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Posts Tagged ‘civil-society’

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Global leadership opinion: Where will the West turn for its survival?

In Uncategorized on December 23, 2025 at 1:22 pm

WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was everywhere: “Enjoy!”

Now, 19 years of democratic recession, a debt crisis, expose Western systems as frail. In our hubristic flush we assumed democratic capitalism was downloadable. Run by a dull-administrative-class alert to the ruinous. The presumption of continuous growth handed agency from politics to borg-institutions, who bent, then snapped their public-mood antennae.

Under all is our obsession with liberty. A history-busting-run at Western freedom is under threat by liberalism transmogrifying into nihilism. The strongmen and tech disruptors’ wells of ressentiment are accelerating an end to post-war sensibilities. They have mastered narrative speed and promised breakthrough-innovation (Norman Mailer: ‘Technology is erotic’).

The tediously long years of the UK’s conservative government between 2010-‘24, was aversion to agency. Characterising Western paralysis. Unlike 1951-’64 (consolidating post-war consensus), and ‘79-’97 (economic re-balancing). Two periods of consequential power. The UK’s four decades of ‘Brussels make the rules’ has drippified British politics. The ontic wake-up has only just started.

The EU, a constitution-eating bureaucratic monster, nudged the UK’s two main parties to become an undifferentiated liberal uniparty. Britain’s Liberal Party proper last won a general election in 1906 and were a spent force by the 1950s. The Conservative (sort of Republican) and Labour (sort of Democrat) parties absorbed deep-seated liberalising moods, shunting their former constitutional-beliefs to the margins. The unifying elements of the two main parties, imperialism (Conservative) and clubbish-socialism (Labour), gradually faded as people sensed genuine social change beneath their feet. An effective constitution being measured by the glacial inexorability of its Goldilocks economics: Not too hot, not too cold, just right.

The temptation of unities

Now, the idealogues on the reactionary right have gained traction as the uniparty has not restrained liberal excesses. Both market and social liberalism have become enchanted by extreme variation. Extremes tend towards ideological unities, which themselves require modern efficiency. The constant appeal within UK politics to modernise into an efficiency-state has been undermined by an inbuilt British transgressiveness. Germany, Japan and even the United States are regarded with a measure of suspicion for their unifying proclivities.

Britain’s post-war self-loathing was not a result of colonial overreach alone, but having spent too long under imperial sermonising about unity. If you are an empire, constant self-justification wears the soul. Learning to love a post-imperial nation is a work of quiet courage. Post-empire we are surprised by our attractive sensibilities. We scan the room and note, we are not that bad after all. But, tempted towards unities. Many of which are illusions. Such as a state-nation in place of a nation-state.

A monumental challenge is to steer, and not destroy our rules-based system, its built-in insurances, civil society’s cohesion, and nation-state autonomy, within a functioning global economy. One that prefers transparency rather than a world of murky state protectionism and eccentric deal-making.

After the nihilism, what?

It is worth reminding that liberal democracy is civil society. Civil society being that plural liberal space we occupy and sustain through constant compromise. Not screaming across the abyss, but crossing it to negotiate with those we profoundly disagree with. For the engine of Western freedom stems from the private realm, the collaborating trusts and mutual partnerships.

And this is a very modern phenomenon, an outturn of the Protestant Reformation’s separation of spheres (politics, religion, economics, family life). This mindset of self-governance defeated the totalising unities of the Catholic Church’s hierarchical social frames. It spawned the myriad voluntary associations, and supercharged industrial capitalism’s distribution of wealth. But we are newly fragile, suffering the enervating effects of supra-institutionalisation. Western confidence is at an all-time low and we are in search of renewal.

Among other egregious illusions is the assumption economic growth itself builds civil society. That is, as social mobility slows, economic hyper-individualism will perpetuate openness and tolerance that previously came from an open public square. By contracting Western institutions to determine the good on our behalf they have drifted into infantile functionalism, distributing liberal rights and privileges devoid of negotiation and compromise. We cannot switch off this machine’s autopilot, with the stark awareness that, as Daniel Bell puts it, “The national state has become too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems”. 

Up to the end of the Cold War, as another writer offers, we were a “centrally organised, rigidly bounded, and hysterically concerned with impenetrable boundaries” which have now given way to a world “in which territorial, ideological, and issue boundaries are attenuated, unclear, and confusing”. The boundary was of course inter-locking international agreements, civil society, with private bodies and individuals as principal arbiters of the good, with their hard yards of moderation.

The collapse of Western institutional legitimacy has meant a lurch from international rules to unrestrained liberalism. Naivete has permitted overspend, supranationalism, an AI gamble, as a means to sustain ‘sacred’ growth above moral authority. This has working communities, those who persist in civil society’s ritual of sustained interaction, as losers in the extreme liberal experiment, craving security.

Motorville and Workington Man throwing spanners in the works

As a result, the working public is on the move, hunting leaders with moral seriousness who can arrest institutional overreach. Motorville, USA, the New Deal Democrat heartland states, has turned red (Republican). Why? Trump is a fighter, they say. In the UK, Workington Man, possessing Motorville’s white post-industrial discontents, is heading towards its version of Trumpism, at speed. Largely with the intent of lobbing a spanner into the machinery. It must be careful for what unities it wishes.

Britain and Europe have allowed sufficient dissolving of negotiated settlements, with their loci of love and politics, and their visible measurable outcomes, to invite authoritarianism. The UK, France and Germany are heading towards populist government at their next elections. America has already responded by gutting the Republican Party of its patrician class. The post-war moderate order, the passive centrists (PCs) trusted a growth model (unending expansion of liberal democracy), not least when its hard power failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, which remain strategic mysteries.

911, it turns out, has had lasting strategic impact. An unseen, unlocatable enemy, wake politicians in the night, and has led to salami sliced civil liberties, and security overreach. A patient, slow-burn UK populace, whose fur is often available for stroking, is roused from its post-war stupor.

In the UK, patrician institutions, such as the BBC, an expanded public sector, even the Church of England, are Fur Strokers in Chief, as they represent the hinterland between extreme liberalism and civil society. They are asked to reassure, by offering the language of a shared consciousness that restrains any sense of a fragile social order. They are split between serving and pacifying.

Bounded liberal capitalism worked because it was put to work generating wealth and well-being within the human settlements it served, measured by the quality of service at the point of delivery. Business and civic society knew who its principal client was. But untrammelled optimism thought, in time, China would, on the back of trade, capitulate to Westerners’ commodious living.

The passive centrists as the new extremists

Trumpism and the Trump Era (ten years of influence) has, in the UK and parts of Europe, exposed the radical centre not as just complacent, but rabidly against action, a violent laissez faire’ism. The EU’s performance leave ribs aching. These are aggressive non-aggressives. You will be passive, and let da system hum and whirr. Trumpism is irking the passionate ‘do nothing’ majority here.

Passive centrism, aggressively passive, points to unities that deny any sense of ultimacy. As in: ‘Ultimate concern for what is ultimately important’. Imperialism, solidarity-socialism, and extreme liberalism are unities that avoid notions of what is possible, and begs the question of what overarching objectives does a modern Western polity reach for next. Is there anything in our inheritance that can anchor our ship?

19th century critic John Ruskin saw a modernism (education and arts) where the images of Christ, as Western civilisation’s ultimacy, its square root of culture, being squeezed out of the canon, and with society denying this ommission to itself in the process. Modernity (society and culture) has then done the same, shunted the horizon out of its dialectic. If the Present Age is turning to reacquaint itself with something real it starts with an agreement that we are, in fact, denying what is possible. Or, as W B Yeats puts it:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”

In The Second Coming Yeats offers another image, the beast-cynic, on his way to re-birth. Weary Willie’s poetry gave in to temptation. He starts Vacillation with a flash of honesty: “Between extremities, Man runs his course”. And slides into disillusionment, seeing more in Homer’s and Shakespeare’s complacent centrism than Christ’s ultimacy.

The PCs have reacted similarly against ultimacy. Christ rejects the synagogue’s rabbi fast-track programme, striking out for the top of the horizon, but the centre prefer him as itinerant prophet-wanderer. The centre’s mumbler, denying Christ as reality realist (T S Eliot). Eliot restores Christ into modernism’s imagery. But misses that Christ was the first modern man, and is not leading us back to the grinding authority of Eliot’s rediscovered orthodoxies.

The PCs respond to the expansionist aspirations of China, who wish to roll back, with Russia and others, the influence of the West, and especially the USA’s global dominance, with all the critical response of a noctambulist. The institutionalised are three iterations behind reality, and, probably unwittingly, have made the fatal slip from cynicism into disillusionment.

Cynicism in the Western vision is a category error. Modernity itself is not a cynical reaction. Reactions to modernity oft are, but the modern itself is not a cynical response to tradition. Modernity, as The New, was and is always there. But modernity itself does not have to unify in place of dialogue.

3rd c. biographer Diogenes Laertius offers Plato’s man in a modern category, labelled functionally as a ‘featherless bi-ped’: “Plato defined man thus: “Man is a two-footed, featherless animal,” and was much praised for the definition; so Diogenes [the Cynic] plucked a cock and brought it into his school, and said, “This is Plato’s man.” 

““And I,” said he, “am Diogenes the dog.” And when he was asked to what actions of his it was owing that he was called a dog, he said, “Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues.” 

So, cynicism has an ability to explore reality, but collapses like Yeats in its inability to offer a path. Populism is built from a cynical offering of unities. And the centrists have fallen into the same vision of modernity.

What centrist governance does not spot during democratic expansion is the extent of its infantilising and categorising, transferring parliamentary sovereignty into a chop technocracy. That is, centrism entered the ‘broken middle’ between dystopia and utopia, but only to over-unify. The technocrat, at a personal level, cannot stomach the necessary messiness of growth, so grab the sensation of unified order. ‘Practical duty’ without a horizon.

Diogenes the dog fawns over physics as a means to understanding, with its visible frames of connections across space and time, but barks at the moment of truth. Ordinary people on the ground, in their creative absurdity, cannot see that technocracy’s boilerplate is a loss of consciousness.

As we face completeness in the West, it turns out to be an illusion of unities. We should not be surprised how so many are in fierce agreement. In fact, everyone in the room. The West, even in its achievements, is being lowered steadily. To borrow from Simone Weil: “We have to think that [whoever has done us harm] has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level”. A humbled West is its best opportunity to offer a renewed ultimacy of what is possible. Albeit over a coffee, or three, in a steaming coffee house, which we offer to pay for.

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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity

In Uncategorized on October 9, 2024 at 8:45 am

AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip.  François Hollande, in his 2022 book Bouleversements (Upheavals), argues the EU is a project of “reason and not of the heart”. Which is warm prose for creating sacred symbols out of modernity. A project which European modernes believe still requires completion, and is in danger now of being left undone.

Although Hollande advocates halting the march towards unfettered federalism he says “European construction continues as before”. This leaves European nation-states with nowhere to go. They are junior to the supra-national EU. Hence the future will be a gradual, and messy, slunk back to the only workable unit in political-economy, the independent nation-state. The value of heading back to this boundary marker, as led by Britain, is it further sees off nascent far-right populism.

For the nation-state is Europe’s great achievement, our inheritance, the place where religion was privatised, and difference not only made essential but welcome. It has been hiding in plain sight, unloved and written out of the curriculum, but remains the golden triumph of Europe’s brutal struggles.

Within its jurisdiction neighbourliness and shared citizenship transcend both old tribal boundaries and blind family loyalties. We are free to associate whatever our colour or creed, as we are neighbours and citizens. “I” require reason and forbearance to resolve differences with my neighbour as I cannot call on gang enmities. Together we form the “we”, bound by moral values, social customs, political institutions. To throw this wildly successful model away for the vague trans-nationalism of the Euro Mod is not just reckless but unthinking.

We in the UK are currently wondering just where are the coordinates of this new government. We know UK governments of late have a tendency to confusion: conservative on Monday, progressive come Tuesday. But both Conservative and Labour policy hearts tend to beat still with European modernity. A collective intellectual laziness. This goes to serve increased awareness that the UK populace has not seen a conservative government in over a generation. Thatcher, the economic liberal (indebtedness as wise and good), Blair-Brown likewise, but gilded with vague metro-moods. And the Cameron-Clegg coalition rolled-over the Blair-Brown government’s desire to knock the electorate off-balance by radiating selfsame turbo-confidence. And now the new Labour government has stolen Blair-Brown’s mantra: “Change is coming”. It is one thing to roll out a cliché, another to repeat it years later knowing just how empty it was then. The technocrat’s great weakness is unworldliness. If we are not ‘obedient to wider meaning, then we must accept the authority of local fashion’, to paraphrase W. H. Auden.

As shared actualities fragment, in our case the faltering post-war consensus between former warring nation-states, modern irony spreads in random forms. Epochal change, if it is indeed that, produces perverse effects, not least the hi-ironists of late-modernity. Irony here in the sense of negating what appears obvious. We the people crave good order, but if a normalcy is ending then figures emerge with “Der Geist der stets verneint”, the spirit that always denies, as in Goethe’s Mephistopheles.

And it is the nation-state that gives the most scope to the subjective self who seeks to negate dying orders, as well as exist outside of any march of history. Irony appears here also as hesitation in the face of anything cravenly unquestioned. In Britain the Great Hesitation was in the face of an unbelievable utopian Europe. The hard-won concept of the free self tends to creak at the prospect of universal ethics or a faux international “we”. Any international “we” is of course an abstraction of language, an unreality.

The change mantra offers a sensation of pace which is a kind of dopamine fix, but is equally an abstraction from the real sensations of daily living. Moving at speed towards faux change invites more clichés, as the faithful are those who ‘get on board’. The antidote is dealing with real things that bind ordinary people together inside their real encounter.

The value of modern irony (which challenges the whole, rather than Socratic irony which took cheery aim at the individual) is it has the potential to flip worldviews upside down. If a revived nation-state is an ironic negation of European modernity, where are its proponents? Genuine conservatives are by degrees an exiled diaspora hiding in The National Trust, the Church of England, and the legion of civic bodies that better represent loyalties to place, past, and the future. Genuine conservatism hesitatingly mutters: ‘Please stop, better do nothing for the time being’. It runs against the inner-drivebelt of European modernity which remains world-as-mechanism and not world-as-organism. World-as-mechanism chases down life down to destruction, and paints an ideal abstract of ‘man and woman’, which gives rise to modern ressentiment. Pursuing ideals is a contradiction in terms as life by necessity is without an ideal.

And in the meantime, our ex, America, is where a progressive landslide has not materialised. The majority of voters remain either conservative or moderate. Liberals have only just moved into the majority amongst Democrat voters. And America is so embattled as a monetary hegemon, with the Fed putting out economic forest fires, as well as the Republican Party being taken over by its members, appointing one of their own as leader, do they have any time for western leadership?

Underneath the return to the nation-state as the only sane model of government, is this tension between the social-conservatism of the voting public, and the metro-modernity of the unrooted political class who wander in a cosmopolitan haze far from ordinary existence. As such Brexit blew another whistle on modernity as a completable project. Hence, the UK’s Conservative Party has a dilemma. Should it appoint a genuine conservative leader who actually represents conservatives, which will see it in the wilderness for some time. The past is the future is not a vote winner.  Hence an ideological wasteland in UK politics, but undertowed by a residuum of Euro modernity.

As a result of Brexit the sun is setting on the EU, for in losing Britain it has lost its Anglo-Saxon trophy, and raison d’etre, which is to counter US hegemony, and to advance France’s Enlightenment vision of a modern Europe. Even though English and US law diverges, the US remains a conservative force, and at direct odds with the European project. Notions of harmony and unity under the English constitution sees English-modernity as a process of tradition constantly shaping ‘the new’, moulding it, making it continuous and stable. English-modernity is bound by its historical continuity. Where French-modernity is a huge effort to found a settled constitution on ill-defined modern progress. 15 constitutions since 1791 and still counting.

For change within a modern context is rooted in contingent spaces and their provisional qualities. The assumption is that forums fill their own vacuum. They do not. Modern public spheres are largely empty spaces and get filled quite quickly, not unlike resort sunbeds. What goes into the western forum always remains provisional. What reaches the modern English sunbed first is the utilitarian argument. It throws its towel down at dawn, but under this seeming pragmatism is a disguised ironic commitment to continuity. Tradition hides very effectively inside chop pragmatism.

And irony is the second casualty of modern rationalism. Irony understands the relationship between modernisation as a project and its effects on the creative life force of nation-states. For organisational leaders in the commercial sector, markets are carriers of modernity and tradition. Effective strategic leadership is alert to both forces and holds the space open. And is alert to how both work in terms of speed and change. The dance or art of the CEO as strategist is understanding how modern rationalism and irony influence notions of authority and leadership.

Authority has been found to be quite distinct from the increasingly contingent word ‘leadership’. Leadership, with sufficient revision, can again effect genuine long-term value-adding stability, but when misused, gradually diminishes authority.

Nature, in response, builds in tension between authority and leadership with unsurpassable majesty. We argue nature’s beauty stems from truth and love, and ugliness in the world finds its root in power and control. Life itself being a target for modern control mechanisms. The ancient argument is that the opposite of love is not hate, but power. Those that seek it gradually shrivel, and their organisation becomes an echo chamber for others to fix at a later stage. Those that do not seek power gain it. As do those who give power away. This presents the problem of vulnerability.

Now that is all well and lovely, as we know monsters do enact revolutions in their own country and manage to hold onto power for decades relatively untroubled. Of course everything around them rots. But here in the West we are prone to working in long evolved democratic spheres which invite extended engagement.  

Currently strategic leadership offers an ability to hold all the above in an adaptive tension. By all means react to new market signals, especially weak signals, but they are always carrying mixed messages which need evaluation. We can re-open dialogue around change and progress, and what they are in the post-industrial, late-modern, post-critical, post-theory, post-post landscape. Under modernity progress was forwards and upwards at speed, which has its inbuilt dilemmas.

T. S. Eliot’s vision in his 1922 poem The Waste Land pointed a finger at the solidified symbols of ‘industrial modern progress’ and reveals them as not progress but rather screen glitches in the eternal. Later in The Four Quartets he suggests it is a question of time confusion. If progress is always in the future, we are fundamentally forgetting progress itself, paradoxically, might be more a work of the past. That is, an instituting of values that leak their meaning throughout the organisation, effecting all behaviours, visible and invisible.

And a new UK government begs questions of not just international alignment but its ideological attachment to modern future, past and present. Turning from Europe to the US means a renewed relationship with both a low-modernity and a hidden conservatism. America invaded Britain after the war with televisual saturation. But America failed to export its conservatism as effectively. Both into Europe or Britain. The odd glimpse of European TV output, by contrast, seemed like something from a Proustian daydream. Renewing vows with the Pax Americana is made more interesting by the fact that western governments have let slip their grip on conservative politics, and its force for stability. Any defence of the eternal ‘western institution’ is being roughed up under monetisation. And the surge of right-wing popularism, with its national and nativist spirits.

Hollande offers that there is no European identity. He is not proposing total integration. But possibly not far off. The UK is still moving its emotional furniture from political integration as ‘the future’ into a surprise encounter with another Blairite progressive Labour government. Which will still largely be as metro-liberal as the outgoing metro-liberal Conservatives, who did little to foster meaningful development of the political ideological landscape. Both parties have fallen foul of technocratic utilitarian panic.

What actually is the ‘Change is coming!’ shtick? Continued modernisation via market liberalism, somewhat limply. It did not really know what it stood for. It did seem to be a code-phrase to say if we disrupt old-institutions through the market, something might happen that is better. But institutions are, despite their turmoil, holding something of a conservative line. Even if led by unworldly metro-liberal technocrats.

This means modernity remains a version of time that is unsustainable. The facing outwards toward a modern future was more importantly a turning away from facing each other. Conservatism (of any political shade) remains a turning towards each other’s face. At root, this is a face-to-face encounter with the ‘eyes and lips of the soul’, and the soul possesses its own natural order. If the “industrial revolution was, at bottom, an effort to substitute a technical order, an engineering conception of function and rationality for the haphazard ecological distributions of resources and climates”, against us adapting nature to our needs, then, as Daniel Bell argued, we are now in that position of being both “outside nature, and less and less with machinery and things”. Our modernity has pushed us past both nature and mechanisation, and into a clearing where we all stand and look at each other afresh, and go, ‘so?’, how do we recover a sustainable ordering of good society.

Bell is suggesting here that the celebrated industrial revolution might actually have been a rejection of a good technical order and even good engineering. A ripping up of good industrial progress itself for the sake of rapacious progress.

The strange mood and sensation of the now is, too few have the desire to complete the modern project. In Bell’s terms it is too random. As Oswald Spengler puts it: “Knowledge, for Kant, is mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories of reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which historical impressions are apprehended.” Better known as we have been thinking inside the world-history box of limited time and space logics. The sweep of civilisations and its patterns reveals more. That is, a culture emerges in its power, and then is spread to the masses (civilianised). That is, our Western Civilisation is a twilight of Western Culture, not its perpetuation. A questionable conception, as with many conservative philosophers, they miss the depth of lifeforce within humans to convert the most inhospitable conditions into life itself.  

Nevertheless, the arc of the Enlightenment project has touched down to ground and we can say science, culture, art, politics, economics have all underperformed under a modernised Western Civilisation. The Right and Left are almost in agreement. This is no more visible than in the hotchpotch of variable architecture in Britain. The beautiful and ugly within our post-war built environment reveal the confusion of what time and progress is.

Social media mimics this confusion. It creates narrow slices of reality. Which paradoxically is restoring context. Viewers repeatedly land on enduring imagery as glimpses of what might be possible if formed inside a new and more helpful world-history. In the background behind a manic presenter fishing for hits is something disturbingly durable, such as an ancient monument leaking its timeless symbolic meaning. A Doric column with its the image of the pure present. It was easy for the architect and developer to destroy these symbols as they pointed to a world that was already changing and needed none of their expensive improvements.

This disjuncture between the timeless and the modern is outlined in Roland Barthes’ studium and punctum. Studium is the desire to make contextual sense of a photographic image, and punctum is your eye falling on something in that image that it is not supposed to. At the opera or stand-up comedy gig, we cannot help notice the audience member on their phone, or the cracked ceiling speaking its own resonant message of reality.

Modern rationalism could not calculate civic value, and we look to a revived nation-state as a means to recovering aesthetic judgement. The same type of judgement that knows what is right and wrong in architecture or music, and is formed from centuries of communal face-to-face participation.

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General election(s) year: UK’s social contract up for renewal… but don’t let the utopians spoil it, as we have the solution already

In Uncategorized on May 30, 2024 at 11:18 am

TRUMP HAS OVERPOWERED US politics, irrespective of November’s presidential election result. How? Encounter, recognition, participation. Great Campaigners offer these in bucket-loads. More immediately a Republican presidency is seen as holing-below-the-waterline the Pax Americana. Teasing that the US will no longer guarantee the Western Alliance. This is the Republican’s ‘pumped-social-contract’, boilerplating anti-statist Jack Reacher-style ‘toothbrush and bus-ticket’ freedoms. A turn of the lens for a more defined American-self but fundamentally a retention of a red-hot market social-contract.

Here in the UK we sense more unsettled moods. We have no Great Campaigners. Turgidly technocratic lawmakers, armed with big spanners, the law, offer to access sub-structures of society to ‘fix the model’. Hammering under the bonnet (hood) currently extends from conscription to nationalisation. All this noise means the UK social-contract needs more than just US-style tweaks; it is up for renewal.

Britain leapt away from the US’s market-model after the war. It had to. Memories of squalor in the 1920s and 30s laid the ground for a post-war consensus. A commitment to full-employment and a truce with the unions was fraying badly by the mid-1970s, allowing Margaret Thatcher’s use of the market as a US-style social lever. Access to capital via debt would enable the purchase of property and even justice, via a right-rudder-turn back to Lockean freedom and its individualised society.

When Thatcher said ‘there is no society’, in an interview for Woman’s Own magazine in 1987, what she meant was it did not exist as an entity capable of action. In this sense she was right. Agency sits with you and me, the family, civil society (groups) and institutions. But, wrong in the sense that the village did actually exist as a coherent entity for social transformation. People did share resources temporal and spiritual, and hoicked the resistant into surrounding fields.

Thatcher’s social-contract has now run its course. As French economist Thomas Piketty infers, the power of capital has grown to such an extent as to unsettle our settlements; the places we live and be. We can’t quite put our finger on it, but our divide might well be the power of money itself. It buys more than it should. Social background is less the prime determinant of life-course in the UK, and increasingly access to capital is. Within communities some face serious jeopardy, whilst a neighbour from the same social contour is existentially safe. Neither lacked industry. In the free market, there are winners and losers; but should it be so? The cause of this fissure: the Rate of return on capital is overtaking economic Growth to the extent this has unbalanced normal power relations across communities.

The last time such seismic social tremors rumbled was the 1970s. The slogan in the run up to the 1974 General Election was “Who governs Britain?”, the unions or government. Industrial strife (weak management and powerful unions) ripped through the post-war consensus and laid the egg for Thatcher’s ’79 victory and the rebirth of economic liberalism, through privatisation of state assets; albeit restrained by commitment to the NHS and welfarism.

When political polar opposites Tony Benn (socialist grandee) and Sir Keith Joseph (centrist conservative turned architect of Thatcher’s policies) met on a train in the early 1980s Benn’s diary suggests they both agreed on one thing: Britain had made a mess of its post-war recovery. That sense of mess has arisen again, along with those willing to perform extreme surgery.

On the fringes there is a heady nostalgia among right-wing utopians to roll back 20th century constitutional reforms, starting with New Labour’s legacy (The Supreme Court, quango-Britain e.g. monetary policy committee), and onto the NHS, welfare state, and eventually taking the DeLorean back to a pre-WWI social contract.

It adds that devolution is a disaster. It says this as it believes a sovereign representative Parliament is the only fora for stable polity. Any delegation to sub-bodies results in ideas untested by the sandblasting of parliamentary debate, and will compound the constitutional muddle we are currently in.

What is the muddle? A clan society of special interest groups, a fudge of rights over responsibilities. A citizenry lacking courage and candour. A nanny-state run by technocrats (siloed administrators), rather than clear-sighted visionaries. No encounter, recognition or participation (ERP).

Again, this suffers the tyranny of the absence of nuance. We are a stunning economy that has managed decline in our industrial leadership since c. 1900. Social mobility has been remarkable. And it is ongoing. GDP has ticked along steadily.

Although it would be fair to say we have under-performed when we consider Britain’s contribution to the world in preceding centuries, our influence globally remains astonishing. But maybe now is the time to shake-out our constitutional skeleton.

Of course, that process has already begun. We came out of Europe because Europe was the future, once. It is not now. The Suez Crisis had brought down the imperial ceiling and in the 50s and 60s we stared up through broken roof tiles. Europe was the passing coracle and has enchanted us constitutionally for nearly five decades.  

But now we must not let the miserable right or left-wing utopians undermine the story. Misery finds company. Utopians are prone to frothing palms. US Republicans fear our apparent weak-tea landscape. They say a wild spirit is better than no spirit at all. But remember, America does not have the UK’s social fabric. One formed through long arcs of change cycles that America is yet to enjoy.

America is a money-society, and this is only a temporary contract. As American builds its institutions, it will move from pure liberal modus to a new diversity in its social complexity. Europe’s ancient and modern institutions offer us an inheritance that America is still evolving. No point in an entrepreneurial society if it does not leave any legacy for the next generation. If you have to keep rebuilding the citadel in every cycle then this is hardly solidarity with past or future.

England especially is a class-based society. That is, unmeritocratic.  Every revolutionary utopian throughout history thinks a social system can be destroyed and replaced. This has not worked anywhere. The US constitution is based on the English constitution; freedoms drawn down directly from the English social contract.

And the notion of class tends to suggest that the English working class is the bottom of a caste-system. It is not. To be ‘working class’ is no poor relation to notions of upper or middle ranks. As the class-system reflects values, and values reflect preferred worldviews, and worldviews are residues of inheritance. A society that has interplay of differing worldviews is at home with itself. It has an historic repository for ready use. We flatten this at our peril.

But there is a great deal in current constitutional concerns and a recalibration is due. A courageous society evolves by giving space to local fora. Local disputation travels to London in the Member of Parliament’s satchel for resolution; but under a bicameral legislature party whips drain the blood. And my argument here is social systems present in the UK are well-placed to deliver ERP. We are a civic society at heart so the utopian right need not blow hard. But their concerns do need addressing.

We can lay at the door of quango-government a weak-tea Parliament and excessively technocratic institutions. A restoring of parliamentary debate is due, but devolution and local political engagement is necessary. Oddly, the root to re-invigorating UK plc, is through grassroots politics and investment. The first step in this of course was Brexit.

The next step is recognising utopian right-wing liberal reform will not benefit the regions. London-centricity dogs the UK, and nostalgia for putting eggs into a dominant London-John-Bull-basket misses the opportunity to make the regions centres of both political and financial innovation.

Worth reminding that 120 years ago the UK-citizen had no contact with the state. Unless falling foul of George Dixon, the common-sense copper, who saw you on your way. The inner-angst of our entanglement with Big Institution is relatively new. Hence a supranational EU offered deep confusion for the Anglo-spheric self. Our social centre of gravity is local; the village is our Grand Model. Cities as ultimate destinations have worked themselves out of our system.

But domestic reform sits in the shadow of threats abroad. UK/Europe is likely to increase its defence spending from two to three percent. UK defence spending was averaging 2.5% between WWI and WWII.

The cracks in the Long Peace are widened by a red-hot US economy. It has seen off seismic shocks, from the 2008 Crash to Covid. Europe has absorbed enough Coca-Colanisation, preferring its humanism to US hubris. A New World Order is shaking out. America has caught its second-wind under Trump’s influence.

But, rapprochement with its enemies has failed. Even if Biden is returned, it is gearing up to be America Mk II: The Retreat. It will be dragged back from this by a Russia/China axis, but won’t come easily given the social underbelly exposed by the Republicans. And a non-allied Britain looks on, asking to hitch a ride on the US’s hegemonic success.

At home various sirens are calling for a Republican-style-contract. Some UK right-wing politicians have been re-born into this vacancy. This is not surprising. Some will wish to quarry-blast the UK from welfarism into a US-style warfare economy. Post-Thatcher Britain has had a succession of vanilla leaders who have not yet escaped the ‘broken middle’ of politics. Whereas America fears the zombie-economies of Europe.

The post-war consensus was like a boxer’s clinch between labour unions and government. This did not necessarily mean we were doing too bad economically, but when we looked across The English Channel, we felt queasy. John Bull was The Sick Man of Europe. We were being outrun. This sense of comparative failure, ultimately gave rise to Thatcher’s Thatcherism. Out with social consensus at home, and in with market liberalism. Her Victorian Christian conservatism, a tautology, a veneer. Whilst preaching kitchen sink conservation, she set in train market liberalism that unlocked forces unknown.

Back in the 70s détente plus sabre-rattling was the order of the day. Chancellor Willy Brandt had tipped West Germany further westward, underpinning the Atlantic Alliance, whilst simultaneously reaching out to The East (Ostpolitik). Such was the man.

Britain had meandered into the European Union (née EEC). And subsequently spent its time trying to get its fingers out of this woodchipper. The European Exchange Rate (Black Wednesday) and single-currency opt out (Maastricht Treaty) were close-run things. Britain was always ‘out’, as it was never ‘in’.

Britain’s Vietnam, The Suez Crisis, had a seismic impact on British politics up through into the 1960s. As Britain pootled, West Germany and France motored economically. An uneasy social compact looked eagerly to state-planning and Europe. Although Britain’s Labour Party had inaugurated this new post-war social contract (universal healthcare and welfare safety net), it was the Conservative Party that was seen as the most committed to its preservation through the 1950s, having been re-elected three-times-in-a-row in that decade.

And here we are now. Between old and new consensuses. Enemies of The West see a lack of guiding principle. After the war communism galvanised Western powers. Then al Qaeda.  But now we are strangely divided. The EU’s federal spirit will come up against Russian imperialism. As in the Balkans the EU will turn to NATO. Brexit empowers Germany in particular to loosen its commitment to US-leadership but when it attempts combined operations with EU partners against Russian forces reality will arrive tout de suite.

Winston Churchill in the latest of multiple revisions of his political career emerges as increasingly far-sighted. We study Churchill regularly because the emotional outfall of WWII meant we could not grasp easily the period in the run up to the war with sufficient detachment. The totemic image obscured the record. As we delve into the detail around his decisions, his modus grows as a siren of war-preparation and détente. His willingness to surround himself with opponents on the eve of The Battle of Britain, and contemplate the unthinkable, a deal with “that man” (Hitler), and allow appeasement voices space to speak, remains the mark of the prophetic. Prophets mirror ‘the people’ to the people. In other words speak the intuitions the people cannot voice themselves. And Churchill saw the value of painful dialogue.

Clement Attlee, Churchill’s war-time deputy and political opponent, suggests Churchill’s greatest gift was largely speaking, or speeching. The coalescing force of his narrative invited Britain into shared struggle, having allowed it to seriously contemplate coming-to-terms with Hitler in May 1940. Churchill could see Hitler was mad. And that is the right word I am afraid. Not least the majority of the world could not see the madness until some time later. Great efforts to explain Hitler have failed. Only madness fits. That human potential to lose humanity exists.

But I do not believe Churchill would have advised Western powers to camp on Russia’s doorstep so clumsily, provoking Putin into an offensive posture, as has NATO. Moral authority rests on simultaneous détente and war-preparation. Churchill’s early involvement in fostering a welfare state, through to his stamp of recommendation for a united states of Europe were typical of his insight. Albeit the latter probably without Britain’s involvement. It was rapprochement between France and Germany that mattered most, and he spoke for it.

Wars come and go. But long unvoiced years of private misery in the 30s sit deeply in the collective psyche, more so than WWII itself. Baby Boomers can recall squalor. Britain’s liberal economy lacked the structure to distribute the largesse from global trade and smoke-stack industry. The expanded public sector distributes wealth to its poorest communities by employing nurses and public officials to, in a real sense, manage decline.

Any post-war UK vision still cannot yet contemplate genuinely radical policies for fear of return to 30s level unemployment and poverty. Thatcher and the labour unions tried very hard to break free into new ideological paths, but events pulled these radicals back to the slow-growth economy that we have today.

It is important to read Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier alongside its contemporaneous work, English Journey, J. B. Priestley’s travelogue. Where Orwell’s portrayal leaves us wrung out by the effects of a mining community locked inside its own world, Priestley cheerfully meanders around England seeing other visions in that period. He sees the ribbon communities living in new build properties. Semi-detached land that brought an economically divided northern and southern Britain into a shared social experience, outside the farmer’s cottage or miner’s back-to-back house.

Oddly, Britain has always had the answer to change within these varied settled communities: civil society. Enshrined in the heart of its national personality it is a principle that gets buried within the denseness of the British constitution. The freedom to associate. The story of Britain is less one of nationalistic fervour and flag-waving, but the nature of its legal system. A citizen’s freedom to appeal to the court in order to protect its civic ventures.

And it is the return to civic entrepreneurship to which all change paths lead. The 2008 crash, Covid, Brexit, and possibly more significantly Thomas Piketty’s (r) and (g): the R-ate of return on capital surpassing economic G-rowth is deeply unsettling. Old-fashioned sweaty labour looks variable when compared to inheriting your parent’s house in the south east of England, and investing it.

So we have the answer within: civic adventurism. Backed by the state. The British Century (1815-1914) put its fingerprints across the modern world. Its industrial and military might are but a memory, but its cultural and political outputs, from the English language to its political legacy, underwrote the globalising of liberal democracy. Last century was The American Century. America’s style of government and its notions of freedom a continuation of the English constitutional model. This Anglo-spheric social contract grew into a boilerplate for The Western Settlement. A model of government and society that ultimately sealed the fate of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

This century is up for grabs. With Britain withdrawing from the EU it won’t be the European century again.  The Belle Epoque of seemingly unassailable European hi-culture shattered, along with British ascendency in 1914. As the Russian, German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were replaced by a new world order of re-drawn boundaries and near-universal suffrage.

The essence of this Settlement remains ‘English induction’. The world built upwards and outwards from the particular to the general. One of the more obscure reasons that Britain withdrew from the EU was the tension between its legal systems. For the English in particular its moral authority rested on the ‘common law’ of England. This was the ‘law of the land’, and not of kings, queens or later the political visions of European courts. The local English court and judge found its reasoning in the particularities of each case. The prime concern was to do what is right irrespective of grand principles.

Fairness grew out of these situated realities, grounded in the law of the land. It was not to be muddied by the passions of the monarch or political vision, such as European federalisation. As the European project was a mass of political visions the provincial English felt their very basis of fairness being replaced by an alien code. The English reacquainted themselves with the Magna Carta, and its assurances the king was subject to the law. For the English the law protected freedom and their suspicion of Europeanness was its ties to a Grand March, with life deducted from remote hi-principle.

The English wanted the law to protect their very eccentric individuality, not turn them towards a utopian dream. If you wonder why the English resist any mass indoctrination, it is this long weddedness to the law of reason rooted in the land, in nature itself. This of course means nationalism is of limited value. The nation is secondary to the law’s protection of fairness and freedom.

This goes some way to explain America’s attachment to the gun. The overriding principle of defence of local territory was first mooted amongst the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples. The individual had even then recourse to a court, whose decisions bound the king also. For the Anglosphere parliament emerged as a law-making body, and underpinned local court decisions rather than overrode. So politicians and kings are not above their citizens. Kings are under sufferance. What flag symbol appears on the English national soccer team kit ruffles some but not all. Monarchs do the heavy lifting in constitutional monarchies, not banners.

When the European Parliament did start distributing rights, detached from local decision-making, here was the fork in the road between the English and European horizons. Once the European Court of Human Rights confers a right, one not rooted in a local court, the psychological pain of a free self that is not obligated within a territory, grows painfully. Once we exit the local community’s mutual obligatory requirements, and turn to making demands of duty on others to whom exists no reciprocal arrangement there is a sense of danger flashing. Rights and duties must be born within a shared space of mutual obligation otherwise further power imbalances will tear social ligaments.

The ability of a local court to be fair to you, must not be easily trumped by the another individual carrying rights obtained elsewhere, outside that court’s jurisdiction. The universal human right versus natural reason sit in continued tension. The Anglosphere pull towards natural law, the revolutionary European Union seeks a politicised European citizen, carrying their rights across borders, unrooted from any local commitment.

As Austrian exile Stefan Zweig, writing from his home in Britain in 1942: “My childhood… before the First World War [was]… the Golden Age of Security. Everything in our Austrian Monarchy, then almost a thousand years old, seemed built to last, and the state itself was the ultimate guarantor of durability.”

Zweig stands appalled as his world collapses overnight in the 1930s, under tyranny. And reminds that weak constitutions are blown away in weeks, if not days. If there is no encounter, recognition and participation at the local level, others will offer it.

If we have travelled from a pre-war warfare-society, through a post-war consensus and a market-experiment, what next? The sub-text of this summer’s UK General Election is: Who leads, Big State or me? The long-game answer is: the ‘Royal We’ via civic innovation supported by the state. The state gradually transferring new agency to regional political and financial hubs. The NHS and welfare safety nets are retained. The original vision of both was to brush down the battered human and refit for occupation, not to put talent on the shelf.