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Posts Tagged ‘history’

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What is The Good Society?

In Uncategorized on May 13, 2026 at 1:19 pm

Guest talk delivered to Carlisle Reform Party Members Meeting, at Carlisle United Football Club, Carlisle, United Kingdom, 14th April 2026:

THE SHORT ANSWER to this important question is: A free society, where you and I can be ‘at home’. Two words we skip past very easily, freedom and home. But both are central to the project known as ‘British’. For Britishness must be a shared endeavour to secure the values of a free society. Where you and I can be ‘at home’.

“[Britain] laid the foundations of law, liberty, free speech, and individual rights virtually everywhere the Union Jack has ever flown,” offered Donald Trump, on the 17th September 2025, during his state visit to Britain. A man of discernment after all?

The question then for government is how it discharges its responsibilities to enable a free society.

Roger Scruton writes: “Marxist history means rewriting history with class at the top of the agenda… Class is an attractive idea for left-wing historians because it denotes a thing that divides us…

Nation, law, faith, tradition, sovereignty – these ideas by contrast denote things that unite us.”

The post-war consensus of a mixed economy created a confused social model, a hybrid of Marxist and conservative visions. This ended and we started on the road to Thatcher’s, then Blair-Brown’s, governance by unrestrained global markets.

As John Gray says: “Liberalism has once again become a creature eating its own tail…

(I should point out that in America liberal means socialist, and in the UK it means free markets.)

…liberals (socialists) denouncing the West as the most destructive force in history… [whilst insisting] Western values… human rights, personal autonomy… must be projected to the last corners of the Earth.” A religious belief that socialism and free markets have our best interests at heart. The Thatcher/Blair consensus is ending now with pressure to move towards economic nationalism. That is, to withdraw from dependence on cheap imports.

But back to the ideas of freedom and home.  

Home is where life is lived. Home is the place we learn our ‘obligations and duties’. We enter any space to discover we are naturally obliged: Loyalty, hospitality, family, and community. Once we spot our obligations, we feel the weight of our duty to take care of each other.

A teenager in the West has infinite choices, and experiences angst as a result. They become an adult by recognising their obligations and duties. By sacrificing our infinite teenage choices, choosing one partner, for life, committing to work, and serving each other we grow up into maturity.

But what an unrestrained global market says is you can have infinite choices forever, and need to make few commitments, as capital, that is money or any resource capable of making more resource, will set you free from obligations and duties. This is known as extreme liberalism. Or the cult of choice.

And Western institutions have aided and abetted infantilising modern liberal democratic citizens to be childlike consumers in the candy store of choice. The ‘We Generation’ has been replaced by the ‘Me Generation’. It is little wonder other societies struggle to respect the West and its ‘way of life’ as it has turned out under extreme liberalism.

David Goodhart’s writing spots the frailty of the Blair-Brown government’s market vision. To send 50% of our young people to university he says is emotionally illiterate. It is an investment in the head, not the heart. The point of education is to turn out courageous people with a vision for building their settlement. Not to become selfish and isolated, unrooted.

The Western model is rooted in privileging the heart above the head, and our faithfulness to home and family. We have lost our way. The path back is mapped out for us. It starts with a heart to tell the truth. An obligation. And then the duty to accept the brutal losses that telling the truth will bring. To think with our hearts.

Learning to fail through telling the truth is where early maturity turns into powerful leadership. Once we’ve absorbed the losses of truth, where else does it lead? To trust. And trust is the basis of civil society, or what we call free association. The great growth of British business, charity and civil society, the model that transformed the modern world, is rooted in the concept of trust.

As we have found over the centuries freedom is costly and fragile. For nearly fifty years our sovereign freedom was handed over to a bureaucratic monster, the European Union. Now, Keir Starmer wants us to realign to EU regulations. The iron cage of Brussels bureaucracy is being wielded again by a visionless anti-democratic administrative class.

And Britishness is disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested, in what you call yourself, how you dress. Becoming or transitioning is a human necessity. We all do it. Banning the burqa is not British. It is petty legalism. Only a tragic society regulates clothing. The politics of resentment and grievance divides. As America has found.

But Britishness is interested in the unrestrained “capitalism [that] concentrates wealth and power in even smaller sections of society, university professors, media figures, lawyers, charity workers, community activists and officers in non-government organisations…”, as John Gray writes. This power means vulnerable human identity conforms to this narrow elite’s shaky self-serving desire to be ‘society’s guardians’. 

In 1974 Prime Minister Ted Heath, another plodding technocrat, during another energy crisis, famously asked in so many words: ‘Who governs Britain?’. Not you! Came the reply. In a television broadcast to the nation on 7th February, 1974, shortly after announcing that February’s general election, he said something which is real again: “The issue before you is a simple one. As a country, we face grave problems at home and abroad. Do you want a strong government which has clear authority for the future to take the decisions which will be needed?”

In other words people do not want government by EU committee or unrestrained markets. The British people want their parliament to govern. Where the words: I am a British citizen, civis Britannicus sum, really does mean something.

If you go back only a hundred years it was possible to live beyond the reach of government. No CCTV, or even passports. The historian A.J.P. Taylor in his Oxford English History said: “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman… All this was changed by the impact of the Great War… The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time”.

And now the Labour government wishes to track you through digital ID surveillance. Are they mad? I think so.

If we look across the pond we see some large red flags. The US is tearing itself apart, between ‘conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives’. It has an unbending two-party system.  Theirs, like most modern liberal democracies, has coded its constitution as sovereign, where here in the UK, parliament reigns supreme, with its multi-party system.

By not chiseling a codified constitution into vulnerable school children’s brains it allows us to swim out into the sea of our long history. The Magna Carta (1215), the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Acts of Union (1707) all soak into parliamentary debate plus our bones, and pub quizzes.

We retain priests and princes in our landscape, for good and ill, as they filter and divert us before any rush to a supreme court to wield the law as an axe above the heads of parliamentarians. The Blair-Brown government’s efforts to install a continental system of government by technical expert committee and a politicised civil service has strained communities who have felt their franchise weakened. In other words European style managerialism, perfectly illustrated by our current Prime Minister, is one of the many threats to The Good Society.

MP and father of conservative politics, Edmund Burke, describes in his speech to the electors of Bristol in 1774 what has become the classic statement of the relationship between Members of Parliament and their constituents:

“To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men… [but] Parliament is not a Congress of Ambassadors from different and hostile interests… Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest… the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole.”

In other words, and this sounds odd to our ears, an MP is to give his or her best judgement on what is good and right for the whole nation. Opinions are subordinate to ‘the good’.

America this week is feeling the limits of its power. Where the British Empire exported modern liberal democracy by staying and building physical infrastructure, such as railways, banking systems, schools; I can go on, so will, rule of law, trading systems, democratic governance, ports and harbours, telegraph and communication, urban infrastructure, administrative buildings, water management. I will stop. America has shown it cannot install regime change by blowing things up. We the British built from the ground up. Building from the ground up is the only governance mentality that sustains. Rooted. Building that which is meant to last. Home!

And, it turns out Thatcher was no conservative. She had read the free market economist Friedrich Hayek as her guiding light. A common story told is Thatcher thumped down a copy of Hayek’s book The Constitution of Liberty on the table at a 1975 Cabinet Meeting, claiming to her colleagues: “This is what we believe!”. The fable continues that she was not a great reader, and did not get to the end of this book, as the postscript is entitled  “Why I am Not a Conservative”.

America’s soft power has been much greater than Britain’s hard power. Coca-Colanisation brought down the Berlin Wall. The cult of choice as an output of modern liberal democracy has been irresistible. America exported British modernity after the Second World War, but in the last 19 years we have seen democratic recession, a debt crisis and Western systems as frail. In particular Western legitimacy, that is the power to influence through building trust and the faithful application of a rules-based order, has been eroded by what American writer Normal Mailer would say is: Plastic capitalism, ‘where even the molecules in its plastic furniture are persecuted’.

But as America falters and is no longer a model society, the British system looks increasingly grounded in a deep and enduring parliamentary system that developed after the Protestant Reformation. And a civil war, which was a revolution that took place 150 years before the French got round to theirs.

I put to you that we are an achieved society because of a complex and difficult history. And we might argue that our tolerant, largely peaceable and functioning settlements, like Carlisle, were only possible through centuries of development. On our foreign summer hols, struggling to find somewhere to go to the loo, or narrowly avoiding dropping to our death from a jerrybuilt beachfront path, we often return to functioning towns and cities and note the care that built them. Albeit slowly and at excess cost. So, any impulse to overthrow our settlement by those on the far-left appears reckless.

Where the English Civil War sought to settle a domestic dispute between parliament and the king, the French overturned their entire system, based on ideological zeal for a transformed Europe. They have had 12-15 different forms of regime since then, the British just one. For the eighty years after the French Revolution a different regime appeared approximately every nine years.

The French capitulated in the face of the German advance in 1940, because, in one view, it was a ‘fatally divided and demoralised’ as a nation. Aside from ‘bad intelligence and bad tactics’ on the battlefield ‘France [was] much more divided than Britain in the mid-1930s’.

What creates ‘patriotic solidarity’ has deep roots not in nationalism or ideology, but in the settlement, in our dwelling place. In our home. And, in this odd and anaemic term: Civil society. That is the bonds and behaviour that enable people to say: Here, I am at home. Where ‘Continental Europe is based on an idea of nationhood’ we here are ‘bound together by our residence in a particular place’.

The European Union was an extension of that ideological French zeal. In the Gothic structures of cathedrals across Europe these buildings trace beauty and nature down to the created world, its clusters of columns mimicking a forest, which is particular, located, a place. A carved leaf here, a knowing gargoyle there. Where national governance systems look to utopian idealism, we found our reason in the roots of a natured and created world, where truth sits stubbornly replicating its beauty. British judges search the facts of each individual case, as we believe in common law. Common to all. Not grand constitutional law.

What does our slow change system achieve? Largely the ability to absorb pressures from upheavals such as industrialisation and protest and loss of empire. Where French regimes fell under these pressures, the British introduced reforms. But importantly slow change gives legitimacy to its institutions, achieving trust and cooperation from citizens.

It is this growing, if not sudden, realisation that we have something not just remarkable, but exceptional, and Britain’s political furniture must move to protect it. 

We took the head off Charles I somewhat by accident, but our fervour for parliamentary democracy over despotism maps all the way back to the New Testament. For the only freedom the world has is traceable back to the foundations of the Christian story.  

No amount of BBC communitarianism or narrative that romanticises the Greek and Roman pagan world will eliminate the fact that there was no freedom in the classical world. Nothing. Not a jot. The abomination that was slavery was defeated by a Protestant conscience weighing heavy on British foreign ministers at night, as they contemplated their eternities.

Catholicism was a political movement then just as Islam is today. But the challenge of Islam to us of course is to ask: So, what do we here in the West believe? If it is pale wishy washy multiculturalism then the totalising force that is Islam will find it wanting. The good society is one then, that knows what it believes. And it cannot be an imitation of past achievements. We are a society that gathers around a Protestant governance system.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher puts it: “The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society… By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men…”.

Kant saw our Western inheritance as a freedom, reason and a truth that is found in nature. Antagonistic, competitive and collaborative. Finding a natural ecosystem, the tree grows in balance with the squirrel and the river. Not like socialism, standing shoulder to shoulder in fake solidarity, where, as George Orwell puts it, we are slave to a single party and ideology. That is a return to the tribe.

Our system over the centuries was to stand face to face, as unsocially sociable, as Kant puts it. Cousin marriage is less about biological variation, but where we place our loyalties. To home or tribe.

This means the alien can come to our home, with their family, and we are free to be antagonistic. To insult each other as we stand face to face and act naturally [with a smile, in loving kindness, and a view to partnership through friendship: Koinonia]. Like our nature dictates. Armed with the load bearing belief system of the Latin West: Forgiveness and repentance. I will challenge you, and if I am wrong I will seek your forgiveness.

The home is something quite unique to our Western inheritance. The Latin Western church gradually shifted the idea of family from the pagan tribe to the Christian family. The ‘we’ of society came to form around the church. Yes, Christ died for all, but his church was to be rooted in the concept of the family as its base unit of transformation. Up close and personal.

For European social policy, from the 1950s, the family was the site of torment, so should be easily escapable. Of course it is a place of torment, but for the British it is the place we stay in and build. Home. Our place of formation.

Historian Tom Holland writes: “The Church, in its determination to place married couples… at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins… Husbands, wives, children: it was these, in the heartlands of the Latin West, that were increasingly coming to count as family”. Previously your slaves, dependents, and hangers-on counted as family.

Now, your husband’s or wife’s parents were sanctioned by the Church’s new canon law, to be your mother and father ‘in-law’. The power of feudal Europe, with its clans trying to stitch power together via cousin marriage was broken, by the Church.

Margaret Thatcher, in her infamous interview in Woman’s Own magazine in 1987, stated: “There is no such thing as society”. What was she saying? It was interpreted at the time that she was heartless. A cold capitalist. The press mischievously ignored her other words: “There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first”.

She was saying that society as a whole has no agency. You cannot go to ‘society’. Paradoxically, this was a grimmer statement than the first. She was a cold capitalist. The double income household, where government has more people to tax, and property owners, whose properties require two salaries to afford, has not meant families are better off.

I am not so foolish to propose women stay at home. But the option for both parents to go out to work was billed as liberation, but is now a necessity. Burnout, excessive commuting hours, childcare costs, monstrous mortgage payments, have helped generate what some call a Polycrisis. Overworked parents have lost their leisure time. Time that would have been invested in community voluntary work, building community cohesion. Home.

Thatcher turned out to be a neoliberal. A believer in cold capitalism. That people are purely motivated, as Karl Marx believed, by material gain. More attuned to Marx’s shaping of a liberal Europeanness than she knew herself. The EU was a project of globalisation. A socialist and internationalist project. As Blair put it to the Chicago Economic Club at the time of the Kosovo War: “We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not”.

A curious trio then. Marx, Thatcher, Blair. Marx saw a large state. Thatcher and Blair, an even larger state. Britain has been under pressure from European social policy since the fifties to adopt the European social contract. Better known as meritocracy.

In revolutionary Europe and America, a rights meritocracy has created an unsustainable inheritocracy. Owners of capital can buy their way into the top universities and professional careers.  Property values have rocketed, and with it a new mass class of millionaires. Others who could not secure property are now the new Precariat. Property is out of reach unless you graduate into a graduate career, or have parents who are ‘meritocracy winners’. After five to ten years following graduation some 30% of graduates are still in non-graduate jobs.

Institutions, clubs, guilds, churches, like Carlisle United Football Club, are agents of civil society, so too political parties. And what is civil society? It is free association. The ability to gather, as we are here, untroubled largely by spying neighbours or agents of the state.

So The Good Society is the sum of the intuitions of those who gather as belonging to a particular place. To belong of course is to stay and build.

Again, as David Goodhart writes, this is then the Somewhere people. Heart people. We belong in this place. The heart thinks better than the head.

The good society thinks with its collective hearts. My wife and I have, like many, have welcomed Iranian and Afghan immigrants into our home. Fed them. Listened to their stories. And got to know them. And shared our Christian faith with them. Do we believe, like Marx, that they are purely motivated by material gain? That they cannot be converted through the good news of the Christian gospel by demonstrating Christian leadership values.

We should of course return efficiently and quickly all those who do not wish to build a safe home. And home here in the good society is built on unchanging values of freedom. Britain has a role in the world again. For its parliament and people to build a good society that is the envy of the world. We have a remarkable opportunity to lead by example. No longer powerful but influential. We should embrace post-Brexit autonomy, strong leadership in communities, applying the law, reject progressive ideologies as a liberal fantasy, and recognise economic reality of new technologies, the environment and financial factors.

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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.

9/11, 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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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.