A Dull Labour Leader Got an Exciting Win

For an American the most amazing thing about the UK general election July 4^th was watching a defeated right-wing politician state the reality that his party had lost, announce that he would be resigning that very day, openly acknowledge that his opponent, Keir Starmer, “will shortly become our Prime Minister”—shortly meaning that same day—and then go on to say,

In this job, his successes will be all our successes, and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent, public-spirited man, who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding, as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door [of 10 Downing Street]. 

There was a peaceful and even friendly transfer of power.  Whatever happens in the US presidential election in November it will not be any of this.  I read the outgoing PM Rishi Sunak’s statement a couple of times for the sheer novelty of the loser admitting he’d lost and leaving. 

 

The General Election has produced a Labour landslide of a size that happens only every 20 or thirty years in British politics. The media is busy complicating this but the basic situation is stark. It’s complete power shift, based on the crushing of the Conservatives and the domination of Labour in parliament.  Keir Starmer is only the 4^th Labour head of party in history to win an outright majority, with Tony Blair being the last. Labour has won 411 seats, a doubling of its 202 in the last Parliament. The Tories have collapsed to about one third of their power until a few days ago, from 365 to 121.  The current truism is that this was a Tory loss more than a Labour win.  Ok, but what a loss, and so deeply deserved.

 

Unless you live here, the crumbling that the Tories generated is hard to believe. Trains, health care, sewage treatment, home building, education, universities, you name it, it doesn’t work.  The Tories actively made everything worse.  They presided over a capital strike in the private sector, made much worse by Brexit, so that basic investment in business is years behind where it would normally be in a wealthy country.  Public sector investment is decades behind.  Cameron and Osborne deliberately starved it on the grounds that services like education, health, and transport are Labour strongholds—while also prepping it for private-sector take-over by Tory-connected firms.  Outside of London and a few other rich cities, the British social fabric is noticeably worse than that its former West and Northern European peers. In capitalist terms, it’s no longer competitive. There’s an ex-First World feeling here, and widespread doubt whether, given the damage done in only 14 years, Britain will ever catch up again. 

 

You’d also have to live through everyday Tory behavior to believe it. The U.S. is big enough to escape Washington. There is no escape from Westminster on the British Isles. The individual cabinet members were never picked for competence or knowledge, like, ever.  Some had a certain momentum in media messaging—Kemi Badenoch for example--but were nonetheless intellectually chaotic and self-serving. They were also always wrong. Michael Gove set the tone for the decade with his TV crack that “the people of this country have had enough of experts,” by which he really meant Tories, and the government was a parade of people who not only knew nothing about their briefs but distained people who actually did—like civil servants, renamed by dopes like Liz Truss as “the blob.” Well the blob had more brains in one protoplasmic cell than an entire Tory cabinet at any given time.

 

The British learned how that turns out. People die unnecessarily from Covid and get an unending series of fake solutions to problems only indirectly admitted to exist. Ministers changed their minds constantly, and each idea was worse than the one before. Their immigration plan was to take migrants who’d crossed the channel in “small boats” and fly them to Rwanda.  (Many of them were Afghanis who’d worked for the UK in Kabul and elsewhere before being abandoned there.) Their solution on transport was to cut the national high speed rail plan to one 100 mile stretch from Birmingham to the outskirts of London. Their response to 50 universities in deficit and 45,000 pounds in average student debt was to propose mandatory national service for young people.  The British military now has trouble firing its missiles. Press events with the prime minister Rishi Sunak were like Monty Python sketches. Luckily Marina Hyde and John Crace were there to write them as such in their Guardian columns. Summing up, Hyde’s book was called What Just Happened? 

 

So Starmer offered himself as a human off-switch for a country that above all wanted Tory misrule to stop.  His acceptance speech was an unrousing promise of “a government unburdened by doctrine, guided only by a determination to serve your interests. To defy, quietly, those who have written our country off.”  But actually promising also nothing was great! Using government to fix potholes will be the same. It means the next few years will at least not be idiotic. 

 

In other words, there is general relief that Labour will stop the bleeding. Self-harm, first and foremost Brexit, will not keep repeating itself. 

 

But I still have to ask, why did the Tories do so much damage to their own country in the first place?

 

I see two big reasons. The first I’ve already mentioned.  Tory culture is still deeply Thatcherite, which always choses power over knowledge. People have been saying for years how absurdly centralized British government is. It controls student fees at every university in England, for example, and controls council budgets. A US equivalent would be the Santa Barbara city and county base budgets being set not in Santa Barbara or even in Sacramento but in Washington D.C. This has been Conservative Party policy since Thatcher. When the Greater London Council became a stronghold of Labour opposition to her policies in the early 1980s, she got it abolished by an act of parliament.  This is good for central power, but also for central ignorance.  Local knowledge and expertise never turns up where the decisions are actually made.  “Devolution” was constantly discussed after 2015 but never enacted. Hence the hallmark of the Tory rule that I experienced since started to spend extended time here in 2013 and then moving here in 2020 was that steady dribble of obviously bad ideas, none of which could possibly work.  And indeed none of them did. 

 

So the first reason for their failure was a permanent Tory knowledge crisis rooted in Tory authoritarianism.  When a warmed-over Thatcher idea like Cameron’s “Big Society” wasn’t working (it was really “starve government”), they just bore down harder on people and issued more orders.

 

The second reason for deep Tory damage was what filled the intellectual vacuum: entrenchment in a kind middle-aged influencer culture.  Government communication was spin directed at the media, always authored by hustlers focused on building their personal brand. It would take a book to summarize the ludicrous acts booked onto the Tory government variety show. The effect was an entire society making major decisions like whether to leave the European Union or obey Covid lockdown rules with government-issued fake information. Naturally, the decisions were main bad, including making Boris Johnson, the epic liar about Brexit yielding £350 million a week for the National Health Service, the prime minister to “get Brexit done.” Large majorities now do see that Brexit hasn’t worked out, and the Tories sent trust in government to modern lows. 

 

Each Tory trait, authoritarianism and non-stop marketing, has the same relation to knowledge, which is to replace it with bullshit in the philosophical sense—with signalling aiming only at getting people to think and do what you want. Authoritarians are good at marketing, since they are tightly focused on compliance.  But marketing is terrible for defining and addressing actual problems—terrible at government in every sense.  And Tories have finally been punished for it.

 

I mentioned that many people see the Conservatives as losing more than Labour winning. And they point to the fact that Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, wrote a bland and empty manifesto, promised very little and trimmed back even that, and focused mainly on reassuring business and financial markets. I have often said that they were running on Clintonomics circle 1992, which is also true. Everyone agrees their economic plan is too tiny to do anything—it amounts to a weekend of British GDP, Andy Haldane pointed out in the Financial Times. 

 

But the great thing is that there’s been an epistemic break. Starmer et al, though the center-right of Labour, see the government as the place to address social problems and not as their personal hustle.  They will lower the quantity of destructive nonsense.  Less lying will make people more trusting. The ideas will have some connection to reality.

 

Finally, a vigorous nod to the consensus view: this has been a very shallow landslide for Labour.  They got a huge majority of seats with 33.7% of the national vote.  That was only one point more than Jeremy Corbyn got in the 2019 win for Boris Johnson that supposedly shattered the Labour party. And it was over 6 points less than Corbyn won against Teresa May in 2017.  This was a national kicking of the Tories, as this slide from Ed Conway shows: 

Labour owes over 100 of their 2024 seats to Nigel Farage’s far-right Racism Reform UK Party taking votes away from the Tories. Reform got 14% of the vote—3 points more than the Liberal Democrats got in their night of huge resurgence. The disproportion between votes and seats is unbelievable, and the biggest ever: Reform’s 14% got them 5 seats, or 1% of seats.  The Lib Dems got 71 seats or 11%. Meanwhile, Labour’s 34% of the votes translated into 63% of the seats (the Conservatives 24% produced 19%).  The Greens had a great night, with 7% of the votes, yielding 1% of seats. 

 

British politics is much more local than North American, but still this is absurd, and says that an increasingly multi-party system will need to move to proportional voting.

 

By the way, I live in Islington North, where Jeremy Corbyn has been MP for decades. I and all my neighbors are happy to say that he won reelection as an Independent in spite of Starmer having purged him from Labour.  And he beat the candidate that Labour had imposed—a medical services privatizer whose views were a further slap in the face to Corbyn.  

 

I’m just going to declare this the start of a new era, really. And hope that France and the US do nearly as well.  

The Problem of the R-Whites

 

The photo shows the Grenoble UCalifornia study abroad students celebrating a U.S. November election 14 years ago--the one that elected Barack Obama in 2008. We all assumed an exit door had opened on the Bush-Cheney nightmare of the global war on terror and that we would all be gradually waking up. Operation Cast Lead hadn't started in Gaza, designed to instruct Obama that the age of war was just getting started. None of the other stuff had happened yet either--Obama failing to bail out Main Street and indemnifying Wall Street, and renewed forms of white supremacism and white nationalism triggered by having a Black family living in the White House rather than working outside to refresh the paint. I still honor the hope that Obama wanted to inject into the political system and also the hope of these amazing students, staff, and unpictured educators, not to mention all the French people on public transport and in the streets chanting, “Obama, Obama,” ecstatically because of the glimpse of that door open to the better world.

There are all sorts of policy deadlocks to discuss, but I'm struck by what used to be called the character issues, by which I mean the disintegration of the personality structures of a majority of white Americans since that day we were all hoping for Obama. I don't just mean the blanket refusal of information and data, though that's very bad, but the widespread toleration, even admiration, for sadistic, degrading activity and the desire for more. The Repubs have canonized a short list of major traits that everybody's parents always tries to keep their kids from taking on:

 

Being a bad loser, to the point of refusing to admit you lost, also crying and yelling

 

Blaming everyone except yourself

 

Cheating

 

Lying

 

Bullying

 

These are all behaviors that R-Whites, for lack of a better term, now celebrate. It's NOT obvious or to be taken for granted that a dominant political party is cool with the degrading, contemptible dishing out of humiliation and scorn to people they don't like. They are cool with making things worse for the obviously unfortunate, the broke, the desperate, the walked-a-thousand-miles to get out of an unliveable situation—what kind of people look on these terrifying flights from horror and work themselves into a state of contempt? They regularly do and also glorify things that would get you suspended from Catholic grade school: mocking the poor kids with bad shoes, beating up the brown kids when the teacher turns her back, accusing the innocent to explain why Jimmy's nose is bleeding, attacking the kids who studied for the test and did well on it, never ever accepting blame for anything, never trying to fix anything, never learning anything, never doing anything better. And instead lying to some refugees to get them on a bus to drop them off on some Dem politician’s corner in a blue city as a funny joke. It’s really the same spirit of throw the firebomb through the Black family's living room window. Except it's the governor of the modern state of Florida doing it, not some backwater klansmen, and with the support of his party, its members, and the state police.

I don't see how we can get anywhere without naming this accelerating shift towards mass pathology--calling it fascism doesn't quite get at the sexual fear, the racial derangement, the hostility to autonomous women, the sadistic delight in seeing people suffer to prove they are lesser than you. I don't know what the name is, but it has to be studied and confronted with both brains and anger until it collapses.

War is the Drift of the State

By now, everyone realizes that the war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition. As BobBaer put it weeks ago, Russia is running shells through artillery pieces and moving a kilometre or less a day through brute destruction. Ukraine demands arms in enough volume to allow them to retake their territory.  The West gives them a fraction of that, enough to control the pace of defeat, and to drag that out. There’s tacit agreement between Putin and the West that this war will go on for years, that war will rule the global economy and climate policy, and that warmaking and war preparation will stay “the health of the state.”

 

Yesterday, the analyst of land warfare Jack Watling described the extent to which Ukraine has been trapped into attritional warfare. Towards the end he writes, “The final process of attrition for Ukraine is economic, and in this realm there can be no doubt that it is running out of money, while Russia can withstand western sanctions. Soon it will be essential for economic relief to sustain the government in Kyiv. Alongside the military considerations outlined above, therefore, ending the attritional struggle in Ukraine is ultimately a question of how much Nato members are prepared to invest in Russia’s defeat.”

 

The answer about NATO investment is “as little as possible.” “Fighting to the last Ukranian” remains the strategy. Reversion to the mean is the default answer, meaning back to the cold war, famine, and global poverty.

 The visits of EU leaders--and the invitations to Ukraine to apply for membership--make it impossible for Putin to back down. 

 

The UK's Boris Johnson didn't want to be left out. Same message.

 

The Westerners insure a Cold War standoff slated to go on for years.

The war comes as a forty-year free-money period comes unglued. Day after day, the Financial Times headlines deepening business alarm.  Will Hutton summarized the dying paradigm in the first paragraph of his Observer column, which appeared on the same day as Watling’s.

This is not the 1970s all over again, notwithstanding the apparent similarities – oil shocks, recession, seasons of discontent, inflation. What we are living through is something more profound. It is the painful unwinding of the dysfunctional Thatcherite economic model, driven by credit, consumption and property prices, so careless of investment, productivity and good, high-performance workplaces. Its end started with the financial crisis, accelerated with Brexit and is now sealed by the economic fallout from Ukraine.

He goes on to point out that this government has no economic plan, and also, that such a plan is beyond the capabilities of this government.

 

I said to Andrea yesterday in Crux Easton that the Tories have spent 12 years making the majority of their people poorer. 

“That’s always been the Tory strategy.” 

“Going back to the 19^th century?” 

“Before that.” 

“Since the Civil War in the 17^th?” 

“Yes, exactly since the Civil War. Since the Roundheads rose up, the poverty of the people has been the Tory strategy.”  

 

More people now say this about the Tories--that their goal is the poverty of the British people. The other consensus is that Labour has no alternative.  Party leader Starmer couldn't see Zelenskyy, so had a photo op with British NATO troops talking about Labour's restored patriotism. Kier and Boris are in full agreement.

 

The policy in the “West” is drift, and drift is the foundation of war.

 

Anything better will depend on mass mobilization, aiming at a positive alternative system.  Hutton again:

But just as Thatcherism emerged out of the 1970s, a new philosophy right for our times must emerge now. Its building blocks are still hazy but already apparent. The trillions of ESG (environmental, social and governance) savings need to be mobilised in partnership with government to pursue great national missions – levelling up, rebasing our energy system and grid to achieve net zero, opening up space, transforming our cities, building in new resiliencies, backing our science.

 

Yes. And this will only happen if policy agency shifts from the current leadership pretty much everywhere to regular people, who've set themselves up in organizations now largely invisible.   This is kind of great.

"This is a different brand of activist — young, mostly female and mostly from Eastern Europe — who believes that the Ukraine war is a brutal manifestation of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. They have joined two causes — antiwar activism and climate change — to take full advantage of this moment when the world’s attention is focused on Ukraine. And to make their case, they confront Europe’s leaders face-to-face."   

They are great, and this needs to spread. It seems small, but only direct action is going to derail what's happening now.

Denying Reality

What is it like to have gone from Trump's America to Boris's Britain in the middle of a pandemic? It was surreal.  Two years later, it's constantly getting more so. By that I mean the British state seems to have a poor grasp of reality, and is working hard to keep it that way.

I'd just gotten back to London in June 2017 when  Grenfell Tower caught fire and burned all night, killing 72 of its residents.  On June 17th, four days later, we visited a friend who lives nearby and spent time at the already very large memorial (hence the photo).  

In a few weeks, we knew the causes more or less: the council had bought flammable cladding because it was cheaper, and turned the building into a torch waiting for a match; they followed no fire protocols, another likely cost saving; responsibility had been deregulated and outsourced; repeated resident complaints and warnings had been deliberately ignored. The white council government of the richest borough in Britain continuously ignored a tower of people of color in its midst by cloaking it in magic incinerator metal. It was an obvious case of malpractice issuing from structural racism that the government was rendering an unspeakable fact years before it seized on the menace of critical race theory.

Today is the 5th anniversary of the fire. There have been no official findings of cause, no convictions, or even indictments.  What has emerged, as the Financial Times piece put it, is "a disregard for safety within parts of the construction industry and a compromised regulatory regime that allowed Britain to become a dumping ground for dangerous goods."

I'd been following the decline of British higher ed since the fee tripling and central funding cuts implemented by the Cameron-Willetts regime in 2011. But Grenfell was the moment when I decided Britain's decline would be obvious to everyone, and that something would happen.  I didn't think of it as a point of no return.  Now I do. 

The Johnson government isn't failing on a few issues where its defunct Thatcherism or right-wing backbenchers are holding it back. It is failing on every front. 

Just on Saturday:

• Farming: the government is not replacing EU subsidies lost to Brexit, and has cut them 20% this year.
• Food policy: the government is diluting the Dimbleby Report, authored by the Tory co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, rejecting "expanded sugar and salt taxes" to fund fruit and vegetable consumption by low-income families. The obesity crisis will continue and probably worsen.
• Immigration: a high court judge ruled the plan to deport migrants to Rwanda to be legal.  This plan is an obvious self-inflicted humiliation to Britain's international reputation, such as it still is, combining casual cruelty, neocolonial dumping in Africa, bumptious illegality, and financial incoherence, all wrapped in Monty-Python absurdist packaging.  Even the crown, in the person of Prince Charles, has been unable to suppress its disgust. And yet first flight is to leave today, with 8 migrants. 
• Northern Ireland: the government is nullifying large parts of its own treaty with the EU to extend its denial of the reality that it put a custom barrier between Great Britain and the island of Ireland.
  
• Education: more strong applicants are being excluded from their first choices of university, even as marketization has degraded the distinctive alternative universities like Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and SOAS.
• Research funding: UK universities have all but given up on managing to stay in the 95 billion euro EU framework program that they wanted to keep in spite of Brexit.
  
• Economics; the government has no actual plan either to "level up" the North or to expand the economy or to create high-wage, high-skill jobs.  It is responding to warnings of widespread food and fuel poverty by promising tax cuts.
  

Intelligence requires foresight, which means seeing the bad effects of what you are about to do before you do it, and not years later, when it's way too late. But the failure of Brexit, the lethal Covid response, the attacks on cultural institutions, migrants seeking refugee status, universities, Black dissent--all the old unforgotten enemies going back to empire--has only hardened the government persisting in the obviously stupid on the basis of dim political calculations that their own people don't credit.  And the hard-core TOry reprobates drive the discourse, which is familar from the U.S., which also has oriented its entire political system around the coddling of its most backward elements.

The actual British people aren't like this. The gap between governments and people is rightly described as wide. And yet these people as voters did put this government in and show no sign of mass repentance and change. 

Meanwhile they may turn the burned tower into a 24 story garden. We do remember the dead and the creativity of the local responses to the living. I dearly hope the latter can spread.

War Diary 7: Checkmate

A month into the war in Ukraine, former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev said that Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine “clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons." He named four of them.  The first two involve nuclear attack on Russia or its allies. The third is any endangerment of Russia’s nuclear capability. “And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”

 

That same day, March 26^th, Biden ended his speech in Warsaw with the famous ad lib, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

 

One month after that, during an originally-secret visit to Ukraine by the US Secretaries of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, Austin said, ““We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

 

The top officials in the U.S. government have directly jeopardized the existence of the Putin government of Russia, which is the same as the existence of their Russia.  I can’t tell if they’re keeping Russia’s nuclear option alive through intent--which can't be ruled out--or blundering stupidity. But the result is the same: Putin and his government thinking the West’s response to the Ukraine invasion is an existential threat to them.  The U.S. response to that has been further displays of contempt.

 

It’s contempt without a plan for de-escalation.  On his April 28^th episode of Background Briefing, Ian Masters spoke with a frequent guest, Robert Baer, the former CIA agent and author who’s best known for the material that led to the film Syriana, about brutal US policy in the Middle East.  Around 15’45”, an alarmed Masters starts to push Baer to produce a concrete answer about how Putin can stop from escalating in Ukraine and beyond it.

 

Masters: But his army’s a paper tiger. You were saying that earlier. So how the hell is he going beyond where he is right now?

 

Baer: He simply has to produce artillery shells. And run them through his artillery pieces. Until Ukraine simply no longer exists. And as of today that’s where he’s going.

 

Masters: And what can Biden do? Biden today announced a 33-billion-dollar package. They’ve been very slow getting stuff to the Ukrainian military, but what’s the 33 billion dollars going to do if this is the ultimate plan? Is there any way to stop Putin?

 

Baer: The 33 billion dollars is a down payment on World War III. 

 

Masters: meaning what?

 

Baer: Meaning an attack on a NATO country.  The Baltics. Go in, take them. He’s got to continue this war on the West and War on NATO. He cannot let it go at this- a piece of the Donbas. There’s so much he’s lost, he’s got to keep going. …. He can’t turn to the Russians and say hey, it was a mistake, we got a bigger piece of the Donbas, let’s declare victory and leave. People have been watching him for years—that’s not what he’s going to do. …We don’t really know what he’s going to do. He’s been listening to these mystics, you know, Russian superiority and the Russian soul and it’s the clash of civilisations. He believes this. We don’t know what he’s going to do.

 

Masters: Let’s just go back to the idea that he fires a nuke at Odessa. That’s a huge game-changer. What’s the West going to do then?

 

Baer: I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone in Washington does. They don’t know what’s going on. They never took him seriously.  When he went into Crimea in 2014 and all this blabbering on about how he’s going to take on NATO and take on the West—nobody believed it. And now all of the sudden you have to figure out what this guy’s going to do next. You can’t tell from pictures, but I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s completely lost his mind. And that means you can’t predict what he’s going to do. You can’t predict whether the Russian command and control will follow orders to launch nukes. That’s unknowable.  We don’t know.

 

Masters: Assuming he does fire a tactical nuclear weapon as a way to break the will of the Ukrainians and destroy Odessa—as much as there are international sanctions now, he’d become an international pariah, nobody would want to deal with him, not even the Chinese, would they?

 

Baer: Ian, right now it’s the Sampson option for him. He has to die and take down the temple. 

 

Masters: right but is there any way that you can let him have some kind of victory that he can dress up as a victory?

 

Baer: there’s nobody to give him that victory.  I  Zelensky turns to the Ukrainian military and says, “hey, we’re going to give up the Donbas to stop this,” Zelensky will be gone the same day.

 

Masters: so both sides are fighting to the death.

 

Bear: Yep. …they’re determined. They’re going for broke.

 

Masters: well they have every reason.  They’re being invaded, right?

 

Baer: yep, they’re being murdered. It’s genocide. What do you do when you’re up against genocide? You fight back.  And surrender does nothing for you, because they’ll keep going.  All these things, it doesn’t really matter what the plans are. It’s what people believe. 

 

Masters: well you’ve given us a lot to think about, Bob Baer, and I thank you very much for joining us here today.

 

Baer: yeah, well none of it is optimistic.

 

Masters: that’s an understatement. 20’15”

 

Two big things are happening here. The first is that a tactical nuclear strike is being discussed as a realistic possibility.

 

Second, Baer dismisses the two current standard "solutions." Arms flows to Ukraine won't stop the destruction of Ukraine. And the other, a diplomatic solution, is no longer possibly psychologically.  

 

We can state the diplomatic solution's starting points: Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine keeps the Donbas with formal rights for ethnic Russians there, Ukraine pledges neutrality and permanent withdrawal of any bid to join NATO. Something like this was proposed yet again on the same day as the Masters-Baer exchange by the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven. But, as Baer would expect, this framework didn't survive even to the end of the show: Lieven later said that Russia needs all of the Donbas to justify its losses, but left out the next sentence as provided by Baer—that the Ukranian military, their country invaded and half destroyed, their existence denied by Putin, will fight to the death to prevent this.

 

Lievan also said,

Lloyd Austin’s comments, and those of the British government, as well, imply a war that will go on essentially forever, you know, an endless war against Russia. You know, we have to ask what that will do to Ukraine, what it will do to the world economy, and what it will do to Europe.

 

We actually don't need to ask because we already know: if the war isn't forever, it's nuclear.

 

Checkmate. See this war for what it is, in order to think past it. 

The Sum of All Toryism

It's interesting to be an American watching Anglo-American decline in the much smaller setting of England, starring Boris Johnson and the Entitled Tories.  The background story is that in recent decades the national governments of both countries have focused on giving their populations less rather than more, and making ordinary town life worse rather than better.  

An obvious example is the National Health Service, which has repeatedly been on the verge of meltdown since I started paying careful attention in 2013.  Covid made that worse, but even before the Tory strategy was to keep core institutions at the level of "barely good enough to get by." The NHS is uber-popular here because it represents equal access, that is service not (for once) graded by wealth and privilege.  Naturally the Tories have been bleeding that example.

The Tories have made mediocrity the de facto standard of public systems, with actual collapse a perpetual shadow.  UK infrastructures are not competitive in the 21st century. The Tory UK is weaker in 2022 than it was in 2010 when they took over.  Neither the media nor much of the voting public ever focus on these core issues. They are less important than another issue, which we'll get to. 

Another example of "making worse" is the government itself. Starting in 2015-16, Johnson and his Tories have turned public discussion in the country upside down. Everything has been about Brexit, everything has been about the people leading it--Johnson, May, Gove, Davies, Frost, et al. generating now seven years of nonsense about everything.  Real British issues like climate disaster, entrenched poverty, deindustrialization, poor national health, faltering education, the worst productivity gains in the rich world, political corruption--all these were drowned by the nonstop Brexit roadshow. 

Brexit got fired up five years into the Coalition and then Conservative austerity reign, which was clearly going nowhere. Over the decade, the BBC, the country's only internationally-respected institution (hate to break the news) was cut 30 percent, and councils, which sustain local quality of life, were generally cut around 50 percent. This forced cuts that hurt essential services (after school youth programs, sidewalk de-icing, rubbish collection, everything), making most of this stuff, even in my well-off borough of Islington, pretty crappy.  Simple repairs (a hole in a sideboard allowing squirrels into the building walls) would take months and months, and then not be done well enough to last more than a few weeks. Councils also ramped up side businesses like moneylending and accompanying risks.  The fatal decision to put flammable cladding on Grenfell Tower was stupid and insane on its face, but very much a part of this austerity-mediocrity ethos that has degraded Britain.

Actually there is another internationally-respected British institution, universities, and the Tory-led Coalition government entered by whacking them too, cutting central teaching funding to near zero for most fields, then later cutting maintenance grants for students, then still later eliminating the London cost allowance, all after tripling the fee level and creating a student debt (and also public debt, don't ask) crisis and then freezing fees for years which has pushed many universities into fiscal crisis--you get the picture.  The entitled, casual fucking around with really complex institutions that took decades and the life-work of millions, well, it is very very hard to understand.

Behind the "great trading nation" rhetoric, the implicit Tory plan is to make everyday life for most people a little bit worse, year after year.  The Tory offer to builders, bankers, and property owners is clear. But they offer nothing material to the general population: they certainly have no plan for economic grandeur of the kind associated with the lost empire, because--short of re-colonial conquest-- that would require massive investments in public and behaviorially-evolved stuff--research, advanced education, sustained managerial effort that goes beyond coercion and bullying, and also long-range, sustained thinking. 

When they get into trouble, as they have now, Tories first think to wreck some more.  Hence their absurd culture minister's plan to freeze and then defund the BBC, the home office minister's plan to sic the Navy on refugee rafts, the likely pushing of more patients into the NHS by lifting all Covid restrictions before Omicron has been contained, and so on.  There's just nothing constructive coming out of the party post-Brexit, which was the pointless, damaging culmination of their first 10 years of post-Thatcherite rule.

So the question is why do these Tories rule? One answer is that the Labour party today offers nothing much either. It presided over many Tory cuts on local councils in the famous red wall regions, and its post-Corbyn alternative is basically nonexistent. What rebuilding would Labour actually do?  Their shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, used a Financial Times interview to promise fiscal discipline, Tory style.

A better answer comes from Nesrine Malik this week in the Guardian--it's kind of the only thing you need to read on the subject (though see also Aditya Chakraborty). Malik rightly claims that Tory supporters aren't going to dump Johnson so easily (though they will happily beat him up enough to make him more compliant with Thatcherite conservatism). 

Johnson is a contracted private service provider – as long as he delivers, then as clients, his supporters don’t really care what he gets up to outside of the tasks he has been hired for. Those tasks are broadly Brexit and a shiny, prosperous country where jobs and funds have been cut or confiscated from those less deserving.

She then helpfully translates:

Those two tasks, at heart, are about contempt for communal rule of law, and limiting sharing resources with others. They are about making our own minds up regarding which laws we would like thank you very much, and creating two classes of people. ... It is no wonder Tory supporters are not storming the gates of Downing Street.

So the Tory offer to the nation is English exceptionalism.  This has two components, one financial and one cultural, read racial.

The sub-clauses in the contract that flow from these two headline items all, one way or another, are about preserving the financial and cultural assets of Conservative voters. Maintaining an economy built on protecting private capital and property values, shifting the blame for low wages and unemployment on to immigrants rather than poor regulation of employers, and forging a synthetic supremacist national identity through relentless culture war posturing on colonial history, statues, flags and national anthems.

Basically Malik has captured the whole story of English Conservatism today.  There is nothing else to say. "As long as the Tories hurt only who they 'need to be hurting,' no frivolity or recklessness will be terminal."  They have no other goals, or other ideas.

There. UK politics is explained. And, if Tory superdominance stays intact, so is the inevitability of English decline. 

Sobriety Week on Biden-Harris

That felt good. Now it's post-Biden-Harris Sobriety Week. Over at the blog Lawyers Guns & Money, Elizabeth Nelson writes, "let’s not interpret a Biden administration as an opportunity to indulge in cultural and political comfort food. Let’s not feel reassured or validated. There is nothing validating about 70 million votes cast for Donald Trump....This is not the time for upbeat “I knew we’d prevail!” indie rock. ...The anger should feel more acute now than ever. Per the GOP’s proven system, Trump will hand Biden a terrible economy and quite possibly an exaggerated winter of  I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-How-Many-Die response to the pandemic. Biden will be pilloried, vilified and obstructed from the moment he takes power. Let’s push back harder than ever." Yes, exactly.

Writing in the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom defines the pushing back as "radical responsiveness" to real US conditions. This means above all extracting full accountability for the Trump Administration: legal forensics into the damage Trump and his people did to public systems from the Dept of Justice to the Environmental Protection Agency to the misuse of executive branch paramilitaries in policing demonstrations in a way that created the illusion of leftist violence that Republicans took with them to the voting booth. There must be a calling to account. The attack on systemic racism that Biden invoked in his victory speech, the rebuilding of public health infractructure (including the disgraced CDC), energy conversion to renewables . . .everything depends on a militant reassertion of expertise, reality-testing, interpretative skills, the whole quantitative and qualitative set of knowledge practices that Trumpism voids. Liz Chatterjee and I have pieces in a forthcoming book (coedited by Anna Alexandrova, to be published by Alan Thomas) arguing that experts truly did earn popular mistrust by supporting policies that did systemic damage to majorities in both the US and UK. That said, the Biden-Harris admin will need to assert, with full militancy, the value of knowledge practices for solving social problems. This will require *investigations* and *prosecutions* of Trumpian corruption, including their deliberate epistemic sabotage. There should be the theater of congressional hearings and legal proceedings, tied to specific lessons to expand the "reality-based community in post-truth America," in Ian Masters' tag-line for his excellent show. Nothing could be worse than forgive-and-forget.

Cottom can be read in conjunction with Larry Elliott's Guardian column about economic troubles. Biden doesn't have an analysis of finance capitalism that can dig the US or anyone else out of the current hole--to the contrary, as Elliott and others point out, Biden is part of the Clintonian Dem establishment that got us here. What kind of worked in the 1990s is failing now, and real budget policy ("fiscal") requires a Congress that Biden-Harris don't control. As Elliott writes, "Monetary policy [via the Federal Reserve] is no answer to America’s need to renew its infrastructure or to make its welfare system more generous. To the extent that it does make a difference, [Quantitative Easing] works by pushing up asset prices and creating a feel good factor so it tends to be better for Wall Street than for the struggling communities in the less well-off states." This has been the play since Alan Greenspan took over the Federal Reserve in 1987, with unaffordable housing and low productivity growth (via low investment) being just two of many negative symptoms. (See French economist Cédric Durand's "Fictitious Capital" for an important analysis of asset-price opium and its damage to the real economy.) So we're going to need a radical rethink of US/UK capitalism, and that work is going to have to be done on a huge scale outside the Biden Admin, which won't touch it unless it grows into a movement.

I'm Going to Enjoy This As Long as I Possibly Can

I didn’t support Biden or Harris in the primaries, mostly trying to decide between two candidates I really did like- Sanders and Warren. Neither Biden nor Harris had policies strong enough to address the scale of the problems that we have. Nor, I thought, did they have the ideas that could mobilize the base. My friend 

Ricki told me I was wrong about the latter, that Harris’s status as first woman and first woman of color in either position would rally people—which did rally me along with tens of millions of other Dems—and also that people would respond overwhelmingly to Biden’s decency and non-reactionary policies. She was right! We all can continue to debate whether more progressive policies would have helped make the Dem margin bigger, including in House and Senate races. But there’s a massive, immediate victory for four issues:

1. racial justice, where overt racism won’t be sanctioned at the top. It’s only a start, but the Democratic win will end the demonization in Biden’s corrupt terminology of mainstream civil rights campaigns, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, queer people at that level of the federal government. The king of the Neo-confederacy has been beaten.

 

2. judicial corruption. The Republicans did pack the Supreme Court and the federal bench, but the removal of Barr from the Attorney General position will allow the Dept of Justice to function more professionally. This will help with civil rights enforcement, investigation of racist police departments, reduction of violence against indigenous peoples protecting water and land, and other basics. We can also again start to imagine enforcement of anti-trust and other regulations in relation to a Wall Street that has had a free hand to reinflate asset bubbles, invest against their own customers, etc. The same goes for the Department of Education on student debt and for-profit abusers, among many others. Rampant sexism no longer has a safe space in the White House, so gender equality can return to its status as a normal goal in the 21st century.

 

3. environmental regulation. Neither Harris nor Biden support the Green New Deal, but they can undo a ton of Trump’s gratuitous damage. They can be pressured into stronger, more adequate positions. and they’ll rejoin the Paris Accords.

 

4. Covid-19. Biden and Harris understand the concept of public health and the essential role of the public sector in operating a pandemic response. The country will get well much faster next year because the Democrats are back in the White House.

 

Other issues are up for grabs—education and higher education policy, labor rights, reproductive  rights, fiscal policy, transportation, infrastructure, the Middle East, China and foreign policy more generally. But i’m going to take a few days off from worrying about that.

 

And I’m very happy to have a community college professor as First Lady. It’s about time!

The Election Standoff: First Exit Poll Review

The blue wave never arrived, and as expected, Donald Trump declared victory--"frankly, we did win this election." He then demanded that ballot counting stop in the swing states where at 2:30 am ET he was ahead. Here's the full clip.

Both Fox and CNN denounced Trump's claim that continuing to count votes would be illegal. On Fox, Chris Wallace said, "This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn't won these states ... the president doesn't get to say he won states ... there's no question that all these states can continue to count votes." On CNN, Jake Tapper declared, “what the president just said is undemocratic and false and premature."  

Now the battle begins, first just to complete voting counts, which will shift blue in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  And the Senate is still up in the air, with only the more predictable flips being called--a Dem loss in Alabama (I'm sad about Doug Jones, actually), and two Dem gains, in Arizona and Colorado. It's all especially terrible for those of us from states like California, where we are hostage, election after election, to the whims of a few perennial swing states, many of which are also bad at counting.

I have some early thoughts on the Edison Research exit poll posted at the New York Times. It confirms David Sirota's take, especially the first and last items, "Democrats' weak economic message hugely helped Trump," and "A large percentage of Americans have lost their minds."  

1. Let's start with the economy (Trump in red, Biden in blue)

Trump does not win the working class vote. I could complain about 40+ percent of the bottom income quartiles voting for an unvarnished plutocrat, but Trump doesn't get a majority until family income hits six figures, or the most affluent 25 percent.  Trump is the candidate of the white middle- and upper-middle class. (re the title of this, my ancient blog). 

This one is extremely annoying.

People whose main issue is the economy went with Trump by 4:1! These aren't necessarily the people who know the most about economics (obviously).   "The economy" seems to have become a proxy for pro-business ideology--tax cuts, deregulation, etc., rather than being a chance to evaluate policy performance. This is a massive failure for the Democrats, and confirms both of Sirota's points above.

No less absurd is the Republican vote for the guy who addresses public safety by endangering it. 

A bit more on the economy: incumbents always do very well with people who think the economy is good (for them). Covid-19 and economic inequality notwithstanding, over 40 percent of respondents say they're better off than 4 years ago.  The surprise to me is that only a fifth of respondents say they are worse off now.  A third of  even those people voted for Trump, again confirming the point that Biden didn't have a strong enough message to beat Trump with the 50 percent who think the economy is not so good or poor (below).

Finally, union households. They are only a fifth of respondents, and Trump gets a percentage of them that should embarrass Democrats, or unions, or both.  Forty percent of union families voted for guy whose appointees have done serious damage to the status of unions, quite deliberately.

2. Race and Gender

One story was that whites were still largely Trumpers but that white women had had enough. This was wrong. 55 percent of white women stuck with Trump.  For me, this is big surprise number 2.

At first glance, 1 + 2 = a confirmation of 2016 analyses that stressed Trumpers voted to keep their racial position rather than to overcome economic anxiety.  This is a depressing continuity.

3. College. 

Another story was the educational divide: non-college people were said to resent the rule of experts and B.A. know-it-alls. Trump was to lose the college crowd, especially women, but score big with the non-college crowd.

Trump hung on to white women and won a narrow victory with white women college grads.  College curbs but doesn't eliminate white enthusiasm for a president who so clearly elevates money and power over knowledge that he makes George W. Bush look like William Faulkner.  The most anti-intellectual president in modern history still gets half of white college grads -- and slightly more women than men. 

The main surprise here is among white men, where college cuts their Trump support two-thirds to under half.

4. Party Identity. 

The red state / blue state dichotomy is a tedious cliché. That doesn't make it wrong.  What seems to be happening is that D v. R isn't about parties anymore, but breeds of American.

Note two things. First, the major parties each only have a third of the electorate.  Second, they each had nearly 95 percent candidate loyalty.  There are not so much two parties as two Americas. I dislike writing that stupid sentence but it seems to be true.

The question for Trump gets the same numbers: the other party's candidate inspires concern or fear in 90 + percent of either party. And that's true even for an "Uncle Joe" moderate like Biden. 

A silver lining is tentative vindication of people like Sanders and Warren who tried to talk the Democrat establishment out of their faith in moderation and the centrist voter.  There's going to be hell to pay for the strategists who spent millions on white "persuadables" instead of on first-time Latinx voters, for example.

Party also beats region.  West and East are more Democratic as we already knew, but not by a landslide.  Biden got nearly half of the South, the same as his score in the Midwest.  We now have country  vs. city parties--confirmation of a trend people have analyzed for years.

5. Pandemic politics

This exit poll confirms that in America, there is no independent reality--only a party line.

We see the same 90+ percent correlations between perception of Covid-competence and party membership. This is a huge embarrassment for a country that prides itself on can-do realism.

Equally embarrassing is the failure of rocketing Covid infection rates to make many people rethink Trump's performance. The same goes for the split on reopening vs. containment.  Democrats did not break through the wall on the basic point that if Covid isn't contained the economy won't rebuild. There's lots of bad news here about the country's epistemic competence.

This polls has huge gaps on issues and better data will be flooding out.  And as of noon in London the count is far from over.