The anti-woke aren’t so anti-elite

Britain’s conservatives are taking America’s lead in the war on ‘woke’

After the election of Joe Biden, UK premier Boris Johnson – who prefers nothing better than being all things to all men – attempted to have and eat another cake. This time the gateau in question was whether he thought president-elect Biden was, as the kids are saying these days, woke. 

Fighting the urge to wince, Mr. Johnson claimed not to know for sure, but he gave the mild caveat that there would be ‘nothing wrong’ with being such a thing. He did not, however, miss the chance to nail his other flags to the masts of ‘tradition’ and ‘history’; something, he argued, we all ought to ‘stick up for’.

Mainstream conservative opinion has been somewhat less equivocal than the Prime Minister, but similarly hanging on to certain traditions – only not historical in the way they might like to think. A recent column by Nick Timothy, former special adviser to Theresa May, claimed former Prince and Princess Harry and Meghan as the perfect fit to lead the ‘New International Woke Elite’. This new, unholy alliance of ‘academia, business, sport and public life’, an ideology of woke, is more than just a ‘cult’, as former mayoral candidate Laurence Fox blithely campaigned on. This global ideology, politicising our children, ruining all the fun, is all thanks to that infamous culprit — postmodernism.

Postmodernism is taking the rap for a lot of divisive stuff across the political spectrum from identity politics to the rise of Donald Trump. Yet, even if Mr. Timothy’s completely-not-hysterical take on things seems little more than a bit New World Order, the struggle against wokeness does have a more complicated origin story.

The politicisation of the term began with New York’s anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic nativists (picture Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, and subtract the talent) urging individuals to stay ‘wide awake’ to nefarious foreign hordes. Yet by 1860, it had been co-opted by opponents of slavery and racial prejudice (for the most part – this is still 19th century USA). To have an ‘open eye’ was key to ‘throwing off past stupor’, atoning for the support of slavery. This iconography, a language of progressive enlightenment, is certainly how we encounter the term today.

After the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, the call to ‘stay woke’ resurfaced with the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, instructing this same vigilance and alertness towards racial prejudice and possible threats of violence against minority groups. Since the feverish summer of 2020, however, defined as it was by the explosive campaigns against racial injustice – present and past – in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the conservative reaction in the US and UK has made its bed on political terrain beyond where it is usually more comfortable and mainstream – in the defense of law and order, and the rejection of violent protest.

Instead, for some, the discussion racially-motivated discrimination, violence and murder as a historical fact, is, for these folks, apparently punching down now. To be ‘woke’ is somehow to be part of an alternative global conspiracy, where the plot is to focus on every possibility of guilt, and repackage it as virtue, assuaging the narcissistic indulgence of the ‘liberal elite’.

Though we might find traces of a traditional English suspicion of showing emotion, these conversations about racism and structural inequality has been imported from across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the backlash against demonic ‘social justice’ has a decisively American branding. Commentators and politicians alike now regularly deploy the pejorative ‘woke’ to denote the insidious pseudo-intellectualism infiltrating our institutions, as it has been popularised by figures like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson (Canadian, but with a huge online following in America). Conversations about racism are what are making western civilisation falling apart, apparently, and we can blame the “Postmodern Neo-Marxists”.

For those already familiar, these usual suspects are just that – the original ‘Neo-Marxists’ who made up the Frankfurt School of Social Research or, more concisely, Critical Theory. The right, however, would construct the narrative that this was actually the hotbed for “Cultural Marxism”, which catalysed the moral and cultural decline of Western Europe through spreading the idea that, as Max Horkheimer put it, ‘the practical aims of social theory should be grounded in human emancipation from oppression’. Add a dash of moral relativism by way of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and lo – here lies the late, great Western civilisation. Baby, it was fun while it lasted.

Even if we leave aside the reality that Derrida and Foucault were in no way synonymous, or even fully-fledged postmodernists, and we tiptoe around the more than slightly alarming fact that ‘the term Cultural Marxism’ is frequently co-opted by white nationalists, there is something more fundamental being pushed to one side. Attacking the ‘elite academy’, while trendy, is little more than a kind of inverted snobbery, weaponised by those with no obvious familiarity with the post-structuralist thinkers they feel emboldened to pithily adjudicate on. What they really need is a bogeyman.

International Trade Secretary Liz Truss – that famous freak for sociological critique – was the latest to offer her confused but not uncommon take on Foucault, who quote ‘ put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours’, arguing that ‘truth and morality are all relative’. Whether Foucault actually said or meant this (spoiler: he didn’t), in broad-brushing swathes of continental philosophy, we are witnessing a wider contempt for the academic humanities as being no longer fit for purpose; diseased, as they are, by a false sense of enlightenment.

The irony is that someone preaching moral relativism to combat racism would surely hold no such truck with the social justice movement, which, like all outwardly moralizing movements, is certainly no stranger to being puritanical. Even so, skepticism towards post-modernism may not entirely undeserved, neither is it a fresh complaint – as Peter Salmon’s recent biography reminds us, accusations against Derrida’s lack of clarity and rigour have abounded for decades. Though I am not an academic, cultural theorists ought to accept the inherent problems that comes of their love for opaque language (they are, in turn, entitled to respond to laymen like me that this is exactly necessary for purposes of clarity and precision). Yet beyond guiding intellectual debate, academia has certainly served to insulate the world that said ‘critical theory’ aims to critique from the messy business of acting practically on these ideas. One recalls Theodor Adorno, arch-critic of consumerist society, famously being surprised at having his lectures crashed by his own revolutionary students and himself being protested for his hypocrisy in failing to commit to their protest movements.

Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who had fingers in all the pies – academia, popular culture, political activism – don’t seem to exist anymore. Foucault, France’s subsequent philosopher king, knew better than to muddy his philosophy by associating it with his political stances. The gap has been filled, it seems, by the internet, with figures like Dr. Peterson who has space to dismiss social sciences, critical and cultural theory altogether, despite the fact that Peterson himself relies heavily on certain fields of psychology unconcerned with proving themselves as scientific, such as Jungian psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

The academy could probably have used someone like Sartre for the last few decades. The Sokal Affair in 1996 famously saw several attempts to publish hoax papers in academic journals for Gender Studies, of which, six were successfully published despite peer reviews. Whether this has achieved the intended result – exposing an entire field of gender and race studies as a sham – is up for debate. At the very least, it revealed the genuine vulnerability of academic journals to their own biases. 

Today, this affair’s legacy lives on in the detractors of ‘Grievance Studies’. These most polemical of critics of ‘white privilege’ and ‘fragility’ attack, in some ways legitimately, the presentation of critical theories like structural racism, white privilege, as if it presents itself as science. After all, no one can scientifically prove that the murder of George Floyd was racist. Empirically speaking, we cannot ‘see’ discrimination as systemic or structural. The problem is that this same principle, however, would apply for any consideration of prejudice which is, after all, invisible.

Skeptics of cultural theory seem inclined to take the fact that theories of how human beings behave rely on a certain amount of abstract ideas, and exploit this fact to suggest established academic disciplines are fundamentally bogus. The very least one could say is that this misses the point.

There is, conversely, a long tradition of pseudo-science, along with philosophy, being weaponised to perpetuate racist myths, such as J. Marion Sims’ medical experimentation with black bodies. In portraying the historical examination of racial and gender prejudice as merely ‘woke’ posturing, critics provide an intellectual cushion to those in concrete positions of power, or Trumpists, who are interested in either sowing division or just wishing these kinds of conversations away. 

For all the talk of limiting free expression, to diagnose the anti-racist impulse as purely resentful, and an intense, disingenuous desire to be moral, is a clever gambit if you want to dismiss the entire project altogether. If ‘woke-ism’ is in fact the dangerous new evangelical herd morality, as Friedrich Nietzsche might see fit to call it, as a power-play based on resentment it has overperformed, somehow creating an unholy alliance between corporatism and left-wing academia.

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, went as far as to admit that on this view, the single operative cause of ‘woke-ism’ is a form of reactionary over-sensitivity. Against the ‘common sense’ of meritocracy goes the impulse for white people to self-flagellate for their inherited white privilege, and atone for inter-generational guilt. Again, there is such a thing as a line, and a foray into woke groups on internet forums would be enough to persuade you that inclusion and diversity are certainly vehicles for puritans. But then, as Tomiwa Owolade writes, so is the frees speech debate.

The point is that these criticisms assume a degree of heft despite their small offer of solutions. Pointing out that extreme behaviour weakens the anti-racist cause is justified, yet it doesn’t just play into the hands of the far-right, but also contributes column inches for a disingenuous and ultimately uninterested status-quo. 

Take The Times’ Gerard Baker. Aside from producing such smash-hits as ‘Donald Trump didn’t lose the election, but the radical left did’ or ‘How the woke stole Christmas’, Baker insists on the analogy between woke intellectual tyrants, and the institutionalisation of Soviet communism. Diversity in the academy is, it would seem, in name only, and only vacuous box-ticking, uninterested in ‘true’ diversity, and more concerned with us all thinking the same.

Gerard’s example was the research manifestos of Oxford University’s Rhodes Scholars (of the Cecil Rhodes namesake); selected, he interprets, according to their alignment with ‘woke’ causes. Unfortunately, ‘woke’ politics is cumbersome, but shall we ignore the status and history of Oxford University as being embedded in colonialism? Or is that just another ‘story’ irrelevant to the present day?

He proceeds later column to denounce the posturing of ‘woke’ corporations as empty and self-serving. Too right, Gerald. How dare corporations co-opt the causes of diversity and inclusion, which we all know are just badges to make academics and others feel righteous, and detracting from the real issues and solutions which will no doubt be delivered by a second Trump term. Wait, what?

The irony of criticising corporations for abusing progressive politics to increase profit, and then proceeding to explain this by blaming the corrupting influence of Marxist academia, ought to be obvious. What is stopping Baker or Peterson going the whole hog, demanding we just go ahead an replace capitalism to spare us from this posturing, guilt-sodden moderation? A swift ceasefire in the tiresome culture war might soon be on the cards.

The anger towards ‘woke’ seems to revel less in a straightforward objection to vigilant radicalism, but instead a typically English distaste for supposed hypocrites and moralisers, savouring that delicious taste that the undermining of posturing ‘do-gooders’ can do for the soul. Yes, identifying “virtue signalling” is welcome when activism is insincere. Yet though we can never look through a window into each other’s souls, this criticism of virtuous displays consistently focuses less on their form, and more on the content itself.

The strange narrative of a ‘Woke’ Inquisition that sees science and logic as the enemy is the latest misconception imported from American culture wars, and instead of the yanks stealing all our ideas, we seem to have besotted ourselves with a homegrown rehash of the tired American classic of ‘free speech’ and the right to being offensive. Karl Marx wrote that history would repeat itself ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’. Were he alive today, he might update it to include the dreaded threequel: as a YouTube compilation of Douglas Murray “DESTROYING SNOWFLAKE SJW”.

Though perhaps we can blame ourselves after all. New Atheism’s fetishisation of the ‘right’ to offend came to the forefront of the cultural conversation a few years ago through heretical Brits like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who defended alleged insensitivity towards religious groups, or, less obviously, admirers of Princess Diana. The sacred cow of religious dogma, similarly defended by elite censorship, for arch-critics of religion like Dawkins finds its counterpart in our ‘woke state religion’. For Professor Dawkins, practically Oxford royalty, the entitlement is simply there for him to imply that 1 billion Muslims are more susceptible to evil than the rest of us.

No-platforming individuals on the matter of politics might be self-indulgent and counterproductive, but elitist? Thanks to the democratisation engineered by the internet, the anti-woke will always have an audience who believe they are more ‘wide awake’ than those at the opposite end. To be ‘woke’, for those with gift of column inches in the Telegraph (or in the case of Andrew Neil, the chance to host an anti-woke themed news channel) is just as easily a cancellable offence, narcissism and sanctimony being the cardinal sins – and yet, for them, these sins are hardly incidental to the anti-racist cause.

The New Atheist idea, that the freedom to offend is necessary to keep the real evil of institutional dogma from our door, finds a neat parallel in the religious zealotry of ‘woke activism’ – that is, if we accept that criticism of ‘social justice’ is just about religious belief.  But if we experiment with the idea that, rather than global communism, the main vanguard of so-called social justice warriors is in fact the domain of ‘feelings’, what are we left with?

What is underpinning this reaction, other than that a rather Victorian impulse to deny the central influence of feelings on people’s various identities? Since there is no longer a wide mandate for a stiff upper-lip—another supposedly English idiom of American origin—why should the existence of these feelings be seen as something irrelevant or to be ignored?

In oversimplifying your opponent’s ideas, claiming that a certain amount of guilt influencing someone with privilege is, at bottom, narcissistic, the right is not being honest with itself. It also forgets that the tradition of criticising white hypocrites was not founded by those who denied the gravity of racism in any way. In fact, quite the opposite. In his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King wrote of the white ‘moderate’, preferring the ‘negative peace which is the absence of tension’. The idea that the reality of racism, of prejudice and guilt, is uncomfortable for white people is not, however, in tension with the idea that guilt might lead to greater sensitivity.

Sensitivity is not an end in itself, but accusations of “virtue-signalling” and “wokeness” supposedly just levelled at white ‘saviours’, invalidates the inference of covert racism as simply, as they used to say, being a do-gooder. In other words, the fault is not merely in its performance, but in principle.

The charge against woke sanctimony rests on the idea that implicit bias might not provide a holistic view of individuals’ inner lives, a gap which conservatives like Peterson fill with their pseudo-Nietzschean brand of psychology, embracing the idea that the unconscious mind is a prejudiced and selfish place. There is certainly a whiff of original sin in the concept of ‘white fragility’ (a book written by white people, for white people) that white people are unable to escape the trappings of their own unconscious bias, determined by a baseline racism. 

But to dismiss outright the concept of behaviour and attitudes which occur unconsciously is not the kind of antidote to puritanism it thinks it is. It smells rather like another way of wishing for just that kind of ‘peace’ in the negative sense, where everybody just stops talking about racism altogether.

Meet your new Daddy?

Boris Johnson is thus far shaping up to be the kind of Prime Minister we always suspected he would be. I for one am not optimistic that this will be his undoing.

It may well be churlish, at the apex of a global health and economic crises, to contemplate the political demise of the sitting Prime Minister, but such a moment as this provides an untimely reminder that this freshly elected, and now seriously tested Johnson, is far from best suited to the level of statesmanship required at such a time.

Does this mean British politics has forgotten what true statesmanship is? The invigorated ‘back-to-work’ Boris Johnson this morning deployed, heavily on-brand, some predictably bolshy, war-like rhetoric to presumably sustain the widespread support for maintaining the universal lock-down. While it may be a shame some of his former colleagues at the increasingly Pravda-like Telegraph appear to disagree, his decision, superficially at least, echo the vigilance of our European neighbours – rather than the Cheeto-in-chief – also reinforces the autonomy he wields within within his own party, unprecedented for a modern Prime Minister since the Blair years.

Such are the perks of a handsome parliamentary majority, but might we be witnessing Johnson’s sensible pastoral instincts? There is a flaming heap of evidence to the contrary, yet from Johnson’s own encounter with the new coronavirus there has emerged a curious narrative of a changed man; a sober, serious leader — the kind I thought I glimpsed in the beleaguered and sickly phone-video addresses he made to the nation before the dramatic night in which he was rushed into intensive care.

Only time can reveal if the new boss is so different from the old boss. The Observer’s almost obsequious reportage presented this notion of this quintessential Etonian chancer (aside from the last one) having been traumatized into epiphany through a brush with the death. Such a narrative is naturally preferable, perhaps carrying a potent parable that may actually reflect the state of the nation, perhaps even the world. It is not just our way of life but life altogether that is eminently more fragile and contingent than we normally prefer to keep in mind.

This would not only bear a touch more gravitas than our politics has indicated it is capable of in recent years, but it would also be, fundamentally, a cannier, wiser politics.

Perhaps we should be so lucky. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan conceived of our relationship to political leaders as being far more base than we like to imagine; the social order is represented, as it were, by the Father — the ‘Third Term’. A crude, infantilizing swipe may not be so controversial when we consider the iconography of our recent history political leaders; we find a disciplinarian streak coursing through the veins of May, Blair, Thatcher, and at least a strong sense of resolve in Brown, perhaps even Major — though he cuts a more sage figure these days. Belligerent at times, but canny, and capable — a safe pair of hands; these are the foundations of the image of political leadership hailing from the twin roots of skilled pragmatism and the insistence, if occasionally blind, authority.

Margaret Thatcher, as Glenda Jackson eulogised, “in no certain terms a woman”, fused matriarch and patriarch together for an Elizabethan-style longevity. This was to be unmatched until fresh-faced but determined family-man Blair led Labour to a similar style of hegemony. Cameron, Blair’s informal “heir” did not exactly end up mimicking his political success, but he inherited the maxim that the ability to take “tough decisions” is enough to project a winning sense of clout and responsibility.

For Johnson, a pretense towards this kind of gravitas has so far been ill-fitting. As Mayor of London he was comfortable in the skin of the endearing buffoon, allowing incredibly viable criticisms of his handling just about anything. But with the spectre of an eventual vacancy for the top job looming, nothing could curtail his ambition. This was, of course, no surprise to anyone, apart from perhaps Cameron himself, who made the mistake of believing that Etonian blood runs thicker than water. Instead, any semblance of loyalty evaporated.

Anyone who had the time to put together a basic profile on BJ could have known this, and whatever ‘inner beliefs’ we can divine about Johnson, his dramatic and suspiciously brisk conversion to the Brexit cause was not merely effective as strategy because of its proximity to the Tory grassroots. In suddenly adopting this sheer doggedness about our money, borders, laws, yada, yada… Johnson refreshed his own momentum in the story of British political history by fashioning his sheer ambition into an image of pure will —a determination. We knew he might not believe in anything, but he believes in reaching the top. In the spectacle of carnage that became of Britain’s prolonged constitutional crises, Boris Johnson makes sense; his “character”, the role he has chosen, is digestible.

Or is it? Before the coronacrisis we were wondering at what point Johnson would end up making a so-called tough decision. The day of our formal departure from the EU, his incendiary rhetoric flared again. Commentators perceived the power-behind-the-throne in Rasputin in a gilet, Dominic Cummings. Some have heralded the end of Toryism as we know it, as a Chancellor resigned over ideological differences towards spending, in constituencies that delivered the Tories their most handsome parliamentary majority for decades.

Arguably however this means little; the Tories needed the vigour of a nationalist project because their governing free-market libertarianism failed in its first inception, and was failing again. After December’s election violently quelled the eurosceptic right’s fear that they might never get the only Christmas present they ever wanted, the aggressive, self-insistent nationalist tone that came to define Johnson’s war-like attempt to bulldoze through Parliament can, safely enough, be characterised as another instance of pure strategy — a clear signal of intent, determination — will. Britain’s relationship with the European project had became so contingent on one man’s boundless ambition that one could no longer deny Johnson’s peerless nature as sheer political force. But not even he could have expected the new rules of the game, the redrawn political map, to be snapped so readily. The sleepy mirage Britain’s “independence” has received a rude awakening, and while the jury is out on whether the global pandemic will intensify our retreat into ethno-nationalism, the “seriousness” of Johnson’s resolve cannot seem to hold outside of that chauvinistic register.

It looked a little touch-and-go at first; there was something moving about Johnson’s video message after recovering from Coronavirus. He surprised me even, thankfully, with the mature and responsible demeanour with which he carried out his shaky, camera-phone addresses to the nation in self-isolation, urging caution and a sensible approach — a calm u-turn from his initial complacency towards the virus which, it emerges, may well have contributed thousands of avoidable deaths.

It was this paternal image that I expected to find traipsing out of the doors of №10 last week; instead we had some more bombastic bullshit peppered through a breathtaking lack of self-awareness over the executive’s initial response to the emerging crisis. It is not enough to bluster this father-of-the-nation shtick canonized by Churchill. Responsibility cuts both ways; you are in power to wield it, not to hoard it.

Yet Johnson’s ultimate ambition is quite meagre in itself; just to survive the slings and arrows of politics for a favourable mention in the history books. This an egotism that, while unchecked, does not seem to bear the propensity Blair had towards control freakery and grandiose self-conviction. When ambition is so fundamentally self-serving, requiring only the affirmation of others to sustain itself, it may instead prove more insecure.

There is a more banal and perhaps humanizing dimension to Johnson’s metamorphoses therefore, in that he wants to be liked, or even loved — to be a popular Prime Minister. His calculations around Brexit were orientated always around seizing the crown, and yet he is no ideologue — a fact he didn’t even bother to try and maneuver. He got a free pass because deep down everyone knew he was in it for himself. In that sense he was an apt face for insular, ego-stroking Brexit Britain, but there is perhaps a deeper reason his appeal seemed to transcend political tribalism so readily as to earn him such a thumping majority at the last election.

People naturally find it harder to trust Labour on questions of economic competence, but I would wager that, having given Corbyn the benefit of the doubt in 2017, the electorate were faced with the dichotomy of open, insolent self-interest, and the puritanical appeal to altruism from a man who would abhor the mere idea of even the tiniest bone of selfishness within himself.

Funnily enough now, it is less surprising that the first option is what people felt they knew they could trust. It is not just the ‘gentlemanly’ Tory selfishness (often hid beneath the veil of its pragmatic cousin, ruthlessness) that is the known-known in British politics. In that instance, people could recognize with ease what Boris Johnson was about — himself — and this was coincidental with the message of his campaign. In being so brazen, he was almost asking us to double-check our suspicions of him; conversely, Corbyn’s unarticulated assumption of moral authority touched a nerve. In Britain we seem to hate moral snobbery more than actual snobs.

Such a heyday for ‘Johnsonism’, whether liberal or nativist, may be long gone. Yet however tongue-in-cheek his recent self-comparison with great dictators, there is something telling in this grandiosity. The key feature of authoritarian rulers is their unassailable self-belief, to the extent that the state itself becomes organized around them, as their play-field of power. Though Britain’s constitution in a sense permits absolute power through governing majority of legislative and executive, the Brexit impasse demonstrated, whether or not the Prime Minister ‘breaks the law’ is at his own discretion.

Johnson is the third British Prime Minister in modern times to govern with this kind of authority. Margaret Thatcher steered her premiership with ideological fervour, laced with an archaic nationalist sentiment, an Elizabethan Golden Age. Heavy is the head, and the Iron Lady was never quite the same without her crown.

While eschewing such mythic overtones, Blair similarly, conceived of himself in such a messianic image, redeeming his party through electoral victory and by extension, hoisting the country towards the horizon of the 21st century. Once that glorious summer of 1997 was darkened by terror and conflict, Blair could readily map his saviour complex onto a febrile, complex historical moment as Western liberator. David Cameron, evidently perceived this test of leadership as a form of political nous, and attempted to imitating this kind of youthful modernizer, a family man who loved responsibility so much he refused to clean up his own catastrophic mess.

Yet in all these images of ambitious, flawed people and their experience of we can locate a certain naivete about power, which acts in spite of an ambition to change things, and the concern that comes with being responsible. Along the way, these politicians’ ideas of themselves as the most powerful and responsible members of the family became the most decisive element in their decision-making. When politics is about choices, the individual that bears the responsibility of decision tends towards more insistent self-justification. We see this now with Johnson’s aversion to any culpability for the death-toll fiasco in the United Kingdom, although it is not as if we weren’t warned about his character. There was never any project for Johnson’s premiership; he achieved power on the grounds of the incompetency of his opponent and the perceived ability to fulfill the onerous constitutional task he had, in the first place, dumped on Britain’s doorstep, for the precise reason of snatching the crown from Cameron “minor”.

Where it might be tempting to proscribe a kind of tragic character flaw in Thatcher and Blair that unravel in Shakespearean fashion, for Johnson there is no dramatic tension within. There is only confusion, tinted by the banal and frustrating lesson that to build your own appeal and sense of political gravity around a tongue-in-cheek but deeply un-ironic, naked ambition can only result in the sorry sight of an un-serious man overwhelmed by a deadly serious situation.

Judging by the latest in a long saga of feigned images of fatherhood, as long as he continues to impudently, shamelessly, side-step the mess he has made, these lessons will most likely elude this Prime Minister.

My Own Private Quarantine: could the pandemic give us immunity to FOMO?

April 28th, 2020

Though it might be bad form to invoke a think-piece inspired by not one but two hallmarks of our increasingly obnoxious cultural lexicon, there is, I think, a connection to be drawn between the two most notorious. That is, ‘YOLO’ (*you-only-live-once — a stunning insight, well done Generation Y) and its apparently logical sequitur: FOMO (*fear-of-missing-out).

Plenty claim to be able to casually dismiss such a fear as childish, but it underwrites our behaviour in a far more pernicious way than we may assume. The former, as many will recall its brief yet all-too-lengthy spell in our shared vocabulary, suggests cheap hedonism-cum-existential wisdom. This fear of missing out signifies something somewhat more infantile, and yet is nonetheless more ingrained in our aspirational culture. While admittedly derived from the sense of our limited lifespans, something about it speaks to a more avaricious instinct that can be applied to our trying to have as much “experience” as possible.

None of this is, of course, ground-breaking, but a cursory google of the acronym yielded some interesting results: from Time magazine, a simple finger pointing at the illusory promise of social media seems to do the trick for explaining just how useless it is to compare our lives to one another. Trite, no? It may read as straightforward enough, but the banality leaves us wanting. We are after all subjected to an industry of comparison; philosophically speaking we’ve been comparing ourselves to our family members, friends, co-workers for as long as we’ve had them. Social media might inflame our insecurities, but a convincing solution may not be found in simply doing away with it.

The FT similarly asked its readers in 2015, when the term was in its infancy, if they ‘suffer from FOMO’. Instead one might proffer that the human mind is just prone to suffering, not in a pessimistic way, but in accepting the negative tendency of anybody’s imagination. It is, perhaps tragically, always easier to picture the worst-case scenario. We have a stronger idea of what might bring down our worlds, and perhaps less an idea of what would really make us happy.

So, and we arrive at the punchline, amid this radically unprecedented scenario in which comparing our situations to our immediate peers has to potential to be less fraught with anxiety, what does this suggest about the act of comparison itself?

Given that the pandemic has assured that most are to stay inside and give up on a glamorous lifestyle, at least for now, does the totalizing nature of the social, political and economic situation offer an opportunity to temporarily withdraw our investment from the frivolous. By this I hope to suggest that, and at the risk of indulging idealism, in doing so, an enduring stay-at-home culture can permit a reflection on what these different attachments mean to us.

In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant claims ‘all attachments are optimistic’ (Berlant, 23). Considering the most mutual and overt example of this is made manifest in the universally pressing desire for this locked-down existence to be altered any time soon, while not obliging some stale form of solidarity, might this still act as a kind of humbling?

Certainly the coronavirus has been no ‘great leveller’ — it has already amplified deep inequalities that exacerbate the vulnerabilities of those outside the white middle-class; the homeless, residents in cramped social housing, and most perniciously, ethnic minority groups. It is somewhat excruciating therefore to see a new kind of romantic hierarchy amplified by social media, layering a fresh gloss of normality to our already increasingly narcissistic culture.

There is no ‘right’ way, we are assured, to ‘do’ the corona-crisis; any normative behaviours belonging to a particular pathway, career or diet plan, have to be abandoned and substituted with a strong aversion to other people. There may images of healthier, successful and well-connected people enjoying themselves without you, or still trying to conjure an entrepreneurial aesthetic amid the pandemic; would it be in vain to hope that those capitalizing on the ability to do just that and carve a kind of ‘influencing’ role become more estranged from the mainstream?

Who knows though, maybe some crap friends of yours are having an exclusive Zoom chat. At least you might be able to find out what they’re saying about you.

Yet there is a revealing, though not surprising, extent to which the publicizing of the private sphere of each individual amplified by social media has become more focused in this new foundation of social distancing. The notion of contagion itself takes on a more all-encompassing meaning; that which modern global capitalism dissipates across class divides, instilling an incentive to ‘influence’ each other online; to insist on, via filtered image, our health and sanity in the face of malady and even death. Perhaps not much has changed at all.

In his hastily published — clocking in at around 80 pages with a suspiciously large font — and dare I say slapdash new work Pandemic!, philosopher Slavoj Žižek surmises that

We are bombarded by calls to work from home, in safe isolation. But which groups can do this? Precarious intellectual workers and managers who are able to cooperate through email and teleconferencing, so that even when they are quarantined their work goes on more or less smoothly. They may gain even more time to “exploit ourselves.” But what about those whose work has to take place outside, in factories and fields, in stores, hospitals and public transport? Many things have to take place in the unsafe outside so that others can survive in their private quarantine . . .(Žižek, 26)

For those whose life continue ‘as usual’, there may be cause, as leftists like Žižek propose, to consider who you give your time to — and if it is indeed worth it. Seeing as this ‘medical war’ we are faced with is fought predominately by a skilled minority, at the very least we should ask ourselves if we have done enough, if our lives are lived in a way that defers adequately to our social reality.

Such a thought may also be luxury for those desperately anxious about rent — while the government’s furlough scheme promises to keep the economy moving, the radical right-wing ideology that has governed international political economy for the past few decades, and dominated in the wake of the last financial crisis, remains perpetually in the wings.

If you can forgive the crude optimism, there may therefore be, out of this horrific scenario, at the very least a channelling of these herd-like impulses towards a different kind of obligation. For those who have not yet encountered the invisible enemy, the immediate, lived consequence pandemic’s radical reminder of the reality that the ideas of success, of the ‘right’ pathway that infects our culture, have been cancelled, or at least postponed. The individualistic hues of each and every person’s social profile may become more saturated — in that at least something from everyone’s immediate future has been, in some way, negated. For the first time, perhaps we all can stop pretending (or just even stop worrying about pretending) to possess the kind of control we’ve been fooled into believing in — or perhaps co-implicated into perpetuating.

Leaving aside the grander and perhaps too fanciful hopes for a resurgence of “Communist” ideas in the wake of the pandemic, it may nonetheless be realistic to hope that, at the very least, the global crisis spurs a revaluation on the level of personal; particularly if, it seems, the things we are predominantly attached to, that which we truly miss, are reduced down to the base, social element of our lives. The vain, romantic hope for drinks with friends before Christmas, the chance to see live music, to play five-aside or have dinner with a loved one. Žižek proposes further still that ‘we will have to change our entire stance to life, to our existence as living beings among other forms of life…we will have to experience a true philosophical revolution’, () one can hope that at the sheer local level, the forms of attachment we build our lives around will centre less on the minutiae of what we are lacking.

We all carry with us an impeachable streak of envy; yet perhaps in our collective longing for the fundamentals of interpersonal contact in the here and now — for foggy, spirited conversation had over a table strewn with drained pint glasses, or the weirdly earthy, plastic-y smell of a candlelit restaurant table.- so long as that is the “normal” we all crave to return to, we may find ourselves more resilient to the fear of the world passing us by. Because, at least for this very moment, if I may be so bold as to draw a blemish of collectivism, everyone’s world has been brought to a slow and tentative crawl.

The background noise of mortality and danger, having heightened to a loud hum, might not live to colour or new way of life permanently. The paradox of our impulse to survive arguably itself is dependent on the spectre of our own limited time. Yet, as Simone de Beauvoir in an interview in 1959 put succinctly, ‘as soon as it takes a morbid form, I do not find that jealousy is a very enriching feeling’. At the very least, it might make us happier not allow our disparate fears of inferiority or lack of status become even more contagious, especially when confronted by much graver and much more concrete possibilities. To ‘miss’ out on some crucial experience that is supposed to enrich our lives irrevocably seems somewhat fatuous in this new landscape of sheltered, minimalist living.

Though nobody would have wished for this, in terms of our assumptions, cultural or personal, a bit of leveling-off might be germane; a little isolated introspection might tell us what we are really missing.

A Serious Man?

April 21st, 2020

Although much of the Guardian’s output these days can be politely described as verging on farcical, it was from the paper’s editorial on Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader that I drew a curious snigger.

The editorial sub-title ‘a serious politician’ had inspired in me the unexpected comparison between Labour’s latest lawyer/leader and Joel and Ethan Coen’s hapless, over-educated, pathetic bore Larry Gopnik from A Serious Man (2009). Straight out of the Book of Job, Larry can’t catch, let alone drop, a break; amid his brutally deteriorating marriage, his wife’s oppressively annoying new lover, the dependence of his mentally-ill older brother and miscreant children, his narrative is beset by perpetual crises of faith – masculinity — identity – the works.

It is unlikely that this is the first image the ostensibly relieved Guardian-istas wanted to come to mind. Perhaps it speaks, usefully, to just how serious we want our politicians to be.

It may just be a testament to the often-painful inanity with which Jeremy Corbyn limped through the hoops of opposition politics that Keir Starmer’s technocratic shtick inspires, if we can use such a word, much of the party and its supporters with a kind of soft relief. There is now, at the very least, a gloss of seriousness on the sick rose of British politics.

Corbynism may have been deadly serious about itself, but apparently not about the country it inhabited. Certainly it behaved un-seriously about its own failures to tackle racism. There is something to be said for the way that Corbyn was portrayed, either by his own flank as both helpless victim and tireless crusader, or as a useless, petty racist and ideologue by his political enemies, and just how un-serious this made him appear. The appealing narrative now seems to be for us to admit that “hey, say what you like about Blair, at least Machiavelli had balls.” Apparently that’s all that matters in leadership these days, especially if you can make good use of them.

Not quite Cavalier, not quite Roundhead, Starmer’s brand seems more akin to a budget Colin Firth, as some have eagerly tried to etch into literary history. He does have a certain quiet ambiguity — easily translatable into just being a bit dull.

For some, his brand of professionalism does not bode well for political conviction. His recent shadow cabinet appointments have naturally given vent to seething suspicion that it reflects Starmer’s covert centrist or even right-wing sympathies, pointing to the arch Corbyn-sceptic additions in the junior ministerial shadow briefs. The New Statesman’s Stephen Bush has qualified that the appointments of Liz Kendall, Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips might be interpreted by the hard left as a nerve-jangling omen for the inevitable makeup of Starmer’s frontbench in the years to come, it is still too early to distinguish public strategy from private sympathies.

The fact remains however that until that happens, it is mere speculation and hot headline-grabbing. In fact, to borrow from The Thick of It’s immortal Steve Fleming, none of this is, or was, buttering anyone’s parsnips (brother).

The Labour Party itself seems to attract the emblem of someone like Larry Gopnik; utterly incurious about his world, cuckolded, self-pitying, etc. Bounced into a mean-spirited divorce by his own incredulity at the disturbance of his grey, middle-class suburbia, Gopnik thrusts his despair and confusion at his audience: How did he get here? How did I not see this coming? What was the way things were really meant to be? Why won’t anyone take me seriously?

These searching questions seem far too familiar in the wake of last Christmas’s election.

Perhaps the only saving grace for the Labour Party at this moment is that — particularly given that there is a global pandemic seared in the minds of the many – those who give a damn about its latest domestic clusterfuck of acrimony and score-settling are few.

The eternal dilemma for the Labour Party, flaring up with each sadly predictable episode of electoral slaughter, is whether there truly is any middle ground between two fundamentally opposite set of beliefs which form the basis of the governing political tribes in Britain. While both Labourism and Toryism are fraying in this current climate, the latter arguably more so, the artifice of our political debate pivots on the endurance of these two brands: Red versus Blue.

The boxer in the red corner is already haggard, heckled by each wing on technique and even the particular type of gloves they’re using (a decision of course which must be adjudicated by executive committee). That is to say, if the player needs gloves anyway? For isn’t it the strength of feeling that will win the fight?

Surely, say the red tribesman, shaking their heads vigorously to themselves — if the heart is full of conviction then surely righteousness will win the day?

In the blue corner, the seasoned, heavyweight champion, flanked by silent sycophants, gormless yet patient, chuckles with mirth at the blind confusion of his opponents — too busy fumbling through sweat-soaked procedural guides on mandatory reselection and railing at the TV commentators to notice him unlace his glove and pull out a handgun instead.

The “serious” man who now has to ease Labour out of its coma presents his leadership style as shaped by the desire for “unity”. It is therefore to his fortune that the mortal threat faced by his party is now mimicked by the circumstances of the outside world itself.

This is not to sound callous, but to point out merely that it is probably the only time the self-indulgent laundry-airing of Labour’s domestic proverbial shitshows will not be played up by a bored, complacent media that is enamoured with political spectacle, and not ‘socialist values’. This internal bloodletting has now culminated in the latest spectacle the Corbyn leadership has left on the table —a supposed smoking gun of leaked WhatsApp bitchiness — presumably as a way of saying “Yeah, while we may have fucked up badly, lots of other people were really, REALLY, nasty to us too!”

I wonder if that constitutes winning the argument…

A handful of apparent sociopaths, who profess to work *for* the Labour Party by hindering its ability to win actual elections, are now defamed for doing so. This, despite have not been in post for two years subsequent to Labour’s dramatic series of electoral gains in 2017, wherein the Corbyn machine held every inch of the party in its fingertips (despite the PLP), is supposed to, with characteristic self-delusion, absolve the Corbyn project of responsibility for December’s bloodbath.

Methinks the blame-game and haranguing is hardly what the world wants to see right now, and rightly so.

The same hand-wringing folk may even see the depiction of politics as boxing, or any sport, as ideological, as too ‘Westminster centric’ – i.e. the place where people literally make laws.

Starmer, a man of the law himself, in his professedly Wilsonian appeals to party unity thankfully appears to grasp that the ability to change such law should serve as the centrifugal element in any political position.

Yet I fear it may be disingenuous to make out as if it this is element is what drives the apparent antipathy of plenty of the hard left towards Starmer. It may be bitterness, or a desire for retribution for the incontrovertible resistance that the Parliamentary Party, the established media had against Corbyn’s Labour. This is understandable. But it is not serious politics.

The country at large might like to hate on the left, and god-knows we don’t make it easier for ourselves. But as have previously emphasised, there is a necessary trade-off between the virtue of a strength of belief, and the empirical virtues of being in government — even, as much as some on the left love to slate New Labour.

In his elegantly brief summary of the plight of Labour politics in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century Will Hutton reflected on the fundamental weakness of the Labour movement and its use of political power.

The fluidity of the socialist ideal stands variously for the values of ‘freedom, equality, community, brotherhood, social justice, the classless society, cooperation, progress, peace, prosperity…within this pantheon of ideas capitalist reformers and revolutionaries alike can pitch their tents…

The utopianism of the socialists thus discouraged them in general from thinking too much about democracy. The object was equality; the means was planning…but the gap between Keynes and Marx disabled the left’s internal organisation, thinking, and more importantly, its capacity when in government to achieve its goals.

Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader thus reads less like the political aberration it was always made out to be, and more like classical tragedy, unfolding in three acts:

Act 1 (September 2015): a bewildered Labour party gambles with itself, and by proxy, the country, that a more forceful, rebellious assertion of its founding principles were the remedy to its electoral misfortunes.

Perhaps the primary motive for electing an an affable though amateurish backbench barnacle to the top job can thus be seen as less blindly idealistic than a sign of sheer philosophical desperation.

After all, if the Labour Party can’t beat the Tories on the turf of fiscal responsibility anymore, with class identity more fragmented than ever and reactive culturalism ascendant, what narratives does it have at its disposal other than the ultimately tried, though incontrovertible truth, that the capitalist system itself is inherently unfair? Who is to make the case for a solution to the fact that the last 40 years have seen the amplification of British financialisation, putting said unfairness on steroids as a result?

Corbyn presented himself as a more perceptive alternative than his leadership rivals, because for many he grasped that austerity was self-defeating, and pretending otherwise wasn’t making us any more electable.

An assortment of Blairites, (“bitterites”) and established politicos with the requisite lack of imagination leaned heavily instead towards the view that Labour was instead indulging its student-politics tendencies, of which recent years have seen, admittedly, a sharp rise in examples of said bullshit.

By the time the EU Referendum has scorched anyone’s pretence for expert opinion on the nature of the British state and politics in general, Corbynism is already written off as equally out of touch and hackneyed as Blairite centrism.

That is, until…

Act Two (2017): Against all expectations (indeed, for Mrs. May, the *one thing* that was not supposed to happen) Labour slash the Tories’ slim majority by gaining 30 seats and achieving 40% of the national vote. The established logic that Thatcher and Blair’s slick coalition between aspiration lower-middle income earners and the asset-owning class was the only game in town fractures violently. Turns out, people will vote for socialism — youngish people anyway. Basically anyone below 45 [link]. Turns out Jeremy Corbyn isn’t so crap but is actually a bit of a show-stopper, and a large minority of people think that, instead of ruthlessness, maybe normcore, hippie coolness could be Prime Ministerial?

In that hedonic moment of Glastonbury fever, Jeremy Corbyn strode on stage, embodying a bizarre fusion of the energy of Grandpa’s bi-monthly trip to the local social club disco and the prospect that social democracy was, after all, electorally viable in a post-2008 world.

The jury may forever be out on whether it was Labour’s moderate social-democratic platform, (professedly “radical”) wot won it that led to a sweeping series of gains and thus bullish confidence that they could take down the Tories at the next, and assuredly, impending opportunity. After all, Parliaments can only hang for so long.

That is of course provided that the opposition decide that government is the aim. Leaving aside the discourse around the distinction between antisemitism and anti-zionism that characterizes the suspicion of Corbyn’s own accused racism, it is not the behaviour of a serious political force to indulge an internal bitchfight so toxic, damaging and insensitive as the gross spectacle of Labour’s antisemitism crisis in 2018.

Faced with the classical pendulum between pragmatism and ideology, Corbyn, with the abettance of messrs. Milne and Murray opted for telling the Jewish community that they had no interest in having an honest conversation. Thus, in the process, telling the country that they were more interested in winning their own arguments than with how people perceived them.

It is this attitude, betraying the fundamental truth that while Corbyn may have won the arguments against the residual neoliberal strain within his own party, it was this fight that it was most serious about. We thus arrive, inevitably, at

ACT THREE (December 2019): Hell

This timely resurgence of Keynesian economics is what has riven Labour with divisions for the past five years, yet I fear that this was a fortunate coincidence for the hard-left that a fervent Bennite was the one making the strongest case for social democracy.

And thus, naturally, exhibiting its innate zeal for radicalism, by the time the definitive ‘Brexit’ election was called it was apparent that the Corbyn project had demonstrated its priorities.

That is, telling us how many things it thought needed changing, than it was in persuading the country that he could carry out the alternative — culminating in an almost wilfully blind stumble into tragedy on December 12th, 2019.

Returning to the present — and unprecedented — moment in which we find ourselves, though we it is in its embryonic stage, one can suspect the hesitancy of Starmer to play opposition politics with Coronavirus as the first, clearest water between himself and Corbyn.

That water is namely, therefore, the recognition that it is in the performance, the spectacle and therefore surface level of politics that people draw their anger or sympathy for political parties, and it is the party that ought to be indicative of the behaviour of their potential government.

As Simon Wren-Lewis among others have been at pains to note, it is firstly to recognise that the press storm against the Labour Party is always, immutably, heavier than against the Tories.

The point is not to rage, Lear-like, between confusion and despair, against the thunder. Nor indeed to question, a la Job, the meaning of its providence. It is of course a piss-poor reflection on itself that the party has been without a woman leader, though in many ways it would not help their cause against the tempest of Britain’s vociferously right-wing status quo.

Yet the key ingredient of such an emotionally fraught party is to take the seriousness with which it takes itself, from which it derives the energy for such bitter internal acrimony, and focus such an intensity on bridging the gaping chasm between itself and the step of people who just don’t give a shit about trigger ballots.

Some have argued that Starmer’s story and personal politics in reality reflect that more archaic, yet decidedly Thatcherite, English narrative of aspiration. Instead we might see him as representing a form of self-assured yet dutiful pragmatism, committed to public service, yet mingled with a requisite amount of ambition it takes to seek the leadership of a political party.

This, as a starting point, is potentially sell-able to the electorate; a familiar, perhaps even Fabian rejoinder to the quiet arrogance of gentlemanly capitalism underpinning the English national character (which funnily enough is historically servile when it comes to real authority).

It is this image that will perhaps endure to benefit the party — that is, rather than to be seen as bounced into becoming opposition leader by a backbench campaign group and then refuse point blank to say that you actually want to *be* Prime Minister.

Maybe nobody actually wants to be PM, but the least we can do is try to give the impression we’re serious about power —which is not naturally co-extensive with being political.

That is if, after all of this, Labour can truly be serious anymore.

La Peste Nouveau

April 8th, 2020

Albert Camus would be having a field day right now. Perhaps not literally — unless you could find a meadow nestled between one of Paris’ labyrinthine arrondissements. Not quite figuratively, even. The closure of “inessential” services, i.e. the Parisian café (although, crucially, not the tobacconists) would perhaps have been one sacred cow too far, especially for the absurdist who denounced the mere idea of sacrilege, bovine or otherwise.

Or maybe it is just too crude to imply that this pandemic would have given the absurdist a cause to cheer for. It would be fatuous to imply anything other than the concerns available to us in his sophomore novel, La Peste — affectivity of the plague beyond its raw potential to destroy the body.

He would certainly have smiled upon the recent comparisons between the pandemic crisis and the ‘spirit of World War Two’. Robert Solomon writes that, as an emblem of the Nazi Occupation, La Peste is useful but too reductive. Yet this comment seems to forget that in its embodiment of sheer fatal threat, as an advancing enemy to which conventional images of resistance fall away, the solemn promise of the plague as metaphor serves a different function than mere allegory. In the words of Camus’ good doctor Rieux,

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.

Despite the truth that this pandemic has brought about at least the veneer of a new egalitarian reality to an increasing majority of us, I write this with the privilege of youth and from the within the egregious sanctuary of one of Cambridge’s oldest colleges. The seductive notion that this unprecedented situation can bless a person with a pure, existential transcendence could just as easily be characterised as the fetish of whoever is able to self-isolate in an ivory tower.

What began as a panic-stricken disavowal of social media and rolling news has now settled into a sober awareness of the slow and morbid intensity of the virus. The selfish attraction of the illusion of safety in isolating oneself from the world, permitting only the bare minimum, also seems hypocritical. The usually dissociative effect that the sheer statistics of “fatalities” have on us has been, perhaps justifiably, inverted by the cumulative stagger upwards of death by the hundreds in less than one hundred hours.

The youngest life now claimed descends to thirteen. I sit mortified, bewildered in front of the screen. Five minutes later I am rationalizing that it must have been exceptional.

Aren’t we all supposed to be exceptional, isn’t that the big, sexy myth? Why won’t it be me? Might we still not know if all thirteen-year-olds are generally safe or more vulnerable than we were told?

The balcony’s gravitational pull envelops my attention. A head now peers out, followed by nimble knees.

Still fucking freezing.

Another Camel Blue — because for some reason I deserve a treat. Bursting from the cold and dark, the flame awakens my glowing companion.

Is it possible that such an embrace of absurdity is all we have now? Can such an emotional triggering to pollute the body even further, as respite from the fear of its agonizing destruction, through the primitive act of breathing itself, is it justified by some infantile reflex?

Or is it far more mundane and simplistic — that I have rediscovered passion for the narcotic relief provided by eloquently starving my brain of oxygen, arresting my blood of its restless flow with every supple intake of smoke.

A young boy, petrified to stillness, choked and sealed off from the world that still loves him. And the view from here is, obscenely, magnificent. The crescent moon, flanked directly below by your most famous constellations, is itself somehow, at this vantage point, centring the entire cosmos itself between the pillars of brutalist concrete on each side of my feet. My legs hug each other close, cold but without a tremor. The smoke leaving my lungs is warm, dirty and sweet.

I take a fancy to the thought that the ‘mental contagion’ that Ben Okri describes, of which we are all plagued by, finds its familiar in the act of cigarette-smoking. Angst and calm both flicker back and forth, licking my mind like a candle and then just as easily abating according to the quiver of the breeze.

This reads more like a crude intellectualization of this global crisis, appropriating a necessary act of meditation in the far too belated acceptance that the nicotine now has its claws in me. The body is now in love with a specific sensation of calm that wipes away the noise.

It may be useful to think, as Alain de Botton, with characteristically twisted mirth, gently reminds us, that what we are witnessing is merely a visitation of existential truths upon our normally unperturbed minds. There is something to be said also for the frequency of mortality to the point that we can barely ignore it, seeing as it now serves as the narrative motor for the news media. Yet that in itself may seem both banal and, curiously, illuminating.

Ours is not simply a case of self-imprisonment via state coercion, but in fact epitomises the enduring reality that we are prisoners of our own instinct for self-preservation, collectively and individually (witness the spike in volunteering for the NHS, of mutual aid groups).

And still — the cigarette draws its fiery dying breath — it takes a remarkable, epochal situation like this pandemic to instruct the reality that we, things, have always been this fragile. That appears to be the real absurdity. Up against the spectre of death’s transmission in the air, our mental defences are breached. Not quite torn apart by epiphanies, our moods instead carry the mild impress of perseverance.

The next night, after midnight, I am on other side of the pebbled bank. Walking further than usual, I encounter a stark clearing between the trees that had somehow escaped my stroll before. I start down the dry mud path. The outstretched magnificence of the trees peer over me again and they whisper a fear through my skull. Clumsily, I kill the cigarette and leave.

Finding a bench this time, my thoughts return to the steady flow of the river, and I inhale the ripples that perfectly divide its burnt red shimmer from the thick darkness. Always turning itself over and over, the current continues, unhurried, determined.

The ghost of Blair still haunts Labour

March 3rd, 2020

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before…

The Labour Party is prone to romanticising, perhaps most often about itself. Yet this overwrought leadership campaign has exposed just how little imagination it actually seems to have when it comes to judging its own history.

Love or hate it, Jeremy Corbyn — the man, the myth, the Marxist in the allotment — was a phenomenon, and in his own way will probably be remembered as an aberration not in the nature of his politics but in his personality, beginning as a genteel anti-politician, possessing a dullness that was infinitely endearing to some, and probably shielded him from a lot more of the outright venom thrown his way than some, left or right, would care to admit.

After winning in 2015, the inevitable comparisons were drawn between Corbyn and Michael Foot — the two men sharing a traditionally romantic left-worldview, unfazed by and even contemptuous of the esteem of the establishment; shabby rebels whose idealism won the adulation of the Labour Party, but not enough to stop abysmal, epochal defeat at the ballot box.

This parallel was always somewhat misplaced. Foot was a compromise candidate to keep the radical left happy, but he was just as exhausted by the Bennites, to whom Corbyn belonged, by the time he stepped down after leading Labour to what was its worst post-war electoral result in terms of seats — until December 12, 2019.

Since the bad death of the Corbyn project, Labour has once again hastily regressed into self-mythology, whereby the runaway favourite to win is caricatured as either a long-game Kinnock figure who will take on the more rabid parts of the far-left; a sheepish and insecure Miliband 2.0, forever caught between radical impulse and the gloss of conventional ‘electability’; even Faust himself, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Maybe it’s the Johnny Bravo hair that indicates a whiff of vanity about Starmer. Maybe the party has just forgotten what a Labour leader as a political performer looks like that they can’t help but reach for the B-word. Such a crazed, messianic shadow Blair seems to cast over his former party. Considering that the Labour selectorate, even after five years under his complete antithesis in Jeremy Corbyn, largely recoils from Blair with such unadulterated ire, and what’s more, showering the man who “led” the party to its worst defeat in nearly a century, suggests that there is something irrational, even obsessive, about such a hatred.

I do not come to praise Blair, nor to bury him. He is, after all, something of a ghost anyway — as Robert Harris would tell us. Andrew Adonis may encapsulate the same brand of dull nostalgia he decries of the hard left when he says that Labour needs to learn to ‘love’ Tony Blair, but there is a grain of truth in the idea that Labour needs to exorcise itself of this shiny, happy demon.

“But Iraq!” a voice cries from the back end of a committee room in some obscure CLP.

Of course Iraq. Nobody has forgotten Iraq.

But it is not the main reason Blair continues to be despised, particularly in his own party.

After all, if Tony Blair had not backed Bush, guess what?

*drumroll please*

The Iraq War still would have happened.

On the eve of the Chilcot report in 2016, a shrewd commentator was quick to note that the question of ‘why’ Tony Blair went to war has always been a fallacious one. Faced with a choice of letting Bush do his thing, or seeking the characteristic ‘third way’ through the UN route, of course Blair picked the latter. It was, and always has been, for Blair, about strategy.

The man became a husk to strategic thinking because his entire political philosophy was structured around strategy, of how to get power and grip it tight. His mentality was how best to do politics, going from the assumptions that people were mostly happy with Thatcher’s political settlement, which he perhaps too eagerly perceived as inclusive of ‘The Special Relationship’ with Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and then Dubya.

It was, in his own perverse way, about keeping Labour in government. If Labour being in power is considered high up on your list of aspirations, then having it as your raison d’etre at-all-costs is far from a demonstration of ‘Tory values’ as so many are quick to hiss at the legacy of New Labour — even as they eviscerate the government that replaced it for undoing its record of public investment and, you know, not scorching the entire social fabric of the country.

Of course Blair was wrong, and he deserves our contempt for the levity he brought to understanding an actual war as distinct entity to politics in itself. Ironically keeping out of the war would have done the Labour Party more favours. Blair played the cards as they were dealt, himself having no previous experience of government and wracked with neuroses about his party’s historic electoral failures. Once more, this does not amount to excuse, only explanation.

It also serves as an important example of the selective amnesia that a large minority in the party are willing to undertake in order to avoid imagining the situations of grave importance and sheer hypocrisy that politics demands.

“Stop right there — this is pure ideology!”

Is this merely a sanitisation of neoliberal political structures, wherein ‘tough decisions’ become synonymous with moral failure, and can be inverted as such and then excused?

Maybe Jeremy Corbyn will always be a better man than Blair because he didn’t go to war in Iraq. It might be fun to imagine Corbyn as Prime Minister politely curtly telling Bush ‘no’ in his own passive-aggressive way, with the typical lack of explanation.

For a while it was tantalising to imagine a man like Corbyn, serial backbencher, calling the shots and trolling the establishment. It certainly needs more than a good trolling.

But the stories of Corbyn and Blair have been appropriated into a particularly potent binary, used to discredit both, though ironically for Blair since such a contrast between principle and power only serves to strengthen his political philosophy. For many members there appears to be a vague but somehow definitive threshold, a tipping point for the soul of the party, whether by a certain concession of policy or position on foreign affairs, wherein the stain of compromise seeps in and the Labour party is not worth fighting for anymore.

If, for instance, you spoke to your most zealous Corbynite before the election about how Labour might behave in a political coalition with the SNP or the Lib Dems (heaven forfend!), you’d likely get a long, wide-eyed pause, the kind you get when someone is trying to imagine something far-fetched for the very first time. These kinds of political compromises were largely alien to how they conceived of politics.

It is not that Prime Minister Corbyn was always a pipe dream. In fact he came tantalisingly close. What happened? Him or his team decided that, having nearly won an election, the glass was half full and the march of history was nearing its end. How tragic that the opportunity, as Gramsci would have it, to exploit their smashing of the neoliberal hegemony gave them cause to double down on their most treasured, obscure positions — the kind which had little purchase in a country where largely, the British do not give a fuck about imperialism, their own or the Americans, other than that on balance the British Empire “was probably bad for the world but I don’t see why they should be tearing down any statues. What’s done is done, eh?”.

Of course such a position is ignorant and wrong, but Labour should be no stranger to this. The voters, are, after all, their own worst enemy. I feel conflicted as I write this because it is hard to read that last sentence and not feel completely arrogant, even if it is harder to look at the parlous state of our public services, the levels of poverty and inequality, to think of the horrors still wrought in the decades succeeding colonialism, and conclude that, to be fair, those who voted Tory merely possess “different points of view”. Politics is about choices, and they are nearly always ethical.

I can say with assurance that the majority voters were wrong and furthermore gullible to believe that Boris Johnson would be an effective Prime Minister, that Brexit would get ‘done’, that Jeremy Corbyn was enthusiastic about the IRA and Hamas bombing people and, perhaps my all time top-five dumbest things said on Question Time, that being on 80k is hard done by and increasing the tax threshold on the top 5% is the politics of envy. These notions are truly pathetic.

But deploring them with such verve is not going to move 44% of the electorate’s views one inch. Claiming that the media is biased against Corbyn’s Labour, or even Labour in general, does not persuade people. Passion has never been synonymous with persuasion, and Tony Blair understood this, even as his ideas could be vacuous at times, and in the end he turned out to be pretty Tory. (Okay, maybe not Tory, but still…).

The truth is the Labour Party is still scarred from Blair, the man who bore the twinkle of ‘electability’ while making gestures towards conventional Labour policies, right before junking them once he had given Labour the sheen of government.

But then we have record investment in public services, Sure Start, Tax Credits…stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. Corbyn’s naturally decision to embrace the exact contrary, using his own hardline streak as electoral strategy exposed the fundamental weakness of a particular left mindset that is now a strong pillar of the Labour party — that given the choice, the public will come out in droves finally, having waited so long for just the right shade of pure, unadulterated socialism.

Instead the public seem to hold Labour in real contempt right now. Call it brainwashing, call it asset selfishness, call it false-consciousness…the fact is most people don’t give that much of a shit. They’re too busy trying to live their lives with some meaning in this torrid system of capital that we espouse to hate so much. Just because we wanted social democracy more than Tony Blair or Peter Mandelson or Chuka Umunna or whatever stock centrist was doing the rounds that week did, doesn’t mean that more people than usual stopped to consider thinking about the arguments the Labour party was having with itself. People thought we were a bunch of self-convinced infants, because we were behaving like ones.

Being a socialist doesn’t make you a self-convinced infant. But wearing your political convictions as a point of pride isn’t charming, in fact it’s pretty irritating. You can see this more than you’d like to think, usually embedded in some randomer’s Twitter handle, as if being an RLB (or even Burgon. BURGON!) supporter was such a profound centre of identity that it must find its expression online, held up by that most eloquent and self-aware manifesto ‘no compromises with the electorate’ beneath it.

I wish we didn’t have to compromise with the electorate. But you know what Boris Johnson’s manifesto was? Compromise with the electorate, specifically the voters that Labour held on to in 2017. The pitch to “end” austerity was a compromise with the electorate. Not pledging to bring back fox-hunting was compromising with the electorate.

Do you really want to know what these six-toed pony-fuckers in their heart of hearts want toput into a Conservative manifesto? I never want to even have to think about that. The spectre of what once upon a time could be called the outlandish and unelectable nuggets of horror from the recesses of the Conservative imaginary now haunts modern politics. So long as they keep on peskily winning these damn elections, I’m not quite so sure how fantastical we can keep calling them.

Arguably, Labour “needs” ‘Blairism’ about as much as it needs ‘Corbynism’; they represent two distinct political instincts that can just about be grouped under one tent yet are in many ways lacking. Aside from the fact that too much pressure each way costs the party either its head or its heart, even if Blair can diagnose some of Labour’s toxic elements more acutely than any other, his style of politics remains alien to the current climate not because strategic thinking and pragmatism are ideological ‘compromises’ for the left (even if they are for some), but because the world that Tony Blair imagines is equally as fantastical as some of Corbynism’s utopian thinking.

Just as Corbynites believe that, in true Blairite fashion, education, education, education is the solution to the voter’s distrust of them, Blair would have us believe that the ‘centre’ is the answer, always, and Labour just has to be reminded of this masochistically through electoral defeat every twenty years or so.

It sounds perverse, but I believe most people do want to vote labour, and much about that hasn’t really changed in the past few years — perhaps it loves us only slightly less than it used to. In his much-derided, ill-judged but somewhat endearing foray into British politics, Russell Brand seemed to represent the kind of authentic but half-baked frustration with the political establishment that seemed to spill over into Corbynism.

Brand was of course slated swiftly and mercilessly, though the established voices’ reaction was also too casually dismissive. Yet in the same way that left populism is too attached to tales about evil faceless corporations versus the little guy, centrism was just as reluctant to admit that the political settlement it thought it could assimilate into social democratic government has been crumbling away for over a decade.

And then we had, of course, Brexit, and consequently two competing populist narratives taking centre stage in British politics in a fight to the death.

What December brutally showed was that, contrary to the left’s assumption that “what people really wanted was to transform society, they just didn’t know how until we could show them”, you cannot ever assume that the policies that arguably are the best for the state we’re in will win the day by virtue of that fact. That was a tough call for what seems counterintuitive to many of us on many factions of the left. But if all our diagnoses about the cynical, showbiz nature of politics are correct, then we have to start playing them at their own dirty game. Yes I would prefer Labour to have a female leader, one who was a bit less dull, perhaps less coiffed, perhaps less nasal, yada yada yada.

But if the polls say that the public are most comfortable with the quiffed barrister then I for one am sick of trying to pick fights with the electorate. Labour knows what it stands for now. We can in a large degree thank Corbyn for that. Isn’t the best legacy for us to have a better way to get the actual villains out of government, by any means necessary?

Then perhaps, when the dust has settled, we can have a reasoned discussion about a four-day week, or ‘open selection’. And yes, sadly, about Israel-Palestine. Not because it is not important, but because no fringe conference meeting is going to solve the problems of the Middle East.

So pick the *most likely* winner and give them hell for their mistakes, because if anything is certain it’s that the membership has more power and responsibility than ever before in Labour’s 120 years of existing(of which we have been in power for a meagre thirty).

Let’s meet people where they are, not where we think they should be. If we disagree with their views on immigration, let’s say so — and say why. Let’s not “explain” structural reasons why class resentment is displaced onto foreigners, or why we shouldn’t do anything about Syria because of simplistic narratives around US imperialism, or why they if they “just read the manifesto” they will see why government borrowing is manageable for investment.

As Paul Mason (another ally recently disowned by the sectarian left in light of his support for Starmer) outlines, there are three defining issues for Labour and Britain at this juncture:

1. The Climate.
2. Redistribution of wealth and power into the local communities.
3. Resisting the resurgent, hard-right nationalist government and the standing up for the victims of the Tories’ ‘lost decade’.

So let’s talk about them. Loudly, effectively, angrily even, because anger one fundamental part of the left’s arsenal, as Tony Benn put it. We can take this the clarity of purpose that our radical instincts and build an effective, pluralistic and confident movement that is conscious of its historic status as an underdog party. This is how we keep the spirit of the Corbyn era, which most of us, for good reason, became so enamoured with.

Remember that whirlwind election of 2017, when to be hopeful was to be, fleetingly, cool? I don’t think any of us want to forget that, mostly because we all know that Labour will probably never do “cool” again. But it doesn’t really have to.

In the mean time, if people aren’t hearing us, it is not because they OR we are completely wrong — it is because we haven’t made the right arguments. And, after all, if Labour is right about anything, it ultimately needs to prove it by majority consent.

Otherwise, what’s left?

The “Brexit” Election has lived up to its shitshow of a name

December 11th, 2019

This has to be the most depressing election ever — it shouldn’t be.

It is an ironic but telling truth that political debate never really permeates everyday life in the way it should — or at least, the way many politicians would like. Yet this election is taking place precisely because the governing party recognises this fact — a strategy that has historically shaped the Tories’ electoral fortunes. As voters we play our biggest role in democracy once every few years, the debate always already framed for us. You can chalk this up to the structure of our political system or, in the current climate, an acute sense of voter fatigue or even dreariness.

A winter election was dreaded for precisely these conditions, but not just for any activist trying to muster the fighting spirit necessary for canvassing in the bitter cold. At the beginning of the campaign you could ask anyone their feelings on Britain once again stumbling to the polls, and the consensus would have been a nagging desire that this could all just disappear.

The fictitious assumption that this election will ‘Get Brexit Done’ and thus make politics ‘go away’, wherever that might be, is therefore the most pernicious of a litany of untruths that have been deployed during this campaign. The noise marches on, and while pressing questions about Brexit’s effect on the UK’s international trade, not to mention the ocean of minutiae it contains will hopefully, eventually, be pored over, the fundamental question of why we have been brought to this point as a democracy will subside. Crucially, this is the fulcrum of Boris Johnson’s strategy — that the only way to harness voter apathy into a successful electoral coalition is to dredge up the ghoulish rage of the EU referendum.

With two days to go, the paradox is that for such a tawdry and predictable affair, it seems the initial inertia and confusion has now been baked into a keener sense of what is really at stake in this election. The fact that Labour have, perhaps with little success, had to build an adjacent narrative of social decline and the fear of a consolidated legacy of austerity has at least recuperated a sense that the election is about the state of the country.

While every election campaign contains disinformation and character assassination, the particular ugliness of this one feels less indebted to tactics and dirty tricks than its conjuring of the wretched spectre of 2016. The brutal paradox of British politics lies in the fact that the obsessive question of what Brexit actually fucking means is both immense and at the same time completely robbed of any substance by the failure of our political system to decipher it. Instead, we are subjected to a compulsive, Freudian repetition of the same question to ourselves while the EU itself (remember them?) looks on in restrained bewilderment and pity.

Boris Johnson claims to have an answer to the riddle of Brexit. Of the options provided by the fundamentally grey foundations on which the house of Brexit was built, Johnson’s advantage lies in the fact that, even though the laborious question of a ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ exit from the EU is apparently for the birds, Corbyn’s arguably more progressive offer is overshadowed by the fact that his “fantastic” deal bears the pigment of reality. Whether the large minority of voters poised to give Johnson’s deal a mandate will do so out of conviction or exhaustion has been made irrelevant. This feels more serious than ‘post-truth’: we have lapsed into a constant papering of cynicism over every complex question.

The idea that it is in this context that the Tories are currently expected to achieve their best result for 30 years should be a damning indictment of our political culture, and yet nobody even wants to go that far — least of all the press. Events and perceptions have become too volatile to be captured by traditional political commentary. Though the Brexit vote emerged from decades of neoliberalism, the event itself marked a point of no return, regardless of how or whether we actually left. It would be easy to take a more theatrical, individualist view of how it has enabled the ascent of politicians with outright contempt for the truth, as opposed to the ‘regular’ kind who are just inconvenienced by it.

But the reality is that for all the sloganeering to ‘take back control’, every day that passes confirms the truth that modern Britain has been let off its leash. That the election has so far revolved around the efficacy of particular deceits only proves further that whatever the outcome, nobody knows how to calm this storm. For the Prime Minister, ‘Take Back Control’ has three years down the line been reheated as ‘Give ME Control’. For Mr. Corbyn, any shot at upsetting the scales will be banked on the possibility of ensuring even more instability with another hung parliament and another referendum.

The tragedy of all this is that democracy should not be this dramatic — if we were to be healthily engaged with it. Even at the point where we are, the national campaign once again shaken by terror, it is not the cynicism of the Prime Minister’s exploitation of this tragedy but the sheer predictability of it that should disturb us. Our de-sensitisation to such knavery has warped the consensus around this winter election into one of detachment, where no party is to be trusted. Labour’s attempt to arrest the narrative of this election by revealing the vulnerability of the NHS in any future trade talks arrives, perhaps too late, from the recognition that the ephemeral promise of Brexit is what will make or break his party come Thursday.

It should be astonishing that we have reached this point, and yet as the campaign has gone on it seems that any natural emotive response is a thing of the past. Johnson’s election as Tory leader was carried over with the pulse of quiet inevitability that had been a constant background hum since UK voted to leave, but the dawning reality of his election as Tory leader crystallised just how morbidly logical our situation is when politics becomes so purely Machiavellian. That an individual so steeped in falsehoods, bad faith and lurid, overweening ambition could be elevated to the rank of statesman might not surprise you on TV. But in a democracy we always have to kid ourselves a little that the mundane reality is that public service might mean as much as a grain to these people.

He wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Five years ago Boris Johnson was a transparent, shoddy Mayor of London yes, but amusing at best and could rely on his charm, with that slight whiff of possible self-deprecation, to win people over. At worst, you could pillory his vanity — a chancer whose platinum education from Eton to Oxford that yielded him a degree in Classics had endowed him not with the wisdom or gravitas of the Greeks, but only a superficial grasp of your nearest classical reference to sprinkle into a carefully honed performance of buffoonery.

Cast your mind back to the morning of the referendum. The ocean of heckling that Johnson awoke to all over the news resonated amid the frenzy — some cathartic respite for the losing side and a reminder to the former Mayor of the opportunity cost of his cynical positioning for the Tory crown. As he reached the podium at Vote Leave HQ, you could glean from his sullen eyes, like the weight of a merciless hangover, some embers of justice. The ashen face and subdued body language of the man who had done more to legitimise the idea of Brexit than any other revealed the true degree to which he had planned for, and even desired, victory. What might resemble shame in a person otherwise incapable of it looked instead to be a fleeting realisation that the chaotic situation he had engineered might just be more important than him.

Since then it has been a race to the bottom in terms of humility. Instead we have had Johnson as Foreign Secretary, whose incompetence led to the jailing of a British citizen in Iran and presumably fit a pattern of behaviour which had Downing Street blacklist him from security service access. A whole host of diplomatic highlights include during the throwing the US Ambassador under the proverbial bus, calling the French ‘turds’, making light of ‘dead bodies’ in Libya, drawing colourful WWII prisoner of war comparisons to the French President Hollande, etc. Even in resigning his post in calculated opposition to his predecessor’s Brexit deal, Johnson still felt that relegating himself to the backbenches for some more plotting earned a front-page, mock-Churchillian spread in the Telegraph. Even this obsession with Winston Churchill itself seems to have only amounted to passing the torch for just about every racist or otherwise bigoted opinion of the past century.

With this Johnson has exposed just how insignificant to him are not only matters of statecraft but basic levels of empathy, responsibility and goodwill. Even as we reach the endgame, the Johnson chimera which has been so far comfortably waxing between passionate bumbler and entitled sociopath has been coming apart under the right amount of pressure.

In the event that the Conservatives do not gain an overall majority, it will in all likeliness be a consequence of tactical voting and a shirking of first preferences. For all of his success in bringing Labour closer to government two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal is demonstrably not enough to bridge the intergenerational gap in Labour’s electoral coalition, for which the 52/48 divide has aggravated without mercy.

It is a poor reflection on his leadership that, having dramatically improved his party’s share of the vote by 10% in 2017, he will have failed to tend that fertile ground towards building a winning coalition (if the stakes weren’t higher, an allotment gag would be appropriate).

There is, after all, a twinge of inevitability to Corbyn’s failings, which lay less in his political views than his leadership style, and the reality of leading a party which, though seemingly united by the last election’s vindication of his policies, in the end could not help but indulge in bitter internecine struggles. Fundamentally, the reality that Labour’s best hope of seizing power is in the event of a hung parliament is rooted in the leadership’s abysmal failure to tackle racism in its own backyard.

There would nevertheless be a bitter logic to a Tory victory. Three years ago (a phrase we have become so agonizingly familiar with) the electorate voted narrowly to leave the European Union. While the victory was seized by the colouring of an irresponsible fantasy with a fierce anti-establishment feeling, contrary to what I and many others residually kept faith in there has been no apparent shift in public opinion. The Tories have run a morally bankrupt but low-key campaign centred on this fact, and the ludicrous nature of our electoral system permits a united Leave vote to call the shots for the next five years.

I wish that there was consolation in the fact that if Johnson is elected, Brexit will finally mean more than just the word, and we will be vindicated. Yes, the Prime Minister’s chicanery will be exposed soon enough.

It will also mean we start finding strange, unregulated products from America on our shelves. It will mean the supposed millions that ‘could’ fund the NHS are instead diverted towards minimising the blows to our economy from cutting off our immediate trading partners, all the while the man who made such wild promises presides over a further crumbling health service.

It will mean the health service becoming vulnerable to the whims of a competing trade agreement with the USA. Brexit will mean that Britain decries its neighbours who will make an EU trade arrangement as difficult as they desire, retreating into arrogant self-pity and a deepening of insular populism.

It will mean exactly what we knew it would mean when the same shifty careerists scammed enough people into endorsing it last time. Brexit will waste years of the time we could have used to fix the problems the Conservatives caused, and will mean that an independent Britain is a lonely one, with its diplomatic goodwill squandered abroad while at home homelessness rises along with the unthinkable amount of children living in relative poverty.

But that won’t be a victory for common sense. It will be a victory for fear and loathing, and the fear is palpable that the parliamentary paralysis we have come from will be sorely missed when it is Britain that has been proverbially “done”.

It would be senseless to admit defeat until the exit poll. If our chaotic recent history is anything to go by, the progressive majority still have time. It would be a bitter irony indeed if the yoof-quake that robbed Theresa May of her hubris would fail to do the same to a new foe who in comparison makes May come off like Maggie Smith.

Though Labour have steadily narrowed the gap, there has not be the same atmosphere around its surge last time around. But to write off hope now would diminish what could be our only tool of resistance in the coming years. Against the shrinking of our future at the expense of a nationalist mirage based on all the wrong lessons of our past, this may be the last chance to save this fragile country from its worst impulses. If my worst fears prove correct, the risk of the hope killing me is worth it compared to the idea that we waste our last opportunity to at least act as if we can make a difference.

On December 12th, give the country an early Christmas present:

Get Boris Gone.