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Global leadership opinion: MAGA-ultras’ blue-collar economic nationalism might survive market turmoil, but will it arrest the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of runaway meritocracies in Britain and Europe?

In Uncategorized on May 21, 2025 at 7:38 am

THE TARIFF BLITZKRIEG has done its random act of violence. Like a B-17 dropping iron bombs over an open sight, one hit the runway, another Mr McGregor’s greenhouse, the rest slugged into the quagmire. But the message has been sent. Technical dashboard politics should give way to nation-state leadership. On the sidelines traditional conservatives remain hopeful that Al and Peg Bundy’s blue-collar MAGA-ultras’ raid on their policy-position will be temporary. MAGA being a reaction to the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of Western meritocracies’ vision of the economic life, where Al and Peg attempted to ‘live their best lives’ but found themselves fallible.

Prognosticator of an Anglo-American New Republic, H. G. Wells warned last century that Americans suffer ‘nation-state blindness’. An inability by citizens to see how their local endeavour is part of national enterprise.

According to H. G., it was this failure to connect dots that resulted in America missing the opportunity to rule with its Anglo partner. As fanciful as that is now, there is truth in the notion of America today turning inwards to connect itself to itself. For a self, even a corporeal self, such as the nation-state, is a self that is connected to… itself!

Of course, the Western-world is Anglo-Americanised, having absorbed its main export, modern-liberal-democracy. FDR-Churchill, JFK-Macmillan, a shared constitutional outlook, kept the marriage bed warm, but less so Trump-Johnson/Starmer. Affinity generated by Brexit was fleeting.

Although America has a more complex history with free trade, what has often united is a liberal hawkishness, in the British sense of the word liberal, meaning laissez faire economics, rather than the US version, meaning centre left politics. But now the social conservative pendulum has swung illiberally (in British and US senses) on both sides of The Pond, the affair is over. Like Elyot and Sibyl in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, two big egos have blown hot then cold.

What about Britain, and the political rumble in the Shires?

In truth America does not like Britain. Its leaders love invitations to Buck House, applaud Churchill’s Anglo-Saxonese, plus eating out expensively on Neville Chamberlain’s censure, when justifying foreign adventure. The new country has often been suspicious of being suckered by the trappings and flummery of ‘Great British’ power-plays. Much of American leadership-style e.g. The Oval Office candour of late, is a Protestant-idealist language-battle to defeat doublespeak and flush out insecurities about who is big or small on the world stage.

Spurned, Britain shuffles uneasily, poking its canapés, mumbling about the vigour of the vulgar younger nation. A Greece to America’s Rome, Britain fancied steering its protégé with diplomatic ear-bending. This is the self-delusion of the defeated imperialist. Trump II’s realpolitik has finally closed Britain’s fantasy of being in a special relationship.

Culturally, America and Britain are thinly separated. Both tolerant. Americans quicker-witted, Britons wittier. But since America is now led by blue-collar Republicans, Britain is further in the doghouse. Trumpists’ contempt for Britain’s and Europe’s secular-liberal-progressive political elite is undisguised.

And having exited the EU, Britain is of little strategic value. Its technical-politics, which is fundamentally watch-and-wait market-monitoring incrementalism, observes helplessly the unfolding US psychodrama. Whilst simultaneously unable to counter far-right threats to its social equilibrium. For Britain has remarkably settled communities who doggedly weather decline. But there is a political rumble in the Shires which Trumpism is fuelling.

And what is the emergent US New World vision?

Amidst D-Day-style assaults on every policy beachhead, action being totemic stateside, the uncertain vision might be: re-shape the global trading model, revive the nation-state, arrest runaway debt. Then slow, and ultimately halt, the rise of Chinese power. Emotionally, heartland voters require the US administration to draw firmer physical and spiritual boundaries around a US that has been overextended economically and militarily since the Second World War.

Of course, orthodox economics is turning various shades, largely puce. The source of this exit from globocracy is rooted in red-raw inequalities caused by the US’s out-of-control meritocracy. One that originally admitted outsiders, and appeared equal, but has morphed, and created a new money-club aristocracy. Which is not distributing ‘dignity and status’ to middle-class American families. Those who doggedly punch the hours of study and work.

For in Britain, our working-class and middle-class = America’s middle-class. The American working-class aligns more closely with the UK’s notion of an underclass. Those who are struggling to both escape precarious minimum-wage zero-hour no-contract work and pass exams.

Add to this the nature of modern politics, which has invested governance within institutional systems, a deliberate throttling of charismatic ‘man’, and has become remote. In many minds a flawed and accessible charismatic nation-state leader is morally more accountable, by virtue of visibility, than cold unresponsive iron-cage bureaucracies. American modernity (liquefying the residuum of European social systems) has peaked.

Meritocratic overreach and Trump II re-set

In essence, the US meritocratic journey has transmogrified into greed. The post-war ‘We Generation’ moved rapidly in social terms, and understood a ‘good society’ requires extending opportunities to all. But by the late-Sixties, the new ‘Me Generation’, the meritocracy winners, started pulling up the draw-bridge behind what they perceived as their success.

The civic duty to acknowledge personal good fortune, has become my effort achieved my status. The humble serendipity of having a talent the market needed at the right time, has shifted towards a hard-faced cynicism, oft portrayed as ‘toughness’. The fear of the ‘We Generation’, the very real abyss at its heels, which they staved off with gritty stoicism, has emerged magnified in their children, who say ‘no way are we sailing near to that nightmare’.

As competition became fiercer, erosion of the ‘common good’ accelerated. Capital-rich citizens have fought tooth and nail to win, and purchase access to a hot-housed VIP lane of private school>good SATS>Ivy League university>profession. The talent+hardwork nexus has shifted to money+power that propels progeny through the narrowing door labelled ‘high-paid brain work’. Stagist theory said to societies ‘stay in history’s waiting room’ until you and your community are ready to evolve together, but new capital says buy access now.

Into this ineluctable globalised market biology, the Trump II administration signals a re-set. Even if they do not know they are the vehicle for change, they embody an apotheosis for political modernity. One which was predicated on a meritocracy distributing fairly. Instead, it has fomented an inheritocracy, where capital sloshes without the handrails of shared core values.

So how might strategic value be created from economic nationalism?

The immediate challenge is to maintain the confidence of the bond market, and attempt significant savings, whilst opening new sources of revenue. And to achieve this by rolling over tax cuts and rebalancing trade. The risks are considerable, as the tariff strategy may slow growth, increase inflation, and ultimately weaken the dollar’s supremacy in the decades to come. History may not be kind to the big re-set. But the trickiest section of the report card is execution. The manner of delivering these changes has created uncertainty.

So, for the sake of a more considered strategy, some of the good intent might simply founder on the lack of plan completeness. For example, when costs are slashed, such as regulatory control, this might suggest long-term savings, but in practice, if assumptions are not tested, they might trigger major political headaches down-the-line when out-of-the-blue crises emerge. But for the ha’p’orth of tar (a tested plan) the ship (strategic value) can still be lost.

And another sagely phrase: The seeds of your demise are often sown during periods of success. So, America sits at a critical moment, some of it historic, some introduced unnecessarily in its rush to force re-modelling. America is the land of genuinely excellent strategic management, and there will be seasoned management professionals whose skillset can still settle the ship of state.

Of course, this is the view from the hilltop called classical strategic management. Although on the surface it is a dull, plodding discipline, it can still deliver careful re-engineering for America Inc., and at the same time win approval from the markets.

The spectre of an Old World social order returning to haunt the New

In the run-up to the 2008 crash ‘orthodox economics was humiliated… sophisticated financial minds hopelessly miscalculated the value of assets’. Why should classical economics read the runes this time?

There are wider forces at work, and if disrupting the world order, including orthodox economics, is required for America to bring down its stratospheric and unsustainable deficit, then client-politics of old is unlikely to have the re-engineering force of character.

Many are familiar with fire-from-the-hip business leadership relying entirely on gut-angst to bring change. Readers of John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow will recognise quotidian American realities grate with its sunshine theology. America is searching for resolving its mile-wide social dualities (e.g. failing meritocracy), but the current US administration is like the preacher, who in the sermon notes writes: ‘point weak, shout loud’. We suspect, like the new right in Europe, the rocket fuel that gets it off the launch pad is greater than the load required for the second and third stages of nation-state development.

What we might be seeing is America’s long resistance to the shadow of an Old World. A world that is complex and intractable, with its ranked social strata offering sustainable modes of living, in contrast to America’s dominant and creaking social measures of income and wealth. America holds action as more sacred than reflection. As John Maynard Keynes said at the end of his General Theory (1936) this is a sign you are held to some form of dogma. Trumpism is about action, but concurrent critical reflection will need to emerge sooner than later. Tyranny is in the absence of the ability to nuance new political positions.

Does the end of political modernity mean sailing towards the shore of classical conservatism?

Although on the surface the DeLorean is headed back to 19th century mercantilism, many are asking are we also headed towards the morally manageable boundary of nation-statism. For this is as much about America’s moral agency, its sense of self. This suggests Britain and Europe, in their commitment to sublate their nationalistic agency post-war, are wedded still to political modernity as an unquestioned philosophy. Hence, across Europe, the new right is making Trumpist-style gains, largely to arrest a runaway modernity (bureaucratic governance) that has become deaf to its concerns.

And so, the argument is that America’s New World Order is a flaming out of a dying meritocratic social contract. A traumatic admission it wishes to establish a more workable social system.

Meritocracy was the fruit of post-Cold War globalisation. Globalisation is the spread of modernity. Modernity is the liquefying of all barriers, personal and geographic, and the creation of meritocratic social order. Meritocracy is the replacement of class/tribe distinctions for the promise of personal achievement and liberation.

The flaw in this utopianism is that social groups are naturally self-organising, and left to themselves can shake out quite sustainably. Artisans cheerfully graft, bourgeois entrepreneurs buy and sell, and aristos refine their sensibilities in well-stocked country house libraries, opening the odd school and fete to boot. All too utopian, and dewy-eyed, but this old social conservative order is resurfacing in the minds of the slogging metro-dwellers sinking £2,500 rent per month into their stuffy broom cupboard apartments.

Our wobbly meritocracy is also faltering as it is run by homo technicus, loyal not to vision or even mission, or healthy social order, but policy. Bureaucracies avoid volatile human fancy, and put oversight into the hands of bloodless policy wonks. This society will not excel, but it will be fairer to a greater number. Or so we thought.

So, what’s not to like?  Well, in the West the emergence of deep inequality. The Western ship has tilted so hard towards the top 1% of achievers, that the bottom 50% are dropping behind like the wheezy pupil on the annual school cross-country race. The few winners are winning hard, and the losers are massing in large numbers. Part of the tilt is capital accumulation has increased the power of money itself. Money + a decent brain = access to a fast-lane that no-one anticipated would create a new money aristocracy, one that does not have a country pile across from the village, so is unhitched from all communitarian moods.

On the back of these broken structures is the rise of new right parties. With Trumpism offering to collapse globalisation altogether, his challenge is to steer towards the shore of classical conservatism. And avoid the rocks of nihilistic mega-meritocracy. Economic nationalism and ethno-nationalism are in the mixer and the former should avoid the latter.  The detail however, may not be written yet. This gut angst may of course have a moral taproot.

The emotionally illiterate nature of globalisation

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.

As the Blair-Brown government told us, we had better get on board the globalisation train. And we did. It did not know where the train was ultimately destined, but was sold as heading to the land of sexy new metro-liberal coolness. We now know it was pure undifferentiated rhetoric.

We also now realise the emotionally illiterate nature of this message. What many missed is that unfettered liberalisation was an ideology for the dipsy-brained. To which politics is meant to counter. Where the British parliament enjoyed and suffered long speeches, now, members have to ‘cut to the plot’ in short shrift. Debating time has been cut so parliamentarians can get home to their families. Admirable, but naïve, when complex issues demand the sort of exhaustive dialogue as found in a major Dostoyevsky novel. Where the fog starts to clear on page 372, but you are still asking ‘who are all these people?!’.

Under successive administrations politics was gradually jettisoned as an inconvenience to market measures. Rationalism in the shape of single-metric politics, however, does not do ‘good or evil’ assessments. No-one saw the 2008 crash coming. And if they did, they were thrown out the room for their apostasy.

Meritocracies play what Peter Turchin calls the ‘game of musical chairs’. They foster competition across the whole of society, and the resulting stampede towards the remaining number of hi-status chairs generates an ever-growing mass of losers.

Added to this mud wrestling, we allowed mass immigration from southern Europe to fill our skills gap, and catastrophically failed to invest in education, as short-termism is favoured by unworldly technocrats who lack strategic instincts. This liberal world order is now breaking up violently. In short, Trumpism is displaying a controversial and upsetting symptom: Leadership.

Globalisation finds leadership per se, expensive. Leadership points out to client-politics that ‘the language of economics’ is taking over in the open society. When people talk about ‘living their best life’, asking ‘are you investing enough in your education?’, ‘have you had a productive day?’, you know homo economicus is eclipsing humanity itself. Institutions have started to become bearers of this two-dimensional message. Self-actualisation (a terrifying term in itself, and Maslow’s other writing is far better than his oversold model), started at some point to become an economic calculus primarily.

Even if deeply unpopular, leadership remains a challenge to dashboard politics, which obeys market indicators, often mindlessly. As we found in 2008. Some will call it new right authoritarianism, and even see it as creating an uber-meritocracy, but either way it is based on a measure of righteous angst about those left behind.

Possible fruits of Trumpism’s correction?

We reached peak bureaucracy at the turn of the century. The Kafkaesque nightmare of call-centres, the institutionalised West, as an assemblage of disembodied rule followers, was bodied in an untrammelled globalisation. Commodified lean service delivery (as sages of Just-In-Time supply chains like to call it) meant policy enforced rule compliance. But, the revolt against global massification of experience had begun deep in heartland communities.

From the Blair-Brown-Clinton administrations onwards it was the role of technocrats to manage the poverty slaying capital markets that lifted all ships. £1 growth in UK/US, €10 growth in Poland. Yes, employers had a free lunch as young poorly paid East Europeans flooded the UK, and wondered what was the point of investing in training when this cheap and compliant workforce did the grafting.

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-British sociologist, who bravely rowed back on globalisation ahead of many, termed globalised modernity’s retraction, and the era of late-capitalism, as liquid modernity. We want the fruit of solid smokestack modernity e.g. undersea cables, WiFi, and freedom to roam, but not the horror of total annihilation of the dislocated self.

The rise and rise of non-spaces, like Junction 44 of the M6, which is not a great cultural addition, provided freedom from territoriality, but also the loss of heroic potential. London is increasingly a non-space. Its museums and history have been gloriously accessible, educating me as a boy, but the slippage is visible. London’s premier Christian house, in the heart of its financial district, St Paul’s Cathedral, is a snip at £26 entry fee. Winners this way, losers round the back? The vast majority of state churches are permanently open and accessible. Lovingly curated sanctuaries display indomitable welcomes come what may.

So, the future re-set might well be achieved from retaining the fruit of technological massification, but re-locating ourselves within a re-born nation-state, its settlements (both physical and philosophical) bearing the weight of life. We do not know if Trump II’s disruption will, in two or three iterations hence, invite civic virtues, a taste for ‘the good society’, and its supporting architecture. We fear it could still unleash meritocracy Mk II. Albeit a nationalised variant.

In Europe we have suppressed nationalism for obvious reasons, but have weakened settled communities that can support those on the margins. For the nation-state is really a collection of laws. If you have arrived yesterday as an immigrant, you can hold wildly different values, but, critically, if you abide by the law, we will all get on. It is this shared respect for laws born from natural reason and history which gradually foster working settlements through highlighting mutual obligations. If the Trump II re-set reasserts this Anglo-American reality, then the bumpy ride will achieve something.

A world-citizen, reacquainted with a relational ordering of society, via a reinvigorated public sphere, where the conversation is held open by the genuinely leaderful, is a curious prospect. A space where the human stands across the square and learns to interpret the micro gestures of their interlocutors, instead of repeating the script of an unworldly technocrat. A shoddy narrative passed down the chain from a political apparatchik. Someone, somewhere, was always going to respond to the Orwellian warning that a society of technocratic party slaves will do itself no good.

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TRUMP II’s existential politics: ‘MAGA’dom versus the university men and women’

In Uncategorized on February 24, 2025 at 9:34 am

THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will ‘MAGA’dom’ bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who are at fault. The government time-servers, who when in power prefer grandmother’s steps, and only deliver what W. H. Auden termed accidie, by ‘accepting social values of the day’. Historian Harold James coined it as Late Soviet America. Where the Soviet peoples woke up one morning and said meh to communism, now the Western voter’s truck is unhitched from “bogus ideologies” dominating its institutions.

Like Sykes-Picot’s Middle East carve up, which was a settling of old scores between Britain and France, the US’s internal pathologies are spilling onto the world. If Congress had its way after WWII the US would have turned inwards and ‘gone to the movies and drank Cokes’. Instead, visionary minds ‘saved the possibilities of freedom’. The so-called ‘wise men’, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman et al, also led with a “sense of selflessness” and “not playing to the galleries”.

For America Inc. to hedge the Pax Americana and lose Cold War II in a game of Russian roulette appears unconscionable, in the light of America’s sacrifices in WWII and their global fight against communism. Acheson said Britain had lost its role after WWII. With America’s overnight equivocation Britain has found its place. To double down on its support for Ukrainian sovereignty, and offer a stark alternative to Germany’s lurch to the right. But it should also recognise The Long Peace is over. The ‘university men and women’ in the legacy media and party elites have gone one way, the voter the other.

In the blur of early-action has a dossier on history’s cycle of ‘catastrophe and salvation’ reached the much-bandaged presidential ear? If the Oval Office’s recent Kremlin contact is the first hi-level encounter since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, then maybe Trump II has read more historic precedent than the pedestrian Biden administration. But to what end? John F Kennedy, for example, was prepared, as is Trump II, to question received wisdom from the ‘wise men and women’ in government, but the difference being there was a generosity about America after the war, offering its ideals.

Seven US presidents served in WWII, and although not eliminating Richard Nixon’s paranoia, war experience resists myopia. The architects of The American Century, like Harriman, Robert Lovett, through to George Keenan, married business, law and diplomacy. Harriman’s Moscow meetings with the Soviets were tough, commercial, and pragmatic. I suspect Harriman and Trump might have had much in common.

When JFK’s granddaughter rang me a few years ago, I instinctively stood up. She had spotted the catastrophic regional flooding here in northern England, and could I, as a local community organiser, host her visit. The New York Times’s climate reporter’s presence in waterlogged Cumbria, was a boost to the community. But my reverence for America’s stylish dynasty is not misplaced. Britain looked to Jack and Jackie Kennedy with as much hope as did Americans.

Britain’s post-war leaders were desiccated, like the touring remains of Tutankhamun; especially when compared to JFK’s physiognomy. JFK was an American president who in summer ’63 crossed the mythical leadership credibility threshold early. Buoyed by soaring rhetoric he had gone toe-to-toe with Nikita Khrushchev abroad, and seen off terrifying nuclear hawks at home. The tragedy in Dallas in November that year was shattering news.

We here (in Britain) had no Norman Mailers, Gore Vidals or JFK’s to capture our mood for public consumption. France had Sartre and Camus. We had undoubted brilliance in Auden, Benjamin Britten, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, J. B. Priestley, even Kingsley Amis and The Angry Young Men, but they were eulogists at Britain’s funeral. Existentialism fizzed in Paris and visionary-pragmatism roared in growth-America. Our public-thought-mojo retreated inside the academy, and stayed there.

DOGE is supposedly ripping into the Pentagon’s procurement and federal spending programmes. We do not know yet whether the tech-bros have a world-picture on the wall, and a room of game-theorists fishbone-diagramming every move.  We suspect this is not three-dimensional chess, but flicking matches in the oil refinery to get our attention. We are certainly interested in their commercial nous doing the numbers on government spend. Who wouldn’t?

JFK, Boston Brahmin, Trump, New York businessman, are unlikely buddies, but their leadership shares a sceptical view of experts, the experienced, the so-called ‘brightest and best’ who laid the ground for Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 recession, and the mindless withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But where JFK offered a transformational US-led West, an engaged America, Trump II is asserting greater power-distance with allies. An early-term tactic of rattling the cozy has its logics. We know there is much myth-making in the JFK-model of leadership which travelled well. The rhetoric went above the action. And the Trumpoos can pull on the strain of “self-criticism, wit, ideas, the vision of a civilised society” that fed JFK’s playbook.

If MAGA’s ‘street-wisdom’ asks clean-limbed politicos the right questions in the right order, it might impact the ponderous defence bureaucracy that cannot keep pace with Ukraine’s drone technology. And wake up an ineffective EU defence policy, with Germany continuing to fail in its leadership. It has to, as the EU lacks decisiveness without NATO leadership.

What we do know is MAGA ideology puts at risk the patchwork quilt of post-war institutions. Without better crafted language MAGA’s divide and rule unsettles global equilibrium. Here in Britain, we feel the quilt stifling innovation. Its major institutions from the Church of England to the BBC operate ‘pernicious neutrality’, simultaneously holding open a vital lacuna, often brilliantly, but then flattening what that space produces, for fear of the unknown. The risk averse careerists are in charge.

By unswerving coincidence my mother was in labour with me when the news of JFK’s assassination arrived onto the maternity ward. The nursing staff disappeared to gather round the transistor radio. The tears flowed. The Kennedys embodied the American Aesthetic like nobody before or after. Ample British babies like me were temporarily Winston, the Old Man, American baby boys, Jack, the New Man.

When criticising the current crop of cretins, incompetents and cry-babies, who fraudulently claim to be scions of Western freedom, especially the chancers on the new right, we can call some of them out for who they are, naïve ideologues and clueless reactionaries. But they are a symptom of iron-cage bureaucracies that have deadened the existential-politics of ordinary man and woman. The voter.

For this discussion is about ‘hostility to power’ among the ‘university men and women’, the career time-servers. Those who in the European Union have failed in the exercise of modern power. And we see the rise of grassroots anti-intellectualism in Europe. The CDU getting into bed with the Alternative for Germany should give all my generation a sick feeling, especially when bumped by the Trumpers’ support. I feel the pain of Americans, as Trump is not the first choice for many, including those who voted for him.

My parents were teenage volunteers in WWII. My father moved from Suffolk’s airfield defences during The Battle of Britain, to London during The Blitz, meeting my mother (an Auxiliary Territorial Service volunteer) whilst defending Portsmouth’s naval docks, then out to India, to halt the Japanese advance. The Greatest Generation did not have the luxury of deconstructing Western values via Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, the celebrities of French Thought, who gulled British and American academies. And still do.

Their generation had ‘great intuition’, gifted from parents’ pre-welfare resilience. My father’s father ‘enjoyed’ four years in a German PoW camp during WWI, after being shot and captured at the Battle of Le Cateau (26th August 1914) after the British Expeditionary Force’s II Corp were ordered to ‘stand and fight’ to halt the German advance on the retreat from Mons. Here in Britain, the 2020s have more than a bit of the 1920s about it. The inter-war period saw Europe fail to spot the madmen. Failure of collective security was the brutal lesson.

For the Trumpites are a cod liver oil dose of anti-politics. Whether it is a tone-deaf and nihilistic backseat-bus-type revolt, we will see. But Trump II brings real world practice to kick the Western world in its orthodoxies. Shake the cage of a complacent West by all means, but do not give succour to the far-right wreckers who are simply desperate for attention. Sir Roderick Spode and the Black Shorts are best left in comical visions. And, over-regulation needs reform, but not overnight. Businesses are spending a fortune on mounds of paperwork. This has to change. And Trump II might well target this, but they need to take a step back and plan over the next year these moves. Less haste, more prep.

Life appearing short, like many, my parents married on a 48-hour pass, and at the height of Britain’s onslaught by the Luftwaffe. Once the battlefront shifted to mainland Europe, mother waved father off to India, back into the infantry, not expecting him to return. These women were supported by the church, and she found faith in the love of Christian community. Neither mother or father collected their medals after the war. Nor marched in its remembrance. Life was forwards and upwards for them. They saw Britain had opened up its doors to rebuilding, and their love was real.

They would see the new right for who they are, fakes and frauds, scapegoating the immigrant and paedophile. To wreckers, the outsider and outlaw is available for demonisation. Playground bullies pick on the nearest vulnerable frame. And the new right are a mix of the frightened and weak.

The notion of British values is deeply complex. You will not find these in a manifesto. We make them today and tomorrow. One thing for sure is, we are an island of immigrants, as much as Europe is an overflow continent. Its citizens originally escaped from somewhere. If Britain is to recover its moral authority, we take immigrants escaping persecution. We take them because that is our duty as a nation. As humans.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with asking young men and women who arrive can we equip you to eventually return to fight for your people. To bring change if you can. Our influence in the world quadruples when we lead by example. And, our ability to effect change through our immigrant population grows when we renounce isolationism and nationalism.

Britain is at its best when offering a model society. Multiculturism was a wheeze that carried many for three to four decades. In truth we are a successful multiracial nation. But there is no such thing as a multiculture nation. It is a contradiction in terms. We steadily come together to form a shared culture based on our traditions, values and institutions. It requires compromise and learning.

We should of course privilege our own citizens when it comes to jobs and training. Those that have stayed to build communities should say to immigrants: ‘Stay and build with us’ and become part of the “we”. But we should not make a trophy out of alienating our refugee community. What we do do is enable their integration, through opening our homes and feeding them, getting to know them and their needs.

When you hear their stories, you understand few leave home for selfish reasoning. One day you might need hospitality and a bed. Life takes funny turns. Now that is my belief, and this must rightly come into contact with other beliefs in the community. A collective reasoning process, where we seek mutual solutions towards integration of the alien. If I would like my neighbour to move their perspective I must be a reciprocal interlocutor.

I will say it is likely an immigrant will be a greater champion of Britishness than many. They know what living under fear is like! British Conservative politician Norman Tebbit’s ‘which cricket team do you support?’ test is specious. You can love your place of birth, and the place you now call home. We have multiple passions, and inviting love of place is a long journey of effective assimilation. You love your settlement over time only if it can form part of your personal story. Conversely, dishing out universal rights at no cost to the individual is unsustainable as it alienates rather than integrates. Rights have costs the community meets through their pot of social capital. An account that needs topping up regularly. The universalist and nowhere citizen who digs into local pots of somewhere people uninvited understandably causes another form of injustice.

It is for Britain to hold its nerve through the Trumpista’s early-term feverish rhetoric. You cannot build any society on a ‘deficit theology’, on what you are against. America is no longer a model-society and MAGA’dom’s ressentiment is a form of admission.

Britain’s industrial decline plus war threw this country into structural change. Some for the good. It is a horrible truism that war resolves as well as destroys. When my father made it back from India, mother pleaded with him to share her Christian faith. He capitulated after attending a tent mission. He got religion quite badly. The Father, Son and King James Bible. But mellowed eventually. The law gave way to grace.

This story will be typical for these islands. A country forcibly and strategically arranged by existential threats of invasion, a resilient island people, dogged, fending off. Not least seeing off Napoleon’s existential politics and huge army amassing across the water. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 was a breath-taking piece of seamanship. It allowed the south coast of England to breathe for the first time in a long time. Jane Austen’s Sanditon, based on my hometown of Worthing, West Sussex, where the author stayed in 1805, offers the rise of the seaside community, newly free from France’s aspirations.

As a young infantryman being shot up by German fighters on Suffolk airfields my father chatted to the RAF bomber crews as they returned from firebombing German invasion barges. Pilots said: “That has put a stop to their little game”. How serious Hitler was about risking the Royal Navy’s domination of The English Channel is debateable.

Napoleon was a poor naval strategist. He meddled with The Combined Fleet’s movements. As they sailed out of Cadiz harbour, their fate was sealed. Nelson, a leader not without his cry-baby moments, a worrier, also possessed personal courage, worthy of recognition. He was undoubtedly a tactician. His famous “England expects” final message to the British fleet came after he had told his ships’ captains to break the enemy’s line at right-angles, defying conventional line abreast cannonades.

He wanted a pell-mell battle, liberating his captains to interpret the battle as it unfolded. The battle was won in a nerve-wrenchingly slow 30 minutes as Nelson’s ships crawled – exposed, hammered by deadly cannon fire – on a gentle breeze into the enemy line, and to then finally open fire through the stern and bows of the enemy. As he strolled the deck of HMS Victory, symbolising fearlessness in the face of the enemy, his war shattered body succumbed.

Such courage, patience, delegation and trust is unlikely to emerge initially in Trump II if all the arrows of power point into POTUS. This will gradually throttle American ingenuity and its global institutions. This is leadership-poor. Nelson, prior to appointment as overall fleet commander, was assessed for his wider consciousness. In spite of storied tactical successes his journals were studied by superiors for strategic capability beyond operational prowess.

As of now, Trump II remains an unknown. We suspect revanchism, but maybe dogmatism, pragmatism or even idealism is present. Britain’s role, shrunken as it is, is to attempt to use its long history of fending off ideologues and shaping spheres of influence. Especially when it can see some cruelties are just unnecessary to maintaining its legacy in meeting existential threats. Building a complex society like Britain is a work of continual attentiveness. America’s attention span is getting shorter. Its citizens drifting quietly from their previous wholehearted commitment to ‘America as project’. Its elite and media increasingly living in another world from ‘the voter’. JFK’s contribution was not unlike Churchill’s, rhetorical. It offered language and meaning that others could adopt. It appeared to gather more than it divided.

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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.