The man, dressed in full urban-guerrilla black attire, complete with knapsack, helmet, goggles, gloves and hammer, but wearing the iconic yellow fluorescent vest as well, systematically smashed shop windows, destroyed items stolen from shops and public offices, and set cars alight, including three empty police and army vehicles. He was finally arrested as he was heading towards the Champs-Elysées and identified as Thomas P., 25, with a record as a far-left rioter and casseur. The police immediately issued a detailed, minute-to-minute report, and saw to it that mass-circulation media, such as Le Parisien, a left-leaning daily, were handed both the film and the report. They emphasised that law enforcement officers had not deliberately allowed him to indulge in his criminal activities for such an extended period of time and in so many different places just in order to arraign him in the face of cumulative and compelling evidence, but rather had been forced to “postpone his arrest” due to the tacit support of “a hostile crowd”. Indeed, French police forces are being instructed to avoid street fighting as much as possible, a practice that goes back to the accidental death of 22-year-old Malek Oussekine during a student demonstration in 1986; the Yellow Vests crisis had been no exception in this respect so far.

Still, a lot of fascinating insights could be derived from the Thomas P. incident. It shed a crude light on the casseurs’ tactics and modus operandi. It raised awkward questions about the relationship between Yellow Vests and casseurs. The former were born in the spring and summer of 2018 as a taxpayers’ revolt defending “peripheral France” — the country outside the largest urban centres — while the latter are well-trained urban guerrillas; what brought them together? Last but not least, how come French public opinion still backed the Yellow Vests, in spite of their association with thugs and their own frequently violent behaviour? According to a YouGov poll released on February 7, 64 per cent said they supported the protesters, and 77 per cent said their demands were essentially “right”.

One possible answer is that the Yellow Vests crisis, while happening in the realm of politics, power and government, had much to do with things that are located beyond politics proper, in the realm of metapolitics — the many cultural, religious or fantasmic “appeals” that, to quote the American conservative political thinker Peter Viereck, are intertwined with supposedly rational collective activities and decisions. Politics and political ideas are usually seen as an extension of down-to-earth interests: markets, commodities, class, income, race, gender, personal competition. But the opposite may be true: culture may precede politics, fantasies may transcend interests. Indeed, the current French protests, which came as a complete surprise to President Emmanuel Macron and his administration — so much so that they still do not seem to have found an adequate riposte — were in fact anticipated long ago both in “highbrow” academic or literary culture (essays, novels), and “lowbrow” popular culture (the internet, social media, YouTube). For years, every best-selling author in France has talked of impending disaster, a growing rift between the elites and ordinary people, civil war and revolution, from the former socialist president François Hollande to the far-right Gaullist turned Maurrassian polemicist Eric Zemmour to the sociologist Christophe Guilluy, the theorist of “peripheral France”, to the novelist Michel Houellebecq. Every one of them can be criticised in some way, but it cannot be denied that they captured something about the mood of the country, and that Macron, for one, should have paid more attention to them.

Take Houellebecq, for instance. A brilliant, bitter and successful writer — the last French literary author to sell hundreds of thousand of copies of each of his books — Houellebecq has always enjoyed a reputation as a soothsayer of sorts. In Plateforme (2001), he foresaw the repeated Islamist terrorist onslaughts that would be carried out against an indulgent Western civilisation, from the 9/11 attacks in the US to the 2015-2016 killings in Paris and Nice. Soumission, which envisages the election of a “Muslim-Democrat” president in a substantially Islamicised France, was published on January 7, 2015, the very day Islamist terrorists massacred the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, including two octogenarian cartoonists, Georges Wolinski and Cabu. Now, Sérotonine, Houellebecq’s latest book, which was published earlier this year, but was written in 2018, depicts a grassroots rebellion of impoverished milk producers in western France looking very much like the Yellow Vests. The rebellion ends in a pitched battle with the gendarmerie at one of the countless highway interchanges that have become a feature of the late-20th-century and early-21st-century French landscape, and have been used over the past months as rally points by the Vests.

But YouTube culture provides even more impressive forecasts than bookish culture. Take the case of the comedienne  Anne-Sophie Bajon, a.k.a La Bajon, 39. She started as a stand-up in the early 2010s, dealing mostly with “women’s issues”. Some three years ago, she lost weight, changed her hairstyle and turned to short, sharp political videos, impersonating shameless, reckless characters — business executives, political aides — who take pride in exploiting people and ruining the environment for quick profit. The 2017 electoral campaign, a disaster for the political establishment, with the collapse of the Socialist Party, a media lynching of the conservative candidate, and a meteoric success for Macron and his hastily-gathered followers, was a bonanza for her. So was Macron’s no less rapid fall in the summer and autumn of 2018. However, her skits have grown more violent and bizarre.

“The Richest Heiress in the World” (La plus riche héritière du monde) was released a year ago, in March 2018. La Bajon plays another absolutely horrendous character: the spoiled daughter of “the world’s richest banker” who parades in a fur coat since her “homeless skin coat” was sent to the dry cleaner. Soon enough, we are told who she is supposed to be: her mobile phone rings, she says “Oh Daddy, it’s you,” and we see “Jacob Rothschild” on the screen. She explains that her father and his family own the largest banks in the world, which in turn own the largest corporations and have every politician, including their “former employee Emmanuel [Macron]”, on their payroll. She adds that they don’t mind destroying the world and reducing people to abject poverty as long as they make more money. There is a further anti-Semitic innuendo when she mentions the Partouche casino chain as part of the conspiracy. There are two main casino chains in France: Partouche, which is Jewish-owned, and the much bigger Barrière, which is not. La Bajon targets only Partouche.

This goes on for about three minutes. The next three minutes look like mere preaching. The heiress is haunted by several grim visions (her own past as a little girl, the future that will emerge from her family’s wrongdoing). Finally, she wakes up in a devastated landscape as the last survivor of the human race, with nowhere to go to and nobody to speak to.

Another video, “Public Purse” (Trésor Public), released last November, when the Yellow Vests’ protests were gathering strength all over France, is about a nice young baker evicted from her shop and then from her late grandfather’s home by greedy tax officials (played by La Bajon and two other comedians). As the baker wonders why famous politicians manage to get  rebates or not to pay any tax at all, the chief tax official (La Bajon) cryptically answers: “This is another case altogether since they are from the family.” Again, the comedy part lasts only half the video: the second half features, so to say, God’s Judgment. While the young baker brings her newborn baby to church to be christened (in a Latin ceremony, no less), the three tax officials succumb to violent deaths: one is poisoned, the second is bitten by a venomous snake, and the third (La Bajon) perishes in a car bombing. When I first watched these videos, I quickly concluded that nobody would be amused by the second halves and that La Bajon was losing her touch as a comedian. I was wrong: she went viral on YouTube. A third video, a Christmas story featuring a civil war between an arrogant king and poor peasants led by a populist Joan of Arc (La Bajon herself, playing a good person for the first time ever), was no less successful. In retrospect, one has to admit that she intuited quite correctly that a very large consistuency in France — which coalesced as the Yellow Vests — relishes such a mixture of anti-capitalism, tax revolt, religious nostalgia, tales of murderous or suicidal violence, and — last but not least — conspiratorial anti-Semitism.

The extent to which anti-Semitism has pervaded the French protest movement is appalling. A photograph taken on December 20 from a car window, and then circulated on social media, showed a typical highway interchange squatted by Yellow Vests. Two large banners had been posted for the benefit of the passing traffic. One said: “To Disobey Unfair Laws Is Eveybody’s Ethical Duty.” The second and more prominent banner, was just a list of names: “Macron=Drahi=Attali=Banques=Media=Sion.” Which is shorthand for: “President Macron is the puppet of Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli high-tech tycoon who was one of his earliest supporters, and of Jacques Attali, a pop philosopher of Jewish descent who once served as Socialist President François Mitterrand’s chief of staff and currently writes an influential pro-Macron column at L’Express, one of the weekly press flagships; both Drahi and Attali are in turn creatures of the Jewish banks that rule the world and the media from their stronghold in Israel, as explained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To make things even more graphic, the A’s were drawn as Free-Masonic triangles, and the S’s as runic Nazi letters. Three more fantastic strata are thus added to the existing anti-Semitic slogans: Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, Judaism as the new Nazism, and, by implication, the Holocaust as a hoax.

On February 14, another Jewish philosopher, the iconic Alain Finkielkraut was confronted near his Parisian home on Boulevard Montparnasse by a small group of Yellow Vests. While some just asked him to don the vest, others, the leader of whom was later identified as a French Muslim, said that they were “the people” and urged him to “go back to Tel Aviv”. The incident, which “smacked of pogromist violence” according to Finkielkraut, was widely reported and widely condemned, including by President Macron, the Socialist Party and National Rally leader Marine Le Pen. On March 16, during extremely violent riots on the Champs-Elysées, Palestinian flags were prominently displayed. According to an Ifop poll for the NGOs Fondation Jean Jaurès and Conspiracy Watch, released on February 11, 44 per cent of the Yellow Vests believe in a “worldwide Zionist conspiracy” compared with 22 per cent of average French citizens. Some solace is to be derived, however, from the prevalence among Yellow Vests of similar weird delusions: 62 per cent of them believe that pharmaceutical companies are covering up, with the complicity of government officials, the lethal side-effects of some vaccines; 59 per cent are convinced that Princess Diana was assassinated; 43 per cent think that the CIA is behind drug-trafficking worldwide. Likewise, it is noteworthy that Yellow Vest sympathisers tend to express more balanced views, whatever the issue, than militant Yellow Vests themselves.

Metapolitics is not just the key of the current crisis. It may explain a lot about Macron’s political fortunes and misfortunes over the past two years.

In the first ballot of the 2017 presidential election, Macron came first with 24 per cent of the vote: not bad for a “boy candidate” in his late thirties, whose only political experience had been to serve briefly as President Hollande’s chief of staff and then as a controversial finance minister, and who had never run in any previous election. In the second ballot, he won a stunning 66 per cent of the vote. Likewise, his centrist party, La République en Marche (LREM), won an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly elections with 307 seats out of 577. Experienced political observers knew that there was a Pyrrhic element in these victories. In the first presidential round, three other candidates (the national-populist Marine Le Pen, the conservative François Fillon and the Corbynesque hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon) had reached almost similar levels — a bit over or under 20 per cent. In the second ballot, Macron’s good fortune was that, under French electoral law, he faced only Marine Le Pen, who had come second in the first ballot but whom a majority of French citizens decidedly rejected. As for the parliamentary elections, his followers’ success was essentially due to a more than 50 per cent abstention rate.

Macron’s real, reliable, political base thus amounted to only a quarter of the vote. This should have been in itself a source of some concern — and of caution. An additional worrying factor was that Macron and his followers had largely made their way as newcomers on the political scene by cannibalising France’s two traditional moderate parties: the conservatives — Les Républicains (LR) — who fell from 27 per cent in the first presidential ballot of 2012 to 20 per cent in 2017, and the socialists — Parti Socialiste (PS) — who underwent an unprecedented meltdown, from nearly 29 per cent in 2012 to 6.3 per cent in 2017. The erosion of the right and left moderates paved the way for the right and left radicals, Le Pen’s National Front, rebranded as National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN), and Mélenchon’s Indomitable France (France Insoumise, FI), who now looked like the real opposition, with a combined electoral potential, as measured, again, by their returns in the 2017 presidential first ballot, of more than 40 per cent.

In earlier times, the differences between the two radical constituencies, of right and left, would have been deemed to be unbridgeable. But that was no longer true. From 2012 to 2017, Le Pen had put forward a statist and near-socialist agenda, very similar to Mélenchon’s, and won a large part of the working-class vote as a result. Both radical leaders expressed anti-EU, anti-Nato and pro-Russian views; both urged sweeping constitutional reforms implying proportional representation and a wider use of referenda. In the second presidential ballot of 2017, Mélenchon had stubbornly declined to endorse Macron against Le Pen, and 50 per cent at least of his first ballot voters followed his tacit advice, either by abstaining or by switching to the National Front leader. As Le Pen later observed in an interview with Valeurs Actuelles, the only issue that still divided Mélenchon and her was non-European immigration, which she rejected and he supported. Even there, Mélenchon frequently hinted at more flexible views, akin to those expressed by Sahra Wagenknecht’s far-left anti-immigration movement Stand Up (Aufstehen) in Germany.

However, in the summer of 2017, most French people were not paying attention to such hard facts. They were willing to give the new president and his team a chance: all the more so since — in a marked difference from the shabby Hollande years — he seemed intent on behaving in a dignified and semi-monarchical manner. Even the oddities of his private life — such as his marriage to his former school teacher Brigitte Trogneux, a woman 25 years older than him — were overshadowed by the fact that they both came from a traditional, bourgeois, Catholic background, and that he seemed to maintain good relations with his wife’s children and grandchildren.

After all, the more depressed a country is, the easier it may be to indulge in charismatic or messianic expectations.

For a while, it looked as if Macron could make it after all. He had run as an unifying Europhile candidate, standing “at the same time” — his favourite expression — for right-of-centre and left-of-centre issues. As president, however, he seemed to turn more decidedly to the right, even if lip service was still being paid to such liberal dogmas as ecology, climate change, gender equality and diversity. He picked a 47-year-old former conservative, Edouard Philippe, as prime minister, and appointed several other conservatives as senior ministers: Bruno Le Maire (economic affairs), Gerald Darmanin (budget), Jean-Michel Blanquer (education). Two senior ministers with a socialist background, Jean-Yves Le Drian (foreign affairs) and Gérard Collomb (interior), were seen as conservative-minded as well. And indeed, the cabinet got to work implementing a set of reforms that previous nominally conservative administrations, under Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, had eschewed.

A first step was to abolish ISF, a wealth tax inherited from a socialist government, and replace it by a much more limited tax on real estate. Other taxes were also at least partially dismantled. A second step was to simplify and modernise a retirement system replete with “special statutes” and other privileges. Blanquer undertook a no-nonsense reorganisation of public education, largely supported by educators and parents alike. Collomb had a Right to Asylum and Immigration Act passed by parliament, far less lenient than previous legislation. Some LREM members of parliament, especially the former socialist wing, were dismayed; protracted strikes were held in some sectors (especially public transport) and some street violence erupted on May 1 (Labour Day). But many classic conservative voters — the LR constituency — and the bulk of the business class took the long view and considered supporting Macron at some point in the future, or at least some kind of Macronist-LR coalition.

Then, during the late spring and the summer of 2018, everything unravelled. There was the case of Alexander Benalla, a highly-paid 26-year-old aide who was disclosed to be involved in many dark, unaccountable and even stupid activities, yet nevertheless enjoyed the president’s steadfast support. There was an outburst of erratic behaviour on the part of the president that did not fit at all with the gravitas he had mustered until then, stating publicly that Benalla was not his lover, inviting a multiracial, transgender pop group to the presidential residence, and being photographed, on a trip to the French West Indies, with half-naked male locals. There were too many extravagant expenses, like ordering a new china dinner service from the Sèvres factory for the Elysée Palace or ordering a swimming pool at Brégançon, the presidential summer castle on the Mediterranean. There was a succession of strictly political setbacks. Macron was about to convene the Congress (a joint session of the National Assembly and the Senate) to pass a constitutional revision, and then defered it sine die. In August Nicolas Hulot, a famed TV journalist turned minister for ecological transition, resigned, citing differences with the cabinet. So did the reassuring Collomb five weeks later: he decided to resume his former role as the mayor of Lyons, France’s second-largest city.

And finally, there was the diesel blunder. The Macron-Philippe cabinet decreed a 23 per cent increase in diesel taxes (and thus on the price actually paid by the average car driver), to please its Green wing; and it planned a ban on diesel vehicles by 2024. What they did not take in account was that no fewer than 61 per cent of all French cars ran on diesel, especially in “peripheral France”: the distant suburbs, small towns and rural areas where there is no life without a car; and that a collateral effect of the proposed ban was a sharp drop in their resale value. A stroke of genius was for the growing numbers of protesters to interconnect through social networks and then to sport the bright yellow vests all drivers must carry in their vehicles in case of breakdown or accident.

The metapolitical advantage that Macron had enjoyed as a young “Jupiterian” monarch blessed by the gods was gone: he was now portrayed as the new Louis XVI and his wife as the new Marie-Antoinette. While a pragmatic administration would have swiftly rescinded its anti-diesel measures, Macron and Philippe insisted for several weeks that they were “staying the course”. The diesel protest transmogrified into a major political crisis that, should a 1 to 9 Richter Scale of revolutions exist, would probably have been ranked 6 or 7.

And now? By Christmas, Macron had rescinded the diesel tax, raised the minimum wage and granted other benefits to the working and middle class. Under the 1958 constitution, he could have then resorted to scores of far-reaching decisions: bringing in a new prime minister and a new cabinet, calling a snap election, ruling by presidential order, declaring a state of emergency to quench street violence, turning to a referendum. Instead of that, he launched a three-month “great national debate”  in order to “listen to the French” and approve “a new national contract”. Apparently, his calculation was to wear out the Yellow Vests until the European Parliament elections in May, and then let the French decide between rationality and lunacy, order and chaos, him and the protesters. Quite a gamble. His popularity rate had fallen to an abysmal 21 per cent last October. It was back to 34 per cent by February. Most of this recovering support stems from the classic conservative Right.

The post Chronicle of a political disaster long foretold appeared first on Standpoint.

The unthinkable is happening. A cocktail of social media and disgruntled populism has thrust the thrice-married, sexist, racist, overwrought, over-combed Donald Trump into the Presidency of the Land of the Free and the thrice-married, terrorist-sympathising, absolver of anti-Semites, 500-time voter against his own party, refusenik of anthem and servicemen tributes, newly tailored, utterly unproven, useless Parliamentarian — but oh-so-useful hustler on the hustings — Jeremy Corbyn will become our next Prime Minister.

Without a viable policy in his head or even a full cabinet, he has promised free tuition, free lunches and pots of gold for the NHS and the arts along with home-baked bread and circuses. You thought Fiona and Tim were manipulators? Glance behind Jeremy and register the truly sinister duo of Seumas (Sheum mishtake sheurly) Milne and John MarxDonald and watch Jezza’s lips move. Glastonbury was his Tamworth Manifesto. Grenfell his photo opportunity. Manchester and London Bridge his chance to remind us that terrorists have a cause.

R.I.P. Lord Sutch — you finally got your deposit back. Students and activists, xenophobic Brexiteers, beleaguered union bosses and benefit cheats, you will finally have what you so deeply desire . . . a Monstrous Raving Loony party.

And step forward in the dock please the Fourth Estate. Because three months ago, Theresa was heroine chic. She was, in the pages of the periodicals, smart, solemn and a safe pair of hands . . . with legs! A groovily dressed vicar’s daughter, in Fab Fashionista shoes who was a charming cross between Margaret Thatcher, Mary Berry and Joanna Lumley. A National Pleasure. She would smooth us through Brexit with tea and empathy and was so far ahead in the polls that Corbyn’s socialists would surely be singing the red flag for decades behind their carefully tended allotments in Penge. Winning a landslide election was a fait accompli.

The only trouble was that there was nothing in this scenario to sell papers. It was a pushover. Mrs. May was fourteen points ahead in the polls. After five years in the Home Office she was respected by her own party as he was despised by most members of his. She had nobly stepped into the gap left by Cameron’s shameful desertion. He was hanging on to his job by a tooth.

There was no X Factor Final. Dash it all — it was impossible to write leaders about these leaders.

The turnabout was sudden. Mrs May went from credible to Cruella in the click of a digital processor. She was wrong to avoid a TV debate, wrong to use the words safe and stable, to campaign in the wrong areas, to have circles, beneath her eyes, she was cold and unfeeling, she didn’t kiss enough babies, she wore sad fashionista shoes and she didn’t have a Brexit plan or a personality . . .

Jeremy, on the other hand, the left one, the sinistra — was a shoo-in for a front page. Whatever his shortcomings, in the council chamber he was a natural campaigner. It was what he did best. Campaign buses energised him. He toured the country, taut, tie-less, tireless and televisual. It was, after all, what he’d been doing for thirty years. Suddenly the beard and Jesus sandals were hip. And the youngsters and the hipsters loved it.

So, perhaps the storyline for the most popular — sorry, populist — soap opera ever is being drafted by Mark Thomas, Jeremy Hardy and, for all I know, Dave Spart in an Islington bar even as we speak:

Boris, at the empty crease for a pre-lunch innings, is caught Silly mid on.

Tories batted out by teatime.

In the White House pavilion sits the reclusive Melania Trump.

Laura Alvarez (who?) Corbyn, sneaks out of terraced Finsbury Park haven to provide the cream teas and Jeremy’s Jam scones.

May retires from game declaring “It’s not cricket.”

The country goes to the country.

Corbyn is narrowly elected; seeks a deal with Sinn Fein to support him at Westminster.

Demise of all newspapers save the Mirror and the Morning Star goes unreported.

Diane Abbott appointed Treasurer.

Seumas Milne and John MarxDonald handle Brexit and the British Economy.

Trident and HS2 scrapped to pay tuition fees.

Britain achieves Third World status.

Newly Independent Scotland joins the EU.

Russia annexes the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands.

China purchases the BBC.

Social media says both stories are fake news.

Jeremy, John, Seumas and the New Apparatchiks announce, on Snapchat, a street party the length of the land.

The Queen and the royal family downsize and move to Balmoral.

So no more Andrew Marr of a Sunday for me or Andrew Neil of a Thursday or Question Time or Eddie Mair of a weekend. I will read Moby Dick and learn Italian. I will get a hobby, volunteer, do an art foundation course, book some tango lessons — anything to distract myself. I will buy some tasty lycra leggings and get out there in celebrity sneakers and do pilates in the park. I will plant perennials and smell the jasmine.

To bury my head in the quicksand is of course, to ignore every lesson of history but to speak out will make me the target of trolls and text threats. I am quite scared to even submit this article.

Abbot turn and tighten your Corbyn, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

“No worse there is none”, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “pitched past pitch of grief,/ more pangs will, schooled at fore-pangs, wilder wring./Comforter, where, where, is your comforting?”

The post Tomorrow Belongs To Jerem-Me appeared first on Standpoint.

Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment, go on wanting their salaries and prestige. To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, the Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s clockwork oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a TV camera. It the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have never come even remotely true need not be enough to discredit him. The same fact, in the case of America’s Professor Ehrlich, has left him untouched ever since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something, and he is always Professor Ehrlich.

Actually a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as August 3rd, 1971, when the Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever since; making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.

The most exalted of all the world’s predictors of reef death, President Obama, has still not seen the reef even now, at the end of his time in office; but he promises to go there one day when it is well again. Assurances that it has never really been sick won’t be coming from his senior science adviser John Holdren. In the middle of 2016 some of the long-term experts on reef death began admitting that they had all been overdoing the propaganda.

After almost half a century of reef death prediction, this was the first instance of one group of reef death predictors telling another group to dial down the alarmism, or they would queer the pitch for everybody. But an old hand like Holdren knows better than to listen to sudden outbursts of moderation. Back in the day, when extreme cooling was the fashion, he was an extreme coolist. Lately he is an extreme warmist. He will surely continue to be an extremist of some kind, even if he has to be an extreme moderate. And after all, his boss was right about the ocean. In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama said — and I truly wish that this were an inaccurate paraphrase — that people should vote for him if they wanted to stop the ocean rising. He got elected, and it didn’t rise.

The notion of a count-down or a tipping point is very dear to both wings of this deaf shouting match, and really is of small use to either. On the catastrophist wing, whose “narrative”, as they might put it, would so often seem to be a synthesised film script left over from the era of surround-sound disaster movies, there is always a count-down to the tipping point. When the scientists are the main contributors to the script, the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen sooner than we think. (Science correspondents who can write a phrase like “sooner than we think” seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word “could.”

When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile. There are only fifty days (Gordon Brown) or one hundred months (Prince Charles wearing his political hat) left for mankind to “do something” about “the greatest moral challenge . . . of our generation.” (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate shindig in 2009).

When he left Copenhagen, Rudd scarcely mentioned the greatest moral challenge again. Perhaps he had deduced, from the confusion prevailing throughout the conference, that the chances of the world ever uniting its efforts to “do something” were very small. Whatever his motives for backing out of the climate chorus, his subsequent career was an early demonstration that to cease being a chorister would be no easy retreat, because it would be a clear indication that everything you had said on the subject up to then had been said in either bad faith or ignorance. It would not be enough merely to fall silent. You would have to travel back in time, run for office in the Czech Republic instead of Australia, and call yourself Vaclav Klaus.

Australia, unlike Kevin Rudd, has a globally popular role in the climate movie because it looks the part. Common reason might tell you that a country whose contribution to the world’s emissions is only 1.4 per cent can do very little about the biggest moral challenge even if it manages to reduce that contribution to zero; but your eyes tell you that Australia is burning up. On the classic alarmist principle of “just stick your head out of the window and look around you”, Australia always looks like Overwhelming Evidence that the alarmists must be right. Even now that the global warming scare has completed its transformation into the climate change scare so that any kind of event at either end of the scale of temperature can qualify as a crisis, Australia remains the top area of interest, still up there ahead of even the melting North Pole, despite the Arctic’s miraculous capacity to go on producing ice in defiance of all instructions from Al Gore. A “C”-student to his marrow, and thus never quick to pick up any reading matter at all, Gore has evidently never seen the Life magazine photographs of America’s nuclear submarine Skate surfacing through the North Pole in 1959. The ice up there is often thin, and sometimes vanishes. But it comes back, especially when someone sufficiently illustrious confidently predicts that it will go away for good.

After four and a half billion years of changing, the climate that made outback Australia ready for Baz Luhrmann’s view-finder looked all set to end the world tomorrow. History has already forgotten that the schedule for one of the big drought sequences in his movie Australia was wrecked by rain, and certainly history will never be reminded by the mass media, which loves a picture that fits the story. In this way, the polar bear balancing on the photo-shopped shrinking ice-floe will always have a future in show business, and the cooling towers spilling steam will always be up there in the background of the TV picture while the panel of experts discuss what Julia Gillard still calls “carbon”, her word for carbon dioxide. Pictures of her beach-level home at Noosa, on the other hand, will never be used to illustrate satirical articles about a retired prophet of the rising ocean who buys a house on the beach, because there won’t be any such articles. The full 97 per cent of all satirists who dealt themselves out of the climate subject back at the start look like staying out of it until the end, even if they get satirised in their turn. One could blame them for their pusillanimity, but it would be useless, and perhaps unfair. Nobody will be able plausibly to call Emma Thompson dumb for spreading gloom and doom about the climate: she’s too clever and too creative. And anyway, she might be right. Cases like Leonardo di Caprio and Cate Blanchett are rare enough to be called brave. Otherwise, the consensus of silence from the wits and thespians continues to be impressive. If they did wish to speak up for scepticism, however, they wouldn’t find it easy when the people who run the big TV outlets forbid the wrong kind of humour. On Saturday Night Live back there in 2007, Will Ferrell, brilliantly pretending to be George W. Bush, was allowed to get every word of the global warming message wrong, but he wasn’t allowed to disbelieve it.

Just as all branches of the modern media love a picture of something that might be part of the Overwhelming Evidence for climate change even if it is really a picture of something else, they all love a clock ticking down to zero, and if the clock never quite gets there then the motif can be exploited forever. But the editors and producers must face the drawback of such perpetual excitement: it gets perpetually less exciting. Numbness sets in, and there is time to think after all. Some of the customers might even start asking where this language of rubber numbers has been heard before.

It was heard from Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels he populated his flying island of Laputa with scientists busily using rubber numbers to predict dire events. He called these scientists “projectors”. At the basis of all the predictions of the projectors was the prediction that the Earth was in danger from a Great Comet whose tail was “ten hundred thousand and fourteen” miles long. I should concede at this point that a sardonic parody is not necessarily pertinent just because it is funny; and that although it might be unlikely that the earth will soon be threatened by man-made climate change, it might be less unlikely that the earth will be threatened eventually by an asteroid, or let it be a Great Comet: after all, the Earth has been hit before.

That being said, however, we can note that Swift has got the language of artificial crisis exactly right, to the point that we might have trouble deciding whether he invented it or merely copied it, from scientific voices surrounding him in his day. James Hansen is a Swiftian figure. Blithely equating trains full of coal to trains full of people on their way to Auschwitz, Hansen is utterly unaware that he has not only turned the stomachs of the informed audience he was out to impress, he has lost their attention. Professor of Earth Sciences Chris Turney, who led a ship full of climate change enthusiasts into the Antarctic ice to see how the ice was doing under the influence of climate change and found it was doing well enough to trap the ship, could have been invented by Swift. (Turney’s subsequent Guardian article, in which he explained how this embarrassment was due only to a quirk of the weather, and had nothing to do with a possible mistake about the climate, was a Swiftian lampoon in all respects.) Compulsorily retired now from the climate scene, Dr Rajendra Pachauri was a zany straight from Swift, by way of a Bollywood remake of The Party starring the local imitator of Peter Sellers: if Dr Johnson could have thought of Pachauri, Rasselas would be much more entertaining than it is. Finally and supremely, Tim Flannery could have been invented by Swift after ten cups of coffee too many with Stella. He wanted to keep her laughing. Swift projected the projectors who now surround us.

They came out of the grant-hungry fringe of semi-science to infect the heart of the mass media, where a whole generation of commentators taught each to other to speak and write a hyperbolic doom-language (“unprecedented”, “irreversible”, etc) which you might have thought was sure to doom them in their turn. After all, nobody with an intact pair of ears really listens for long to anyone who talks about “the planet” or “carbon” or “climate denial” or “the science”. But for now — and it could be a long now — the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit. The theory has always been manifestly unfalsifiable, but there are few science pundits in the mass media who could tell Karl Popper from Mary Poppins. More startling than their ignorance, however, is their defiance of logic. You can just about see how a bunch of grant-dependent climate scientists might go on saying that there was never a Medieval Warm Period even after it has been pointed out to them that any old corpse dug up from the permafrost could never have been buried in it. But how can a bunch of supposedly enlightened writers go on saying that? Their answer, if pressed, is usually to say that the question is too elementary to be considered.

Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such a complex issue that no “science denier” can have an opinion about it worth hearing. For most areas of science such an insistence would be true. But this particular area has a knack of raising questions that get more and more complicated in the absence of an answer to the elementary ones. One of those elementary questions is about how man-made carbon dioxide can be a driver of climate change if the global temperature has not gone up by much over the last twenty years but the amount of man-made carbon dioxide has. If we go on to ask a supplementary question — say, how could carbon dioxide raise temperature when the evidence of the ice cores indicates that temperature has always raised carbon dioxide — we will be given complicated answers, but we still haven’t had an answer to the first question, except for the suggestion that the temperature, despite the observations, really has gone up, but that the extra heat is hiding in the ocean. It is not necessarily science denial to propose that this long professional habit of postponing an answer to the first and most elementary question is bizarre. Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist. Einstein realised that the Michelson-Morley experiments hinted at a possible fact that might not fit Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics. Einstein was a scientist too. Those of us who are not scientists, but who are sceptical about the validity of this whole issue – who suspect that the alleged problem might be less of a problem than is made out – have plenty of great scientific names to point to for exemplars, and it could even be said that we could point to the whole of science itself. Being resistant to the force its own inertia is one of the things that science does.

When the climatologists upgraded their frame of certainty from global warming to climate change, the bet-hedging manoeuvre was so blatant that some of the sceptics started predicting in their turn: the alarmist cause must surely now collapse, like a house of cards. A tipping point had been reached. Unfortunately for the cause of rational critical enquiry, the campaign for immediate action against climate doom reaches a tipping point every few minutes, because the observations, if not the calculations, never cease exposing it as a fantasy. I myself, after I observed Andrew Neil on BBC TV wiping the floor with the then Secretary for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey, thought that the British government’s energy policy could not survive, and that the mad work which had begun with Ed Miliband’s Climate Act of 2008 must now surely begin to come undone. Neil’s well-informed list of questions had been a tipping point. But it changed nothing in the short term. It didn’t even change the BBC, which continued uninterrupted with its determination that the alarmist view should not be questioned.

How did the upmarket mass media get themselves into such a condition of servility? One is reminded of that fine old historian George Grote, when he said that he had taken his A History of Greece only to the point where the Greeks themselves failed to realise they were slaves. The BBC’s monotonous plugging of the climate theme in its science documentaries is too obvious to need remarking, but it’s what the science programmes never say that really does the damage. Even the news programmes get “smoothed” to ensure that nothing interferes with the constant business of protecting the climate change theme’s dogmatic status. To take a simple but telling example: when Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s Vice Chancellor and man in charge of the Energiewende, talked rings around Greenpeace hecklers with nothing on their minds but renouncing coal, or told executives of the renewable energy companies that they could no longer take unlimited subsides for granted, these instructive moments could be seen on German television but were not excerpted and subtitled for British television even briefly, despite Gabriel’s accomplishments as a natural TV star, and despite the fact that he himself was no sceptic.

Wrong message: easier to leave him out. And if the climate scientist Judith Curry appears before a US Senate committee and manages to defend her anti-alarmist position against concentrated harassment from a senator whose only qualification for the discussion is that he can impugn her integrity with a rhetorical contempt of which she is too polite to be capable? Leave it to Youtube. In this way the BBC has spent ten years unplugged from a vital part of the global intellectual discussion, with an increasing air of provincialism as the inevitable result. As the UK now begins the long process of exiting the European Union, we can reflect that the departing nation’s most important broadcasting institution has been behaving, for several years, as if its true aim were to reproduce the thought control that prevailed in the Soviet Union.

As for the print media, it’s no mystery why the upmarket newspapers do an even more thorough job than the downmarket newspapers of suppressing any dissenting opinion on the climate. In Britain, the Telegraph sensibly gives a column to the diligently sceptical Christopher Booker, and Matt Ridley has recently been able to get a few rational articles into the Times, but a more usual arrangement is exemplified by my own newspaper, the Guardian, which entrusts all aspects of the subject to George Monbiot, who once informed his green readership that there was only one reason I could presume to disagree with him, and them: I was an old man, soon to be dead, and thus with no concern for the future of “the planet”. I would have damned his impertinence, but it would have been like getting annoyed with a wheelbarrow full of freshly cut grass.

These byline names are stars committed to their opinion, but what’s missing from the posh press is the non-star name committed to the job of building a fact-file and extracting a reasoned article from it. Further down the market, when the Daily Mail put its no-frills news-hound David Rose on the case after Climategate, his admirable competence immediately got him labelled as a “climate change denier”: one of the first people to be awarded that badge of honour. The other tactic used to discredit him was the standard one of calling his paper a disreputable publication. It might be — having been a victim of its prurience myself, I have no inclination to revere it — but it hasn’t forgotten what objective reporting is supposed to be. Most of the British papers have, and the reason is no mystery.

They can’t afford to remember. The print media are on their way down the drain. With almost no personnel left to do the writing, the urge at editorial level is to give all the science stuff to one bloke. The print edition of the Independent bored its way out of business when their resident climate nag was allowed to write half the paper. In its last year, when the doomwatch journalists were threatened by the climate industry with a newly revised consensus opinion that a mere two-degree increase in world temperature might be not only acceptable but likely, the Independent’s chap retaliated by writing stories about how the real likelihood was an increase of five degrees, and in a kind of frenzied crescendo he wrote a whole front page saying that the global temperature was “on track” for an increase of six degrees. Not long after, the Indy’s print edition closed down.

At the New York Times, Andrew Revkin, star colour-piece writer on the climate beat, makes the whole subject no less predictable than his prose style: a cruel restriction. In Australia, the Fairfax papers, which by now have almost as few writers as readers, reprint Revkin’s summaries as if they were the voice of authority, and will probably go on doing so until the waters close overhead. On the ABC, the house science pundit Robin Williams famously predicted that the rising of the waters “could” amount to 100 metres in the next century. But not even he predicted that it could happen next week. At the Sydney Morning Herald, it could happen next week. The only remaining journalists could look out of the window, and see fish.

Bending their efforts to sensationalise the news on a scale previously unknown even in their scrappy history, the mass media have helped to consolidate a pernicious myth. But they could not have done this so thoroughly without the accident that they are the main source of information and opinion for people in the academic world and in the scientific institutions. Few of those people have been reading the sceptical blogs: they have no time. If I myself had not been so ill during the relevant time-span, I might not have been reading them either, and might have remained confined within the misinformation system where any assertion of forthcoming disaster counts as evidence. The effect of this mountainous accumulation of sanctified alarmism on the academic world is another subject. Some of the universities deserve to be closed down, but I expect they will muddle through, if only because the liberal spirit, when it regains its strength, is likely to be less vengeful than the dogmatists were when they ruled. Finding that the power of inertia blesses their security as once it blessed their influence, the enthusiasts might have the sense to throttle back on their certitude, huddle under the blanket cover provided by the concept of “post-normal science”, and wait in comfort to be forgotten.

As for the learned societies and professional institutions, it was never a puzzle that so many of them became instruments of obfuscation instead of enlightenment. Totalitarianism takes over a state at the moment when the ruling party is taken over by its secretariat: the tipping point is when Stalin, with his lists of names, offers to stay late after the meeting and take care of business. The same vulnerability applies to any learned institution at all. Rule by bureaucracy favours mediocrity, and in no time at all you are in a world where Julia Slingo is a figure of authority, and Judith Curry is fighting to breathe. Under Stalin, Trofim Lysenko became more indispensible the more he reduced all the other biologists to the same condition as Soviet agriculture, and even after Stalin was dead, it took Andrei Sakharov to persuade Khrushchev not to bring Lysenko back to office. Khrushchev was well aware that Lysenko was a charlatan, but he looked like an historic force; and who argues with one of those?

On a smaller scale of influential prestige, Lord Stern lends the Royal Society the honour of his presence. For those of us who regard him as a vocalised stuffed shirt, it is no use saying that his confident pronouncements about the future are only those of an economist. Vaclav Klaus was only an economist when he tried to remind us that Malthusian clairvoyance is invariably a harbinger of totalitarianism. But Klaus was a true figure of authority. Alas, true figures of authority are in short supply, and tend not to have much influence when they get to speak.

All too often, this is because they care more about science than about the media. As recently as 2015, after a full ten years of nightly proof that this particular scientific dispute was a media event before it was anything, Freeman Dyson was persuaded to go on television. He was up there just long enough to say that the small proportion of carbon dioxide that was man-made could only add to the world’s supply of plant food. The world’s mass media outlets ignored the footage, mainly because they didn’t know who he was. I might not have known either if I hadn’t spent, in these last few years, enough time in hospitals to have it proved to me on a personal basis that real science is as indispensible for modern medicine as cheap power. Among his many achievements, to none of which he has ever cared about drawing attention, Dyson designed the TRIGA reactor. The TRIGA ensures that the world’s hospitals get a reliable supply of isotopes.

Dyson served science. Except for the few hold-outs who go on fighting to defend the objective nature of truth, most of the climate scientists who get famous are serving themselves. There was a time when the journalists could have pointed out the difference, but now they have no idea. Instead, they are so celebrity-conscious that they would supply Tim Flannery with a new clown-suit if he wore out the one he is wearing now. In 2016 he dived on the Great Barrier Reef and reported himself overwhelmed by the evidence that it was on the point of death, a symptomatology which, he said, he had recently learned to recognize by watching his father die. Neither he nor any of his admirers at the Sydney Morning Herald cared to note that it has now been almost fifty years that the reef has been going to die soon. But the moment never came, although it will probably go on being about to happen for the next fifty years as well. The reef death disaster is like those millions of climate change refugees who were going to flood into the West by 2010. They never arrived. But when the refugees from the war in Syria started to arrive, there was a ready-made media apparatus waiting to declare that they were the missing climate change refugees really, because what else had caused the war but climate change? They were the missing heat that had been hiding in the ocean.

A bad era for science has been a worse one for the mass media, the field in which, despite the usual blunders and misjudgements, I was once proud to earn my living. But I have spent too much time, in these last few years, being ashamed of my profession: hence the note of anger which, I can now see, has crept into this essay even though I was determined to keep it out. As my retirement changed to illness and then to dotage, I would have preferred to sit back and write poems than to be known for taking a position in what is, despite the colossal scale of its foolish waste, a very petty quarrel. But when some of the climate priesthood, and even the Attorney General of the United States, started talking about how dissent might be suppressed with the force of law – well, that was a tipping point. I am a dissenter, and not because I deny science, but because I affirm it. So it was time to stand up and fight, if only because so many of the advocates, though they must know by now that they are professing a belief they no longer hold, will continue to profess it anyway.

Back in the day when I was starting off in journalism — on the Sydney Morning Herald, as it happens — the one thing we all learned early from our veteran colleagues was never to improve the truth for the sake of the story. If they caught us doing so, it was the end of the world.

But here we are, and the world hasn’t ended after all. Though some governments might not yet have fully returned to the principle of evidence-based policy, most of them have learned to be wary of policy-based evidence. They have learned to spot it coming, not because the real virtues of critical enquiry have been well argued by scientists, but because the false claims of abracadabra have been asserted too often by people who, though they might have started out as scientists of a kind, have found their true purpose in life as ideologists. Modern history since World War Two has shown us that it is unwise to predict what will happen to ideologists after their citadel of power has been brought low. It was feared that the remaining Nazis would fight on, as Werewolves. Actually only a few days had to pass before there were no Nazis to be found anywhere except in Argentina, boring one another to death at the world’s worst dinner parties.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, when it was thought that no apologists for Marxist collectivism could possibly keep their credibility in the universities of the West, they not only failed to lose heart, they gained strength. Some critics would say that the climate change fad itself is an offshoot of this lingering revolutionary animus against liberal democracy, and that the true purpose of the climatologists is to bring about a world government which will ensure what no less a philanthropist than Robert Mugabe calls “climate justice”, in which capitalism is replaced by something more altruistic.

I myself prefer to blame mankind’s inherent capacity for raising opportunism to a principle: the enabling condition for fascism in all its varieties, and often an imperative mind-set among high-end frauds. On behalf of the UN, Maurice Strong, the first man to raise big money for climate justice, found slightly under a million dollars of it sticking to his fingers, and hid out in China for the rest of his life: a clear sign of his guilty knowledge that he had pinched it. Later operators lack even the guilt. They just collect the money, like the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, who has probably guessed by now that the sea isn’t going to rise by so much as an inch; but he still wants, for his supposedly threatened atoll, a share of the free cash, and especially because the question has changed. It used to be: how will we cope when the disaster comes? The question now is: how will we cope if it does not?

There is no need to entertain visions of a vast, old-style army of disoccupied experts retreating through the snow, eating first their horses and finally each other. But there could be quite a lot of previously well-subsidised people left standing around while they vaguely wonder why nobody is listening to them any more. Way back there in 2011, one of the Climategate scientists, Tommy Wils, with an engagingly honest caution rare among prophets, speculated in an email about what people outside their network might do to them if climate change turned out to be a bunch of natural variations: “Kill us, probably.” But there has been too much talk of mass death already, and anyway most of the alarmists are the kind of people for whom it is a sufficiently fatal punishment simply to be ignored.

Nowadays I write with aching slowness, and by the time I had finished assembling the previous paragraph, the US had changed presidents. What difference this transition will make to the speed with which the climate change meme collapses is yet to be seen, but my own guess is that it was already almost gone anyway: a comforting view to take if you don’t like the idea of a posturing zany like Donald Trump changing the world.

Personally I don’t even like the idea of Trump changing a light-bulb, but we ought to remember that this dimwitted period in the history of the West began with exactly that: a change of light-bulbs. Suddenly 100 watts were too much. For as long as the climate change fad lasted, it always depended on poppycock; and it would surely be unwise to believe that mankind’s capacity to believe in fashionable nonsense can be cured by the disproportionately high cost of a temporary embarrassment. I’m almost sorry that I won’t be here for the ceremonial unveiling of the next threat. Almost certainly the opening feast will take place in Paris, with a happy sample of all the world’s young scientists facing the fragrant remains of their first ever plate of foie gras, while vowing that it will not be the last.

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Clearly Andrews has not been ignored by the art world — just last year one of his canvases made £1.265 million at Sotheby’s. Yet he has never enjoyed quite the same fame as his “School of London” friends: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Andrews was slower to produce than they were; he may also have been less willing or able to push his work to market, because of his diffident personality: “I am more of a spectator than I am at most times prepared to admit to myself.” Certainly, a shyness was reflected in his gentler stylings and in his restrained way with material: though he often painted on an epic scale, with evidently grand ambitions, he was incapable of pictorial exclamation or proclamation.

That subtlety has, however, always gained him the admiration of critics and, especially, other painters. Sir Lawrence Gowing, who was an examiner for the Diploma at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1952, remembered that of all the pictures submitted that year, “two were exceptional and remain so. One was called August for the People, a subject based on a poem by Auden set for a summer composition the year before — the other, now in the Tate Gallery, was A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over. Both were by Michael Andrews who was then 24.” To Gowing it was immediately obvious that these paintings were “remarkable and wholly individual achievements”, so he took a personal interest in the promising student and, in 1980, he was writing the Introduction to the catalogue for Andrews’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Those two exceptional student works — sadly absent from the Gagosian show — have by now become legendary among the more ambitious and sensitive young painters in London.

It must partly be due to Andrews’s surprising and sympathetic depiction of the outsider, not as the bohemian poseur but as an ordinary man in a grey suit, falling over, or stranded on a beach with bathing youths — a man who would only play by the rules, but whose very being is exposed, and found out, by circumstance; a man whose aspirations make him ridiculous. The appeal of these figures is similar to that of Watteau’s Pierrot: the man — the artist — appears clownish not because he wants to distinguish himself, but because his work, and his whole position in life, is inherently comical, and potentially tragic.

What makes Andrews so inspiring now may be precisely what set him apart from his contemporaries: he managed to avoid all modernist dogma, and his painting was always motivated by, and dedicated to, the subject. His ultra-precision — you may catch glimpses of gridded-up underdrawing through the paint — must have developed under the influence of his professor, Sir William Coldstream; but Andrews, born with such “uncommon imaginative equipment”, could never have been satisfied painting only in the Coldstream fashion, just collecting and analysing and adjusting the most minute observations.

Andrews first made his name painting party scenes, exploring how social motives and patterns may be depicted. He liked that at parties, people perform. “They succeed or fail. They increase in stature or flop. They put themselves to the test.” Rather as they do when they paint. And his most famous party scene, The Colony Room I (1962), happens to feature painters: Lucian Freud stares out at us, hawk-like as ever — a different sort of spectator — while Francis Bacon holds forth (we recognise him just from the back of his head).

Here the paint is built up and buttery in places, sparse and scrubbed in others; black lines on top redraw parts of the figures, and the strokes of big flat brushes work vigorously across larger areas. The effect is lively, and it suits the subject; but Andrews would soon stop himself working this way: “I was aware that the habit, which encouraged me to think that all these revisions were permissible parts of the picture structure, amounted to a kind of special pleading. As if I were to say, ‘Look how hard I have worked, look at all the travail I have been through …” This is a critique not just of his own methods but of modern painting in general, and of ‘School of London’ painting in particular — I wonder what Freud and Auerbach made of it.

Later, Andrews would jot in a notebook: “For the regeneration of the realism of palpable presence we’re indebted to Francis Bacon.” It was Bacon who gave Andrews the confidence to move towards more personal subject-matter. But while it would be true to say that Freud and Auerbach were, in their different ways and to different extents, realist painters groping for ‘palpable presence’, Andrews always seems to have been after something else — I would say, something of greater importance.

“Lights VII: A Shadow” (1974) by Michael Andrews (© The Estate of Michael Andrews. Courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London)

And often, something quite opposite. In the Lights series of paintings (1970-74), nothing is palpable. In the haze of evening, through the dark of night, we follow a hot-air balloon over fields, cities, bridges and pier pavilions; sometimes we see the balloon, sometimes we seem to be viewing from its basket — in the most beautiful of the pictures, Lights VII, we see only the balloon’s shadow on the shore below, drifting towards the empty sea where it will melt away. Andrews was now using very liquid acrylic paint and spraying in onto the reverse hairy side of the canvas, building it up until it formed a thin even crust. Though he often went back into the paintings with a brush to add movement where necessary, the surface he achieved was, while unique to him, as impersonal as he meant it to be.

It is in this that we really see the influence of Bacon: obviously not in the impersonality of the surface, but in the attention paid to the quality, both physical and symbolic, of every painted mark. Andrews’s spraying of acrylic paint cancelled out the juicy brushstroke in oil, and would approximate the effortlessly neutral surface of a photographic print; and Bacon must also have been the prime influence in suggesting the expressive potential that photographic effects might have in paintings. Photography freezes subject-matter in its moment, while painting condenses and stills — captures — its subject slowly, quietly, as observations accrue in a moving light; so the characteristics of the media strongly effect how we involve ourselves in the picture. Degas excitedly used photography, and Sickert, who so admired Degas, began experimenting with how to translate the photographic sense of “moment” into paint; but no painter has taken the problem of photography — which must now be the essential problem for painting — more seriously than Andrews, before or since. Indeed, much of the acclaim now given to Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans — for their innovation, at least — is more deserved by Andrews. Like them, what Andrews wanted for his painting was not the drama of the moment but the essential inertia of the photograph — to make that inertia expressive.

By now Andrews was surer of who he was as a painter: he was reconciled to his role as a spectator in life, and ready to embrace that role fully in art. The balloon in the Lights paintings was meant as a symbol for the ego, and so its floating away symbolised ‘ego-loss’. The idea was that meditation — which in Andrews’s case meant painting — should lead to enlightenment, the liberation from ‘self’. In these paintings we see no people with whom we can identify, only the lights — electric lights — that guide them, or at least signify their activity, perhaps their hopes and dreams. The viewpoints in the paintings are so high, yet there is no sense of vertigo, no fear of the balloon’s — the ego’s — puncturing now; there is only calm as the land below — the society below, or civilisation — at such a distance, silent, going in and out of focus, appears but an abstraction.

Andrews conceived two further pictures which seem to extend the series (they are hung alongside the Lights paintings here, as they were at the Tate retrospective): Liner, showing a great ship leaving harbour at night, and Cabin, showing a jet plane flying over a port city. In Cabin the pilot might appear as a ghostly apparition through the cockpit window; but what makes both these painting unforgettable is our sense of the passengers and their shared destiny: gliding on water or hurtling through the air, together, having relinquished their individual responsibility, where will they end up?

Andrews has quite rightly been called an existentialist painter. But while his particular interests in Zen Buddhism, Freudianism and R.D. Laing are very much of his time, as Gowing observed: “. . . looking at these pictures one can believe that all good painting has really, one way or another, to do with such issues of identity and awareness.”

The behaviour of fish provided the subject-matter for the next series of paintings, called School. The method remained the same, still sprayed acrylic to produce that mysteriously impersonal surface; the distanced, floating viewpoint was employed again, now under water, to give that liberating sense of spatial dislocation — of entering another, significant, dimension, and Andrews carried on with his themes on the individual in society, and on tribalism in particular — the fish too perform their roles, take their risks, succeed or fail. In School II, Pike and Roach, the predatory pike lurks and hovers before us: with his cool, determined eye, square to ours, he is reminiscent of Lucian Freud in The Colony Room, I.

By the ’80s, Andrews was mostly painting the natural landscape. He made a series of pictures of Ayers Rock, after making a pilgrimage there. He had walked all around it, and climbed it; at one point he had lost his footing — the sense of his disorientation and danger inspired his painting. Concerned with the grandeur of nature, Andrews’s landscapes immediately appear in the tradition of the ‘sublime’. But he meant more by them: “Actually what I’m painting is historical landscape, that’s to say landscape relating to the chain of events. It’s time and landscape that interests me. The way it’s been affected by the people living in it.” Ayers Rock was ancient, and holy: he titled the most majestic paintings in this series, The Cathedral. The rock forms mutate, soften, seem human — there are bulges, wrinkles, orifices (for this they seem related to Degas’s late pastel landscapes). We can only speculate about what this natural monument, as worshipped by a most foreign religion, could have meant to a Methodist boy from Norwich — but maybe it was exactly its foreignness, its strangeness, the contemplation of which would allow another escape from self. His painting is worshipful; but rather than worshipping nature, it worships the tradition of spiritual contemplation — it is a tribute to the very idea of grand mysteries.

“Thames Painting: The Estuary” (1994-1995) by Michael Andrews (Collection of Pallant House Gallery. © The Estate of Michael Andrews. Courtesy James Hyman Gallery, London. Photo: Mike Bruce/Gagosian)

After the Ayers Rock paintings, in which Andrews’s sprayed surface was becoming less neutral and more variously agitated — with calligraphic streaks and swirls sinking into the canvas like oriental inks, and newly intense colour contrasts of hot earth oranges and deep, dark blue skies — Andrews gradually returned to oil paint and brushes. And he returned to the familiar English countryside, to a landscape imbued with his own history. Like that other East Anglian painter, John Constable, Andrews saw a nobility in this mild land, so unrelentingly and so comfortingly green. Though he was using more traditional perspectives than before, he was still painting such expanse; and the breadth and depth of his views suggest the long passing of time, of ages. Over a career, what artist has ever painted bigger space?

By 1994, Andrews began a new series of paintings of the Thames. Now he thinned his oil down to a mere stain and tipped it onto the canvas, even pushing it around with a hairdryer. The river may have symbolised continuity; but it is impossible to see these as anything other than “late” paintings, made in awareness of the end’s approaching (Andrews was diagnosed with cancer). He mixed ashes into the paint. In The Thames at Low Tide, barges are left stranded in the mud as the river pulls away, yet rolls on. In Thames Painting: The Estuary, distant shaded figures stand by their boats. Do they belong to the past? Or are they eternal? The water is now wispy white — and the muddy old Thames becomes the Styx.

There is a melancholy in all Andrews’s paintings. That his colouring tended to be dull, contributed to this effect. He will not — he would not — bowl you over. His friends’ paintings may hang more proudly on the wall, but when you leave their exhibitions too often you have only a particular taste in the mouth. You leave Andrews’s exhibitions quietly convinced, remembering every picture. Andrews the “spectator”, whose individuality was defined only as it had to be — by his true creativity — was a most considerate painter, and he gave us a whole worldview.

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Among all the hip new election maps, up to date polling analysis and software, Votecastr, fresh out of shiny Silicon Valley, was its neon flagbearer. This hot little start-up proudly led the charge of algorithm-based big data companies seeking to transform a polling industry during the US election. I, alongside many others, found myself checking their homepage just before America went to the polls. Its business model promised to provide real-time projections as votes were collected, before any official tallies. The company partnered with Slate and Vice News to absorb data from dozens of polling locations and outfits throughout election day, before feeding it through their predictive software to generate “minute-by-minute projected outcomes”. While releasing vote estimates before poll closure is controversial, the value of such technology is obvious. Using a large variety of polling data (reportedly from Democrat and Republican party sources), Votecastr would overwhelm any biases or misinformation, leading to better predictions. Of course, as the company admitted on its homepage, predictions still depend on the veracity of input data, but this read like an afterthought amid technical jargon and promises of lifting the election curtain. For market speculators, real-time election projections offer a potential edge few can ignore.

The early predictions as votes came in suggested a Hillary landslide. After observing 20-50% of the votes in seven battleground states, Votecastr had the Democrats not only winning but dominating in all. And the markets may well have listened. By 11:45am Eastern Standard Time, well before official projections emerged, investors had seized on this, with stocks and the peso spiking. The shock the markets later suffered, futures tanking and the peso hitting a record low, mirror the reaction of the global consensus: shock, horror, and panic. The abject failure of Votecastr, as well as countless other predictive polling sites used by media outlets, reveals a deeper, societal disconnect. In the case of both Trump and Brexit, there seems to be a clear trend of silent support, camouflaged by the media. Clinton received support from 240 editorial boards to Trump’s 19, a number unprecedented in US election history. Whatever you think of Trump, how does a free and open press fail to reflect half the American electorate, and until now, not even realise they existed?

My answer is that our consumer society feeds off pop culture, celebrities, sensationalism, and trends. On my first day at school, I was castigated for not knowing about the rapper Eminem. I quickly learned who he was, didn’t listen to him, but had enough information to avoid awkward encounters. Did this happen with the polls? The unifying nature of popular culture has transformed a phenomenon which used to involve pop stars or fashion into a political one, and one dominated by the Left. Putting the example of silent support for Trump into this context, the explanation becomes clear. Yet what this doesn’t explain is his success. With media so firmly entrenched in one camp and many of Trump’s election promises objectively ridiculous, how did he win? The explanation is twofold.

First, an addiction to collectivist thinking on both sides of the spectrum has driven our society apart, both in Europe and America. With Corbyn’s Labour (the American Left will now follow their lead) and Trump’s Republicans, both sides have become polarised, legitimising their hatred of one another. Alternative media on the right facilitate a lack of critical thinking for conservatives in the same way mainstream media do for the Left. Trump’s support thrived despite his disadvantage. Second, with the Left so dominant in media and culture, its supporters have become both arrogant and complacent. Trump’s movement, against all the odds, became an underdog. Large numbers of first-time voters supported Trump, motivated by the idea they were fighting a system represented by television talking heads they despised. Essentially, leftist media hegemony has made the right into a counter-culture.

The failures of polling organisations were not technical, nor due to bias. The real failure was in society, where ordinary people, dismissed by an authoritarian Left, fled into the arms of a resurgent Right. Both sides are now circling, sabres drawn, neither wishing to give an inch, and I suspect this is only the beginning of our society’s radicalisation. While Votecastrwas widely scapegoated, almost every pollster got this one wrong. Yet the polls accurately captured America as a land divided, confused, angry, and scared.

The post The Polls Were Wrong — But Revealing appeared first on Standpoint.

To elaborate, while the hard Left has always been strong in universities (Socialist Workers Party posters littered my campus seven years ago), it has now become the establishment. The academics are no better than the students. One English Literature student I spoke to at the YHBS event recounted how she had been set an essay entitled: “Show proof of Shakespeare’s racism and misogyny.” She asked if she could offer an alternative point of view on Shakespeare’s views, in more of a discussion format, but was refused. She ultimately conformed to her professor’s wishes. This dogmatic and limited approach to education is far-reaching. A uniformity of ideas has created hypersensitivity among students to language and opinion, throughout America and also in Britain; and led to a stifling atmosphere where voices are restricted — all encouraged and supported by professors and the NUS. We now have “safe spaces”, where if an opinion “triggers” (upsets) someone, that opinion is removed. Originally intended to target bullies, it has devolved into a method of silencing speech.

The YBHS was proposed to counter all this. The first thing to strike me was I’d never experienced a “conservative” event so upbeat, diverse, and numerous in its clientele. Such was demand that the organisers relocated to a larger venue, and high turnout led to a long delay in starting. Most curiously, the attendees were distinctly normal. I should add a caveat that, in my experience, students who openly express right of centre views fall under the “outcast” spectrum in many cases. By taking such positions they often isolate themselves socially — there are many exceptions, but this is certainly a trend.

While mostly male, the number of women and minorities, and the class fluidity, was striking. The YBHS chairman, Danial Mirza, is a Muslim. A young black student was so enthusiastic he left his seat and approached the stage in an effort to be noticed during open questions. People were excited, jovial, and relaxed: a boy in front of me advertised his public gaming channel on the back of his shirt. Beneath the surface however, was a wariness and uncertainty.

“Hi! Which university are you from?”

“I’m actually here as press.”

“Oh.” The guy’s expression morphs as the ramifications filter through his brain. We continue to talk; he’s not hostile, but he is guarded.

The audiene is asked how many of them have been banned from Facebook, and there is an instant show of hands — more than fifty. (Facebook has been accused of bias towards conservatives — and of banning them for unjust reasons.)

“Fantastic,” says Milo, before encouraging his fans to rebel against the establishment and take every opportunity to mock or ridicule their “oppressors.” He is wearing some kind of absurd seraphic toga.

I’ve no idea why these people were banned from Facebook, or even if it’s true, but it highlights how far these young people are from traditional conservatives. Attacks on freedom of speech have fuelled a strong sense of rebellion. If this were the 80s it could be a British punk concert. These conservatives no longer wish to conserve; they wish to burn.

The other speakers — Sophie Thomas, who discussed free speech on campus and the no platforming of speakers such as Julie Bindel, and Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian activist who spoke about the dangers of political Islam and the need for vigilance — were decent enough. We’d all heard it before. As one well-dressed young gentleman put it, “I’m here to see Milo.”

“Are you a big fan then?”

He smiled at that. “No, but I agree with a few things. I mostly came here with an open mind, you know.” Pretty clear then, who was the big draw. If you are unfamiliar with Mr Yiannopoulos, he is a contrarian British journalist (a columnist at Breitbart) who has become notorious for his anti-feminism, provocative language, over-the-top mannerisms and willingness to debate opponents on any platform. Now a celebrity in America, his style is that of a stand-up comedian: everything is exaggerated and obnoxious. And yet he so infuriates the modern Left that it’s easy to see why he has fans.

But in truth I heard nothing outrageous being said, even from Milo. There was plenty of patriotism: “The values which will serve you best — which Americans don’t have — are British values, and they are conviction, bravery, camaraderie, critical thinking — and pride.” Massive cheers to that, and similarly to Sophie Thomas arguing against intellectual uniformity in education. Not to say there weren’t unsavoury opinions, such as odious Trumpism and uncritical hand-wringing over the evils of feminism, but it never felt like dogma. There was plenty of disagreement. Everyone I spoke to was open-minded. This was a collection of young people passionate about politics, who feel unable to express themselves in our halls of learning. That we have allowed this to occur is astonishing.

Ultimately, this was all pantomime. But as it ended I couldn’t help but wonder if, just like geek culture, being a young conservative was starting to become cool. There are far more young people out there who I’d suspect would privately agree with many of the things said at this launch. Many of them avoid politics like the plague, but as the hard Left invades people’s lives, and pushes harder in universities, those people may well end up in the arms of Milo, or joining their local YBHS chapter. Time will tell.

The post The New Student Right appeared first on Standpoint.

All parties contain or relate to a number of distinguishable categories of person: these include leaders, aspiring leaders, follower-members, devotee-members, loyal voters and marginal voters. A Tory MP, for example, might be either an aspiring leader or just a follower member or both or fall into several other categories. But the relationship between these elements differs markedly between different parties and determines the nature of the party. What the Labour Party and the Republican Party have in common is that devotees are far more important than they are in other parties, though I am going to call them fundamentalists as I think that word suggests some of their more important characteristics. Therefore the central dilemma of democratic politics — compromise and win, or maintain your principles and lose — is far more central than it is in other parties. They are, of course, more or less opposite principles: egalitarian, collectivist and neo-pacifist as against individualist, nationalistic and puritanical.

This makes these two parties different in kind from their major opponents. The Democratic Party has regarded itself since the New Deal as essentially a coalition of interests; though it is not the same coalition that it used to be, the essence of the party, the definitive strategy of Democrats, is to build a coalition big enough to win elections without losing credibility or over-extending. Whereas I have always argued that the Tory Party is essentially negative, that it exists to oppose foolish projects. It is far easier, therefore, for Tories to remain loyal without having to agree as success can be defined simply as winning and therefore excluding everyone else from power. Thus American and English “conservatives” are opposites in important respects because the former are essentially idealists and the latter are equally essentially anti-idealists.

Jeremy Corbyn is a genuine fundamentalist who has always seemed as if the integrity of his beliefs is his prime motivation and power is barely a temptation. Donald Trump is surely not, but he has acquired the tricks to appeal to fundamentalists and has acquired some of their characteristics during his campaign. One of the important normal characteristics of fundamentalists is that they lose. That is, when the fundamentalists run the party they lose to the parties run by coalition-builders and negativists. Jeremy Corbyn’s two fundamentalist predecessors as leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury and Michael Foot, both lost heavily, in 1935 and 1983 respectively. This has to be modified by the proviso that they lose in normal times. If a crisis is so severe that the status quo is not an option, as they say in the business schools, then the fundamentalists may be on the winning side, such as Britain in 1945 and Greece in 2015.

Having said that, my theory might be said to have a Thatcher problem and a Reagan problem. Was Mrs Thatcher not a successful Tory fundamentalist? And was President Reagan (unlike Barry Goldwater) a Republican fundamentalist who won? No and no. In the Thatcher case I almost entirely agree with the thesis of my late colleague Jim Bulpitt that she must be understood in terms of her statecraft. She took over a state which had got itself into an untenable position and managed the agenda in such a way as to make government possible. Michael Foot made speeches saying that if unemployment reached a million civil order would break down completely; under Mrs Thatcher it reached three million. She did the same things as Ramsay MacDonald did in 1931 and as any other British prime minister would have done in the 1980s. There really was no alternative. The late Tony Benn used to take a kind of encouragement from Mrs. Thatcher, saying that her career demonstrated that “conviction politics” could win, but he was quite wrong to do so.

Reagan, on the other hand was a deceptively professional politician and an excellent faker who could talk the language of fundamentalism without having to bear its costs. Remember the old boy banging on about shining cities on hills? Nobody knew what he was talking about, but they liked it. He seemed to be embodying some pure version of Republicanism. Then compare the role of the state in the US economy under Reagan with its role under anyone else and see if you can find a difference.

Thus the fact remains that, for different reasons, the Conservative party and the Democratic Party do not really have fundamentalists. Ask yourself what a Tory fundamentalist would propose. The restoration of the pre-1832 constitution? A completely free market . . . in land? . . . in labour? The concept is absurd. Keep the bad guys out and muddle through such events as history throws at you — that’s all it can ever be about.

It is both frightening and exciting that the fundamentalist wings of the two parties are in the ascendancy and it is instructive to consider the range of similarities between the two leaders. Both despise and are despised by the established moderate wings of their parties. Conversely, both succeed in giving political energy to many people previously disillusioned with politics. Both naturally portray their party as a movement and a crusade. Both are capable of causing enormous offence without understanding (or admitting they understand) why. Both use language in the same appropriated fundamentalist way. A Corbyn example is “better”: he wants to build a “better” society. Well, don’t we all?: I’d like a society that was better defended, had more stringent punishments, fewer people etc etc But he doesn’t mean any of this and, crucially, his use of the word carries a kind of pseudo-objectivity, as if there could be only one valid conception of what was better. A principal Trump example is “American”; this isn’t any conception of what it is to be American in terms of facts or rights, but an appraisive distinction, as in “un-American activities”.

The most interesting and ultimately revealing aspect of the comparison concerns religion. Formally, Corbyn is a non-believer while Trump is a Presbyterian who collects bibles. But it would be difficult to claim that Donald Trump is a particularly religious man as he has behaved as something of a libertine by the standards of many of his followers. However, everybody is aware that Trump has to be nominally religious in his political position, whereas Corbyn does not; in fact one of Corbyn’s predecessors, George Lansbury, was an avowed believer whereas Michael Foot was not. The comparison is a little like the one made during the 1983 General Election when earnest vicars wrote to the Guardian to say that Michael Foot was a true Christian whereas the (occasionally) church-attending Margaret Thatcher was not. (It was an argument heard in my own household.) Exactly the same argument could be applied to Corbyn and Trump. Indeed, it is obvious that you could only sustain Corbyn’s degree of egalitarianism and pacifism as, at least, religiose beliefs because there is no way you could derive them from logic, reason or empirical observation. To be fair to Corbyn, he seems well aware of that; not only is he less hostile to Christianity than many of his New Labour contemporaries, but he has acknowledged his debt to the “Judeo-Christian tradition”. Meanwhile, when Trump claims he would be the most Christian of presidents he only seems to mean that he would be the most anti-anti-Christian in giving Muslims and atheists a hard time.

If all this seems paradoxical, the resolution is in the history of ideas. We never really had the Enlightenment. Instead of dumping the Judeo-Christian tradition we revived it in new forms: man in the image of God and God in the image of man are not so far apart. Thus the importance of what Bertrand Russell called “Sunday truths” in our culture. We may spend all week assuming that people are profoundly unequal and trying to make ourselves as unequal as possible, but at some level we believe in equality. We may also normally believe in a wicked world in which it is essential to defend yourself, but we also want to indulge in fantasies about world peace. Thus a politician of the fundamentalist ilk is able to carry some of the moral high ground. Thus, too, some interesting electoral phenomena such as the “shy Tory” in England and “heart and head” voter in France, both of which involve voters expressing their self-interest through the ballot box while believing at some level that it’s wrong to do so.

Finally, as a betting man, I must choose between which of these two fundamentalists is most likely to become a national leader. Corbyn could win if he can hold the moral high ground and there is a certain kind of crisis. But the obstacles to his victory seem (even) more formidable than those to a Trump victory. Crucially, the powerful forces of patriotism could work in Trump’s favour, but against Corbyn. Bearing in mind also the Tory majority, our fixed-term parliaments and Corbyn’s age, I put Corbyn at 25/1 with Trump 12/1. But no large bets, please!

The post Same Difference appeared first on Standpoint.

On 5 June 1989,­­ the hard-right Conservative Monday Club held a black-tie banquet at the Charing Cross Hotel. Its guest of honour was Dr Andries Treurnicht, leader of the South African Conservative party, whose bitter opposition to any form of liberalisation of apartheid had led the press to nickname him “Dr No.” Among the Tory parliamentarians present at the dinner was Tim Janman.

Perhaps the voters of Thurrock, who ejected him three years later, cut short what would otherwise have been a glittering political career. But it’s probably safe to assume that, had he been re-elected, few of Janman’s parliamentary colleagues would have queued up to ensure that the views of a member of the Monday Club — which, aside from its support for white minority rule in South Africa, also backed repatriation and had a soft spot for Central American dictatorships — were given a proper airing in any of the Conservative leadership elections which followed the party’s three defeats at the hands of Tony Blair.

Janman may never have made it on to the ballot for the Tory party leadership but, this month, Jeremy Corbyn will find out how he has fared in the battle to succeed Ed Miliband. Fifteen per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party nominated Corbyn so he could contest the election. Many of those who did so publicly stated that they had no intention of voting for the Islington North MP but wanted to ensure that those Labour party members who want to back Corbyn’s dogged opposition to austerity and cuts in welfare have the opportunity to do so.

The problem, however, is that Corbyn is no less a representative of the hard left than Janman was of the hard right. While the Monday Club were cheerleaders for those who thought black South Africans incapable of governing themselves, Corbyn shows a puzzling indulgence for the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah who crow about their desire to kill Jews. It was, Corbyn said, his “pleasure” and “honour” to invite “our friends from Hezbollah and our friends from Hamas” to parliament (the Israelis, he went on to note, had prevented the latter from attending). 

Corbyn’s vocal support for Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, when Teresa May tried to deport him from Britain in 2012, is a case in point. Salah, said Corbyn, was “a very honoured citizen” who “represents his people extremely well”. But the voice that Corbyn said “must be heard” was the same one which suggested Jews use the blood of gentile children to bake their bread; wondered why “a suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work” on 9/11; branded homosexuality “a great crime”; and preached that “Jerusalem will soon become the capital of the global caliphate”.

In 1982, a former member, Alan Clark, confided to his diary that the Monday Club had become “a prickly residue in the body politic, a nasty sort of gallstone”. Twenty years later, the Tories finally severed links with the Monday Club and ordered three of its MPs to resign from it. Rather than giving Corbyn a three-month platform, the Labour party might want to think about how it passes a few gallstones of its own.

The post Labour Should Be Cautious About Corbyn appeared first on Standpoint.

It is good to see Ypres doing so well. In the war it had the misfortune to be a “salient”, initially captured by the Germans, then re-captured by the allies although surrounded on three sides, and held for the duration, an object of siege from one side and a springboard for attack from the other. Naturally, it was razed to the ground, and after the war some thought it should be left as a ruined memorial — as Oradour-sur-Glane was in France after the Second World War — or rebuilt as an ultra-modern town. But local people just wanted their old town back and that’s what they got, even if it did take half a century to finish. It may be the most complete piece of architectural replication in the world in the sense that a higher proportion was rebuilt in the old style than was true in the likes of Dresden and Warsaw. It raises the possibility, given the trillions of photographs which now exist, that we could replicate anything that was destroyed from now on, including the entire planet after its destruction.

Naturally, for anyone alive today the fascination of Ypres lies in the conditions of the First World War and the emotions of fear, pity, horror and incomprehension which the consideration of them arouses. A life in a puddle, plagued by rats and lice, in constant danger of death and mutilation from the invented horrors of machine guns, shrapnel shells, poison gas clouds or colossal underground mines is actually the most unpleasant thing that has ever been foisted on human beings. We took a day trip to Waterloo, a trip quite manageable so long as the Belgian motorways and the Brussels ring road don’t get jammed up. The coverage of that battle now includes a wraparound 3D cinema in which you simulate the experience of being charged by thousands of cavalry. As someone who, like most of my generation, has barely heard a shot fired in anger (and they weren’t being fired at me) I can just about imagine getting by as a member of Wellington’s army. There was a lot of movement and a lot of work, but danger was only imminent for a very small proportion of the time. Waterloo was a killing field: there were 55,000 casualties. But it was one day; you could take your chance, live or die, win or lose, do your best, get through — and then it was over. But in Ypres there was a second “battle”, then a third, then a permanent battle, like an endless and recurring nightmare. I can’t imagine not turning into a quivering jelly under such circumstances. However, I am not so baffled by why troops “put up with it” as Jeremy Paxman seems to be in his book on the war. The “bubble reputation”, as Jacques calls it in As You Like It, is surely the key. If the immediate choice was to go over the top and face possible death as a brave patriot or to be shot as a cowardly twerp in the eyes of my friends and relatives, I think I would have done what everybody else did and obeyed orders.

What should one make intellectually of the emotional contemplation of life on the Western Front? What is there to learn? Two themes recurr on the many hundreds of  substantial multi-lingual notices to be found on the battlefield and I find both to be facile and potentially dangerous. The first concerns “the futility of war”; this is allegedly something which modern school pupils are asked to comment on when considering war poetry. This would be a return to medieval education where argument was judged by its success in arriving at a pre-approved conclusion. At one level it is just excessive generalisation — like gathering one’s pupils round a rotten apple and lecturing them on the rottenness of apples. But there is a more complicated mistake involved, the fallacy of the choice of circumstances (to borrow, slightly, from Marx). There is no Global Events Committee which decided to have a Great War and on which one might have voted against the proposition. The futility of resistance? The futility of keeping promises? The futility of the Big Push? These are real futilities, relevant to decisions made by actual people in actual circumstances. Only the Kaiser and Von Moltke were in a position to consider the futility of war and they both liked war — or, at least, they thought they did.

The other inference which takes thought way too far is the appeal for European unity as a way to avoid events like the Great War. People who argue this are like the generals of the war itself insofar as they are trying to solve a previous problem rather than the one they actually face. The 1914-18 war took place because European states were competing for world domination; they are no longer doing so. The wars of the last generation as it is now have been like those in Abkhazia, which I have some experience of, or Bosnia, which I haven’t. They arise out of excessive political unity, by the claims made by multi-national states in complex ethnic conflicts and in some respects, being semi-civil wars, they have been more unpleasant than the Great War. The slogan that should be borne in mind comes from Robert Frost: “good fences make good neighbours”.

The First World War was a very bad war. War is, in a very important respect, the opposite of sport. Good sport occurs when one horse gets its nose ahead going up the hill to the finish or when all four results are possible on the last ball of a cricket match. Good war happens when the good guys wipe out the bad guys before most people realise the thing has started. But once the Western Front bogged down in the late autumn of 1914 there was the most hellish and dysfunctional system of war that mankind had ever known. The problem, summarised later by A.J.P. Taylor, was that the systems of defence were about two centuries ahead of the systems of attack. On the one hand: machine guns, shrapnel shells, mines, barbed wire, etc. On the other, men walking or running at and through the above. It is all very well to see French or Haig or Foch or Hindenburg as dim donkeys, but this was a new situation which contradicted every doctrine of “fire and movement” that they had been trained to believe.

So what could have been done? There were new forms of attack. Gas worked immediately, but only at the surprise stage. Underground explosions had some effect in certain sectors. The development of tanks and planes was going to work in the end, but took years. Treating the whole thing as a massive siege to starve the enemy out had seemed promising and U-boats were the best shot at that, but it was U-boats that brought the USA into the war. Open a new front as Winston Churchill insisted? The Dardanelles campaign looked good on the world map, but pretty silly on the smaller scale as it landed troops at the bottom of cliffs with no water supply. It is still arguable that it might have worked with more experienced troops and better leadership, which is what it never had. I’d like to think that I would have perceived that defence was feasible and defended pending technological developments, but the generals did not think this was an option in terms of morale.

By the road just outside Ypres is yet another cemetry where once stood the field hospital where John McCrae wrote the poem, “In Flanders Fields”. This, of course, unlike the bitter brilliance of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen later in the war, was not an anti-war poem at all. It urges men to take up the baton and see the thing through to the end in the name of the fallen. Which they did — surely the only real option. Incidentally, I have believed for decades that it begins, “In Flanders fields the poppies grow . . . “, but actually it is blow, not grow.

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