrary dictatorship of the elderly and its debilitating “orgy of ennui”, the Rosamund Tea Rooms could be a stand in for modern Britain, and the downwardly mobile Miss Roach a British millennial: “She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken for forty-five. She had given up ‘hope’ years ago. She had never actually had any ‘hope’. Like so many of her kind — the hopeless — she was too amiable and tried too hard in company and conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.”

It is surprising in our era of housing crisis, that the boarding house has not yet returned. Perhaps it will, or perhaps the HMO, its successor for today’s era of pinched and straitened middle-class circumstances, has taken up its purgatorial role. The HMO has not yet made its literary mark, but if material conditions as well as ideological currents influence our culture, perhaps it already shapes our times. Like our plummeting birthrates, could the inquisitorial suspicion, the nosy backbiting that defines millennial culture (around which an entire culture war has developed) derive as much from the enforced proximity gifted by inadequate housing as from indoctrination by progressive teachers? But it would not be in Conservative interests to highlight another of their own failures if so. Yet our current oppressive cultural atmosphere, characterised by dissident rightists as the culture of the “longhouse,” could just as well be termed, in Britain, the politics of the boarding house. We are all trapped together, by circumstances beyond our control and among people from whom we are increasingly estranged, in a stifling ennui seemingly impossible to shift.

Our state, after all, looks increasingly like Hamilton’s penny-pinching landlady, Mrs. Payne, “who had put a stop to electricity on the landings simply by taking all the bulbs out – thus succouring her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.” Our political discourse, increasingly repellant in almost every aspect, is stuck at the level of the elderly tyrants, the pub bores and tiresome pontificators who dominate the shared living quarters in Hamilton’s fiction like “the president in Hell”: like poor Miss Roach, we are doomed to listen to their vapid self-regarding pronouncements every single day. With the simple pleasures of life vanishing, and puritanical new restrictions enforced, our public realm increasingly reflects Hamilton’s “endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions.” But then Hamilton’s literary intentions, for all that he aimed to capture the lived experience of his class, were always directed towards a portrait of the British state and character, parodied in his little-read 1939 satire Moribundia as a “stagnant society, one that is lacking vitality and possibly nearing its end,” ruled by the static ideology of “Unchange,” with “a deathly fear and hatred of innovation, of an overturning of their system, behind all their nauseatingly idealistic postures and utterances.”

There is something depressingly current in Hamilton’s depiction of his era, when world historical events, the rise and fall of empires, were experienced first and foremost as sharply declining living standards, a gnawing atmosphere of privation and neglect, and of being increasingly nagged by petty, seemingly arbitrary rules. We areourselves doomed to live in history: the 2008 financial crash, Covid, the war in Ukraine were each epoch-defining global events that beset us in short order, each of which demanded a grand response by the British state which either never came, or instead came in the most self-defeating and immiserating way.

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By choosing austerity over investment, the Cameron government weakened the British state ahead of the crises to come; when Covid came, Johnson promised the sacrifices demanded for the greater good necessitated a wartime response, which in the end came only in petty restrictions, growing debt and some expensive meal vouchers; the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, similarly, have sharply driven down living standards, without any meaningful government strategy or investment to alleviate them, let alone transmute crisis into opportunity. And there is more to come: both the international situation and Britain’s social and economic prospects are worsening. We are asked to endure ever more, without a path or plan to victory. New privations are announced like grand national projects, while grand national projects are cancelled, as unaffordable or simply beyond the nation’s capacity. The only laws the government can pass are for censorship; its only remaining talking points are to condemn the future rationing proposals, fictional or otherwise, of their successors. Promised a humming war economy, we got rationing and restrictions, with neither guns nor butter at the end.

How will this end? What was new about this year’s Conservative conference is the perception that none of it matters, at all. It was merely a ruling party unconvincingly going through the motions of governance, in a country going through the motions of democracy: all a provincial purgatory of sorts, the turbid backwash of world-historical events outside our control.

The Labour Party will enter government with a mandate for total change, and the future stability of the British political system will depend on its capacity to deliver it. On housing, Labour’s bold announced housebuilding commitments begin to address the scale of the problem, offering hope of major reform. Yet Starmer’s timid jettisoning of the grander prospects for reform risks settling for mere tinkering around the edges of dysfunction, and new petty rules with new state functionaries to enforce them. No longer the engine of grand national projects, much the same disenchantment could be applied to Parliament itself, whose restoration costs will apparently total £22bn: is it worth saving? Perhaps it would be better to let it crumble into the Thames, the breeding ground of crows, as a romantic monument to a lost civilisation. For any other purpose, without a bold commitment to reform, its time is running out. As polling for Onward shows, “six in ten Gen Z’ers support the idea of running the UK with a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections’, compared to only 29 per cent of over-55s. Focus groups suggest this is borne out of apathy: ‘what has democracy done for us?’, they ask with a shrug.” It is difficult to see that the events in store for us, or the state’s response to them, will re-enchant British voters with their decrepit political system.

No wonder that for the young, the talk is no longer of reform but escape. For the fictional Miss Roach, release from her purgatory came through an unexpected inheritance, allowing her to return to Blitz-ravaged London, where for all the risk, “You had to square up to the war. The horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just the fact that it was not squaring up to it [but was] in its petty boarding-house lassitude almost insensible of it.” The miserable conditions of ration Britain were likewise dispelled by the postwar economic boom, but without a concerted effort, without reformist ambition and grandeur, there will be no such unexpected prosperity in our future.

Today’s historic shift of global wealth and power will require a titanic effort to maintain our current lacklustre level of prosperity, let alone achieve the far greater wealth Britain should aspire to. As the rival parties’ regional pantomimes show, there is still no squaring up to reality in our grim national boarding house.

This week, that thing was the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. A two-horse race between the SNP and Labour, the result of which was supposed to offer important clues as to the direction of political travel both north and south of the border. Or at least, that’s what all the commentators and analysts were saying.

They know that the only way Labour can win a significant majority at the next UK general election is if a sizeable chunk of Scotland flips from yellow to red. And Rutherglen and Hamilton West had done exactly that on three occasions since 2010, which is why the SNP and Labour were on a war-footing there long before disgraced MP Margret Ferrier was recalled and then ousted for breaching Covid rules in 2020. Yesterday, there was a 20.4 percentage point swing back to Labour.

The two politicians fighting it out were the SNP’s Katy Loudon and Labour’s Michael Shanks. They are young and energetic. And even though relatively unseasoned, it is clear that each has already acquired the necessary affectations to bullshit their way through a live political debate. So rather than a battle of ideas, during their television debates we saw a battle of the brands fought with all the authenticity of a used-car salesman gesturing towards a smoking electric car, assuring you that “it’s a great little runner”.

We had Loudon, a South Lanarkshire councillor since 2017, pressing Shanks on his change of heart over Brexit and the two-child cap, which places not only him but Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar out of step with Keir Starmer. And she accused Labour of flip-flopping on its commitments, which might have landed more powerfully if only her party, in government now for longer than the Tories, were not also serial flip-floppers.

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And then we had Shanks, delivering political platitudes and then failing to press Loudon on her party’s indecision over arts funding, free school meals for all kids, abolition of the council tax, and its position on nuclear weapons. He then turned on her for supporting tax hikes in a cost-of-living crisis, knowing perfectly well that the hikes would be on high earners, living in the most valuable properties — the sort of progressive taxation you’d expect a Labour up-and-comer to support.

What was utterly lacking was anything specific about the actual constituency. The whole campaign has been an exhibition of nervous insincerity. The candidates know what’s at stake; they know they’ve been pulled in off the bench in the 80th minute in the wider war between the SNP and Labour. The sheer volume of heavy-hitters who have made cameo appearances to bolster both campaigns speaks to the height of the stakes here — and to the painful truth at the heart of this by-election: the most deprived locals are merely useful pawns in a tribal game.

Swathes of South Lanarkshire — the local authority in which a decent chunk of this constituency sits — are unglamorous, grey-washed urban purgatories rendered nondescript by post-industrial malaise. Maybe that’s a little harsh. We have some wonderful partially closed Sixties swimming pools.

Poor health and poverty are also embedded across this part of the country. Three years ago, South Lanarkshire Council published public health statistics that didn’t make comfortable reading: two in three people were deemed overweight. One in three was obese. Just 19% of babies were exclusively breastfed — significantly lower than the Scottish average of 27% — and around 20% of children lived in poverty. Out of a population of over 300,000, 41,000 were income-deprived. And the poorest residents of Rutherglen and Cambuslang — two areas which fall within this well-publicised contest – were, at that time, regarded as among the unhealthiest in Scotland.

Some will argue that’s because of their poor choices. But what choices do they have when their community consists of too much traffic on too few rush-hour expressways connecting rundown retail parks to gambling facilities, charity shops and junk food outlets?

The above statistics were published before Covid. Since then, every metric by which inequality is measured is flashing red. We have bouncers on the doors of Tesco Express. Security tags on baby food. And more food banks than we have McDonald’s, all while a billionaire class enters a new space race and no politician has yet suggested taxing them upon re-entry. On the plus side, energy prices are now so high the Tories can only afford to gaslight us for another four months.

Given the level of media interest in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the scale of political campaigning, and the partisan chatter on social media, the casual onlooker would be forgiven for thinking the contest is of great material significance to local people. They’d be wrong.

This wasn’t about Rutherglen and Hamilton West. This by-election was both a progress report on First Minister Humza Yousaf’s wobbly early spell in Scotland’s top job, and a litmus test for how a resurgent Labour may fare at the next UK election. Pundits obsessed over possible turnout: would SNP voters stay home, unenthused by the lack of movement on indyref2? Or worse still, would more moderate pro-indy supporters sense a chance to oust the Tories and, perhaps worse than staying home, vote Labour. What would become of the Tory and Lib-Dem vote, which, if combined, is significant enough to swing the result if deployed tactically? And what do Jackie Ballie, Angus Robertson, Keir Starmer and Fiona Hyslop think of it all? Utterly riveting stuff.

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This was politics at its worst. There were no big ideas here. No grand visions. Even the insults rang hollow. The reason for this is simple: all that separates these two broadly progressive parties are their respective positions on constitutional issues which grow less salient by day — yet they must engage in the charade that there are profound differences.

According to the SNP, Labour are just the same as the Tories. Labour, meanwhile, wants us to believe the SNP are not the same as the Tories — they’re worse. This level of debate is worryingly disingenuous. Either these people actually believe the pish they talk — or they’re so cynical they willingly talk pish they do not believe. You would find more consistency of logic on the stands of a local football stadium. Yes, it’s politics. Yes, there are forces at play which constrain political discourse in ways that politicians cannot always control. But does it all have to be so tedious and predictable and insincere?

You can really see the draw of becoming a political diehard. Of nailing your colours to the mast and warring till the bitter end. It’s a far simpler existence. You train your eyes and ears for the errors of others, while remaining blind to your own. Behind the impressive professional facades both parties project, what we see are flawed, embittered, manipulative and often quite delusional people. There’s no craft, no skill, and no courage. Just both sides constantly trying to pin things on their opponent that they themselves have been guilty of in the past, or worse, are actively participating in as they speak.

Take the tit-for-tat over public services. The very day Scottish Labour talked up rumours of closures to local police stations, including three in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, blaming SNP cuts, the Labour-controlled council in neighbouring North Lanarkshire was forced into an embarrassing U-turn following a backlash to its planned closure of no less than 39 cultural and leisure facilities. Labour insisted the by-election was a mini-referendum on two failed governments at Holyrood and Westminster — but Labour is the party in control of both this constituency’s councils. Whether centrally controlling their parties, marginalising critical voices, or announcing policies they have no intention of actually implementing for fleeting traction in the press, the idea that one of these political shitshows has a moral high ground above the other is utterly laughable.

It suits both the SNP and Labour to portray themselves as diametrically opposed, but they’re two flaps of the same fanny. Most of us see clearly that these apparently rival factions are variants of the same essential strain of managerial centrism — both holding the belief that you can radically change society without doing or saying anything radical.

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Anas Sarwar, while steering Scottish Labour assuredly through some choppy political waters, claims Scotland needs fundamental change and says he can provide it. But I’ve looked up “fundamental” in the dictionary and that doesn’t match his actions. As far as I know, he has been out chapping doors for days in the plusher parts of the contested constituency, warning those comfortable homeowners cloistered around the best-performing schools that the SNP plans to punish them by raising their council tax to something approaching fair. This, from the same Labour Party that simultaneously lambasts the SNP for failing to reform local taxation after 16 years in government.

Their campaign has involved walking the classic centrist tightrope of promising action to the poorest on poverty, while keeping the middle-class happy with the sort of perks that only entrench the inequality. Scottish Labour needs to attract the kind of people who are not worrying about multi-morbidity, or two-week waits for GP appointments, or the stigma of food poverty, or the two-child benefit cap. Being on the right side of Scotland’s educational attainment gap, and a world away from the drug death crisis, voters of this ilk, while certainly feeling the cost-of-living pinch, are not exactly hard-up. And if they vote Labour, they’ll expect something in return. They’ll expect the various mechanisms by which opportunity is distributed blindly upward to be maintained and expanded.

Conversely, the SNP is paying the price for a decade spent playing the same game. Their problems run deeper than Yousaf being less popular than predecessor Nicola Sturgeon. The tragedy is that at precisely the moment where Yousaf could legitimately claim to have moved even further to the Left than ever before — going toe-to-toe with landlords over short-term lets, pioneering child poverty payment, nationalising Scotrail and abolishing peak fares — their own base is beginning to lose interest. People are so numb after years of political capital being blown on the pretence that another referendum was imminent that, even though the SNP seems finally to be using devolved power to make a difference — safe consumption rooms, progressive taxation, and at some point in the near future, a Scottish Welfare System — many simply shrug when these achievements are pointed out.

The biggest problem both parties have, even if they end up in power at the same time, is that they are now political hostages to their own bullshit. Namely, the volatile constitutional issues of Brexit and Independence in which they are now, in their own ways, enmeshed, yet forbidden by electoral imperative from speaking honestly about.

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The SNP has known for a long time that IndyRef2 will not happen soon — even the movement’s most gung-ho campaigners are placing the next referendum a firm 10 years away — yet it has engaged in the charade that it was just around the corner. Meanwhile, the party insists that because Scotland voted to Remain, we’ve been torn out of a lucrative political and economic union against our will, failing to see the contradiction at the heart of their campaign to take Scotland out of the UK without evidence that a majority of Scots actually want this to happen. The SNP wants us to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time: that Brexit is harmful to Scotland and that Independence won’t be (I’m all for indy, but I’m also realistic about the challenges it will bring).

These intellectual gymnastics are mocked and mirrored by Labour. Starmer, Sarwar and the rest of them must pretend Brexit is settled and that the shambles of leaving the EU in the hardest possible fashion has had little bearing on the UK’s dire economic fortunes — even though they understand only too well that such a tumultuous exit from the Single Market has made the very people who voted for it poorer. But Scottish Labour must also talk tough on independence to fend off the threat of the Scottish Tories, while knowing full well that the Scottish Government will always be severely constrained in the progress it can make when key issues such as immigration, labour laws and most taxes remain the preserve of London politicians.

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Some might be relieved that constitutional issues were not as prominent in this by-election, but it is clear that, without the mobilising prospect of a rematch on either Brexit or a second independence referendum, Labour and the SNP will return to their comfort zones, taking their loyal bases for granted, pricing-in working class apathy, and targeting middle-class moderates whose political convictions could be written on the back of a fag packet — leaving space for all 228 lines of “Tam o’ Shanter”.

The only people actually buying what the politicians are selling are devout party activists, students yet to be disabused of their naivety, partisan hacks who study politics the way your Auntie Betty studies Emmerdale, and middle-class moderates who’ll swallow any old, reheated pish for stable house prices and a quiet two-driveway life. Nobody else gives a shit. If we can be bothered, we turn up on polling day, we hold our noses, and we vote for whichever party we believe is the least terrible option that year.

Coincidentally, the scepticism many Scots feel when London journos take a sudden interest in our affairs is precisely the scepticism many in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency probably feel about the preening top-flight Scottish politicians chewing scenery in the run-up to the by-election. Working-class people here are mere beads on an abacus, their votes appropriated for some national narrative that doesn’t serve them. Today, the travelling political circus will pack up and leave without a backward glance.

Last month, he joined Freddie Sayers in Oakland to talk about the global war on motorists, the beauty of tinkering, and Silicon Valley’s threat to human freedom. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Freddie Sayers: A few years ago, you published a book called Why We Drive — and in many ways, you were ahead of the times, because drivers all over the world are now pretty angry. In London, there appears to be a full-on “war on motorists”: with a new 20mph speed limit, and an Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). This motorist fury has spread to the Netherlands, to Spain, and to the truckers in Canada. It feels like drivers are forming some sort of coalition.

Matthew Crawford: You could also mention the gilets jaunes in France. And there have been protests about the German autobahn. The Germans have a saying that translates as “free driving for free citizens”. Then you also had this big fight between the London taxi drivers and Uber. It does seem like people’s attitudes towards driving have become a bit prickly, as though the political authorities somehow lack legitimacy. A lot of populist energy has become focused on the automobile.

FS: Quite often this is framed as a class thing. Drivers are presented as people who probably have all sorts of unsavoury political views and therefore if life becomes more inconvenient for them, it’s probably a shift in the right direction. But your book goes deeper than that: you suggest that the action of driving is existentially important.

MC: I like to start with the skateboard, or the bicycle: simple implements that extend and transform our native bodily powers. A bicycle becomes almost like a prosthetic, an extension of your body, fully integrated into your bodily habitation of the world. And I think something similar could be said of cars, especially relatively primitive and lighter vehicles, where there’s a lot of feedback from the road. A kind of directness of control. That’s why a lot of people get quite attached to the experience of driving. Nietzsche said, “joy is the feeling of your power increasing”, and I think that you can understand that not as a scary doctrine about power-seeking, but just as an insight into how some technologies seem to extend us out into the world in ways that are deeply pleasurable.

FS: So we’re not talking about political power increasing? It’s more of a sense of being alive?

MC: The absence of remote control is really a key part of that. The idea of driverless cars — the sense of being passively carried around — triggers a kind of revulsion about being a passenger. There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. They seem to be slackened and completely safe, and somehow less than human. I think that’s a heightened or exaggerated picture of what disturbs us about this.

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FS: And, dare I say it, unmanly? The passenger character staring at the screen is the opposite of a strong person using a machine.

MC: Yes, or even genderless. A sort of gender blob. I guess there is a kind of masculine ideal of self-reliance, certainly in America — and just moving about the world by the exercise of your own powers appeals to that. So even using GPS, which I admittedly use all the time, forces you to turn your brain off, and there’s a kind of passivity and dependence to that. And I think the push for driverless cars is an instance of this wider pattern. For the sake of convenience, and in the name of safety, we’re lured further into passivity and dependence.

FS: There’s a line that you write about beyond which technology stops enhancing life: instead of making you more powerful, it starts to make you more dependent. Where do you draw this line in the case of cars?

MC: I think intelligibility is a crucial thing. Can you, by inspection at least, imagine how the thing works? Does it invite your intervention? Does it invite the effort to understand it? Or is it completely opaque like the shimmering obelisk at the beginning of the film 2001 that the humanoids are all entranced by? There’s a deep intellectual pleasure in being a master of your own stuff, in taking things apart and trying to understand them. Tinkering is a kind of quasi-philosophic impulse.

The other feature that really rubs a lot of people the wrong way is this idea of remote control. It’s not so much that it’s digital. Conceivably, you could become an expert coder in the various software systems that run the car. But I think what people don’t want is a sense that they’re somehow geared into this bureaucratic machine that stands behind the technology.

FS: There’s also a practical sense that people want to have a car that works on its own, independent of any external network being operational.

MC: Right, and that cannot be disabled remotely. The trucker protests in Canada were mercilessly crushed by seizing the bank accounts of people who contributed money to the movement. Shortly after, the Canadians took steps to mandate that all trucks be remotely shut-off-able. So you can see that there’s a political taste for preventing any such occurrence again. This is one of those instances where I think a lot of Western leaders look to China enviously as a control society. And given the metastasising systems of surveillance and control in our own society, the car stands out as a last reserve of some kind of capacity to stand alone.

FS: More worryingly, electric and driverless cars can in theory be turned off or driven into each other by central command; in a wartime or crisis scenario, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that this could be dangerous.

MC: At least in the US, we don’t have nearly the electrical grid that you would need to charge all these cars, according to the vision being laid forth. And of course, building that infrastructure isn’t glamorous, politically. The whole green energy mandate is this massive diversion of investment to party-aligned actors that will tend towards energy poverty, which will hurt the working and middle classes. And all this is part of a larger phenomenon of the party-state capturing transportation and energy policy.

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FS: Do you think this anxiety is particularly strong in America?

MC: Yeah, when shit gets real, you’re going to want to hit the road and get the hell out of Dodge, right?

FS: This leads us to the question of what we should do about it, given that these technologies are already everywhere. What would a practical rebellion look like? How can we resist without simply being Luddite or reactionary?

MC: The first thing to notice is the feeling of futility that people have about putting up any kind of resistance. In San Francisco, you have street guerrillas putting cones on driverless cars to paralyse them. And you have quite a few cases of driverless cars impeding emergency vehicles because they stall out and need to be rebooted. Despite this, earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved to have driverless vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in large numbers.

It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars. Hovering in the background here is this sense of a “corporatocracy”, where the will of citizens really doesn’t come into play. And, in fact, when Pew polls people about their attitudes toward driverless cars, the majority of them are not interested. They’re suspicious of it; they’d prefer to drive themselves. So this is not in response to consumer demand: you might say it’s a kind of for-profit social engineering.

FS: Perhaps also that faith in technology is central to an elite idea of progress? If you are on the wrong side of it, you are seen as a bad person. 

MC: It’s an expensive solution to a non-problem. Humans are actually pretty good at driving. This is merely another case of a transfer of wealth: Silicon Valley trying to grab profits from Detroit; Waymo versus Ford. So, yes, there’s always a narrative of progress.

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FS: What do you say to the counter argument: that while some people might enjoy driving, many people don’t. Driverless and convenient electric cars should open up hours in which we can be more creative, fulfilled, and productive?

MC: Sure, I feel the force of those arguments. I’m sure there are occasions where I would totally want the option of a driverless car. One of the difficulties is when autonomous cars share the road with human drivers: that has turned out to be a far harder engineering challenge than was anticipated a few years ago. We’ve arrived at the point now where in San Francisco, at night, when traffic is light, they’re allowing driverless cars. But there’s still a lot of breezy talk about outlawing human drivers in order to make the road more hospitable to driverless cars.

FS: You can imagine that being a serious proposal in a small number of years.

MC: What would you have then? You’d have the infrastructure of a city made hospitable to automation, including driverless cars; you’d have an urban operating system that’s essentially designed and installed by some cartel of tech firms — and you can be pretty sure they would not be amenable to democratic processes. Nor would the code be accessible to inspection. This is all very proprietary: it has to be because that’s what makes the “smart city” the next trillion-dollar frontier.

FS: And if you are considered transgressive by that private company, you won’t be able to get around. 

MC: You can imagine terms of service that have all kinds of stipulations. And you can view this development as part of a long arc of high modernist urban planning that goes way back. Yet this aspiration to remake the city often creates model cities that nobody wants to live in because the human element is somehow squashed. The ethnographer Jane Jacobs wrote a beautiful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she shows how a street works at a fine grain level as a social place. She describes how neighbourhoods get vacated by these planning schemes that are hatched from on high and render the city vacuous. I think we should revisit some of these critiques of modernist urban planning, by way of trying to get a handle on what the tech firms are up to with the smart city and driverless car.

FS: I think perhaps we accepted too readily this idea that not having to drive would be liberating. And this points to a larger question about technology: is convenience always better? If you’re liberated from the more fundamental, supposedly mundane aspects of living — feeding yourself, moving around, sorting your car out — is your life necessarily going to improve? 

MC: If you go far enough down that road, the whole world begins to look like one big assisted-living facility. There’s a psychologist named Kelly Lambert, who’s done some interesting stuff on what she calls effort-driven rewards. She works with rats, but the idea is that we’ve evolved to secure our own basic physical existence, and when you make everything effortless, people become anxious and depressed. And of course, a lot of that leisure time will be filled with entertainments that plug us into the hive mind. Americans in particular don’t really know how to do true leisure — a Sabbath, a time of repose. We tend to fill up everything.

FS: Do you advocate trying to resist the relentless technological advance by living more simply? Some people are trying to feed their spirit by “unplugging” and trying to be more connected to the earth, more connected to nature?

MC: Well, this is the perennial question, isn’t it? That sort of romantic back-to-the-land or back-to-nature revolt against not just technology but technocracy — the entwining of these systems. People do want to escape it; to re-humanise themselves. I guess for some people, it’s back to the land — land, of course, is scarce and expensive — for some people, I think it’s tinkering and trying to get a handle on their own material existence and become self-reliant in various ways. We have people homeschooling, just trying to unplug from what feels like a voracious borg that feeds on individual agency.

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FS: Is there a good version of that and a scary version, do you think? For some people it seems that their answer is to burn it all down, to destroy the “borg”, which starts to sound violent?

MC: I’m thinking of Fight Club, is that what you’re thinking of?

FS: More that if there are enough people who feel alienated by technology — and by this supposedly sophisticated way of living — they are going to come with pitchforks and try to destroy it. Do you think we should worry about that?

MC: I don’t see much prospect of the pitchforks coming out — we’re too well entertained. A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. Through a combination of virtual reality and AI, I imagine we’ll be sucked into worlds that are not real. What I mean by that is that they are constructed worlds: constructed for profit, and engineered from afar. They will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency: I’m sure there’s a menu of different options for action within them. Maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery. I say that both as a former physics guy, and as someone with intuitions that there’s a created order that has a benevolence to it, and some elements that aren’t fully graspable and masterable by us, and that I think of as a source of renewal. When you put yourself in nature or even in the built environment, the human environment, there’s always scope for serendipity and surprise, and renewing your sense of wonder in the world.

FS: How do we defend that? What are the micro rebellions that we can try to unplug? You talk about tinkering with your car. What should someone in a city do? 

MC: Every time we meet face-to-face as we’re doing right now, we’re engaged in the permanent human possibility, encountering one another in a real way. And I think that will always be available to us. We often get a little too doomerish about the borg, especially when the ordinary pleasures of existence and of sociality remain available to us. We have to throw ourselves into that with courage and hope.

FS: Maybe this is finally a political fight that’s worth engaging in. Perhaps motorists should defend their right to drive whatever cars they want — and maybe, they’ll win. 

MC: Yeah, Sign me up. We hereby inaugurate the freedom to drive movement.

Freddie Sayers: I was struck reading your book that the world of media politics is changing extremely quickly. In the old days you knew where the power lay — with the big networks, the party establishment, the stars, the newspaper. And now, it’s harder to tell. The characters you cover are in many ways figures from the past.

Michael Wolff: I think this has been the case for some time. Virtually everyone in this business has been challenged in some profound way — and often they’ve been disappeared. They were there, they were important, and then they were gone. One of the interesting things about Rupert Murdoch, of course, is that he has been there for so long — for 70 years. He has held more power and influence far longer than anyone else in our time. But now, the sands are not only shifting but dissolving beneath him.

FS: This week, he finally announced his retirement at the grand old age of 92.

MW: That is partly because at that age, the end comes inevitably — but there are also other factors. It’s not just that he’s aged out of the game. The game has changed, and the game is changing in so many ways against him.

FS: We tend to think of Murdoch as a sort of omnipotent puppet master. But your book presents him as a man overtaken by events. You talk about him mumbling a lot, making the wrong calls, being bullied by his children. He’s actually a rather forlorn figure. And it seems from your account that he’s been like that for some time.

MW: His sell-by date probably ran out some time ago. But he holds on because he’s Rupert Murdoch — because all of the people around him think, “well, he’s Rupert Murdoch, he must still be Rupert Murdoch”. And I think in many ways, that’s not true.

I guess you could say he is reaping what he sowed — and it’s not pleasant for him, especially when it comes to Fox News. Donald Trump won the election largely because of Fox News, and it is confounding — wounding even — to Murdoch that he might have made a man he detests the President of the United States. The ultimate reality is that Fox News and Donald Trump are his legacy.

The tragic irony is that Murdoch never had much to do with Fox News. He started it in 1996 after being rebuffed in his efforts to buy CNN. But he’s never been that interested in television: he never watches it, he certainly isn’t a television executive. He hired Roger Ailes to start Fox News and to grow it — and Roger sat at the top for more than 20 years. It was Roger’s network, not Rupert’s. Although Rupert was happy to collect the incredible amounts of money that rolled in.

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FS: All this paints a very different picture from Succession, the hit TV show, in which the Rupert Murdoch character played by Brian Cox is always in the newsroom. He is obsessed with cable TV. But what you’re saying is that the real Murdoch wasn’t stoking the fires of Fox News — in fact, he was embarrassed of it. It’s in many ways a disappointing revelation.

MW: Rupert Murdoch is a newspaper man. It’s the only thing he really is passionate about — that, and the family dynasty. When you see Rupert with a newspaper, it’s like this physical love affair: the way he handles it, the way he folds it, the way he marks it. You know, it’s nearly erotic. The other parts of his empire, such as television, have made him enormous amounts of money — because he’s a very astute media guy, a business guy. He can see the audience, he can see where the money is flowing. But it’s not him. His love doesn’t flow there.

Now, the bulk of his newspaper holdings — apart from The Wall Street Journal — are no longer profitable. They are declining assets. And it would be very hard to argue that a future without Rupert Murdoch will include his family still holding on to those newspapers.

FS: Has the departure of Tucker Carlson undermined Fox News? Would you say it’s losing its grip on the Right-wing narrative? 

MW: You have to see this against the wider media background: cable television, which was the great media cash cow for 25 years, is a declining business. Its decline won’t be as fast as newspapers — but it is just as inevitable. One of Murdoch’s daughters has been arguing they should sell Fox News because it is only growing less valuable.

FS: Do you think that Donald Trump will win his war against Fox News? He has already boycotted two Fox-sponsored Republican debates. Is he bigger than the network? 

MW: Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Rupert Murdoch, feeling guilty or trying to burnish his legacy, decided that he would try to undermine Donald Trump by inventing the candidacy of Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is a Fox bubble — and he has failed terribly. The result has been that Donald Trump is probably a more popular primary candidate than anyone in modern history. Despite four indictments, and despite New York State having taken away his business, he is still almost inevitably headed for the Republican nomination. He may well be president again. This is all in spite of Fox News.

FS: If you were a betting man, would your money be on Biden or Trump? 

MW: You can logically argue that Trump should not win. He’s always been a minority figure. His campaigns are run in the most chaotic and disorganised fashion. In 2020, weeks before the election, his campaign was $200 million in debt. This has never happened before. So he should not win, except for the fact that in very close races, exogenous factors usually determine the outcome. Will Biden fall over a couple of times? We wait and see. But the important thing to remember is that Trump certainly could become president again.

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FS: Your relationship with Trump is most unusual — and it illuminates some of his strangeness and maybe some of his genius. You are not thought of as a diehard Republican, to put it mildly. And yet he invited you into his circle, he gave you exclusive interviews, and even after you had written about him in a not very flattering way, he kept getting back in touch. Do you still speak to him?

MW: He threatened to sue me and tried to stop the publication of my book. So yes, we’re still in touch. But in a somewhat peculiar way. I think that he’s come to see these books as a positive chronicle — if only because they’ve sold so many copies. Therefore, they must be good. Not too long ago, one of the Trump people said to me: “The only metric we pay attention to is how much attention he’s getting: good, bad, doesn’t make any difference.” So I guess I’m part of that attention matrix.

FS: Allow me to suggest a second theory. Maybe there is still a part of Donald Trump, just as there was a part of Rupert Murdoch, which craves the approval of the liberal establishment. He’s a New Yorker. You’re the Vanity Fair guy: the esteemed journalist of showbiz. Is that fair?

MW: To be perfectly honest, when it comes to Donald Trump, it doesn’t really matter who he’s talking to. He can talk to anyone. The important thing is that he’s talking and someone is listening.

FS: For some people, this will be almost disappointing to hear. We’ve discussed these two outsized, Right-wing characters — Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump — and what you’re saying is that at some level both of them still want to be liked by the mainstream. Does this make them phony conservatives?

MW: Well, I think that is probably true. In a way, it’s more surprising in the case of Murdoch than Trump, who grew up in the bosom of the New York establishment, even if for much of that time he played the buffoon. By contrast, for most of his career, Murdoch has insisted: “I am the outsider.” But clearly, somewhere along the way, he became the establishment — although I’m not sure Rupert himself exactly appreciates this. He became one of the most powerful forces in politics, business, and, of course, the entertainment industry.

FS: Despite having been president, Donald Trump is still mysteriously considered anti-establishment. He’s outside the Citadel. Why is this?

MW: I think part of the genius of Donald Trump — although I’m not sure he planned it out in this way — is that his stature has only increased through conflict. If you spend 14 years as a reality television star, I think you understand that you have to have conflict at every turn — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real conflict or not, you just have to find an enemy. Challenging “the establishment” is a very convenient way for Donald Trump to keep being Donald Trump.

FS: Let’s focus now on the current president, Joe Biden, because at times your characterisation of Murdoch — slightly too old for the job, slightly overwhelmed by the complexity of the modern world — reminded me of him. Do you think that America has an old man problem? 

MW: Biden looks terrible. He looks like an old man, he walks like an old man, he talks like an old man. I’ve been covering politics for a long time, and Joe Biden, even as a young man, had the air of an old man — certainly in the way he spoke. I think that, under the circumstances, he has actually done a pretty good job. And I think that’s what Joe Biden feels: “I’ve done a good job. So, screw it, I’m 80 and I might fall over at any given moment, I’m gonna do it.”

FS: Do you think liberals are to blame for the rise of Trump — and for the political mess that the US seems to find itself in? 

MW: The liberal establishment has clearly not been up to competing with these rising conservative outliers. It has been unable to respond in any effective manner. I don’t think they have a clear voice. I don’t think that they have a clear mission. I think that they’re caught in their own sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction.

In the decade since, more than a trillion dollars of investment have poured into BRI projects, a figure that rivals what Western countries together put into their aid budgets. That China found eager suitors around the world for its new largesse is no surprise, not least because Western countries had started pulling in their horns — with Britain, for instance, recently cutting an aid budget that had been a pillar of its soft power in order to build an aircraft carrier.

But in filling that vacuum, China has unsettled Western nations and few of them will attend when representatives from more than 100 countries gather in Beijing for the third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation. Increasingly, especially in the American foreign policy community, we hear talk that China is using the BRI to build a rival bloc to the West.

In an apparent response to the BRI, at the recent G20 Summit, the US and some of its partners announced an infrastructure programme to connect Asia and Europe. But if they’re hoping to go head-to-head with China, they may want to reconsider their tactics because one thing China is really good at is building infrastructure. In the time we’ve spent trying to make up our minds about whether to dig a short tunnel to Euston station, China has installed nearly 40,000 kilometres of high-speed railway.

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In any event, finding nefarious intent in the BRI may say more about the observers than the observed. A recurrent temptation we in the West face is to look at China’s behaviour through Cold War lenses, substituting the Middle Kingdom in the role vacated by the fallen Soviet Union. Seen this way, the BRI appears to be China’s attempt to transform its economic power into political control by drawing a string of countries more closely into its orbit. Some even detect an ideological blueprint in China’s willingness to forge partnerships with autocratic regimes, citing it as evidence that it wants to build an anti-democratic, anti-Western bloc.

In reality, though, there wasn’t much geopolitical thinking behind the original conception of the BRI. Instead, it was concocted by bureaucrats who were trying to solve an economic challenge: China’s economy had run into a wall. To overcome the 2008 global financial crisis, it had embarked on a massive fiscal stimulus and succeeded in lifting the world economy out of recession, but also left itself with a lot of excess capacity. Meanwhile, China was nearing the limits of a growth model that had relied on low-wage workers to assemble goods for export. As the huge surplus labour force was mopped up, wages rose, auguring a future in which Chinese firms would no longer be able to undercut their competitors abroad.

If it were to escape this classic middle-income trap, China would need to orient its output towards more technologically advanced production, and move its labour-intensive assembly offshore. Having built its economy by luring the waves of outsourcing that had helped deindustrialise America, it now needed to do the same and move some of its own manufacturing to lower-wage zones beyond its borders.

A group of civil servants came up with a plan to achieve this: by creating transportation networks that would give it access to overseas markets, supplies, and labour, and then exploiting those links to develop its partnerships, China would be able to expand its economy beyond its national borders. It would not use a classic aid programme like the Marshall Plan to do this, though. Instead, Beijing would encourage its banks to stump up the capital on commercial terms, something they were quite able and willing to do given the vast pools of capital accumulated in a country that saves nearly half its output, and where the list of high-yielding opportunities at home has been diminishing.

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The policy proposal landed at a propitious time. With Xi Jinping having just gained power, Beijing was growing increasingly concerned that its good relations with Western trading partners would come under increasing strain. Barack Obama’s ascent to the US presidency and his administration’s pivot to Asia, which boosted America’s military presence as a counterweight to China, solidified this perception. China’s subsequent exclusion from negotiations around the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership only reinforced that belief in Beijing. Xi made the BRI his own, and it soon became a linchpin of his new economic policy.

While the BRI was crafted as an economic programme, it soon became apparent to the Communist leadership that it could drive a new geopolitical strategy too. For one thing, the BRI gave China the chance to showcase a whole new model of development. Whereas the Western approach to global development focused on using multilateral financial institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization, to engineer pro-market policy regimes, then assist their implementation with targeted aid, China believed that building infrastructure was the key to development. Meanwhile, China regarded the regime of development or governance or human rights a country might choose to use as entirely its own business, a position which reflected its tradition of non-interference. Given the widespread perception in the developing world of Western countries as arrogant imperialists imposing their own moral or economic agendas, China’s standoffishness proved a refreshing change.

All the same, the BRI hasn’t created an alternative global financial architecture — at least not yet. Unlike the multilateral order created at Bretton Woods in 1944, it has more limited ambitions. The IMF, World Bank and WTO operate all over the planet; China’s BRI is focused primarily on Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania — in effect, in those parts of the world that could at a stretch be called its hinterland. And when it comes to diplomatic engagement, China still prefers to avoid multilateral regimes to focus on the more modest but practical approach of bilateral relations.

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This approach, though, is causing China some growing pains as it engages with the world in a way it’s never seriously done before. On the one hand, the BRI is serving the country’s goal of expanding its export potential. But in many countries, especially in Africa where China has a large and growing presence, the administrative capacity to manage complex infrastructure programmes is lacking. As a result, the initial euphoria over Chinese largesse has in recent years given way to a more sober assessment, as payments have come due and some governments have struggled to meet them.

This has led some Western commentators to latch onto the concept of “debt-trap diplomacy”, the idea that China has loaned money with the aim of later swooping in and seizing assets when the debtor defaults on payments. Often cited as an example of this is the case of Sri Lanka, which allowed China to take direct control of one of its ports on a 99-year lease when its government found it couldn’t pay its debts.

But the reality is probably more prosaic. China is learning the hard way what Western governments have dealt with for decades — the problems of insolvency in sovereign debtors. In response, it appears to be re-orienting towards a somewhat more Western style of “small but beautiful” lending that prioritises smaller, targeted projects. Over the years, Western governments have developed an elaborate global architecture through such institutions as the Paris Club, which facilitates the quick resolution of fiscal crises. But China has resisted joining such bodies, instead working through problems on an ad hoc basis. That hasn’t always been easy. Debt diplomacy seldom is, and China is finding that the role of benefactor can ultimately carry a hidden price.

The hype of the BRI’s early years has given way to a more sober assessment of the costs and benefits of engagement with China, as its partner countries find the role of an aspiring hegemon goes beyond just doling out goodies. Many countries still find it useful to have a rival pole they can play off against the US-led alliance, but Italy’s recent reconsideration of its participation in the BRI can probably be seen less as an instance of the Western allies circling the wagons, than of many countries rethinking the degree of dependence on China they’re willing to countenance. China has built its soft power and cut its teeth on diplomacy, but it too is finding that the fun part of the BRI may now be over.