Labour And The Kitchen Sink

The Left has never had much cause for optimism. For about three months in 1918 it might have looked like a genuine worldwide revolution could be about to start, but apart from that it has been chiefly a movement slumped in a permanent slough of despond, watching what governments it can get elected compromise their values until they are little more than pale imitations of their more energetically capitalist opponents, opponents who delight in the ease with which they can undo and privatise the meagre gains against capital the left can make. So it is with a great sense of familiarity that the Left now returns to internal feuding in the UK, a comfortable position of outrage and dissatisfaction that seems to exist in a world where getting a Labour majority elected is an easy thing, as opposed to something that's happened all of three times without the help of Tony Blair.

Everyone and their dog now has a diagnosis as to why Labour lost and what they should do next. I have plenty of my own, though I think at this point it is a bit irrelevant: the career politicians in the party have spent too long serving their time, jumping through the hoops and riding the conveyor belt upward to do the necessary thing and resign en masse now. That conveyor belt stretches all the way back to university - I have seen its start, which means I can see that the next few decades of careerists are already queued up. Everyone has too much invested in the game as it stands to get out of it, and while I'm sure those researchers and spads now feverishly putting out papers about why Labour lost have read John Harris and Jon Cruddas and understand the depth of Labour's problems connecting to its supposed base, I doubt that one of them has acknowledged that the correct conclusion from it all is that they should resign from the party and never run for so much as a parish councillor in their lives.

Harris in another article for the Guardian wrote about the decline of Labour with the line that may yet prove its epitaph : "To state the blindingly obvious, Labour is a party of the industrial age". This fact was staring the party strategists in the face for decades and they had no real plan to deal with it. The circumstances in which the party was founded were light years away from today, and now they have lost the union muscle and industrial organisation that underpinned their early strength they have nothing with which to replace it. Their long-term decline has been disguised partly by picking up ethnic minority votes, but immigrant communities went to Labour because they had nowhere else to go, not because of a deep sympathy with the labour movement. This has led to Labour slowly morphing into a loose coalition of the disaffected and unhappy, and frankly there aren't enough unhappy people in the country to win a parliamentary majority.

In short, the industrial age could provide an electorally significant population of industrial voters, and the post-industrial age can't. In addition to this, late capitalism can make enough people happy to outvote the unhappy. That means a critical mass of people who are doing well enough, who are old or read the Daily Mail or who live in suburbs, who have something to lose in a more equal society. They vote in huge numbers, and this is entirely legitimate. And my friends on the Left are entirely in denial about their existence. It must be false consciousness or media propaganda! But no, capital does provide quite a lot for these people. Labour's talk about the 1% has blinded them to what's right in front of them: a good 30% doing comfortably from the status quo that their own rhetoric has forgotten about.

In the Labour camp, on the other hand, there is that mix of disaffections. Could you provide an English nationalist story without alienating your BME vote? Is there a way of reviving the meaning of the word "Labour" amongst those communities who haven't even heard the words "trade union", or is it a lost cause? Is there any way of reviving positive left wing optimism in, say, the Midlands, while keeping the "aspirational" Mondeo men the current leadership candidates are so keen on?

The task ahead is so vast and varied, and the cacophony of voices crying traitor at all the others so loud, that I can't see much hope for progress on the issue. The scary possibility no one is talking about is not that the party needs to go left or right, but both. It doesn't need its base or swing voters, but both. Blair won three elections by throwing the kitchen sink at the Labour electoral problem: appear all things to all men, gather up right wing votes by sounding pro business, pledge high public spending, make just enough sympathetic noises to the white working class that you'd keep their vote. But there are only so many kitchen sinks in a party's kitchen, and I doubt a new attempt to go both left and right at the same time would fool many people unless it was sold with the kind of overpowering charisma and conviction that is so lacking in a party of spads.

Yet the kitchen sink is probably what is needed, even if that phrase implies a lumbering and obvious strategy. Rather, it should be nimble and responsive. A leader like Obama for the Democrats could offset pretty much any charge made against him in 2008: too high-taxing? A tax cut for 95% of families was his response. Not patriotic enough? His speeches were peppered with red meat patriotism. Too charismatic? He appeared in debates as professorial and calm. Labour doesn't have the leader that can pull off that slipperiness. But some concrete changes that sound fresh even while they obscure mutual contradiction would be a start to their narrative-changing plan to win back everyone in the whole country.

I'll end with my own suggestions, since there's a bandwagon that can still just about stand my weight:

1. Purge the careerists. Recruit a massive new tranche of community leaders and "commonsense" tradesmen to be MPs and publicise the search widely.

2.Reclaim Englishness and Britishness. Get nationalistic in the Billy Bragg/JB Priestly mode. There is nothing to lose by being shameless here.

3. Start being pro business in a pro small business way.  Talk about being pro market. Talk about how rubbish corporate governance and banking is. Sound like you enjoy talking about it.

4. Get your people seen helping with anti-austerity protests and strikes. The kind of community organising that allowed for E15 and Occupy could be galvanising, but stay away from union stuff to make yourself look new and fresh. Clone Stella Creasy and get lots more community campaigns going, preferably with the aid of Anglicans to confuse the media narrative even more.

5. Confuse the narrative further by adopting radically different tax policies. You don't even need to shift the burden of taxation - just cut it massively in one area, say corporation tax, and increase it in property. Then you get to shout about being a tax cutting party and the traditional narrative (which doesn't help you) gets muddied.

6. Talk about the deficit differently. Don't apologise for high spending, apologise for it at the wrong time. Say we will save in good times and spend in bad. It's basic Keynesianism.

7. Do something radical. Take your pick, but keep Greens and LDs on board with a promise to scrap Trident or nationalise something big. At least it makes you look like you're moving somewhere.

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We Are All Congress Now

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face impotently shouting at another human face, forever. It is said that where America goes, Britain will follow, and looking forward to the next parliament, it might be true. Americans by now are numb to the rather scary fact that they've just endured two of the least effective Congresses in history in a row. Were I a US citizen, I feel I'd be a little perturbed that the central organ of my democracy had just ceased to operate. I'd be more perturbed still that with a Clinton presidency on the horizon and Republican dominance of Congress all but locked in for the next decade, the prospects of any major legislation being passed before I'm well into my thirties are near zero.

The drafters of the Constitution planned on checks and balances, not paralysis. They didn't have a plan for when two equal power blocks became capable of vetoing each other into submission for generations at a time. The last time that happened they had to fight a war, because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft lead to complete slaughter. The British constitution, by virtue of being whatever people decided it was at the time, shouldn't have this problem. It should at least be able to deliver commanding majorities that allow the process of government to go forward - and it has more or less done that since the Second World War.

That's not to say there haven't been minority or simply weak governments before. But in 1929 Labour was on the rise and the Liberals on the decline; it was an accident of timing that at some point there would have to be a three-way split in the vote. In 1974, the only other time before 2010 our system failed to deliver a majority, the weakness of the main parties was due to a moment that combined poor economic times with a briefly resurgent Liberal party, and it was temporarily resolved with another election later the same year, and more satisfactorily resolved with the appearance of Thatcher's winning coalition at the end of that decade.

There is no Thatcher on the horizon for us today, however. Assuming Scotland remains part of the UK, Tony Blair is probably going to be the last person to put together a winning coalition for decades. If the Tories couldn't manage after a massive recession against an unpopular Labour leader with an agreeable-enough leader themselves and the press on their side, when can they? And Labour has nothing to offer to the swing voters who made Blair Prime Minister, either. The Left is hobbled by not quite knowing what it's meant to be doing these days, and infighting, an infinite conveyor belt of career politicians and grassroots despair at capitalism's dominance will hobble its chances in the long term.

That leaves us with the possibility of a long succession of anti's draining votes from these two: anti EU for UKIP, anti UK from the SNP, anti-mainstream from the Greens, anti-the-other-two from the Liberals. The days when either of the two larger parties could attract those voters back to their column are almost certainly now gone. In an era of trade unions and Women's Institutes, there were the kind of large community groupings that could solidify a country around two political poles; in an era of Cold War, there was the sense of a larger ideological battle to pick a side of. Now we live in an era of endless choice and endless individuality. What future can Labour offer us? "Responsible Capitalism?" What the hell is that? And where are the Tories going to find the kind of numbers they'd need to rebuild Thatcher's coalitions?

I don't know if anyone has worked out how they're going to up the numbers voting for them in the long term. The problem is that no one has enough to offer: there's no socialist paradise and very few people actually want the kind of free-market country at the end of the Tory rainbow. This isn't the seventies - we don't need post-imperial resurgence, we don't need to tamp down the unions, we don't need to modernise our economy. What we need is a thousand things, and everyone has their own opinion on them, and the democratic result ends up being shouty incoherence. Even within the big parties there is so much ideological messiness that getting a small majority might end up as a slightly more painful form of paralysis.

So perhaps we are all Congress now. While the Americans suffer from two-party dominance allowing for total gridlock, we are going to suffer total gridlock from multi-party lack of dominance. The end result will be the same. A lost generation with nothing getting done. Nobody passing bold legislation because even a majority government would have to take too big a risk.

Is a lack of bold governance tolerable? We're in a better position than the US - we have a working healthcare system that only has to be funded to continue, and at least gridlock would prevent it from being dismantled. We have a growing inequality problem, as ever, but I don't know how much legislation can do more than tinker at the edges of that. So how about the UK just muddles on for the next couple of decades without its parliament having a great effect on the country it purports to govern?

and on and on and on and

It may be, after all, that by neutralising the power of its democratic representation through not agreeing enough the UK public has given itself some breathing space. We can go home on Thursday knowing that no one can do anything too radical. Apparently this is the most important election in a generation (funny, I remember the last one being that too- generations go so fast these days). But if nothing much is going to change because no one can muster the numbers, then it may be the least. We may not see an important election again for many years. We may just watch as politicians shout at each other, promise to do everything in their power to stop their opponents doing what they propose, and to their great surprise, always succeed.

That would give us a chance to go away and think up some new ways of achieving change. And if we do that, by the time the next winning coalition has been formed, it might look very different, and have community building skills and goals and attitude we haven't yet seen. The power of the people might get its greatest boost from the impotence of its politics.

Green Shoots (And Misses)

Natalie Bennett's interview today raises several questions, not least about what the hell the Greens were thinking when they decided to replace Caroline Lucas with her, a decision I likened on Facebook to having Napoleon march in the front rank of the infantry at Austerlitz because it would be Only Fair. I have long suspected the Greens of being a not-terribly-serious party, and this seems to further confirm it.

Many of my good friends support the party, though, because it provides a genuine leftwing alternative to the mainstream, and fair enough. Except that it is not a long-term solution to support an environmentalist party, since the new recruits of the 2015 intake will almost certainly suspect the old guard of being tie-dyed vegetarians with their heads full of soft organic cotton wool. Out of such divisions come immobilising party rifts built on mutual suspicion. Checking out the online comments of left-wingers who wanted to support the Greens, as they tear their hair out at the unpreparedness of the party for the big time, you see a vision of the future wherein the Greens become a permanent fixture of UK politics. The socialists will always blame the tree-huggers for being softies, and the party will either collapse or drift into infighting. One side will suspect that the others would let the working class drown if it meant they could keep their pious certainties, the other that the first would let the world drown if they could keep the working class in carbon-heavy jobs.


No-one really thought the future of the Left would seriously be rooted in environmentalism anyway. The labour movement has often made sympathetic noises to it, but the roots of the two are as fundamentally different as that with Liberalism and Toryism, and no longterm fusion can be made. Die Linke remain apart from Die Grünen in Germany, and they will here too. Even the workaday canvasser in UK politics is trained to separate the two parties within the Greens out: Socialist Greens and Environmentalist Greens, and you can usually tell them apart just by asking about previous votes. Everyone knows the Left has fled to the Greens because they are a port in a storm, even if the lighthouse is solar-powered and the proposed wind farms to harness the power of the storm have gone massively over-budget.


So a question: in an era of multi-party politics, what would a good party for those Socialist Greens look like? Even by Leftwing standards a three-way split would be a bit much. That said, there is definitely a space for a British Syriza or Podemos, and it needn't have anything to do with the Greens. It needn't even be especially radical - imagine a party with Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman (hell, even Martin Wolf) as its policy chief, and you'd have something that rejected austerity in a way that Labour has definitely not, and wanted land value taxes and graduate taxes and the sort of thing Labour has simply stopped caring about. Free from the Green and labour traditions you might also have chance to resynthesise the left.


By which I mean that perhaps like the CIA, proper procedure with every leftwing party should be to disband and reform every couple of decades. The fact that the labour movement has deep roots makes it no more useful for uniting today's more disparate Left, proud as those roots are. The working class that powered it no longer exists, but there is still and will always be a strong radical tradition. The Tories will always be Tories because they have the same constituency they always did: the powerful. But why should the left pretend to be the same? Occupiers and UK Uncutters should be able to find a party where they are welcome, and the milquetoast Labour Party is not it. Nor are the Greens.

The key to uniting the left has never really been about policy, but about vitality. Socialists will accept anti-austerian Keynesian capitalists as their leaders if they think they're pushing the country in the right direction and are going to win. Which is why Blair was right to create New Labour, although he could have called it anything - it didn't need a tradition. It was only what he did with his victory that was a failure - a decent new leftwing party would have genuinely fought establishment interests until it became inevitably bogged down and corrupt, at which point it would disband and reform to try again. That is the job of radicalism. It is the opposite of revolution because it weakens revolutionary forces by giving them just enough progress. It is probably essential to a long-term democracy, and I fear we are losing sight of it.


Yet quite what policies a New English Radical Party (or a New Chartist Party, or New Levellers or whatever you like) could agree on I don't know. It's a question I mean to ask more over the coming months, but there's a lot of space for it, and little of it is covered with Greenery.

On Emerging From Darkness

Mental health is not a topic I particularly want to write about on this blog. It's getting talked about a lot more these days, which is excellent news, of course, but also raises new questions I'm not capable of handling. Once we're talking about it, we immediately run headfirst into how ill-fitting our vocabulary is on the subject. Who gets to be "depressed"? Who is circumstantially depressed and who is clinically depressed? Is there a difference between being perennially miserable and being depressed? Can it be possible that a quarter of our population taking medication to regulate their mood is a state of affairs we should regard as prudent and commensurate? And, whisper it in dark corners, are genuinely depressed people now able to engage in a kind of unhealthy narcissism by blogging endlessly about their innermost feelings under the worthwhile guise of ending stigma?

My suspicion is unsurprisingly related to suspicions of myself - I have deliberately attempted to keep the topics of this blog as far from me personally as possible for fear of what I would do if allowed to wallow in my own emotions with an unlimited wordcount. But I do want to talk a bit about my dealings with depression now, because I think there is a time and place for it, and I feel sufficiently emerged from whatever it was I was in to be a bit more useful in my analysis now.

I received a phonecall telling me I would be doing my current job on Blue Monday, January 9th, and I appreciated the irony of being given the chance the emerge from the darkness on that day of all days, for this new job has given me a level of routine considerably better as a painkiller than any antidepressant. I resolved to write about that irony once the pills had worn off properly. But I can't put a name to whatever-it-was. My struggles with depression? I've never really liked that one, since misery makes me lazy, not in the mood to struggle. Suffering depression? That sounds like an illness, and I have long known people who are clinically depressed and don't wish to insult them by saying whatever-it-was was the same thing they had. If I "suffered" it, I'd prefer to think of it on the level of having a leg in a cast for a couple of months. Which is not the same as a proper illness.

I refer to my dealings with depression because I quite like the image of it as a shady envoy of the local mob turning up at my shop to quietly demand some protection money: not actively threatening, certainly not more so than to any other shop on the street, but just someone to watch warily from the other side of the desk. So that doesn't put me in the same camp as other genuine sufferers, but since everyday language is incapable of making the distinction (as are doctors, to be perfectly honest), it is about depression that I must write, even when good verbs to relate to it are unavailable.

What I wanted to do is put forward a thought on the subject of the West's mental health timebomb, as it is known - because as I say, there is something disturbing about the sheer number of antidepressants needed to keep our society going. It has become a fuel as precious as oil. What are we going to do about it going forward? First, I would suggest two interrelated causes of the explosion. Broadly, these are the explosion of freedom and the concurrent understanding of that freedom.  A populace that, with an automated economy and liberal political rights, has a vast number of creative and interesting options to spend their lives on; whether in art, writing, humanitarianism or what have you - but also has the education and popular means of information available to show them those opportunities. Such that an average citizen of the UK has the literacy to write a song, the information from X Factor etc to imagine themselves doing it, the potential free time to write a song, and the understanding that as a democratic citizen, it is their opportunity (if not their right) to become famous as a songwriter.

Everybody's got the right to be happy...

Now, you may have noticed that the two elements of freedom and awareness of freedom are what makes up the classic existential conception of angst, and I think certain dead philosophers would see a grim satisfaction in the entire Western world collapsing in on itself in a fit of godless Kierkegaardian crisis. I don't think this will happen. I wrote before about the possibility that our virtue system is outdated (and I did so in the depths of my funk, which I think is clear from reading it) and it may take time for us to work out what to do with a society where there isn't enough work to do.

The clockmaker in Nuremberg in the 1700s may have had to worry about war and plague, and I do not suppose that his life was in any way nicer than mine. But were I him, I would have a trade for life and no popular information about what else I could be doing with my life, nor the sense of agency to make it happen even if I did. Such a man needs no antidepressants. Remove the war and the plague, add in the information and the freedom, and suddenly it seems the human constitution provides an automatic stabiliser of unhappiness, so that a free and educated population is miserable simply because it has context. The millenials are swamped in context. What is Facebook but a giant industrial engine of context. Where Jesus Christ was the Great I Am, Facebook is the Great Thou Art Not. You are not your friends, and they are living life to the full and you are not.

A society with that context at its heart is one that will deal with depression as its primary enemy, like the hungry Sparta forever eyeing the creative riches of its neighbour Athens. I am to a modest extent a preliminary victim of that struggle - I won't aggrandise myself by saying I myself struggled, because I did not; I was in the path of a historical whirlwind, and there is no struggling against weather. I have begun to accept my place as a mediocrity, which is a terrible shame given the advantages I started life with. But to dwell on the possibilities is to invite annihilation by regret, and how to deal with regret in this freedom-haunted world is a problem I and my civilisation will have to deal with. Regret has faced unfree humans for generations, it may yet threaten to drown free ones.

I shall have to return to this topic, unfortunately, since I think it is important. But I don't regard it as therapy, or an expiation, or a release. I just think it's there. I'm looking at that little mobster over the other side of the table, wondering exactly who he is and just how dangerous he might become.

The Everlasting Animal

I went to school in a place called Sevenoaks, the very exemplar of those strange little Home Counties towns built to store rich people within an amenable commuting distance of London. As a child who had grown up on a farm, I found the city of London intoxicating - it meant the Natural History Museum, dinosaurs, hustle and bustle, ships, skyscrapers and adventure. I also loved the Sussex countryside, its brooks and copses, the smell of cut grass and the distant sound of a propeller plane. But in between the two was a place that thoroughly disquieted me: suburbia. And in that town of Sevenoaks I had the most excellent education possible in quite where that disquiet came from, spending much time as I did wandering those streets on the way to a friends' house.

The threat of suburbia to me was not so much the watching from behind curtains familiar to English stereotype, though that scared me, nor was it the creepy nighttime hum of the streetlight in such a determinedly quiet place, though that scared me too. It was a slightly more existential fear, looking back on it, that got to me. I had been told by Harry Potter and other examples of the cheerfully anarchic strain of English children's literature that every house in the suburbs looked the same. Yet in Sevenoaks they all looked different, every one. So consciously different, in fact, that they entered the uncanny valley of domestic architecture: too different to be recognisably suburban, too deliberate in their difference to be individual. The fabulously wealthy bankers and lawyers had bought their little slice of identity, and it looked the same as everyone else's.

Oh, sure, there was a conservatory here, mock Tudor there, skylights and big modernist extensions and a couple of Doric columns there, but it was all papering over the fact that every plot was the same size and not one architect had thought of anything interesting to do. Nor would the owners have wanted them to. The point is to have individuality, because rich people can afford individuality, but not to actually be interesting with it, just make a point of it. These people were satisfied with their plot and their regular lives, their black labradors and four-by-fours and private tutors for their kids. With the grandness of their individual home they had tapped into the aristocracy's stately home tradition, and were happy to think no more of it. And walking down those streets, I felt both an immense pity and the occasional fleeting wish for a bulldozer.

I mention all this because a similarly Sevenoaks-educated friend who has subsequently joined the fine enfants terribles et riches tradition of George Orwell, Tony Benn and Charlie Gilmour of becoming a socialist (upon leaving that school I quipped that if you weren't a diehard Marxist after seven years of private education you hadn't been paying attention, a glib line that I nevertheless still suspect might be correct) just posted an interesting piece on stately architecture. I don't mean to combat its admirably balanced points too stridently here - though I can't help thinking that were he a young Chinese man surrounded by the noise of the Cultural Revolution the side of his mind that favours the bulldozer might outbalance the one that likes the cathedral.

Its relatively straightforward Marxism aside, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the desire to demolish the houses of the wealthy, if only because they are not only so incredibly dull, but dull in a quite terrifying way - no one can even think of a new style for gargantuan wealth, so just relives old Tudor cliches. I remember visiting an American mansion in Washington DC and being horrified to discover that each room had a different "Old Europe" theme - Renaissance Italy, Belle Epoque France, Georgian Enlgand - as if the owner had decided that wealth just looked Old, so wanted as many kinds of Old as money could buy. It's like going to the opera and realising that so many corporate freebies there are bored stiff but are happy to be there because opera is what rich people do. If all wealth can buy you is an extra slice of your own mediocrity, then it is not just futile, but hatefully futile.

All of which raises an interesting question. 99% of human architecture that has survived a century or more is the preserve of very wealthy people. The built environment of England, the country I feel so patriotic towards and so at home in, is dominated by the remains of people I hate - clergy, aristocrats, slavers, bankers. Yet I love country houses and love country churches. I gain a great sense of peace from an English landscape garden. And indeed the works of Shakespeare and Milton, and just about every artist who ever gained the money to work in any civilisation, were for and in deference to a horrid aristocracy. How can you possibly divorce architecture from the people whose stories it tells? You can't, which is why being an English patriot is a business so tricky most people give up the nuance for a bad job and embrace the flag and the monarch and Downton Abbey despite knowing how stupid it all is. And I must admit, I am mystified as to how a vicious hatred of the class system and monarchy especially can coexist in my imagination with a genuine stirring feeling at the sight of King Theoden leading his knights against orc armies on the big screen.

Tragic liberalism, which means taking seriously the degradations of the past while accepting that horror is the lot of humanity, might be a cure for this. My friend gives a series of principles for the good Marxist when viewing our heritage:

Keep anything that you can reuse.

Preserve any objects of purely aesthetic value as purely aesthetic objects.

Do not let the built environment of the past constrict your conception of what the future might be.

Bulldoze anything that does so.

I wince any time the bulldozer is invoked as a positive good. I know where that instinct comes from, and I distrust it. Like it or not we live with the sins of the past, however much the Marxist might believe we can transcend them. People will be cruel to each other in utopia, too. I would suggest that these rules betray a lack of imagination: to believe that the conceptions of the future are weak enough to be subverted by the built environment, to the point that its destruction is required, is to betray a lack of faith in them. The populace is not a slave to what they see around them. Or on some level we all are, indeed, but this is not something to be willed away by wrecking balls. It is something to be stared at in the face. I keep my faith in human imagination.

I am put in mind of George Orwell (again):

The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

When I go into those National Trust properties now, those same properties my friend believes have been turned into a theme parks rather than the empirical academic antique of aristocracy they should be, I do indeed see children playing in them. That seems quite a radical subversion to me. Not quite children's holiday camps, perhaps, but getting there, and god knows what they are imagining as they slide and play tag through the gardens built on the blood and lucre of England's corpulent war booty. I like to think their imaginations might be freer than mine or my schoolfriends of English public-school suburbia could ever have been.

England's Grey Men

If history had a screenwriter, they would be extremely bad at remembering to make things comprehensible to the casual viewer. Case in point is given by Wolf Hall, a show I am enjoying immensely but which has the unforgivable sin of featuring no less than four principal characters (including the lead) with the name Thomas: those surnamed More, Wolsey, Cromwell and Cranmer. Even George RR Martin, when attempting to create a totally convincing alternate medieval world didn't go as far as extending the realism to naming practices, or there would have been about twenty-one characters in Game of Thrones called Rickard. If viewers are having a hard time following Wolf Hall, then at the very least history's disregard for simplicity isn't helping.

Behind the scenes, too, there is a lack of nominative diversity, with Peters Kosminsky and Straughan, director and screenwriter respectively. Both of these men have the requisite back-catalogue to match the literary stature of Hilary Mantel or the dramatic heft of Mark Rylance and Anton Lesser, but it is Straughan's back-catalogue that suggested the most intriguing comparison to Wolf Hall to me: for he also wrote one of my favourite films of the last decade, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There is a running joke on the Kermode and Mayo show about this John Le Carre adaptation not being about spying in the same way Jaws isn't about sharks - this is possibly why the film hasn't had the lasting impact it deserved, because it was marketed as a thriller instead of what it is, a portrait of a decaying England with the last embers of Empire fizzling out and no idea of where it's headed. Tired old men choking down cigarette smoke in beige rooms, distrusting each other.

Tudor England is a rather different place to Cold War Britain - true, Europe is torn apart by a war of ideas, spies are everywhere and foreign powers are not to be trusted, but there is always a boisterous energy associated with the reign of Henry VIII - England looks like it might finally become a power to be reckoned with, springing out of the backwaters rather than sliding back in as George Smiley's country seemed to be. And yet Smiley, in Mantel and Straughan's telling, has a close forebear in Thomas Cromwell. These are an unexpected pairing, perhaps, the Machiavellian lawyer with the zeal of the reformer and the battered old spy, but they are two faces of an unsung archetype in the English imagination: the grey blur, the creature of the system, the man who could become Stalin or Karla or Smiley. I am intrigued, and worried, by the idea that so many Thomases became key Tudor players because no-one could remember which was which. Anonymity is a weapon in the hands of clever men.

We are introduced to both Smiley and Cromwell in shots that have them to the side, the men who in another movie would be functionaries, extras, the men who hand the clipboard to the hero. They are at the right hand of their master and apparent focus of the scene: John Hurt's Control and Jonathan Pryce's Wolsey. They are immensely loyal to the point of sentimentality to both, a pathetic father figure for men well past their middle-age for whom the system is a better family than they ever had themselves. Neither say much or emote much. Their words are careful, slow, with only the occasional bite of wit coming through to hint at the whirring machinery behind the eyes.

Drama, for me, is defined as not knowing what is going to happen next. The reason these characters make for such good drama is that they hide so much that they could be capable of anything. Even for those who know the Le Carre novel or know what became of Cromwell, the idea that Smiley might suddenly lash out from that cage of a face or Cromwell might express a human desire at any moment keeps you on your toes. It's like watching an action scene on someone's face. The tension is not in the plot, for in both books the plot is too close to reality to be sensational, but in when and how these men will move when they choose to.

It is only actors of the absolute first rank who can firstly succeed in making silence and greyness fascinating, and secondly succeed in convincing an executive that audiences will be enraptured by it. It is for this reason we see so few heroes as lugubrious as Oldman and Rylance (it's worth remembering that Rylance is almost exclusively a theatre man unable to count on the small gesture while Oldman is capable of this) and they are clearly revelling in their rare opportunity to dial things down.

The moment at the end of the most recent episode of Wolf Hall when Cromwell responds to a wish for God to wreak revenge on Boleyn and her cronies with "no need to trouble God - I'll take it in hand" is stunning TV precisely because the audience have been waiting so long for this sad-eyed man to reveal that hand. And Oldman's Smiley too has only a couple of moments where he properly emotes - one when he's drunk and imagining his nemesis Karla, and another one that stays with me most, for some reason. When he finally has the mole imprisoned and at his mercy, the man who stole his wife away, who drove his adopted father Control to his death, who betrayed everything Smiley believes in, Smiley still refuses to show anything. And then, in retort to Bill Haydon's protest that he isn't Karla's "office boy", Smiley raises his voice, just a little: "What are you then, Bill?" Why this line reverberates around my head I don't know. But the rage of the quiet man is something awful and awesome to behold.

As with Cromwell's threat of revenge, isn't there something terrifying about the idea that the little grey man who stands in the corner of the room and takes notes or offers the odd point to his superior - that that man is plotting to destroy you? It is the snake in the grass, the unseen terror in the dark woods. Those who keep their eyes grey are to be feared. And both Cromwell the historical figure and Smiley the fictional one are terrifically good at their jobs. Are they good or bad people? Smiley and Karla work for different systems, but are mirrors of each other. Cromwell's reputation shifts depending on who's doing the telling. And Stalin killed millions. Could any of these men have become the others? We cannot know, because we have so little to read. And that's why they are scary, impressive, and make for such good drama.

I like the fact that Straughan has found the strands linking these little grey Englishmen. As I keep saying, the memory of England is poor, our Empire conquered by accident and never properly justified, mainly due to the work of the Smileys and Cromwells, not the slightly befuddled inbred aristocrats who line Whitehall in bronze. Our greatness, if you want to call it that, is drawn in a series of grey blurs: cunning merchants, conniving lawyers who can outmanoeuvre Imperial China, and civil servants who had the foresight to build education systems to teach locals why their subservient state was just. These men do not make morally great heroes. But they do make good heroes for television. Let us have more of them.

NB: I now remember that the other Peter, Kosminsky, also directed Rylance as a slightly more heroic grey blur, weapons inspector David Kelly. A man who found himself in the history books almost by accident, but no less tenacious and impressive for that.

Dark Memories

Tomorrow marks the end of Germany: Memories of a Nation at the British Museum, an exhibition so good it has proved in my mind that a well-curated museum can do more for your understanding than reading three history books on the same subject. I say "well curated" because the exhibition was also the first in which I can remember noticing the skill of the curator in the same way you would note the skill of a playwright or painter; truly Neil MacGregor is a master of his craft and deserves every honour and book sale bestowed on him. Much as with his Radio 4 series to go with it, his ability to draw entire stories from objects is the work of a supreme raconteur: the implications behind the Jewish prayer bag emblazoned with the imperial eagle of the Hapsburgs or the threatening, bizarre figure of Bismarck as a blacksmith at the forge.

I wanted to write something about the series and the exhibition, but there's not a lot for me to add, other than my newfound conviction that Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach may be the artistic pairing best placed to sum up the 20th century for future generations. I was interested, however, to note that there was a gap in the exhibition possibly there deliberately, possibly because it is impossible to fill. It is the gap between the dark and light sides of German history, and it occurs about two thirds of the way through the exhibition. From the sunny all-encompassing optimism of Goethe's world to the technical achievements of golden mechanical galleons and chronometers, Germany for much of this story has a forward thinking energy and verve quite intoxicating to behold. It's there in that prayer bag and in the Hebrew on coins and decorations - a reminder that many Jews felt safer in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.

The turn towards darkness is of course dominated by the Nazis, but intelligently MacGregor ensures it isn't a purely chronological shift - the pain of the First World War's famine is mixed in with it, and almost small enough to miss alongside that a print from the Thirty Years' War of a mass lynching, a cold reminder that the horrors of 20th Century Germany were history rhyming. Yet the Thirty Years' War is something quite unusual in the history of an Empire that for all its absurdities often proved a more peaceful and stable arrangement than its European contemporaries. I took to wonder whether German history was brighter than I often imagine it. Long periods of urban civic life whether in the Hanseatic league or the university towns along the rivers, unencumbered by imperial intervention, come across as pretty nice places to live if your alternative is, say, Hundred Years War France or Hungary under the Ottomans.

And yet, and yet, the gates of Buchenwald loom heavy over the whole thing. Are there hints of what will come in the insecurity and identity crises of the 18th and 19th centuries, the attempt to find a true "German"ness? Historians have been attempting to explain the Holocaust almost since the last oven went cold, and I don't claim that thee exhibition gives a new insight into it. But going by MacGregor's telling of the country's history, there is no slow slide into darkness and barbarism, no slowly building catastrophe, no attempt to use the power of hindsight to pick out the seeds of the slaughter in medieval or Enlightenment or Romantic thought. There is just that implicit warning that barbarism can come out of nowhere, at any time, to a free people who can write the St Matthew Passion with their heads and build moving golden galleons with their hands.

Je Suis Charlie, Et Ma Femme Aussi

A riddle: how many times must you poke a Muslim before he becomes used to it? 

I have no answer to that one, actually. Neither do any of the papers and tweeters continuing to share the images of Muhammed from this week's Charlie Hebdo, which is a shame because it is the question they all implicitly ask with their "defiance".

My original response to the attacks was that the cartoons should be reposted as many times as humanly possible on the basis that Islamists wouldn't be able to kill everyone who shared these drawings and therefore might at some point get tired of trying to do so. Similarly to when Twitter users reposted a Twitter joke that got a man convicted with the hashtag #iamspartacus in order to point out that since the law couldn't prosecute everyone who did it, the conviction was by definition unjust, I felt that maximum visibility of the cartoons would point out to Islamists that any attempt at redress was pointless.

The problem is that basically one of my ignorance, yet again. I don't hold anything sacred myself, though my empathy can just about stretch to, say, imagining being a black person seeing a caricature of black people as monkeys and feeling offended by that. To make that leap I can draw on times when I have felt belittled myself, and imagine what it is like to feel my very personhood diminished by association with a caricature - in that case I can understand the pain caused. But I have no reference point at all for the pain felt by Muslims when they see the prophet depicted.

They tell us they feel that pain and we must believe them. But because I can't empathise, just believing them isn't really enough. I can nod along and say we must respect their sensitivities, but deep down nothing will stop the voice saying it's a bloody picture! A picture, incidentally, that hasn't even been forbidden throughout Muslim history! I don't deep down believe the picture can be offensive, and yet clearly it is painful to some people, so who am I to say whether we should or shouldn't post the image?

Because to a large degree I am relying on my own flawed empathy, I assume that once Muslims have seen enough Muhammeds they must get used to it, like getting used to insect bites on holiday. After all, it's not like it can hurt that much. The effort involved in getting angry every time someone publicly mocks the prophet will just exhaust them, and after getting slapped around the face seventy times seven, they'll throw up their hands and forgive.

Obviously, understanding that this course of action will leave Muslims feeling humiliated and marginalised, we would need to add some kind of "we love you really" disclaimer to it all. I'm sure they'll understand that if they just stopped being offended, we'd stop it and we could all be friends. 

Once again I am reminded of the following exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:  

Galahad: Let us taunt [the killer rabbit]. It may become so cross that it will make a mistake.

Arthur: Like what?

The progressive response to just enrage conservative forces until they either make an error or give up is always tempting, but rarely good strategy. The wells of rage and resentment are deep, and self-replenishing. It is quite possibly the Muslim citizens of the west simply get more and more angry, which solves no one's problem. A considerably more complex solution is required than just thumbing our noses, even if Spartacusing is legitimate as far as it goes.

In any case, whether liberals provoke them or not, Muslims are going to have to get used to having their faith routinely insulted. The Terry Jones fiasco of 2012 demonstrates that there's not much of a way of stopping racists and nutjobs from insulting the religion in a free society, nor much of way of explaining to mobs around the world the difference between a citizen doing it and the state endorsing it. Since Muslims live in a world where technology if not states allow for anyone to say anything, they physically can't stop these insults from happening. The target is too massive. Arabs don't have the energy to riot every time someone somewhere does or says something Islamophobic, and the quicker they realise that the quicker they can come up with a new less violent strategy of redress. 

Whatever the intentions behind retweeting or reprinting these cartoons, it may well be that repeated viewings of offensive material are the surest way to smooth Islam's titanic collision with modernity in all its messy and confusing glory.

The Failure Of Satire

We've seen a bunch of paeans in the wake of Paris to the wonder of satire  in western culture, to how we have always responded so bravely to evil by mocking it. Our hero is Charlie Chaplin for doing the globe dance in The Great Dictator. But every hero we are bringing forward today: Voltaire, or Chaplin, or Twain - they are all useless in the face of yesterday's carnage. They all mocked the power structure in their own societies. Monty Python could mock Christianity because they understood it. They had all been to schools where the religion was drummed into them.

But in Holy Flying Circus, the post-modern docudrama on the reaction to Life of Brian, the following scene makes a very important point:

However much the Daily Mail may moan, there is a reason we don't satirise Islam. We don't know anything about it.


Since Voltaire is being brought up so much, what would he have done today? He would have been as powerless as the rest of us. His enemy was Christianity and monarchy, and Chaplin's enemy was fascism, and Private Eye's enemy is government. All things we understand, come from our own cultural context, and have power over us.

The reason Charlie Hebdo wasn't funny enough was simply because it broke the cardinal rule of comedy: don't punch down. Muslims are poor and dispossessed in France, and in insulting their prophet they come across racist, ignorant bullies. The problem is that Islam is also powerful and for that reason deserves mockery. But we are not the ones to do it, because it will never be clear enough just where our fury comes from whether bigotry or righteousness, and that doubt is enough to fatally wound well-delivered satire.

The horror we must now face is that our greatest strength as a civilisation, our boisterous open free-for-all of irreverence, is completely useless against the greatest threat to liberalism in the world today (though I would say there is a tight contest between wealth inequality and Salafism for that title). And there is very little in the recent history of global Islam to suggest that such a culture of righteous mockery will emerge from within it, although there is perhaps more further back in history to give us some hope on that front.

We like to say that the gunmen attacked the cartoonists because they were a threat. If so, they were wrong. Western satire is no threat to Islam of any stripe. Satire only works when directed at its own culture, or it fails in its primary task of being funny. The jihadis needn't have bothered.

L'Etendard Sanglant Est Levé

It is with great regret and not a little fury that I follow a post about France and its ability to withstand endless punches by marking a genuine gut punch, not just to that indefatigable country but to all the liberal world. You could not dream up a more telling, more brutal, more slavishly, thuddingly dull response to the boisterousness of the open society than a massacre of cartoonists. Cultures that cannot stand laughter have never lasted long, for laughter bubbles out from human existence as irrepressibly and inevitably as air escaping a tyre, and those creeds that would deny it will spend their time in an endless chase of covering up this or that puncture to the point of exhaustion. That such a culture as Salafist Islam could last as long as it has is only a function of it being on the margins, forever spurned by a majority or using force to keep itself in place, forever broiling in resentment and forever doomed to stay there.

I have little else to say on the matter except that I have never felt as French or at least as European as today. Solidarity often means so little, but here I feel strangely as close to the front line as those who were murdered. They were killed for expressing opinions, and they let me live only because I was not  visibly expressing those opinions, which hardly seems a decent reason to outlive them. Part of me wants to run onto that Paris street neck bared like Cicero shouting to empty space "kill me too", since I am equally as guilty in the eyes of these killers for denying that Muhammed is the prophet of God. These cartoonists merely made that more apparent than me. Solidarity, it seems, is linked extremely closely to survivors' guilt.

One other thing. I say "front line" very carefully here. I know very little about the thinking of the Salafists or Qutbists or whatever these people can be called, but the more I learn about Islamic history the more I realise just how grand is the narrative these little shits think they're playing in. This is a grand battle played out in the shadow of the end-times, Ishmaelites fighting Israelites, the whole shebang. The whole Salafist ideology requires that the West is set up as a mighty enemy paradoxically always on the verge of collapse, our liberalism and institutions doomed to fail by their basis in man's and not God's law. As Simon Jenkins says today,

To them, western democracy is skin deep in its freedoms, while the simple disciplines of their form of Islam are more powerful, more courageous, more lasting.

They are engaged in a war we don't even recognise. ISIS garnered ridicule for promising to "march on Rome" from people who didn't understand that "Rome" has variously meant Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, or whatever the nearest bulwark of the West is at the time. And the shellshocked response this Paris attack has elicited is that of one side in a war that only the other side actually imagines is being fought. Deep in their hearts, and for all the impressive firepower deployed by the West over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is probably a part of the jihadis thinking "Is this it?" Is this all the massed armies of Rome have to offer? Where are the mighty hordes we fought at Yarmuk and Hattin and Mohács? We're meant to be fighting an apocalyptic total war, not a bunch of half-hearted counterinsurgencies.

For them the defence of their prophet, as they see this attack, is an attempt to have us ride forth to meet them on an appropriately impressive battlefield. It must disappoint them that we simply howl in impotent rage at them, being such spoilsports as to not understand the terribly important epochal battle we're meant to be fighting. We should remember that we are essentially engaged in battle with especially vicious LARPers eternally annoyed that we don't get what elves and orcs are or why we're supposed to care about them.

How do you fight a battle where the whole battle is not getting pulled into a battle? I don't know. But we cannot be brought to violence by all this. We must laugh at them and mock them and show them that if they want to slaughter people who mock their religion they're going to have quite a heavy workload ahead. But we must not fight. We must dance around their rage and make them feel ever more stupid, pathetic and closer to what they must on some level know themselves to be - overgrown children playing Cowboys and Indians with inappropriately deadly weaponry.

Tant Pis

Via Krugman, this chart points out just how bad the UK has had it under Osborne's economic stewardship. Looking forward to May, I am reminded of the dictum that the perfect election strategy is to deliberately collapse the economy for four years so when growth comes in the fifth you can point to your resounding success. Never mind. It's how France has fared that really interests me here.

Yes, France seems have done surprisingly well from the 2007 basepoint, despite being shackled to a horrible currency and suffering the innumerable problems of high unemployment, stagnant labour market, low competitiveness and everything else traditional for France. That's sort of my point, really. Even under a very poor leader with a weak political system and terrible economic times, France seems congenitally incapable of actually going into decline. God knows it's been threatening to since at least the time of Louis XIV.

If you quickly skim over the history of France, it can at times seem to be the history of permanent crisis. Even the period from 1780-1815 on its own should have been capable of knocking the country out of the running for Great Power status. Bankruptcy, famine, revolution, civil war, political turmoil, fighting absolutely everyone else on the continent for twenty years and losing most of your money and manpower in the process should put paid to a country. Later years involve being devastated by Germany three times in a row, a political system that could very rarely be called stable, expensive colonial wars, and on and on. And yet after seemingly being on the edge of terminal decline for pretty much two centuries, here they still are. Never was Adam Smith's "much ruin in a nation" quip more apt than for France.

How has France managed to be simultaneously the butt of jokes about efficiency and ability and more resilient than any other country? There are plenty of economic arguments to be made about what underpins the endless resurgence, I'm sure, although I have a strong feeling that the economic shackling to Germany postwar has had a curious effect of downplaying French success: that French corporations tend to be well-run and have high productivity rates, for example, is overshadowed by the more cliché-friendly if no less accurate similar observation about German ones.

As 2015 begins I am strangely sanguine about the future of Europe if only because the French experience proves that morale very rarely has an impact on the long-term prospects anyway. France, despite pessimism, sclerotic institutions, incompetence and instability has continued to win at history in the long term. I would be quite happy if the future of a united Europe was merely a rolling barrage of disaster, since that seems to have served one of its largest countries pretty well.